…and still be an #$*
Back on May 31st when I was looking at various links around the blogosphere about the Turkish flotilla. I found myself curious what the newly left leaning Charles Johnson might be saying, so I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I checked his blog to see what it said. Here is what I saw:
And in a sign that there is still hope for him: Charles Johnson:
The Israeli Navy boarded a flotilla headed toward Gaza yesterday, leading to a wild melee that ended in several deaths. The IDF is reporting that the “peace activists” planned the violence in advance, and released the following video — clearly showing the “peace activists” attacking the IDF boarding party with a variety of weapons, including firebombs and stun grenades.
His new friends on the left won’t like those quotation marks but I am very pleased to see them.
It was the first time I linked to him in a very long time. I didn’t read anything else on the blog and basically forgot about it until a little more than a week later I noticed a story on memeorandum from the Fox site that credited LGF for noticing Reuters cropping a photo to disarm one of the “activists” in the flotilla that headed to Israel to try to break the Gaza blockade. I also noticed that none of the found it kind of funny that all of the links on Memorandum didn’t mention Johnson:
This isn’t a surprise, I don’t care for Johnson, I don’t like the way he treated my friend Stacy, or Pam or Peg and he has run in my opinion run his site like a cheap dictator, but in the end his position on Israel and his willingness to expose Reuters shows he still has a trace of the old Johnson in him.
Christians in general and Catholics in particular are very much into redemption. I’ve still got a little Pollyanna in me so I’ll include him in my prayers this week. Who knows.
If I had been reading his site I would have noticed that although he is on the side of the angels on the Gaza flotilla it hasn’t increased the thickness of his skin as Stacy and Ace both note first Ace:
My experience with throwing tips to Charles Johnson was this: Don’t bother. Because if you sent him the tip that a Reuters story included interesting paragraph 1, interesting paragraph 2, and interesting paragraph 3, your “reward” from the Great Charles Johnson was seeing this up at his wonderful blog:
Reuters [direct link to Reuters story]:
Interesting Paragraph 1. [which you sent him]
Interesting Paragraph 2. [which you sent him]
Interesting Paragraph 3. [which you sent him]
Via Ace of Spades. [Gee, thanks! You mentioned me! You see that, Ma? I’ma somebody now!]
It quickly dawned on me that if I wanted any traffic from LGF readers, the right strategy was to not tip Charles Johnson, thus forcing, sort of, his readers to come over to my blog and see for themselves if I’d found anything of interest.
Because, if I sent Johnson a tip, that whole tip was going up on his site, pretty much, just as I myself had put it on mine, with no apparent reason for any reader to click through to me. In other words, having an Ace of Spades tip up at LGF pretty much meant his readers wouldn’t come over to the site, as they’d know that CJ had faithfully reproduced the only interesting thing on my site that day.
Better, then, to leave it up in the air as to whether anything interesting was going on on this site then, so at least I’d get curiosity-clicks.
It’s kind of screwed up when you realize you probably get more traffic by not being linked from a site than being linked by it.
And this is only a sample of what he has to say (go and read the whole thing).
Stacy picks up the narrative with some screen shots from LGF where Charles thin skin is demonstrated in visuals:
UPDATE: To put the Ace/LGF situation in context, some explanation is in order. There was a minor media-bias kerfuffle this past week in regard to the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla,” and I didn’t blog about it because the source was Little Green Footballs. But it got picked up in the media and everybody else blogged about it, including Yid With Lid:
Reuters is now doctoring its pictures from the violence aboard the Guerrilla Flotilla.
YWL got linked at Hot Air, and this prompted Charles Johnson to go thermonuclear on Allahpundit:
Ironically he gives shots and the backstory of something similar involving Charles with another blogger with the roles reversed.
When I had put up my initial “credit where credit is due” post and promoted it on Twitter Stacy tweeted back with the following warning:
@SissyWillis @DaTechGuyblog Be Ye Not Deceived!
followed by four further tweets about Mr. Johnson’s history.
Now I only knew about his role because the Fox story mentioned it, if I had seen it at Yid with Lid or hotair first I would have credited them first. The blogosphere is a pretty big place and unless you are Glenn Reynolds (who I suspect is a future regeneration of a certain 2000 year old timelord with a TARDIS of his own) you just can’t see everything, link everything and credit everything on the web.
I tend to read memeorandum first, then Robert Stacy, then a few of my linked blogs and then Glenn. By the time I see Glenn I’ve already linked and scheduled several posts that he might have already put up. I don’t look at LGF but I don’t look at Ace of Spades much either (Sorry Ace but I just don’t). With 24 hours in a day and something resembling a life I just can’t do it without a longer life span and a time/space vehicle.
If Charles hasn’t figured that out yet concerning people like Allahpundit then right or wrong on this issue his troubles remain.
It doesn’t look good, with God all things are possible but apparently with Charles he is taking his time.
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