Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Apparently you can be right on an important issue…

Posted: June 13, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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…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.

I say Alinsky them…

Posted: June 13, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, opinion/news
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One of the rules of Saul Alinsky was to make people live by their own rules knowing that they can’t.

Yesterday Pam Geller, a fearless foe of Jihad was informed by PayPal that she is considered a “hate site” and is removing her ability to raise the small amount she does via them.

SIOA and FDI just got notified as well. There are no accidents. I said repeatedly in news stories that the money for the bus ads came from my websites — that there were no large donors. So the global jihad, choking on petrodollars, is trying to shut down my little spigot.

Robert Stacy is properly outraged:

An Associated Press article about Geller last month quoted Faiza Ali, of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who accused Geller of a “long-standing history of anti-Muslim bigotry.” Geller said Saturday she is considering pursuing legal action against PayPal’s attempt to attach a “hate” label to her site.

“What do they expect me to do, stop blogging about jihad?” said Geller, whose blog emphasizes national security issues, Mideast policy and the War on Terror. “These are strange times. And they’re going to get stranger still.”

She is on the right track, but she can do one better. There are an awful lot of sites that use paypal including pro-jihad sites. If she can show discrimination (and it won’t be hard) the potential payoff for a company that is linked to eBay is large enough that even liberal lawyers would be anxious to be a part of it.

Alternatively they can publicize each of these sites that get paypal funding and sue paypal for each site that is kept up. Stacy continues on his site about foreign money:

Read the rest of that – not just the foreign money, but Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, a veritable Who’s Who of elite philanthropic foundations, none of whom ever gave a penny to any conservative group. And what kind of religious organization would accept money from the United Nations Population Fund? They’re WorldWide Abortion Inc. Their motto might as well be “World Peace Through Dead Babies.”

So the Ground Zero mosque people get millions from big-time foundations, plus the United Nations and all kinds of foreign money, and Pamela Geller can’t be permitted to push back with a few thousand bucks raised via PayPal?

Hello?

I suppose this should be considered a complement that worldwide Jihad inc is afraid of one Jewish American woman, (of course if they ever met Pam in person they would know that this extraordinary woman is not someone you want as a foe). But complement or no this should not be allowed to stand.

One can debate the rights and wrongs of various things…

Posted: June 12, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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…but the one thing you don’t do is mess with the blood supply:

A government health committee Friday recommended not changing the ban on gay men donating blood but also called for new research on alternative policies, citing flaws in the current rules.

Gay men have been prohibited from giving blood since 1985. But momentum to change the ban has grown recently, with advocacy groups, blood-collection organizations and members of Congress calling for the Food and Drug Administration to revise the donation rules.

The safety of the US blood supply is of paramount importance, once that is lost or confidence in it is lost all bets are off.

The American Plasma Users Coalition, representing people who depend on the blood supply to maintain health, urged additional research, forecasting that revisions in the donation rules eventually will be made.

But the coalition’s Mark Skinner also said, “It’s not about blood supply; it’s about blood safety … Ultimately the end-user bears 100 percent of the risk.’’

He said, “The fact that it’s discriminatory does not mean it’s wrong if it’s in the interest of public health.’’

Added Corey Dubin, a hemophiliac infected with HIV from a tainted blood product: “This is daily question of survival.’’

Forgetting the risk to lives for a moment if you want to increase litigation and cost to a healthcare system this is the way to do it.

Will Israel decide to be taken for Wolves?

Posted: June 11, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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A few years ago I wrote this to Glenn concerning Haditha saying with the press and left’s cry of “atrocity” to all we ever do eventually those who support the war might decide to be taken for wolves rather than sheep.

Today Victor Davis Hanson says something similar about Israel:

Israelis should assume by now that whether they act tentatively or strongly, the negative reaction will be the same. Therefore why not project the image of a strong, unapologetic country to a world that has completely lost its moral bearings, and is more likely to respect Israel’s strength than its past concern for meeting an impossible global standard?

How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.

David Borg Expands on things:

The path toward terrorism begins with the erasure of moral lines. It starts with the equation of terrorists — who seek to kill civilians — with the armed forces who seek to stop the terrorists. It mistakes cartoons with corpses, collateral damage with intentional murder. It fails to distinguish between an errant missile and an intentional suicide bomb. It confuses the “extremists” with those who fight extremism.

As we Americans fight the war on terror, we must fight with our heads as well as our hearts. Americans must always demand the highest standards from their army and from those of allies such as Israel. But we should never validate the type of thinking that is the hallmark of the very enemies we pursue. Today Israel’s soldiers are in the dock. But tomorrow it will be our own.

Victor considers it a matter of ignorance:

Obama reminds me of my own twenties when I was both ignorant and arrogant in my self-absorption: Wondering why a particular ag supply company would not put all the bags on the pallet that I paid for, confused over why the guy I hired to level a field left his CAT meter on his idling carry-all while he visited his girlfriend and billed me for the “hours,” disheartened that workers would habitually write “320 tablas” on their first grape tray, when in fact I counted only 231 when I walked down their rows, and curious why a big ag corporation would spray “fix” on their table grapes that made them bigger and prettier than mine, even though the chemical was long banned. Unfortunately, appeals to reason were, to quote Mark Knopfler, “all for nothing.”

He thinks the president will eventually learn. I think that Victor and David are both thinking like an ignorant youths. The erasure of the moral lines isn’t a bug of the left’s thinking; it’s a feature.

And it looks like the events of the day suggest that “learning” will not be for a while yet:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that senior Obama administration officials have been telling foreign governments that the administration intends to support an effort next week at the United Nations to set up an independent commission, under UN auspices, to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident. The White House has apparently shrugged off concerns from elsewhere in the U.S. government that a) this is an extraordinary singling out of Israel, since all kinds of much worse incidents happen around the world without spurring UN investigations; b) that the investigation will be one-sided, focusing entirely on Israeli behavior and not on Turkey or on Hamas; and c) that this sets a terrible precedent for outside investigations of incidents involving U.S. troops or intelligence operatives as we conduct our own war on terror.

Again a-c are features. After all administration actions have political costs, international actions can produce the condemnations they wish without the political risk and can be reluctantly be accepted.

Update: The Whitehouse is denying it. That could mean that they were not planning on doing this or that they were until it came out early and they want to avoid any political damage ahead of time, a lot easier to deal with a fait acompli that to deal with it ahead of time.

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