Monday, December 14, 2015

One day at a time...

http://i.imgur.com/5DV3LiE.gif

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Well, it's been 29 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes, and 32 seconds (but who's counting?) since I "snapped" and left the sub-community of the Counter-Jihad otherwise known as Jihad Watch comments.  If the reader wants to know in more detail why I left, he or she should look at my two previous essays, which are linked in a recent essay Cold Turkey, written for Thanksgiving and, pun intended, describing my resolve to stop the habit "cold turkey" of going back there.  I've been "clean and sober" all this time, taking one day at a time, sweet Jesus...

So far, this has been surprisingly easy for me.  Perhaps I'm still in the early stage of "withdrawal denial" and I don't realize how bad I'll be jonesing for that old Jihad Watch comments fix soon enough.  But I no longer miss it.  And if I ever do feel a twitch of the old temptation, all I have to do is refresh my memory by looking at any one of scores of comments threads I've bookmarked (perhaps hundreds, if I spent the time plumbing through the sewage of the JW archives) in which JW regulars, Phillip Jihadski and Angemon, zoomed in to pester me, mock me and attacked me.  And it's not just about me -- it's the fact that they bullied me so long in defense of a soft position on the problem of Islam.

And it's not so much the mere fact they did that (however annoying it turned out to be), but that no one else in that community ever came to my defense in any way other than once in a blue moon, and with a limp wrist and a wet noodle.  Indeed, when others bothered to even take notice of what Jihadski and Angemon were doing, they would choose to chide me, not them.

Some of my readers may not know how deeply and intensely I participated in that sub-community of the Counter-Jihad -- year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, for ten years from about 2005 to November 13, 2015.  It became part of my daily routine for over a decade -- so much so, that the smell of coffee in the morning mingled with the civic duty I felt I was participating in, in my own humble way, as a concerned civilian trying to educate himself on this most pressing, and worrisomely worsening, problem.

As part of that, I would dive into the comments fields to rub elbows with everybody else and offer my two cents; and I kept hoping for some kind of a sense of community, where at least some people had your back and were sort of on the same page, even while others chose to mock and attack you -- and most of all, a wider community where people could feel free to criticize each other without incurring the wrath of tribalistic, high school cliques who swaggered around policing what was "acceptable" to write. 

I finally saw that it's hopeless; there is no real community for me at Jihad Watch.

P.S.:

Just one example of my copiously intense participation at Jihad Watch comments -- typical of most of my ten years there -- may be gleaned from the fact that during one three-month slice of time in 2009, when comments were temporarily hosted by intensedebate, I logged 2,016 comments!  (Unlike Jihad Watch, intensedebate allowed for archiving each commenter's total output; see this intensedebate archive page if you have a perverse inclination to waste a lot of time...)

11 comments:

Richard James said...

A besetting problem with all the Counter-Jihad sites of which I know is that BTL in particular there is little going on but individuals or small cliques making themselves feel good about themselves either by attacking commenters they feel are too "extreme" or by crowing about their own or their party's or country's supposed superiority in dealing with Islam.

As an Englishman I've long since tired of the regular comments on Jihadwatch - even from Robert Spencer himself - that England is finished, Britain is finished, Europe is finished and so on. None of this is true and it's main effect will be to make us over here weary of Jihadwatch and its clones.

When I read such stuff I get the sense that most such posters are whistling in the dark, convincing themselves that Europe will go under but the USA won't. Yet I know from reading online and from talking to American friends that PCMC self-inflicted weakness and capitulation to muslim demands infects US society almost as much as it does that of Britain, Ireland and Europe.

I also sometimes wonder at the apparent ignorance of many US BTL commenters. They don't seem to understand that whatever the border controls we have in place a Jihadi or just an everyday troublesome muslim can - if needs be - walk from Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or Mecca to Vienna, Rome, Munich, Paris, even London at a pinch; it's a continuous landmass give or take bridges and tunnels. There aren't several thousand miles of ocean separating us from the islamic cess-pits of Asia and Arabia or even North Africa.

I think that most of the BTL commenters on the likes of Jihad Watch, no matter how far we know they are from a thorough understanding of the threat posed to us by muslims, islam and our own cultural sleep-walk into submission, would be better occupied educating their friends about what they understand of the threat it poses, doing even as little as that, than just bitching self-righteously in the comments sections.

I first became aware of your blogs through your posts as LemonLime at Jihadwatch, was shocked to see how you were regularly attacked by the BTL commenters and banned by Spencer. I now limit my thorough reading of Counter-Jihad sites to yours, using the others just as news sites.

