Scrubbing Bubbles

My latest essay ("Black and White -- and Gray"), located just one floor down, past the green tea dispenser, hang a left after the LGBT rest rooms and go down three doors past the meeting hall of the OCD Counter-Jihad, concerned a recent Jihad Watch article and its comments thread. The article was titled "UK: 12 Muslims jailed for sexually exploiting 13-year-old girl".

I noted at the time that I just accidentally and almost randomly decided to dip into its comments (after months of avoiding JW comments) because I noticed how many were there for that article -- and on the spur of the moment I wanted to see what Jihad Watchers were up to these days and if they were still hiding their heads in the asymptotic sand on the banks of De Nile (particularly about the pernicious effects of Muslims in our midst, to which the title of that article sickeningly and alarmingly adverts).

As I also noted, within a matter of minutes as I had that page open and had read through most of the comments, pleasantly surprised by one new commenter, "Gray" (new to me, at any rate), who introduced some robust sense into that increasingly retrograde community, I got up to get a piece of toast to finish off my coffee with. When I returned to my screen to refresh it to see what new comments may have appeared in the meantime, not only were there no new comments -- but a whole slew of comments I had just read moments before had vanished!

As I said in my aforementioned article, I could understand the Jihad Watch censor(s) deleting the first nakedly genocidal comment; but it was silly of Robert Spencer to ask Marc, his editor and tech guy, to drone the whole wedding party of innocents as collateral damage along with that one egregious comment.

Luckily, I managed to find that article with its previous comments, on Google cache -- and I salvaged and reproduced the best comments (by "Gray") in my aforementioned post (one floor down, past the green tea dispenser...)

Well, it gets sillier.

Not only did Spencer scrub a whole gaggle of harmless and intelligent comments in his anxious alarm to allay our PC MC Landlords -- I now see that he has scrubbed the whole damn article. Titled "UK: 12 Muslims jailed for sexually exploiting 13-year-old girl", it was dated "February 8, 2016 11:53 am By Robert Spencer".  If the reader tries to find that article now on the Jihad Watch website, he will search in vain -- even if he goes back into the archives (as I did, even back to the last week of January, to make sure).

And yet, the article still exists somewhere -- in the Cloud of Anxiety Deferential to our PC MC Masters, evidently -- for, while I was looking, I happened to notice that in the short list of "Recent Comments" which Jihad Watch has on every page at the very bottom, buried among bells & whistles of self-promotion and advertisement crap, the list indicated that a JW regular had posted on that thread. It provides a link, so I clicked, and lo and behold, I was taken to that non-existent article (still scrubbed clean of comments offensive to our PC MC Masters, of course). I just checked again, and there are no comments to that article on that short list - no surprise there, since that list changes minute by minute, since so many commenters comment on so many different articles as the hours of the day go by.  (Interestingly, another recent article vanished into a cloud -- a kind of parallel universe of Jihad Watch where articles still exist, but they are no longer on the website itself:  see here and here.)

Thank Allah the original comments still exists under Google cache -- however, it gets even sillier and sillier.

When you click on the cache to go there, you arrive at a most curious cache: the whole restored article is there, but it looks blacked out, yet if you squint carefully, you can see the article is still there beneath the darkness of the blacked out overlay. The reader can compare this with the normal way other cached Jihad Watch articles appear when you click on them: they simply yield a normal page of readable brightness. I simply copy-pasted everything when I salvaged and reproduced the comments for my aforementioned article (one floor down...).