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The profound thought process of Charles Johnson; and a discussion of H.R. Giger
(Note: This entry discusses the disruptive and pornographic cartoons and other displays that the people on Johnson’s enemies list will see if they try to link to his site.)
Alan Roebuck writes:
You’ve pointed out that Charles Johnson is regarded as a conservative because he opposes the “Islamists,” but that he acts like a liberal when he drums the “racists” out of the corps. Well, here’s an LGF post where Johnson goes on record against the “fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism [and] aggressively anti-gay rights” that allegedly lost the GOP the election:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31824_Should_the_GOP_Double_Down_on_Social_Conservatism
I would call this empirical proof that Johnson is a liberal.
LA replies:
Here’s the complete Johnson comment:
If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide. As much as anything else, this election was a referendum on the social conservative agenda, and the social conservatives did not win.
So the social conservative agenda of John McCain, a politician who is famous for not being a social conservative, a politician who has openly stated that he doesn’t relate to social conservatism, cost McCain the election.
It’s the lowest form of knee jerk thinking. Johnson doesn’t like certain things, namely “fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights,” a.k.a. social conervatism. Therefore, since McCain lost the election, Johnson automatically concludes that McCain lost because McCain supports the things that Johnson opposes. Such is the human mind—or, at least, the liberal human mind—in action!
* * *
Note: any link to LGF from VFR will open a very loud and insulting cartoon. Charles Johnson does this to all websites that he doesn’t like, meaning websites that are (in ascending order of the seriousness of the offense) racist, anti-Semitic, fascist-sympathizing, fascist, neo-Nazi, Nazi, genocidal, or critical of Charles Johnson. To allow the reader to avoid the cartoon and get to the actual LGF webpage, only the web address of the page, not the link, is presented above. Copy the address into your browser’s address bar and load the target page there. If you want to see the startling and unpleasant thing that happens if you try to link LGF directly from VFR and from the other blogs not approved by Johnson, click here.
- end of initial entry -
Philip M. writes:
Shouldn’t the cartoon say “You are an idiot,” not ‘You are a idiot”?
Pretty childish though.
LA replies:
I’d say it’s a lot worse than childish. More like a demented hooligan. It is not normal behavior. When I initially posted it, it had a regular link, and a female reader clicked on it and got the cartoon. She wrote to me that she has an epileptic condition connected with visual stimulus and this cartoon triggered a slight seizure.
Philip M. replies:
Yes, it is weird. Even if I were not discerning enough to see the holes in the LGF worldview, I like to think I would have doubts about the seriousness and wisdom of a man who engaged in this type of behaviour.
Alex K. writes:
Is it supposed to be part of the joke or does the writer not realize that it should be “an” idiot?
LA replies:
It reminds me of the McCain staffers who were trying to portray Gov. Palin as an idiot, but did it in such a stupid and vicious way (claiming that she didn’t know that Africa was a continent) that they made themselves look like idiots and worse. It was as though they aimed a gun at her and shot themselves—a farcical echo (going backward from the farcical to the tragic) of Macbeth’s soliloquy in which he contemplates the murder of King Duncan:
But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.
November 9
Terry Morris writes:
Wow! Demented juvenile hooligan indeed. Are the members of LGF still in good standing with their demented leader aware that this is what an outsider gets when he clicks on a link to LGF from an unapproved site, one wonders?
Is there someone who can be contacted (say your female reader’s Congressman or Senator) with the power and the will to resolve this issue with these juvenile shenanigans of Johnson’s resulting in epileptic seizures. This guy’s not just a nuisance, he’s dangerous left ungoverned by an outside authority. Some people just have to be controlled, what can I say.
* * *
November 11
The female reader, JV, who had a seizure as result of the LGF “redirect” sent Johnson a letter about it, which I post with her permission:
Mr. Johnson,
I has the misfortune to experience an example of your extreme immaturity. I was reading View from the Right, which I understand you don’t care for. They had a quote and a link to your Little Green Footballs page, which you maliciously redirected to a flash page. A flash page with flicking light, which as someone who has a seizure disorder and who is extremely photosensitive caused me to have a seizure. I am lucky I didn’t have a far worse seizure, as I can have seizures where I stop breathing and/or aspirate.
This kind of childish behavior on your part only reflects badly on you and is the kind of low brow antics one would expect at the Daily Kos. A mature person would allow the links even if they disagree with the blogger. Maybe I ! am expecting too much. I hope not.
FYI the proper English is “you are an idiot”
JV forwarded the note to me with this note:
It’s not a very nice letter but what I was hoping for was that he would have the decency at least to change the redirect so that it would not be a health hazard to those of us who have seizures triggered by strobe lights. BTW migraines can also be triggered by flashing lights as well.
