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I’m not an expert on Charles, nor have I said that I am. I’ve given my impression and opinion of him.

I did read Jummy’s post; you can tell by the way I responded to specific points he made. Did you read mine?

I don’t cringe in the least at ‘Oil Tick’. The Saudi Princes really are scum.

And again: If your only point is “Charles is a bad person”… I don’t even know what to say. Are you a good person? Can I see everything you wrote four years ago and check to see if it’s identical to what you say now, and if not, tell you that you’re pandering?

The one way I can most directly see Charles having changed his mind is looking at AGW, where there is a huge amount of disinformation. I’m never surprised when a non-scientist (like my own father) falls for the propaganda. What is surprising, and nice, is when a non-scientist actually finds their way out of the propaganda.

Charles did that. He started in a place where he was wrong, and, after time on the subject, realized he was wrong and came to– and championed– the factual point of view.

That is a good thing. Not a bad one.

You really appear to be working off of a rote script, and not actually engaging with what I’m writing. It’s rather disconcerting.

“I personally question the character of people who are unwilling to question themselves”

I love how Obdicut has supposedly only been a lgf and Charles follower for less than 2 years and is supposedly an expert on him, so much that he feels that he must take time to defend Charles.  

Charles hasn’t changed his tactics, he’s only changed those at the receiving end of his invectives.  I know Jummy’s post was long, but did you guys read it?  

In the past I supported Charles, but cringed at his “oil tick,” “religion of peace, my ass,” his Palestinian “car swarm” pictures, etc.  Charles is a bad person, not because of his desertion of the right, but because he’s a sensitive, crazy, nasty, hypocrite.  He turned on friends he met and worked with him, and then attacked those people.  Some “friend”  … Jummy’s summed up a lot of the evolution of lgf over the years, and anyone that’s followed that site knows that Charles is not credible when he said he’s looked at the facts and changed his mind.  Most of his conversion may be just pandering to his audience and the fools lavishly lap it up.  

And show me where Charles has “questioned himself”?  Questioning himself doesn’t jibe with Jummy’s accurate post as someone who appears to know Charles better than most.  Charles is a fraud or crazy.  He’s definitely not a man of principle.  

But that doesn’t mean that any of my current stances or arguments are actually hypocritical.”

It is if one goes by the ideology that what one may see as personal growth indicates some sort of personal character flaw, which is pretty widely held in all political corners, and that change is weakness. Despite the Edmund Burke quote that a reader wrote, this is a pretty strong element of alot of people.

The untested hypothetical is that if I had engaged Charles back in the day, I would have been banned. It is possibly true. It is untestable. Therefore, it’s an untestable hypothesis.

What you are demonstrably wrong about is that people with dissenting opinions are banned. Given that I’ve seen people keep up ‘dissenting opinions’ for months on end, often to tiresome lengths– such as AGW denial– I am absolutely certain you are wrong. You don’t appear to care that you are wrong about this, or that you said something that’s been disproved. I have no particular reason to believe your story about your banning, when you’re saying something that I know to be false. One can indeed express dissenting opinions at LGF without being banned.

You haven’t actually provided any actual reason why I’d cynically join LGF, except some bizarre attempt to turn it to the left. So what? What would that achieve?

Your final point appears to be another hypothetical; if I ever should use past behavior of someone else against them, I have to be a hypocrite because I’m giving Charles a ‘pass’.

The thing is, I’m not. I don’t approve of a lot of previous posts on LGF. I think he got swayed by bad information when he shouldn’t, and I think he supported things he shouldn’t have.

I also think that I shouldn’t have, in the past, held a lot of views that I did, and that I should have known better. Hell, I believed the ACORN tapes when they first came out; I should have known better. I also believed pseudo-science on global warming before I learned more about it, I also flirting with Randian beliefs for a thankfully short while. I was a relatively absolute pacificst for a period of time, too, a position that I know find foolish and eye-rollingly unpragmatic.

Since I don’t have a website that I make posts on, none of this is known or obvious to people. For Charles, all of his past mistaken views are there for anyone to see and use against him. Not so for you or I; and yet you’re content to use this past as ammunition against him, safe from anything of the sort yourself. I don’t find that useful way to behave. Furthermore, given that I am myself someone who now holds views very different from ones that I expressed in the past without having made any sort of public apology or acknowledgement, I’m sure that I deserve your contempt just as much as Charles does– which raises the question of why on earth you’re trying to convince me of whatever it is you’re trying to convince me of.

