Tim Blair

He teaches journalism at universities!!!!!

Serenity Nooow!!!!!!!

And where does defining your worldview through terrorism get you? It gets you to a place where, although you don't like to admit it out loud, you secretly, guiltily welcome massacres like that in Madrid, as an opportunity to berate your opponents and as a reminder of your own moral indefatigability.

(The secret word here is "projection".)

Statement: “Comments often read like a less mediated, more uncouth interpretation of what the author him or herself thinks.”

Translation: "I have just given myself permission to dishonestly blur any distinction between the person who runs the site and the most brutish commenter to happen to post on it."

at first i thought this comment there was parody:

"A great piece and some very good comments, but so far, one thing this thread lacks: the question of who is really behind the psy-op commonly referred to as "al-Qaeda". As any well informed realist would have to consider after watching world events since 9/11, these bombings were most likely done by surrogates ultimately under the control of Synarchist bankers, as opposed to any group of so-called "Islamic Fundamentalists". The global Anglo/American financial oligarchy, along with their wretched allies the zionists, were behind the Madrid bombings. Just like they were behind 9/11 in my home of New York City. Btw, cell phone activated detonation is a particular specialty of Mossad. So are high degrees of operational coordination and split-second timing. Use your heads people, we've seen this all too many times before (Bologna train station for starters).

God Bless and Love the proud and smart people of Spain for turning the result of these bombings against what the bankers had intended! You have the deepest respect and admiration from this American. And my heartfelt sympathy for your 200 countymen murdered by this fascist garbage that threatens to ruin us all. Let the dead be martyrs in a new cause, the finest cause, the cause of REAL freedom from tyrants! As for the rest of Europe, be like Spain, don't allow yourselves to be deceived either: believe me, your worst fears about a runaway American Empire under zionist control are well founded! Of course you already know that, just don't forget it in case something goes BOOM in your own country! Never forget this: the only "terrorists" coming, are the ones "they're" sending.

And whatever any of you do, never, ever, give one single thought about what the fool Andrew Sullivan says about anything. He's a lying little whoreboy in the service of zionist media trash, who has long since sold his soul for a few pieces of silver. Of course, for his ass, he'll give you an even better deal than that.

Posted by Ed at March 15, 2004 08:25 PM "

but after reading the other posts there, just chock full of protocols of zion-spouting insights, i think he meant it. my god, the anti-semitism in europe is in full flower again.

Mmmmm....bulloney...

Even more interesting: the post previous to the one Tim linked to is titled "Even if Iraq Had Nukes, the War Was Wrong."

... the hell??

It's yet another slur against the lowest common denominator, too. Where does that come from? The lowest common denominator is the biggest number in the problem, not the smallest. The lowest common denominator of 9 as 12 is 36, for God's sake. You work hard to get an education, and where does it get you?

A) teaching journalism is like teaching someone to swallow. It's a waste of time, and I say that as a journalist at one of the biggest international organizations. And B) anyone who describes an act that kills hundreds and determines a national election as ``empty'' shouldn't be allowed anywhere near young journalists.

Yeah, the Jewish homeland was established just so rich "Palm Beach Jews" could kick some muslims around. Nothing to do with how the continentals had treated their own religious minorities. Nope.

"Shahid" is Arabic for "suicide bomber", oddly or not so oddly enough.

ah, i kept pronouncing it "shithead"

my bad

It was only a matter of time. We've arrived at anti-anti-terrorism. The same people who acknowledged the evil of the Evil Empire, but deplored fighting back even more are at work smoothing out the ruffles in our social psyche.

What this fellow doesn't get is that folks committed to the war on terror have accepted, ahead of time, that these sorts of attacks will continue until we get serious about all of this.

And if that makes me more clear-headed to comment on the importance of a particular attack, because I'm not numb with shock, but simply determined to convince the world that this war is a war that will be fought -- now, conventionally, or later, in ways to horrible to contemplate -- than so be it.

Ron - Your defense of a mathematical concept is touching. :)

As for O'Neill, it's easy to see that he's immoral, perverted, and deeply unhappy just by noting that he believes the murder of 200 Spaniards is "empty terrorism." What would make it meaningful terrorism to O'Neill? If the bombings had made the election go in the direction O'Neill *didn't* want?

Or, to O'Neill, is all terrorism not worth fretting over, because British journalism teachers are so rarely the targets?

Shaheed:
> There in the M.E. you have this rich Palm Beach
> Jew who doesn't look the least bit middle
> eastern, flying over to Jerusalem, kicking out
> the Palestinian from his home, because according
> to him 3000 years ago his granduncle had left
> the place. When the poor guy retaliates, the
> civilized world says: that's terrorism.