She followed up a few days later:
BTW Charles never responded and I found that there is a wiki article about LGF URL redirects. He’s been doing this for years. Like I say this reflects only on *his* lack of character. It’s a shame that the quality of our public education and public demeanor has been so degraded that people don’t even see this anymore.
November 12
Robert B. writes:
That redirect is worse than you think. If you start backing up through the directory path, you will find that the offensive flash movie has been enlarged to make it worse. But wait!! it gets even more disgusting, back up one more directory and you can mechanized porn.
Be careful, and watch quickly, you may not catch it the first time:
LA replies:
In my browser I was partly able to load the pages Robert talks about. I did not see the mechanized porn, but something else from the depths of perversion. Readers are warned. I link this so that people may understand the real Charles Johnson.
This link will take you to the strobe-lighted, “You Are A Idiot” cartoon. Then you start deleting the web address from the right side, going up the directory tree, stopping at each forward slash in the address.
Again, readers are WARNED. This is not for the weak of stomach.
I had heard several times that Johnson is homosexual, but knew nothing about it and never commented on it. Also, there is a homosexual contingent among his Lizards; one of them a few months ago launched a filthy attack on me which I never linked or quoted online. But the webpage I saw is is not just homosexual, it is deeply sick.
Chris B. writes:
The piece of music in that video is from the soundtrack to a computer game called “Quake” written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. I believe the track is called “It is Raped”. The video is probably about machine rape.
Is Johnson into nihilism and sadomasochism? Either way he is pitiful.
M. Jose writes:
Oh, so when I clicked on the link from VFR to Little Green Footballs, I got redirected? So that wasn’t the LGF homepage? I thought that it looked more intelligent than what I usually find there.
LA replies:
You mean the “You Are A Idiot” cartoon seemed more intelligent than LGF? Ha.
Harry K. writes:
I recognized the mechanized porn as the style of the Swiss artist H.R. Giger. Most famous for his work on the original “Alien” movie, he has produced numerous monochromatic airbrushed paintings in his trademark biomechanical style, many of which feature nightmarish, fetishistic, sexual images. One can only wonder what his considerable technical talents might have produced had he not used them in service to the nihilistic and deviant demons that torment him—and our society.
November 14
LA replies:
It’s interesting that “Alien” comes up. I saw “Aliens” (the 1986 sequel to the 1979 “Alien”) in the theaters when it came out, and, with its conception of the alien creature and what it does to its human victims, it was by far the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen. It was, sort of, to me what the torture threatened on Wintson Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four was to him: the image of ultimate nightmare. The after-effects of the movie stayed with me literally for months. I remember mentioning to my niece, who was 15 at the time, how disturbing I found the movie, and she hadn’t been bothered by it at all, it had just washed over her.
John L. writes:
I also recognized the mechanized porn as something by Giger. I discovered the oeuvre of this strange artist one day while visiting his home village of Gruyère in Switzerland, more famous for cheese. Gruyére is a beautiful village. All the buildings are medieval, the main square is charming, there is a small castle, and the whole is surrounded by green meadows full of the cows that produce the famous cheese. The combination of charm and gastronomy draws many tourists. Right in the middle of the village is the H. R. Giger museum, full of not only his drawings and full-sized polystyrene models of the Alien, but also much of this deranged nightmarish biomechanical porn. Stumbling out of the dark museum full of Giger’s horrific creations into the warm, sunny village of Gruyére was one of the strangest juxtapositions I have ever experienced.
Perhaps one day Western civilization will escape from the shadowy horrific nightmare of liberalism and emerge blinking into the warm sunlight of traditionalism?
Mack writes:
I don’t quite understand John L’s comment…
“Perhaps one day Western civilization will escape from the shadowy horrific nightmare of liberalism and emerge blinking into the warm sunlight of traditionalism?”
Is this just typical blame Liberalism for everything talk?
Humanity has flirted with the darker sides of what make up the human consciousness from time immemorial—you can’t blame Liberalism for that!
This leads me to the question that this comment provoked—Is there a denial of human nature on the right that somehow corresponds to that of the left? Human beings are not some sort of inherently pure and beautiful creature that is cruelly influenced by a corrupt and decadent society, the removal of which would miraculously remove the blight on our race. To imagine this to be true is just as absurd as saying that you could take any child at birth and socialize them into an astrophysicist—it’s patently false, on both counts.
This is emblematic of a certain naiveté that affects the positions of both Liberals and Conservatives—credulousness surrounding the inordinate influence of culture and socialization on the way people behave. Our culture isn’t degenerate because of HR Giger or pornography, our culture is a product of human nature—a tendency on an individual level to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and to successfully propagate our genes, this is what causes our society to become decadent and I don’t know how to change it, we have certainly tried to in the past, but we all know that the world never became dominated by monks, stoics, or ascetics!