Finally, if you can provide an example of a time I’ve said someone should never be allowed near respectable discourse after they’ve changed, feel free. The closest I can think is that I do not believe in the sincerity of Bob Barr, or at least do not believe he was the best choice of a candidate for the Libertarian party. But even that is rather far from saying he’s an eternal monster.

So again, what we have is you engaging in a hypothetical situation to make your point. Your point appears to be that you think Charles was bad for posting some of the stuff that he did. I think some of the stuff that Charles posted was definitely bad. I think, as I said last thread, I was stupid to support Draw Mohammed Day. I think a lot of my past nose-tweaking of religion in general was stupid.

But that doesn’t mean that any of my current stances or arguments are actually hypocritical.

And again: You still appear to have no real point you’re attempting to make, since all you have is a hypothetical scenario where I’m a bad, hypocritical person. I think you might ask yourself whether emotion is driving your posts a lot more than rationality is.

in any case, i don’t think it’s a fair characterization of my comments here or elsewhere to say that “all (i) have are untestable hypotheticals,” when i entered the thread with testable arguments backed up by links to johnson’s statements.

on a sidenote, elbruce’s comment perplexed me. i suppose he believed he found something mitigating in the rest of charles’ claim that the nyt had finally come to agreement with him that obama is a “seekrit muslem”. but the passage he quoted continues on to claim that obama, as a seekrit muslem, would not have to fear the same reprisals as other apostates supposedly must under islamic law, because islamic radicals would understand the strategic necessity of his apostasy. in other words, the part elbruce added reveals charles to be more paranoid and bigoted, not less. and it certainly doesn’t undermine the demonstrated fact that charles full-throatedly promoted the notion that obama is a “seekrit muslem.”

you asked me what cynical motives a liberal might have had for joining lgf. i’m not sure when you joined. just after the election? just after the inauguration? just prior? during the creationism flap or before that, during the vlamms bellang thing? at any point in that timeline, you must have come to lgf from somewhere and known something about lgf. perhaps not every ugly thing charles had said about liberals as a class or muslems as a class, but lgf was rather famous as a “nazi-esque hate-site” within the left of the blog-o-sphere. thus, the portrayal of charles as a man of moral and epistemic consistency is implausible. either you don’t know lgf or charles and you’ve never been there or you know something of charles and lgf and you forgive him of his past as a raving, paranoid mccarthyite bigot based on an unprincipled exception.

there is one third explanation: you enter the lgf community with designs. at this point, it’s clear that any effort to “concern troll” lgf into a left-o-sphere asset would have been moot in light of charles’ willingness to become one, but that might have been a plausible motive 12 months ago. not the only one; one might assume any kind of trolling. in any case, i’m certain i don’t need to explain this further as you are familiar with the current climate at lgf in which dissenters are immediately flamed with a variety of pejoratives for “troll” such as “concern troll,” “sleeper,” etc., by both the community and charles himself.

i once witnessed a commenter enter an agw thread and argue an anti-agw position without uttering so much as a four-letter word, even as his opponents assailed him with empty ad hominem (“wingnut” and the like. the prohibition against incivility only runs one way at lgf, you see). he proceeded at length, providing sources which had not been previously addressed at lgf, and he refrained from impugning his opponents’ motives. eventually, charles entered the thread and banned him because, in his words, he had grown tired of reading his comments.

this was not the only case i have witnessed which undercuts the popular cult myth that “no one ever got banned who war’nt askin’ fer it”. charles once threatened to ban mandymanners because she posted a video of supertramp’s “goodbye stranger” because he was ready to interpret anything from her, the last surviving conservative at lgf, as a “flounce”. and, really, this is not new behavior. charles was too ready to ban for the crime of heterodoxy when he was a raving, paranoid, mccarthyite bigot as well.

on this, i must insist that you respect the fact that i have years more history at lgf than you. i was there during the period in which i staged my “untestable hypothetical”. i know you would have been banned for contradicting the party line. as i was.

let me give you some background. i am not, nor have i ever been part of the blogmocracy crowd. unlike charles, i was never a birther or a “seekrit muslem” guy. unlike charles, i’ve never been an anti-immigration lunatic. i strongly dislike sarah palin and i am an atheist. it’s also important to keep in mind that i, like charles, was a mccain supporter and decidedly not a paleo-libertarian. and yet i was, as i remain to be today, a conservative back when charles ran a sometimes troubling but generally worthwhile blog. despite charles’ more extreme professions, i was able to tolerate him for his posts about the war on terror and the perfidy of the left. my posting account was -=@$$=-.