What brilliant analysis! I suppose that if the rich Palm Beach Jew *HAD* looked Middle Eastern, everything would have been all right?

Look, genius, if being kicked out of your home is an acceptabler excuse for terrorism, we'd be seeing massive suicide bombing campaigns all over India and Pakistan... to say nothing of the 600,000 Jews who were forcibly ejected from Arab countries in the years following 1948.

Amazing, isn't it? Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were NOT ejected from their homes, become suicide bombers. Israelis of Middle Eastern descent, whose families WERE ejected from their homes, do not. And yet it's Israelis who are the bad guys. Unbelievable.

respectfully,
Daniel in Medford

If I am not mistaken this Brendan is part of the "parcel" that forced Melanie to close down comments on her website.

His name rings a bell, but I can't remember exactly what it was.

I think this is fairly typical of his previous posts... I do believe I've spiked responses to him on numerous occasions.

Of course, I went and posted in his comments there, so let's see the hatemail I get.

I don't uisually quote Spiro Agnew, but in some cases he had the mot juste. My experience with journo professors leads me to think of Agnew's comment in another situation "They're all as soft as a duck's behind."

Did you read the comment immediately under yours?

"Obviously this bombing in Madrid was the work of the Israeli Mossad.

The jews will stop at nothing to try and get peaceful Europeans involved in fighting this "war on terror" which is codespeak for visiting genocide on peaceable Arabs. Next on their list is the creation of a New World Order. Utopia will only be possible when the "Zionist Entity" is destroyed and a pogrom of vertical expulsions is enacted.

Posted by: IronWorker on March 16, 2004 07:45 AM"

Could this be an even better as an example of "the comments represent . . . an interpretation of what the author him or herself thinks”? I doubt Brendan is actually anti-semetic, but he did open the door on this one, didn't he?

Semper Fi,

J

Brendan O’Neill has evidently swallowed the dread fake flying plastic turkey ichneumon & it is bursting out of him.

Meryl, he has caused a few minor brouhahas over the last few years. One was over blogging (I believe it was a bloggers vs. real journalism type of discussion - guess where he came out?).

The other one I can recall was a post, seen here in which Mr. O'Neill came up with such gems as:

"I don't support human rights, particularly the use of human rights talk in international affairs, because it bolsters Western domination over the third world."

"Human rights has become a byword for Western governments getting rid of regimes they don't like and installing pro-Western, pro-human rights regimes in their place"

Checkout Ironworker's linked site fron the comment's thread.

"Obviously this bombing in Madrid was the work of the Israeli Mossad.

The jews will stop at nothing to try and get peaceful Europeans involved in fighting this "war on terror" which is codespeak for visiting genocide on peaceable Arabs. Next on their list is the creation of a New World Order. Utopia will only be possible when the "Zionist Entity" is destroyed and a pogrom of vertical expulsions is enacted.
Posted by IronWorker at March 16, 2004 07:45 AM

Mike Hill:

It was only a matter of time. We've arrived at anti-anti-terrorism. The same people who acknowledged the evil of the Evil Empire, but deplored fighting back even more are at work smoothing out the ruffles in our social psyche.

Actually, the anti-anti-terrorist movement started while the Towers were still smoking. The weekend after, the "peace" movement began to organize to oppose the US defending itself.

O'Neill has simply shown himself to be a fool - yet again. His contributions to the otherwise outstanding "Spiked On-line" are dependably weak, full of fuzzy thinking and misrepresentations.

In my experience, supporters of the War on Terrorism do not see it as World War 2 revisited. It is simply not that all-consuming. Yes, it is something of a "lowest common denominator" in the sense that you legitimately expect all reasonable people to be unified in our support of it. It is hardly the be-all and end-all of politics, however. Why shouldn't people with widely different political persuasions share the beleief that islamofascist terrorism needs to be stamped out ruthlessly, including stifling it at its source (ie working to democratise and educate the Middle East over time).

O'Neill's psychobabble bullshit about seeking certainty is just that - some silly opinion expressed as though it were truth supported by actual evidence. It's not because it's simply untrue. Many supporters of the War against Terrorism have fairly clear politics of their own (and can be lefties like Barham Salih or Jose Ramos Horta) while many revel in the uncertainties of the modern world, like me.

I probably agree with O'Neill on the actual risks and impact of islamofascist terrorism. Tragic and heart-wrenching as individual attacks can be, they are truly pathetic, given the stated objective of bringing down Western civilisation. The islamofacist blow-hards who claim responsibility and make threats show nothing more than the depths of their own delusions.