LA replies:
I think John L. was contrasting the normal, attractive, civilized world of Gruyère with the nightmare portrayed in the Giger museum.
To say that civilization and beauty are better than an SM basement is not to embrace a Pollyannish view of human life.
As I say over and over, civilization is not something to be simply possessed and enjoyed; civilization is an island in the midst of a sea of barbarism, and must be constantly defended and maintained.
As for John L.’s equation of liberalism with the dark forces represented by the Giger museum, of course, there have always been dark forces. But liberal society is the first society in history that specifically attacks its own ability to defend itself from dark forces, by denying transcendent truth and objective morality and saying that all desires are equal to all other desires and should be equally free.
Bob Dylan says in “Jokerman”:
Freedom
Just around the corner from you.
But with truth so far off
What good will it do?
Freedom without truth is the world of liberalism. It’s the “Democracy” described by Plato in Book VIII of The Republic, where all desires are equally liberated and life is a celebration of diversity. However, in Plato’s account, Democracy soon gives way to Tyranny, in which the man with the strongest desires and the least restraints on them, the man who lives as in a dream where he can act out any impulse he wants no matter how evil, takes over.
Laura W. writes:
It seemed Mack missed the point of what John L. was saying. The dark forces that create pornography have always existed, but until recently the West did not openly celebrate them by including pornography (as opposed to art that presents nudity or sexual themes) in museum collections. Museums today are similar to altars. By sanctioning this museum, lovely Gruyere seems to be expressing a bit of self-loathing.
Laura W. writes:
Mack also says, “we all know that the world never became dominated by monks, stoics, or ascetics!”
Count me out. I don’t know that at all. Monks, stoics and ascetics were small in number, but they infused society with their convictions. They never attempted to make everyone a monk, a stoic or an ascetic. From his cell, Aquinas changed the world. If Mack doesn’t see that as a form of domination, he doesn’t believe in the power of ideas.
John L. writes:
In reply to Mack:
My last sentence was not as serious as the preceding paragraph.
I didn’t mean to argue a thoughtful position asserting an analogy between the Giger Museum and liberalism, nor assert that liberalism is the source of Giger’s oeuvre or darkness and evil generally. It was just meant to be a playful analogy using the serious and very dark preceding material to try to say something more or less cheerful.
To speak seriously to the matter, I hold the traditional Christian position on the origins of evil. Society is not to blame for it, but the now-fallen human heart. It IS fair to say that one society is far more corrupt and corrupting than another. Imagine Giger’s work existing in Chaucer’s time. There’s an awful lot of fornication and adultery in Chaucer, but it is impossible to imagine any of his characters having a taste for Giger’s bio-mechanical depravities!
There are two aspects that I think we can fairly blame on liberalism. In a traditional society, I don’t think Giger’s art would have a museum with a big entrance on the main street of the village. Also, this kind of darkness grows with feeding. Consider the effect of living in a liberal society on Giger’s own soul. A more traditional society would have encouraged and helped him to resist his own inner darkness, as well as to direct it into less destructive channels.
I wonder what would have become of Giger had he been born into a traditional Catholic society. He could have expressed his fascination with horrific darkness by becoming a painter of Hellfire, damnation, Last Judgments, bloody martyrdoms, and so on. He would have rivaled or surpassed Bosch.
In this way even his instinct for perversion could have been put to some kind of honorable use in the service of God and man. Would not Giger himself have been a happier man in such a society, even if he never believed the Gospel himself? Perhaps now I AM falling into a Pollyanna-ish optimism.
John L. continues:
While we’re talking about it I just wanted to comment a bit more on Giger’s art itself.
It seems odd to call it pornography or sadomasochistic. Although it is certainly sexually depraved, I don’t think Giger particularly intended to provoke lust.
The common theme is rather the invasion of the human by the machine. Almost always the human element in his art is passive, helpless and motionless, while sinister machines have taken over some or all of the body itself, just as the aliens in the Alien movies do. The nightmarish quality is due less to the sexual element and more to this transgression of the boundaries of the human and the vision of a humanity permanently transformed into some half-human, half-mechanical, but utterly alien hybrid.
It is the most disturbing stuff I have ever seen.
LA replies:
Well, this explains “Aliens” to me, which, as I said, was the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen (even as it made no impression on my teen-aged niece).
I think the word pornography was first used in this entry by me. It was in response to one of the images I came upon at the Johnson website. I don’t want to describe it. It may not have been pornography in the usual sense, but that was the word that came to mind. Let’s just say it was extraordinarily sick, evil, and anti-human.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2008 04:14 PM | Send
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