Sparse Posting

In the relatively short time that I’ve been doing this blog, I’ve already experienced first-hand a phenomenon often mentioned by other bloggers, namely the sense of pressure to post on a regular basis (I was trying for at least one post per day).

Once I began to notice that I was getting a certain relatively steady level of traffic, which I took to mean that I had a set of regular readers, I began to feel that didn’t want to disappoint them — or should I say you.  If you were going to be nice enough and appreciative enough to come back to my blog every day then I sure wanted to have something for you when you arrived.

Unfortunately, I’m finding I just plain don’t have the time for a post a day. Things are now happening in other areas of life that are making that pace — already leisurely enough by the standards of some bloggers — impossible.

I’m not going to announce a cessation of blogging. I’ll just say that I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post. I may get a couple of posts up per week, or maybe only a couple per month, or maybe not even that. I don’t want to say I’ll stop because I can well imagine that something will come along that I’ll just have to post about. By then, of course, I may well have no more readers. Pity, but oh well. If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, the tree has still fallen.

NAAACP Whinges About ‘Racist’ E-Mails

UPDATE: A commenter has drawn my attention to the possibility that people may not read the whole of this post, with potential resulting mishaps. So let me put the alert up front: this is satire, people. Read the whole thing.

The NAACP has sent a pathetic, moaning complaint to authorities after its headquarters received e-mails from nine-year-old children in an Alabama school calling its members “niggers”, saying that they were sub-human, genetically incapable of advanced culture, and should be used as slaves. The NAACP whinges that this is “racist”.

Although the e-mails had come from the school’s e-mail servers, the school’s Principal denied that there was any problem. “It is true that these e-mails were written by children at our school while they were in school, but we always try to teach the children to consider various points of view”.

Primavera itself is unable to take any position on the e-mails. We simply report the news and it is not up to us to evaluate whether calling black people “niggers” and saying they are sub-human and should return to slavery is in any way racist. One man’s racist is another man’s freedom fighter, after all. That is why the word “racist” in the headline is in inverted commas. If this blog used photos, here’s the one we’d use to accompany this article, because it’s important to underline that there is a possibility, after all, that those kids may be right and that niggers really are sub-human and would make good slave material. And anyway, to be perfectly honest, it just doesn’t suit Primavera’s own prejudices and priorities to show any concern over racism against niggers – on the contrary — which his why we need to distance ourselves from any such concern by the use of scare quotes.

What in the world am I on about? This.

Hat tip: Normblog

(Note: this post is satire.)

Haiti? Never Heard of it. But Dubai – Now THAT’s a Story with Legs!

How long did the Haiti earthquake stay in the news? A week or two? Not more than that. These days you can open the Google News home page at random, at any time of any day, and not see a thing about it. That earthquake seems so long ago. We certainly haven’t heard much for a while.

How long did the Dubai hit stay top, front and centre on the Google News home page? Well, it’s over six weeks now, and counting. It’s non-stop. The biggest story of the year. Seems like only yesterday — yet it happened just exactly one week after the Haiti earthquake.

When NATO takes out Taliban and Quaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan via targeted killing, it’s a line in the news for one day. When Israel takes out a Hamas terrorist in Dubai via targeted killing, the whole world erupts and can’t get over it for months.

There’s a good op-ed about this in today’s FT. It’s a reply to the appalling anti-Israel smear-job that the FT ran last week, and a capable defence of of Israel’s right to defend itself. Andrew Roberts writes:

The intelligence agents of states – sometimes operating with direct authority, sometimes not – have carried out many assassinations and assassination attempts in peacetime without the legitimacy of those states being called into question, or their being described as “rogue”. In 1985 the French Deuxième Bureau sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior trawler, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, without anyone denouncing France as a rogue state. Similarly, in 2006, polonium 210 was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko without Putin’s Russia being described as “illegitimate”. That kind of language is only reserved for Israel, even though neither Pereira nor Litvinenko posed the danger to French and Russian citizens that was posed to Israelis by the activities of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The reason that such double standards still apply – more than six decades after the foundation of the state of Israel – is not because of the nature of that doughty, brave, embattled, tiny, surrounded, yet proudly defiant country, but because of the nature of its foes.

Indeed. Read the whole article — it’s not long and it’s very much worth a read.

Haiti is forgotten because nobody really cares. How much private satisfaction is to be gotten out of reading about a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale? Gloating over the supposed mis-steps and supposed immorality and general all-around terribleness of the Jewish state, however — that’s something there’s a market for.

Who’s Silencing Whom?

Thank goodness for blogs like Harry’s Place.

I blog because I have things I want to say, and some of those things strike me as being very important, and some of those require a bit of thought and care to put clearly and succinctly, but on most days I just don’t have time or only have time for brief, shoot-from-the-hip posts, and  so I often wind up leaving unsaid the things that are most important because I just don’t have time to say them as well as I want to. So it’s great to find just the thing I wanted to say very well formulated somewhere else. I can just quote it, link to it, and feel I’ve done what I really wanted to do, namely add my voice to those saying a certain important thing.

I found one of those things today on Harry’s Place. It’s been said before, but it needs to be said as many times as possible by as many people as possible. It’s this:

The familiar complaint that critics of Israel are being silenced or cowed by charges of antisemitism is in some ways the reverse of the truth. It’s people who call attention to antisemitism, and the enabling or papering over of antisemitism so vividly illustrated by Pilger’s rant, who are being dismissed as Zionist agents, Arab haters, people who can’t possibly be arguing in good faith. We’re not opposing bigotry, the logic goes; we’re employing “the usual tactic,” as Caryl Churchill said of Howard Jacobson when he condemned her ugly [and shockingly anti-Semitic -- Primavera] play Seven Jewish Children.

That was written by David Adler of Lerterland, and I found it via Harry’s Place. Adler goes on to quote Huey Newton:

We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such.

In other words, we categorically refuse to discuss or acknowledge antisemitism, and we will greet anyone who attempts to do so with unthinking hostility.

And we will loudly (and dishonestly) complain that anyone who brings even the slightest criticism of Israel gets accused of anti-Semitism, and we will congratulate each other for being the brave ones who resist the strangely potent and dark and furtive powers that seek to silence us, even those of us who are experts on different kinds of Jews and openly have Jewish friends and use words like “goyim” and “mitzvah”.