But having put it in that perspective, we still have a group of people who have declared war on us, who wish to randomly murder us while we go about our daily business and who are beyond reason and dialogue in their own perceptual and ideological/religious universe. We have the choice to try to ignore them, to try to appease them or to systematically go about destroying them utterly. I am in the latter camp, all of my other politics notwithstanding. The truly weird thing is why spoilt intellectual brats like O'Neill are not.

Translation: "I have just given myself permission to dishonestly blur any distinction between the person who runs the site and the most brutish commenter to happen to post on it."

Hey! Sleazy sophistry in service of barely-concealed ideological bigotry! He is qualified to teach journalism!

The following excerpt from the very fine "Bizarre Science" site may be of interest and provide some context for the debate:

Scientific Dogma
After reading this quote in a book I am re-reading, it is quite obvious why Anthropogenic Global Warming is the problem it is perceived to be.

“Once we have become convinced by our theory, for whatever reason, artifacts of that belief are bound to emerge, for we see the world in the context of our belief.......

“If we are in the position of saying ‘Since we now know the theory is correct, what follows’?’, the item under investigation here is not the world of experience, but the theory, for experience no longer has the power to question that belief. The addition of empirical evidence at this point changes nothing, because whatever evidence we include will be interpreted by our theory, producing such artifacts as the illusory ‘confirmation’ and correction above. There should be no confusion about this. A firm conviction precludes any possibility of learning from experience. . . . By treating the theory as a known parameter we approximate tautology . . . the theory is unbeatable because it is allowed to interpret our observations while they are being made or recorded. Once this has been done, it is only logical that the data so collected cannot be used to question the interpretation, being a product of it.

cf. R Brady, "Dogma and Doubt," Biological j. Linnean Society, Vol 17, (1982), p. 90.

Obviously I am not referring here to GW but to the tendency to let the facts fit the theory. If your theory is that we rich white westerners (rww's) are bad then you will fit every action and event, even one as improbable as GW or terrorism, into that view. We rww's caused terrorism. We did it in the 12th century and frankly we deserve what we are getting.

I don't want to overrate the impact of the bombings on the Spanish election result. Maybe the previous government was due for a rest anyway and the bombings were coincidental. The good thing for us rww's is that we can exercise our right to change governments.

The intellectual media would blame us for having jobs and schools and hospitals but we work for these. We forego things so that we can educate our kids. We refuse to let our kids dodge school and go and throw rocks at authorities. Gee we really are bad!

And where does defining your worldview through terrorism get you? It gets you to a place where, although you don't like to admit it out loud, you secretly, guiltily welcome massacres like that in Madrid, as an opportunity to berate your opponents and as a reminder of your own moral indefatigability.

This is a version of the argument often used by Right-wingers - "the Left welcome misery/starvation/war/oppression because it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their supposed 'moral superiority' by means of demonstrations, campaigns, letter writing, etc". It seems to me to be worth considering.

They are opposed to mass murder, to nihilistic bombings, to the killing of 200 innocents as they travelled to work on a Thursday morning. This is the morality of the lowest common denominator, an empty political vision defined in response to empty terrorist acts. To paraphrase Tony Blair: 'It is as pathetic as the terrorists are opportunistic.'

This, on the other hand, is about as low as you can go.

you've all given O'Neill too much credit. maybe he's just a dickhead?

This Brendan character has a chemical imbalance in his brain. Either that or he is just plain evil.

It's because of posts like the one you point to, Tim, that I've long referred to O'Neill as "the accidental comedian", though he is apparently gifted enough to understand the motives and intentions of every person who makes a comment with which he disagrees.

What an arrogant pillock.

In my earlier post I referred to the practice of believing our theory to be true as the starting point of observation then all evidence will only be evidence if it supports our theory. That is definitional. It is logical but invalid. Nevertheless it is widespread.

As one experiences the world it is usual to come to uphold the view that the rule of law, private property and free economic opportunity are the foundations of what you want for you and your family. Given that these are your desires you eventually find out that many others do not have the same stake in these values that you do.

It is a possibility to hope that these "others" will go away if ignored but we learn early from the schoolyard bully that this is not a winning strategy. It therefore becomes a tactical issue ie how do I make my values prevail and for most of us we learn that it will not happen without sacrifice and commitment.

In my value system there is simply no excuse for terrorist bombings and I see a real and sharp moral difference between that actions of the "coalition of the willing" and Al Queada.

To me terrorists are at war with my values. Any success they have directly impacts the viability of the way of life that I wish for all people. It doesn't matter if they are Islamic except to the extent that this religion institutionalises oppostion to my values. I would oppose any group (and have) who opposed my values.

If it were practical I would support intervention in any country where people are not allowed to be free, own their own property and be protected by the rule of law.

Shaheed forgets Egypt and the surrounding area was Christian for awhile, what happens if we try and take it back?

