Really?

[james_davis_nicoll]

"leftist SF critic James Nicoll"? Leftist?

Comments

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

I'll note that your commenters are pretty free with labels like "Republican", "right of right wingers", and so forth.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's a real shame how badly those brands are damaged; and how quickly their replacement brand names are damaged. It makes you wonder if there's something very wrong with the underlying item.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I think they hit on it pretty well with the "Know-Nothing Party" brand.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

"It's a real shame how badly those brands are damaged"

That happens because they're not based on underlying principles, but rather, irrelevant historical accident and random assemblages of policies. That makes them endlessly mutable.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Oh, look at this output from refugee'50s little pen:

No, you commie shit nozzle, I will not shut up. I will not go quietly. I will not do as I’m told.

It is the work of the Twenty First Century to clean up the socialist mess once and for all. You will not win, because your win is slavery and death. [...]

But if you want it spilled here, on American soil — and it’s clear you do — remember, we kept our guns, despite your best efforts, and we will shoot back.

I had a mental profile of this guy: heavy basement dwelling compulsive masturbator etc. His blog confirms pretty much everything except the intense use of hand lotion, although looking at his posts on feminism, I bet he posts at Instapundit's wife's crazy blog complaining about the wimmin.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Oh my God he quotes Steven den Beste on politics *and* anime! I thought den Beste was in jail for trying to look up a 10-year-old Hmong girl's skirt or something.

This is awesome.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Breitbart is all of that. More, Breitbart knew how to inspire, in a way that Beck does not.

I am not Breitbart, no. But I wish I was, and I strive to be.

Oh this is incredible. I am literally laughing out loud.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Wow. I disagree with refugee50s' politics, but I never assumed he was a bad person because of that. But, man. What a colossal jackass.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

Oh, from the very moment I first heard that that he feels extremely uncomfortable, to the point of believing himself enslaved, whenever he is not secretly carrying the means to murder all of the people around him at any moment he feels it would be convenient, I was absolutely certain of his posterior equinanity.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

At some point this should be expanded into a short essay in favor of open carry.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Oh, and he's finally decided to become a "Christian" after a lifetime of skepticism. If it has improved his morals, I can't see it.

No, being baptized doesn’t give you a license to judge others. Christ gives you a standard by which to judge yourself.

I wonder who gave him the license to judge others, then? Was it at the bottom of a Kleenex box?

I see his blog roll there has noted holy man Vox Day. So his spiritual company is still, shall we say, a little unsettled.

Will refugee50s' new-found faith grow like a mustard seed within his heart? or will it just confirm the same things that make him so profoundly unhappy and angry at the world that he fantasizes about shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting leftists and feminists and all that sort until they are dead and waterboarded [*] in acid and fucked up the ass with a wood rasp?

Only time will tell. What an oddly specific fetish, incidentally.

[*] I thought waterboarding wasn't torture? well, we all know better now don't we.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Ooh, civility from refugee50s:

To those on the left losing faith:

Fuck you. Tie you down to a sparse bed of nails, waterboard you with acid, and fuck you up the ass with a red hot wood rasp until the shit boils out of your nose.

[update, 11 Jan 2011]
And now, in the wake of Loughner, I scroll back through my blog and find I’ve written this. I can do two things: erase it and hope nobody notices, or own up.

I’ll own up. I am not happy to have written that, but I am tired of being polite in the face of venomous rage spitting from the mouths of those who presume to be my betters, and for a moment there, I let it boil over.

In words. On a blog hardly anybody reads. I don’t know what I’ll do if somebody ever actually does what I wrote there, but I will not be pleased with myself. Heck, I’m not pleased with myself for that now.

Utterly horrible. The initial vitriol is par for the jackass course, but what a powerless person you must see yourself to be, how much you must hate and resent the modern world, to recognize yourself in Jared Loughner.

At least you know you're worthless.

[rachel-swirsky.livejournal.com]

Disagree. I think a lot of people realized then that the use of violent rhetoric had the potential to contribute to the actions of violent people. I appreciate that refugee noted that and realized it was a problem, that he was willing to see himself as part of a context which includes Jared Loughner.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Agreed. While a lot of the views are IMO pretty ugly, I'll give him credit for backing off such language and not just wiping it.

