Read John Hawkins on the descent of Little Green Footballs

Because I am new to conservatism and blogging, when I first saw Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs attacking dear, brave Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, whom I met at CPAC and came this close to asking her to autograph my … arm — so much do I admire her courage — I did not know what to make of his accusations except that I cannot bring myself to believe evil of her. People who want me to believe evil of her are playing with fire and running with scissors at the same time. However, by the time Charles got to denouncing Stacy McCain of The Other McCain (see below for his recent replies); Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit; and Pajamas Media, the group blog he co-founded with Roger Simon; THEN I knew I was on solid ground in questioning his judgment, and possibly his sanity.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a thoughtful post on “The Descent of Little Green Footballs” today that includes his reactions to Charles Johnson turning on his fellow anti-radical-Islam bloggers, starting with Pamela Geller:

At first, I noticed that Charles Johnson was getting into feuds with the other anti-radical Islam websites. Early on, as far as I could tell, it was all Charles attacking websites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Gates of Vienna over these European political parties that they supported because they were anti-radical Islam.

At the time, I didn’t know who was right and was wrong. In fact, I still don’t because Charles’ arguments were all very “Seven [Yo, John! It’s six!] Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Some European political party I had never heard of was terrible because it had a high ranking member that I had never heard of who freely associated with some other people who were REALLY BAD that I never heard of and — all these bloggers were terrible, horrible, awful racists and fascists for liking these political parties.

I was sad when I saw Charles attacking Pamela and I didn’t know enough of the “who struck John” to spring to her defense. It appears I wasn’t alone. And maybe Charles was using the difficulty of checking his work as a cover so his mud would stick.

John continues:

Eventually, the bloggers Charles was picking fights with started firing back at him and I started to notice that Charles had a huge beef with Christians. At one point, I looked over at LGF and noticed that literally half the posts on his front page were edged pieces about creationism. This struck me as extremely odd given that creationism wasn’t a hot topic at the time. You could read through 30-40 blogs, not read one word about creationism, and get to LGF and there were 10 posts about it.

This, I found to be a very troubling sign. There are certainly plenty of atheists and agnostics who are good conservatives. However, inevitably in my experience, when you have someone who has a huge beef with Christians, they turn to the Left. That’s exactly how it happened with Andrew Sullivan and John Cole from Balloon Juice and it’s how it happened with Charles, too.

Now here I have to distinguish my position on Christianity, Creationism and Intelligent Design from Charles’s. First, I am spiritual but not religious. I do not have a problem with Christianity until it intrudes into government and education to appropriate the apparatus of the state to impose its dogmas as the law of the land — in the case of homosexual equality — or as facts — in the case of demanding that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design, which are religious dogmas, be taught in school.

My stake in the homosexual equality discussion is obvious — I support equality for homosexuals.

My stake in the Creationism/Intelligent Design argument is due to the work of my father, Hubert P. Yockey, because he has demonstrated that the orgin of life is unknowable, just as the origin of matter is, and that what should be taught about the origin of life in schools is WHY the origin of life unknowable. The sequence is: [unknowable origin of matter] > matter > [unknowable origin of life] > life. In addition, he has pointed out that objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution based on gaps in the fossil record became obsolete with the discovery of DNA because there are no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to the present and we can now look back through the genome and DNA, so that gaps in the fossil record are irrelevant.

I only want church and state, and church and science, to go to their respective corners.

Charles reports on the intrusions of religion into government in the form of people of various religions getting laws passed to require that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design be taught in schools. So I am keeping Little Green Footballs in my newsfeed. There is a delicious irony in this, though. My father’s work shows that ALL of the accepted theories on the origin of life are wrong since coding theory shows why it is unknowable, now and forever. So I consider Charles’s beliefs on the subject to be as faith-based as those of any Christian, even if the faith is based in dialectical materialism. The belief that it is possible to discover the origin of life in the laws of physics and chemistry — which do not contain sufficient information for the problem — is exactly like believing that if you study the physics and chemistry of ink, or pixels, you will be able to discover the origin of works of literature. Exercise-in-futility-wise, it is the modern-day version of trying to figure out how to turn base metals into gold.

Turning to Charles’s attacks on Stacy McCain, below I link the best of Stacy’s recent thoughts about Charles, who really, really should not have poked the bear:

“Andrew Jackson’s Mother Advises This Response to Charles Johnson:

Contrary to anything Mad King Charles may tell his dwindling pool of yet-to-be-banned readers in their “private” discussions, this engagement began when Johnson attacked my friend Pamela Geller for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels conference. Though I was not involved in that dispute, as I told Pamela in a brief phone conversation this morning, I now regret that I did not immediately leap to her defense.

(snip)

Say what you will about Pamela Geller, she is not afraid of a fight. And what the conservative movement needs now — far more than we need ideological unity among intellectuals or would-be intellectuals — is people who are not afraid of a fight.

“LGF Boycott HQ” — too funny!:

We know you’re dying to know what’s going on in Lizard Land, so here are recent LGF headlines and summaries:

No Racism at the Tea Party?

Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:59:05 pm PDT

Photos of anti-Obama posters at DC 9/12 rally which proves “racism” because anybody who doesn’t like Obama is racist, just like anybody who hated Bill Clinton was anti-oral sex.

(snip)

In other words, you’re not missing anything at LGF you couldn’t get from Amanda Marcotte or Firedoglake.

“Charles Johnson exposes yet another scary neo-Nazi: CHARLES JOHNSON”

God told an angel I’ll call “Lydia” to send me an e-mail:

After reading about the dust-up, it occurred to me that Charles could be exposed as a hypocrite by using his own methods. CJ uses what I call a “Six Degrees of Extremism” (or Six Degrees of Racism/Euro Fascism, etc) political parlor game.

He condemns Robert Spencer [of Jihad Watch, linked above] for “associations” with “extremists”* and you for “connections” to white supremacists, yet he adds Daily Kos to his blogroll and approvingly links their posts, which contain the exact kind of material and links to people that CJ uses to excoriate his new targets.

Based on his own criteria, CJ himself is now a racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi fascist. Here’s how: [click here].