Dots and Lines

Well, you were going to get a post of observations that may or may not have led to a cogent conclusion, but the General has already covered the ground, certainly better and more cogently than I would have.

Patterico's asinine assault on TBogg was the first in my series of observations. The second concerned an explosion of assaults on Jane Hamsher at some other nutjob blog (Ace of Spades, I think), wherein the debate centered on whether or not the commenters would do Jane Hamsher, and a detailed exploration of their tendencies toward being, essentially, rapists.

Does Jane Hamsher have issues? Sure. So does the alleged Deb Frisch. Neither is representative. And despite their issues, the publicly expressed threats of anger-fucking, or other rape behaviors, toward them are deeply twisted.

There is, in fact, something really weird about the proclivity of proponents of the war of fucking for...well, fucking, and in ways I don't think their little crusade is supposed to contemplate. Y'know, I have a pretty twisted psychosexual makeup my ownself--I'm no stranger to the conflation of sex with other emotional or functional experiences--and I have a hard time understanding the fundamental disrespect for others that is involved in the positions these people carve out for themselves. They're truly dangerous.

But that's not news, either. I see that, over the weekend, Malkin devoted pretty much her entire front page to posting about Reuters darkening up a photo of smoke over a bombed out neighborhood in Beirut, or somewhere Lebanese. Then she found that some Reuters stringer maybe marginally doctored a picture involving an Israeli aircraft firing missiles. Maybe it was dropping chaff or flares or something.

Something happened at Reuters--they recalled the smoke photo and replaced it with a version that included...lighter-colored smoke, and less smoke. Wow. That's some serious distortion, there. And warplane firing missiles, instead of warplane dropping chaff? Holy shit, I can sure see how that makes Reuters a pack of terrorist sympathizers. And I can easily see how it dwarfs photoshopping 30-year-old pictures of John Kerry and Jane Fonda into some association for campaign purposes, or photoshopping the crowd at a pro-war rally, or maybe photoshopping pictures of Bill Clinton so that it looks like he's necking with some broad at a speech, as a source of significant agita.

Reminder: when someone tells you that the New York Times and/or Reuters and or any other outlet of the so-called liberal media are untrustworthy or treasonous or otherwise bad, remember to tell them to shut the fucking fuck up, and be sure to include some detailed commentary on the lizard-like quality of their intelligence.

And don't forget to read my previous post.