And Carlos's mockery is getting pretty unseemly too. But hey, it's Carlos.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Well, refugee50s made his comment, "remember, we kept our guns, despite your best efforts, and we will shoot back," nearly a year and half after his "I feel bad because I sound like Jared Loughner" cri du coeur. Last Sunday, in fact.

Guess what? HE STILL SOUNDS LIKE JARED LOUGHNER.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Your comment here seems more polite to the "fuck you up the ass with a red hot wood rasp" guy than the person mocking him. What the hell?

I'm glad Carlos is posting this. I thought refugee50s was just a run-of-the-mill right-wing USian who got occasionally snippy on James' journal. Now thanks to Carlos' comments here, I know the kind of thing he posts, retraction or no, and I am genuinely freaked out to a moderate degree right now. Knowing that this guy I've interacted with for years on James' journal is capable of writing "fuck you up the ass with a red hot wood rasp" and "we will shoot back" -- and is more than willing to escalate his trolling of James' journal by posting trollbait on his own blog -- is upsetting.

Politely ignoring what refugee50s has said is dangerous. Mockery and exposure is necessary.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

More polite to the guy who backed off the violent language than to the guy saying "you're a basement dwelling masturbator" right now, yes. Drawing attention to public posts is one thing. Gratuitous insults and asshole behavior are another. Compare to Doug M., who often makes the same points in discussion without being an aggressive asshole throwing personal insults aroun.

But *you've* probably never been accused of being a troglodyte living in your parent's basement while you were visiting and helping your parent who was dying of cancer. For me Carlos isn't just someone who happens to other people.

And you seem to be leaping to conclusions with the 'trollbait'.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Just FYI, Damien is right: I'm not a terribly nice person. I'm harsh, I set traps, I treat people who don't measure up with contempt. If I see people being willfully stupid or cruel, I'll go out of my way to treat them like an object, a grievous sin if you follow Pratchett morality. And I rarely forget.

I think what really disturbs people, though, is that I seem to enjoy the process entirely too much. A higher-up from one of the chan-related groups once called me a Dexter. I think he meant it as a compliment. Not sure how to take that.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

A lot of people with addictive behaviors will admit they have a problem. They'll talk your ear off of about it, and then ask you for a twenty. It's a step, but it's not a big step.

Since the modern world is not going to change to accommodate refugee50s -- nor should it, since it would mean a radical diminishment of millions of peoples' lives, and for what? just so he can feel like a real man? -- he has to change himself to accommodate to the world. But his resentment forms so much of his self-identity, he has based his entire worldview around it.

It's not a real change. He doesn't have the empathy for it; he probably thinks empathy is a dirty word, since that's become a partisan shibboleth.

Can he learn? Can he change? Can he grow? I would truly like to think so. But as it is, he's pretty low. And so he'll probably die unhappy, but blame everyone else first in the process.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Calls it as we sees it and all that.

I'm pretty free with Libertarians are a bit dim labels too myself.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

"Calls it as we sees it and all that."

Exactly my point; so do I call it as I see it.

So here I am, someone people describe, no, decry as being on the right, while ascribing views to me that I do not remotely hold. And yet, when I refer to them as being on the left, relative to me, that's offensive.

[scratches head]

Weird.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Except that's not what you did is it?

You described James as being leftist, not 'leftist as far as I'm concerned' but 'leftist' - I don't particularly think he is myself btw.

OTOH having looked at the junk you write on your blog, I'd peg you as some kind of Objectivist Libertarian type who is most certainly on the political right of almost every issue.

If you're not, then MAN, you need to really re-think your writing style... and you certainly shouldn't invoke Breibart.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Isn't something like "in my opinion" or "as far as I'm concerned" generally understood to be invisibly appended to statements like that?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Not convinced it was in this case...

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Or to be more accurate, I took it less as an opinion and more as an 'all else is therefore suspect' rider...