I don't know if anyone's posted anything about this already, but in regard to the incident in which the Japanese exchange student was shot and killed, it happened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, about an hour's drive from my hometown of New Orleans, so the details are quite secure in my memory.

Anyway, the young man was shot not because he was Japanese--the homeowner was unable to see his face as it was a dark Halloween night--but because he proceeded towards the gun holder after having been loudly and urgently told to "freeze!" It became one of the most horrible manifestations of language-gap imagineable, that this young gentleman was not familiar with that particular usage of the term.

Anyway, I'd bet a million bucks (U.S.) that had the guy seen the boy's Japanese face, he would have been tremendously relieved--"Thank Christ it's not some nig or white-trash scumbag!"--quite contrary to the point that that dope Brendan, whoever he is, was making. For what it's worth, the shooter, perhaps needless to say, appeared to be absolutely devastated for having made that horrible mistake.

I've been living in Japan for the past 6 years, and the Yoshi Hattori story has now a part of Japanese foreign-travel hazard folklore; the mere mention of the incident prompts any Japanese present to shout "FREEZE!"

here's some more on hattori affair

http://blogd.com/archives/000124.html

Brendan O'Neill is, as suspected, a moron. How wonderful that a "teacher of journalism" is so sublimely indifferent to the correctness of the basic facts it if distortion helps his agenda.

Somehow it's all so fitting. Fuck you O'Neil, you sanctimonius shithead, it's people like you that make the general public despise and distrust journalists.

This Brendan appears to be a basket case, and should be dismissed as such.

Let's discuss the real issues. For instance: Do you advocate a world where the Good gird themselves for perpetual War against the Bad? What alternatives are there, if any? And where do those of us who are neither Good nor Bad fit in? Will we be victims, or will we be perpetrators? Or both? Do you advocate "kill them all" as some of the contributors to this blog often say? Does this make you a bit like Them (the Bad)? Is it kill or be killed, or is it always going to be kill AND be killed?

Nemesis: I see you finally understand at last.* By the way: it's not a matter of "accepting" or not -- unless you mean "do you accept reality?" Yeah, life sucks, there will be no paradise in our time. Deal with it.

*I know he doesn't, actually, "get" it. He still thinks that we can somehow bring "peace on earth" by giving up and giving in. But it's fun to pretend!

Of course, everyone on both sides of every issue is foolish and wrong and should be ignored.

What we should be talking about is BUSHLIED!!!

And do you really want to live in a world where the "government" creates "laws" to "protect" us from "criminals"? Isn't that like admiting that certain actions are "wrong", and are there any alternatives to calling them "wrong"? Why can't we all just agree not do the "wrong" things, then everything will be fine and we won't need to gird ourselves with these silly "laws" because no one will ever break a rule that doesn't exist. If nothing is "wrong", then no "wrong" will ever be done.

My favorite bit from "george" in the comments after the o'niell (o'niall?) article
"Conspiracy----no way Dannny Boy--Guess who has-had airport security contracts also?!
lets give it another look---what better method of getting in the WTC if the secutity was contracted to brother Bush and the a moving company had access to the buiding"...."What better way to to have a cover of sabatoge--moving business"
Was this bloke for real or was "george" one of you lot?

You nearly had me there, Andrea. Just for a moment, my jaw dropped as I thought for the first time ever you were about to engage in some semblance of a sensible dialogue.

But no. The usual vomit. You're just not up to it, are you?

As for my near namesake - I made absolutely no mention of Bush lying. But now that you mention it...

But why bother - neither of you has any response to the points I make, so you make up points of view for me, and attack those false positions instead.

Wow. Sharp.

If you two are indicative of the intellects on your side of these issues, its no wonder you're struggling.

Obviously people who build strawmen must be dismissed.

What we really should be talking about are whiney anonymous trolls whose sole purpose in life is to dismiss the subject of every thread in order to make an unrelated point about something that they couldn't post on their own blog if they knew how.

I pooped my pants!

People who can't control their bowels aren't an issue.

The real issue is, do you advocate a world where the Good toilet train the Bad? What about those of us without rectums?

Oh, so that's what Nemrod's problem is -- he doesn't have a rectum. So much is explained.

Andrea,
No the problem is that he has had all backbone surgically removed. To cope he has to eat a diet low in moral fibre.

Rectum? Split 'im in two!

O'Neill has lost the plot. I recall actually lking the first thing of his I read, which was sneering at the anti-war protesters for being spineless feel-good nudniks. His argument was that they should actually be trying to stop the war, rather than poncing about, but that wasn't on their agenda.

A lot of people of his "worldview" seem to have tossed their reason out of the window rather than face the terrible possibility that maybe they have been dead wrong and lost their moral bearings.