Every political blog is an inkblot test of some kind or another, but Little Green Footballs is more of one than most: Los Angeles Magazine called it “constitutionally-protected hate speech” for its adversarial view of (radical) Muslims, while it is championed by allies as an exemplar of “anti-anti-Semitism.”
But there is a crucial disconnect between the site’s defenders and detractors. The former, such as NRO’s Cathy Seipp, focus on the front-page blogging of (software-programming, jazz guitar-playing, bicycle-riding) Charles Johnson; the latter zero in on the self-named Lizardoids, members of the closed-registration commentariat that typically adds hundreds of comments to each posting. LGF Watch, arguably the longest-running blog watchdogging another single blog, finds most of its (legitimate) material in the comment sections. (What’s more, this being the Internet, there is always someone on hand to watch those who spend their time watching the watchers.)
Which is why my interest was piqued when I first saw a link to the “Lizard Lounge” — a chat room linked in the upper right-hand corner of Johnson’s website. It seems to have opened in November 2006, and like the primary LGF community, is restricted to the registered. There’s no telling when, or if, registration will be opened again.
Johnson is already known for putting comment-submission filters on unambiguous slurs. But people will always find a way, and the comment restrictions may have helped spur along more, um, creative slurs such as “moose limbs” and “Koranimals.” Could the creation of a Lounge, off-limits to detractors such as former business partner Dennis the Peasant, be another way to shelter the community from criticism?
That answer probably depends on one’s existing feelings about LGF. However, with at least an attempt at objectivity, I compared the LGF archives from October 2006, the first month before the Lizard Lounge went online, and January 2007, the most recent calendar month for which it has been open.
Survey says? I got nothing. I find no drop-off in comments in January that would suggest the Lizardoids had taken their less defensible slang behind closed doors. And though LGF Watch can hardly be considered a disinterested arbiter of Little Green Footballs’ rhetoric, they did post 9 times more in January than in October.
That said, just this weekend the watchdog site did identify some objectionable comments about Islam and race vis-á-vis Barack Obama. So if the Lizard Lounge was supposed to keep the more incendiary stuff beyond critics’ reach, it doesn’t seem to be working.
Additional links and material provided by Olly Ruff.
With all due respect and my compliments on a good post, I find your parenthetical use of the qualifier “radical” in the first paragraph misleading at best.
LGFers and the like-minded can frontload it with extraneous prefixes all they like, but the wholesale hatred, and subsequent caricaturization, of a group of people who originate from the Middle East because they subscribe to some other dimly understood religion, plus one heard somewhere that they want to take over the world by surreptitiously mingling among us: this is pretty much the original textbook definition of straight-up anti-Semitism. Yes, of course it’s constitutionally protected, as it should be. It’s also ugly, ugly stuff.
Paging Dr. Rorschach…
“Plus it really makes me uncomfortable!”
True enough: though I pay heed to neither Allah nor Jehovah, the prevalence of bloodthirsty anti-Semitism in my own country posited as patriotic resolve does sort of make me uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to, you know, call it what it is. Weird!
Thanks for the heads up, but if you look closely at our site you’ll actually find that Charles Johnson himself provides plenty of material without us having to delve into the tedious comments of his lizardoid minions. When we do, it’s not to attack them but to point out the hypocrisy of Charles Johnson, a man who claims to be stand up for Western values against racism and hatred but manages to run a consistently racist website full of distortions and outright lies.