Right-Wing Flame War | Hacker News Reader

Right-Wing Flame War

nytimes.com

21 pointsFlemlord11 comments

> Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. "Get off my Web site" was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true - that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him - but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)

> Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve.

His banning of anyone who disagrees with him is why LGF is also commonly nicknamed "the little green echo chamber" because only those who echo his sentiments are permitted to stay.

"'Running a community is hard,' says Markos Moulitsas of the liberal Web site Daily Kos"

Same with Daily Kos. What's more, it's not a 'liberal' blog, it's a blog dedicated to getting Democrats elected. The FAQ specifically says it's not a liberal blog, and most of the people who get banned are liberals.

I never thought I would say this, but what does this his to do with HN? I come here to HN to get away from all the politics discussion everywhere else.

Well, I suppose a lot of it has to do with online social communities can form around social issues, the power they can exert, and how they can be destroyed. I found it quite interesting, but perhaps it's little borderline.

One tiny problem: Charles Johnson has never been a member of the "right wing". He's a liberal who's eyes were opened by 9/11, but as the jihadist threat receded he reverted to type.

It would be pretty silly to expect his "right-wing allies" to continue to be such when he attacks so many of them on such scurrilous grounds. I've only watched his feud with Stacy McCain, but that's enough for me.

That's a gross mischaracterization. Charles Johnson wasn't really a Liberman style anti-jihadist democrat. He really was part of the strong defense/small gonvernment style conservative base. His problem has been (for a very long time) the hateful religious right who he feels has too much influence with the GOP leaders.

Just because he's pro-science doesn't mean he's liberal per se.

I do not think science has anything to do with it. My impression of Charles is he is liberal in the classical sense of the word, not the modern American sense (loosely related to the left side of the political spectrum). So I am not surprised he is picking fights with the Right as well as the Left.

(Disclaimer: I never read the comment threads on LGF, only his postings. The threads I saw were dreadful to me.)

He may style himself as a "liberal in the classical sense of the word", but his behavior is pretty illiberal in the old sense of the word, e.g. see Tangurena's comment on his dedication to open discourse or rather lack thereof.

He also has too many fixations that are characteristic of the Left/new style liberals for me to take that self-characterization very seriously.

It didn't take me long to find stuff supporting my take, e.g. from the horse's mouth http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy/2009/12/charles-john...

"I've been telling people for a long time, if they wanted to listen, that I was a social liberal. I actually fought against being classified as a right-wing blog for a long time."

Read more at that link; that plus a little Google Fu shows that his issues with the "right-wing" go way beyond the "hateful religious right".

ADDED: Ah, here's his "Why I Parted Ways With The Right" essay (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_W...). Very little of that has to do with "the hateful religious right" or even the GOP.

> as the jihadist threat receded

Seriously?

That's my not thoroughly examined interpretation. Spend some quality time with your favorite search engine, e.g. using R. Stacy McCain as a starting point (CJ claims he's racist), and you'll find plenty of others.

Or are you questioning my "as the jihadist threat receded"? In that case, I mean that it's receded in the minds of Americans due to a lack of successful attacks in the West or on Westerners (e.g. Bali). India, for example, has a rather different interpretation on that, and of course we in the US have seen at least three serious attacks in 2009, two successful (at that Arkansas recruiting center, Ft. Hood and of course the Knicker Bomber).

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