There’s been yet another Blogosphere conflagration –seems like they’re every week, these days. This time it involves Little Green Footballs, one of the primary “warblogs” that rose in the immediate post-9/11 era. LGF’s proprietor, Charles Johnson, mines the Arab press to find overheated anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, of which there is always plenty.
While regularly capable of interesting analysis, LGF devolves way too often into overheated rhetoric of its own, especially in the comments- more unfortunate examples include references to Islam as “the religion of piss,” comparisons of Arabs to animals, and mean-spirited “pancake” jokes directed at Rachel Corrie, the American college student killed by a bulldozer in Gaza last year.
It’s a bit much, and I say this as someone who’s generally right-leaning (whatever that means these days) on Middle East issues. Anyway, somebody thought it might be funny to take various phrases used by LGF commenters, compare them side-by-side with those of Nazis (Late German Fascists- get it?), and turn the whole thing into a quiz.
Well, Johnson and his army fired back, aiming particular ire at Matthew Yglesias, a major left-leaning blogger who had linked to the LGF/Nazi quiz. Yglesias’ post was met with 798 comments (as of this afternoon), some calling him a Nazi himself while others defended him with similar ire. Reading even a couple dozen posts is a meaningful education of the political divide in this country right now- the two sides might as well not even be speaking the same language.
But what’s funny is, you could take a typical day of LGF comments and mix it with a typical day of Yglesias comments, and the result wouldn’t look particularly different from the above.
Posted by Stephen Silver at April 13, 2004 09:29 PMThe weirdest thing is, if you read LGF posts pre-9/11, they're all about boring computer stuff.
Posted by: Jeremy Wahlman at April 13, 2004 09:39 PMI quite enjoy reading your blog. I am also read LGF on a daily basis. I do not wish to get into a protracted debate (but I will if you want) but to suggest that Rachel Corrie was killed by a bulldozer is quite misleading. She was killed by a bulldozer in the same way that a person who runs in the street with no regard is killed by a car. She chose to try and protect illegal smuggling operations into Israel and did not heed the warnings of the IDF.
Having said that, keep up the good work.
I thought you were talking about Matt Drudge for a second there. Now there's a match-up I'd like to see. Otherwise, my money is squarely on Charles.
Posted by: Karol at April 14, 2004 11:31 PM