Ever have one of those days when a couple of houseflies in the livingroom seem more worthy of your attention than, say, an overdue work assignment, the London riots, what’s for supper, or the Middle East?
This is one of those days. The vicious, bigoted, stupid and grossly ill-educated who swarm in the comments sections of on-line right-wing media like the aforesaid flies on dog feces occasionally set up blogs of their own. They have readerships of half-a-dozen or so—each other, in fact—and engage in vigorous bouts of political circle-jerking.
It seems that I have come to their bleary-eyed attention.
Exhibit One is an Islamophobe who calls himself Kaffir Kanuck. Back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he had been unleashed upon the unsuspecting locals by Her Majesty’s armed forces, we must assume that his duties did not include teaching literacy skills to female children. He’s simply not literate enough himself.
Here is a satirical piece I recently wrote, to send up barking mad historian David Starkey.
Hands up all those who thought this was a real Twitter exchange. Why, there’s Kaffir! I am taken to task for calling my faked-up Twitterstream an “interview,” and accused of logical fallacies. (Did he have to look the last word up? It’s spelled correctly.)
This from a fellow who commits the fallacy of composition several times in that one post, not to mention numerous non sequiturs, with the assistance of the redoubtable Kathy Shaidle, no slouch in the not-too-bright department herself, but a towering genius compared to Kaffir.
To shore up Coren’s “not BlackBerries but Black thugs” thesis, we are presented with two interviews with real Black people, neither of whom were actual rioters; informed that another riot many years ago had Black thugs™ in the rioters’ ranks; and, via Shaidle, that Black thugs™ commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime—in the US.
QE effing D.
Moving on to Exhibit Two, we meet a small-time gay pornographer and screechy defender of Israel, for whom any critic of the place is an “anti-Semite.” You know the type.
This one calls himself “Backseat Blogger.” He is apparently monitoring me.
He took me to task most recently for averring that Ramat Shlomo, a site for more planned Israeli settler housing, is in East Jerusalem. Where it is, of course.
He is also a copyright thief, who has been previously warned, but persists. His current anonymity will not save him.
Finally, as Exhibit Three, take the newly-arrived Sassy, of Sassy Wire—please. Did she kiss her mother with that mouth?
All of these trogs take great delight in linking my blog handle with my real name to ensure priority Google listings for their frequently libelous denunciations. None of them, of course, are identified on the ‘net. Yet.
When folks refer to Stephen Harper’s “red meat base,” this is precisely what they’re talking about. Yes, yes, not all conservatives, etc., etc.—some of that persuasion comment with decorum and occasional aplomb right here at Dawg’s. But the base, in both senses of the word, are the ones who provide the fuel for the government’s increasingly confident attacks on minorities and those who fight for due process and the rule of law, for its unfunny comic-opera foreign policy, its punitive domestic raids on good sense, its religio-conservative war of attrition, its wacky totalitarian impulses.
Call ‘em the “lock and load” folks. They are the raw material out of which fascism is constructed. They live near us. They may look like us. But perhaps it’s time to search the whole country for pods.