Please keep up this blog Hesp, it's the only one where I find good sense.

gravenimage said...

Hepserado, just to let you know that you *are* missed at Jihad Watch:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/12/swedish-govt-in-panic-after-isis-letters-give-3-days-to-convert-to-islam-or-be-decapitated/comment-page-1#comment-1343548

I miss your comments as well. I'm not trying to lure you back--just thought you should know.

Hesperado said...

P.S.:

By the way, if I were still commenting on Jihad Watch, and Jihad Watch featured the Danusha Goska review of the new book by Mahtob Mahmoody, and I typed in a comment basically repeating what I wrote in my second-to-last article here (I Can Call You Betty), I have no doubt -- wearily based upon hundreds of similar occasions over the years -- that Angemon would zoom in to pester me with a tissue of sophistry laced with mean-spirited assumptions about me and all based on a presupposition of softness supposedly superior to my impatient cynicism about the softness of Goska -- and then gravenimage and the other members of the Peanut Gallery (JayBoo, Mirren, Wellington, Western Canadian, et al., including a fledgling member, quotha raven, who manages to be even more passive-aggressive than gravenimage) would ignore him; and if I pressed the issue or complained about Angemon, they might deign to notice and chime in -- not to tell Angemon to knock it off, but to chide me.

Egghead said...

Richard James, if it helps at all, please understand that Muslims can walk right across our borders here in the USA as well.

Most people think about the Southern border being wide open where Muslims sneak in with the rest of Central and South America.

But, the northern border is also wide open which is worrisome now that Canada is importing a surplus of Muslims.

It appears that Trump would need to build two walls....

Hesperado said...

Well Egghead, the Canadian border presents an easier problem (once we become less PC MC, that is), insofar as 1) Canadians haven't been streaming down into the USA illegally for decades; and 2) the Muslim immigrants they will have more of will be easily distinguishable from most Canadians -- unlike from Hispanics. As the Hispanic-American candidate for state Congress of Arizona, Gabriela Sauceda Mercer put it:

"That includes Chinese, Middle Easterners. If you know Middle Easterners, a lot of them they look Mexican or like a lot of people in South America - dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes, and they mix in..."

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2012/11/muslim-physiognomy.html

Hesperado said...

And had I posted the above comment on Jihad Watch, no doubt Angemon would have swooped in to pick at me for exemplifying some facet of being "another Goebbels" as he once called me (a grotesquely offensive accusation for which gravenimage at the time ineffectually and mildly chided him with a wet noodle).

Egghead said...

Hi Hesp, Would it make you feel better if you thought that people have been - and are - literally paid to troll 'conservative' websites to sow strife? Granted, I see people call out trolls on other 'conservative' websites, but these paid trolls confuse the ordinary people in two ways: 1) they feel isolated, and 2) they worry about being attacked themselves.

There is a famous quotation: "If you're not catching flak, you're not over the target.

https://tobefree.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/freedomquotes-if-youre-not-catching-flak-youre-not-over-the-target/

Hesperado said...

Thanks Egghead; well, with Angemon and Phillip Jihadski of Jihad Watch comments (the two worst offenders of the high-school-clique-cum-lynch-mob making me feel increasingly unwelcome there), I think it's actually worse: they sincerely were soft and took obsessive offense at my tougher stance on Islam. If they were merely paid trolls, that would be more understandable and, frankly, less dismaying. But as I've said repeatedly, Angemon and Phillip Jihadski's behavior was not the real problem -- the real problem was the unwillingness of anyone else to have my back in any way other than so minuscule it was ineffectual; and whenever I began to object to and protest this situation assertively, they would move from inaction & pretending not to notice to outright adding of insult to injury, joining hands with Angemon and Phillip Jihadski against me. Quite dismaying and disheartening.

Egghead said...

Hi Hesp, As I tried to explain to GoV, Israel and other countries like Russia and other regions like the Middle East have a lot of foreign-owned agents dedicated to promoting very destructive narratives (on the Internet and elsewhere) that harm the United States and it's sovereignty and world eminence.

Spencer is joined at the hip with Geller who has said (paraphrase here) that she is protected by an army (which army because it is not the USA army owned by Obama?).

Horowitz has paid Spencer. Follow the money....

Egghead said...

Foreign influence on think tanks:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html?_r=1&referer=http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/12/16/cold-anger-discussed-with-a-british-accent/

Egghead said...

Relationship tracking site:

http://littlesis.org