during the time that charles was promoting the inductive fallacy that, because stormfront had a ron paul banner on their site, ron paul was a “seekrit neo-nazi”, i wrote a post which cut and pasted anti-jihad rhetoric from stormfront. the quotes i used could have easily been written by charles at the time. you see, while charles was still best buds with pam geller and robert spenser, i had already been aware that there was something about the direction of the anti-jihad movement which reeked of racial nationalism, and i was taking flack for saying so.

i suppose if i wanted to remain part of the open, reasoned discourse at lgf, which values a vast array of opposing viewpoints, i should have waited a couple years. posting it when i did, in the vast unacknowledged period that was before obama’s inauguration, charles banned me – without a word. not even a “bye now!”

that’s one of the things you have to consider when you try to float the claim that you’ve never seen someone be banned for simple disagreement. you may just have never seen it. because charles doesn’t have to show you.

all of this leaves aside the serious question of whether a blog-owner who bans commenters for snarkiness or impolite disagreement isn’t violating the de facto ethical rules of the blog-o-sphere. for a blog which hates rand paul-style paleo-libertarianism so deeply, charles and his community do love the trope, “this is charles’ dime and he reserves the right to refuse service…”

in any case, when i said i was taking flack for opposing robert spenser, it was at other sites, because i knew that saying so at lgf would mean the end of my user account there. back when charles never wrote the word “racism” without enclosing it in sneer-quotes, even the slightest suggestion that there may be a racist component to any part of anti-jihadism would get you banned. calls to “glass mecca” might, on occasion, cause charles to come into the thread to say “calm down. that kind of talk might make us look bad.” then, like today, charles pruned his commenting community with an intervening hand unequaled in the blog-o-sphere. he didn’t get around to banning iron fist until 2009. the reason is simple: he didn’t find anything wrong with it. then as it is now, charles has the commenting community he chose.

so, keep that in mind. keep in mind that, when charles laments that the one cool thing about bush was that he didn’t pander to anti-muslem bigotry, in the actual time that bush was in office, charles was saying that the one terrible thing about bush was that he didn’t pander to anti-muslem bigotry. keep in mind that when he talks about how deranged and paranoid the crescent-shaped missile defense logo stuff was, he created the story that a crescent shaped flight 93 memorial was a conspiracy to erect an “islamist shrine”. keep in mind when charles talks about the bigotry of the arizona law, that he once argued that the u.s.-mexican border should be treated like the israel-gaza border.

or, as an alternative, you can try this. the next time you discover that a republican or conservative or the like has, in his or her past, some kind of peccadillo, and you’re tempted to bring it to the fore, blow it out of proportion and use it to frame them as an eternal monster who should never be let within a mile of respectable discourse, consider that the unprincipled exception you make for charles johnson makes a hypocrite of you.

It’s easy to understand your original reaction. The crime committed by the 9/11 terrorists is obviously horrific and inexcusable. Generalizing their action out to include 24% of the world’s population is not as horrific, and easier to excuse. It’s more simple bigotry than evil. And some folks find bigotry less supportable over time than others.

I respect your insight.

NY Times Admits Obama’s Muslim Birth
After relentlessly labeling anyone who brings up the issue of Barack Obama’s Muslim origins as a bigot, a racist, or a lunatic, suddenly this morning the New York Times publishes an op-ed that actually admits Obama was born a Muslim—and that it might cause serious problems in an Obama presidency: President Apostate?

After the NYT quote, he goes on to say:

“I predict that even if the Islamic world does see Obama as an apostate, if he’s elected president it will not be an issue.

Islamic prohibitions against apostasy are remarkably flexible when it comes to powerful people, and the sense of power Obama’s election would give the Islamic world would vastly outweigh the apostasy factor.”

I would hesitate to label TLP as “state’s rights libertarian,” however. We had a big debate between I and Brad Warbiany on the issue. I contended that individual rights are primary and that “state’s rights” is a loaded term associated with Southern segregationists.

I think you’ll enjoy it. Warbiany, the curator, is brilliant and recently did a pretty good overview of progressive, conservative and libertarian ideologies that seemed fairly fitting. I think you’ll enjoy it here.

There are plenty of dissenting opinions at LGF that have not been banned. I have never seen anyone banned for anything other that severe, severe, severe misbehavior. One poster, for example, routinely and constantly posted AGW denial, for months on end. He wasn’t banned for that, even though his posts were basically lies, and also ‘dissenting’ in the extreme.

He was banned, months and months later, for severely savage personal attacks. But not for dissenting opinions. Those he was allowed to post.

So, given that I factually know that you’re wrong, and your only point appears to be one that wouldn’t be testable, I don’t really see any reason to give you one whit of credibility.