Eric:

Great blog!

Let me just clarify a few things:

1) What I meant by the "LGF mentality" was simply the mental state in which one creates classes of people according to general characteristics (like race, religion, sexual orientation) and then demonizes the entire class based on the actions of a few of its members.

Sorry if I was a bit unclear in my Daily Kos posting ...

I did not link to examples of this on LGF, because I felt at the time that the statement was self-evident. This may have been a failure on my part. I don't have time to go through all of the LGF postings now and find the details, but if you do a search on Google for "site:littlegreenfootballs.com arabs" and "site:littlegreenfootballs.com muslims" you can see what I mean here. There are literally scores of examples in which the site operator takes a news story about something that has happened in the Middle East or Southern Asia and then extrapolates out in this manner.

When I said, "evil and pernicious," I was specifically thinking of the site owner's use of this kind of rhetoric to inflame emotions against these classes of people, rather than directly against their perpetrators or against the actions themselves. This is the way that innocent people get caught in the crossfire of these kinds of conflicts and serve to magnify and deepen the problems, generally, and make it much more difficult and costly for us (as Americans) to solve them (or at least reduce the danger they pose to us).

2) While, as you mentioned in your other posting, the site owner at LGF has indeed brought up information to suggest that he does not have problems with gay people ... To me, it is hard to distinguish this sort of mentality when applied to Arabs and Muslims from this mentality when applied to African-Americans or gay Americans. Granted, I am not a member of the LGF community. Reading the comments there yesterday, many of them strongly defending LGF and especially fellow blog commentors, I came to the realization that there is a lot of subtly in language and context in the community discourse that I normally do not grasp. For this reason, when I look at the site, I just see, "Blech!" where others might see a conversation of a more sophisticated nature.

Still, I did not read what I would consider a good and direct refutation of the principle statements of my thesis: That LGF is a racist, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim website, whose main focus is inflaming emotions against these groups of people.

3) I'd like to add some "color commentary" to my own viewpoints here.

I believe myself to be a patriotic American. I believe that the American system is the best system in the world and the best system that the world has ever created. I believe that the evidence for this is that people from all over the world are desperate to come here. They see what we have and what they do not and they are voting with their feet. I believe that domestic security and national defense is a legitimate concern for government and that Americans should demand and receive a strong military from Washington.

Here is what I also believe:

While the safety of individual Americans might be threatened by terrorism, America itself is not threatened in this way. Our wealth, our might, our willpower and our spirit are so much greater, so much stronger and draw on such vaster reserves than any other contemporary nation that the actions of people like Osama bin Laden do not threaten our existence, per se.

LGF is notorious for literally FREAKING OUT over the 9/11 attacks, as if our country was weak enough to be destroyed by organizations like Al Qaeda and countries like Iraq. To me, this lack of confidence in the strength and ability of Americans is distressing and rests on false arguments. Fortress America will not be razed by terrorist organizations, no matter how strong-willed. And certainly not by third-world countries like Iraq. From the content on your website, I suspect you must love Gibson as much as I do. See "Decline and Fall" for more on how great states meet their end.

4) Markos Zuniga, Kos, had nothing to do with my posting. In fact, I doubt he ever read it before LGF readers started e-mailing him about it. He probably looked at it once then and didn't go back to it. The Daily Kos has thousands of active posters with hundreds of new diaries per day. Mine probably lasted five minutes before it scrolled off the page. Bigger fish are being fried at the Zuniga household, I suspect, than the lone diary of an infrequent participant in their community.

Keep up with the blog. I think you make some good observations. I hope you will turn your acute sight over to Little Green Footballs sometime, rather to just the reactions that outsiders have about it, and make an analysis of the type of posts that are printed there and the types of comments they arouse.

Thanks, finally, for your thoughtful responses to my Daily Kos diary.

Bink.

One more thing ...

No, Kos does not exercise any editorial control over Daily Kos content. It's wacky, wild and fun. A right-of-center equivalent is at RedState.org, which can also at times have great content, though it has a smaller community base. RedState.org uses the same software as The Daily Kos. Go forth and contribute!

Bink, I really appreciate your thoughtful analysis, and I thank you for the kind remarks. Appearances can certainly be deceiving, and when I read your diary entry I probably made assumptions of my own. I am glad you don't judge a blog by its commenters, either. Sometimes I completely miss some really bad comments, and even then I'm hesitant to delete, because I think they should speak for themselves.

I will defend Charles Johnson any chance I get, not because of any "mentality" perceived or otherwise, but because he is reporting stuff which never finds its way into the regular media.

While we're at this (and I know we are not going to agree), I suggest Bill Whittle's essay on Strength, especially what he says about LGF:

***QUOTE****

One of the most vilified people on the internet right now is Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. It is the only website that I will check at least twice a day. Charles has been called a racist, a bigot, and much worse. He is personally threatened daily. Charles is attacked personally, and with a viciousness rare even among the most vicious out there, because there really is no other defense against the arguments that LGF makes, many times a day, than to attack the man.

But Charles Johnson is not the issue. I could counter with the fact that I have met him several times; he is, like Steven Den Beste, an extraordinarily gracious, soft-spoken and gentle man. None of this matters.

What does matter is what Little Green Footballs does on a daily basis. Charles Johnson does not sit down and write five essays a day on why he thinks Radical Islam is a deranged and poisonous and growing Death Cult. Charles simply links to newspaper articles, usually from Arab and Islamist sources like Arab News and Reuters, that show without question that Radical Islam is calling, daily and nightly, for the destruction of the West, the murder, enslavement or conversion of its citizens, and the establishment of a world-wide Caliphate where Shariah – Islamic Law – is the only law.

This is not his opinion. This is not the opinion of Western editorial writers. This is a filter (and of course it’s a filter – that’s why it is useful) that looks at Islamist thinking and behavior daily and shows what Islamists are saying and doing in their own words.

I and many others view Little Green Footballs as the equivalent of the Cold War’s D.E.W. Line – the Distant Early Warning radar system that searched the Polar skies, looking for incoming threats. This is why Charles is attacked personally. He is attacked personally in an attempt to discredit him and his website because the fact remains that almost everything he links to are articles by Islamists, about Radical Islam – and what they say in their own words is so totally compelling, damning, and down-right blood curdling that anyone not seeing the danger brewing does not deserve to be part of this argument.

****QUOTE****

I don't think condemning Radical Islam has anything to do with race, and to the extent it has to do with gay sexuality, such condemnation defends gay sexuality against Radical Islam.

Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts!

Eric: "What I wrote earlier generated some comments accusing me of saying that Kos wrote this post himself. I did not say that! However, it does appear at Kos's web site and he has not disagreed with it. It is therefore reasonable for me to at least pose the question whether his site is bigoted against Charles Johnson ..."

My post (attacking Bink) appeared on Kos' site, and he has not disagreed with it. Is it therefore reasonable to ask if Kos is bigoted against Bink?

This isn't complicated. ANYONE can register at Daily Kos and post diary entries. They are not edited or endorsed by Kos. Ergo, it is not fair to condemn "the people at Daily Kos" for Bink's diary entry.

Btw, I agree with everything you wrote in your comment here responding to Bink.

Bink: "I did not read what I would consider a good and direct refutation of the principle statements of my thesis: That LGF is a racist, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim website, whose main focus is inflaming emotions against these groups of people."

You did not make a case that "LGF is a racist, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim website". You simply asserted it. If someone said, "Bink is racist, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim" without offering evidence, how exactly would you go about refuting the charge?

Why should anyone waste time refuting a groundless assertion?

Congratulations, Eric. You just made my brain hurt.

It usually takes a leftist to do that successfully. ;)