Sunday, October 18, 2009

AMATEUR LOONY RIGHT-WING BLOGGER BECOMES SEMI-PROFESSIONAL LOONY RIGHT-WING BLOGGER.

A few weeks ago I told how the myriad of right-wing bloggers are inter-linked with each other and then all link back to the mainstream media right-wing blogs run by the Murdoch propaganda empire thus forming a seemingly large network of blogs which, while it might seem extensive and well read, is actually not so much read by a broad readership, but just by each other feeding off themselves.

I mentioned how many of them had aspirations of becoming part of the mainstream media as ‘journalists’ following in the footsteps of the likes of Tim Blair, a propagandist blogger with Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Telegraph.

Well, it seems one of those amateur bloggers I mentioned, J.F. Beck who runs, or ran, a blog called RWDB, which apparently stood for Right Wing Death Beast, (right-wing, death and beast all being words closely associated with each other when describing fascist and fascist-like people) has made it, well, not quite big-time, but is now writing for some online blog called ‘Asian Correspondent’; not quite mainstream media, but Beck has probably deluded himself into thinking that it is.

One of his first pieces at ‘Asian Correspondent’ is a parting shot at a left-wing blogger who Beck says is a ‘lame response’ to the likes of Islamophobes Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and their mainstream blogs.

Beck is a pedantic-style propagandist which means he ignores the mains issues and points of any given argument by honing in on some tiny grammatical or factual error made by anyone on the left. He then, regardless of whether or not the error has actually anything to do with the pain point of the debate, attempts to blow the error out of proportion in an effort to demean or trivialise the debate and the person who is making the argument.

Beck seems to be obsessed with writer Antony Loewenstein. One mistake from Loewenstein, no matter how trivial, and Beck is on to it like a shot for some twisted reason. If Loewenstein says the Israelis killed ten Palestinian civilians when in fact they’d killed nine, Beck would be there to expend hundreds of words demonising Loewenstein to the hilt for making such a ‘massive’ error of fact, but, of course, Beck would ignore entirely the fact that Israelis killing even one Palestinian civilian would be a crime.

As Beck himself says, what he is best known for is “Accuracy – my ideological opponents (progressives) get all upset when the facts prove them wrong”. Most times accuracy of facts has little to do with the ideological aspect of debate; while facts should be corrected when needed, they often are totally irrelevant to the subject of the debate.
But that wouldn’t stop Beck – especially if the debate was one Beck was otherwise intellectually unable to take part in.


UPDATE

And, as if to prove the point, Beck launches straightaway into some pedantic criticism of Loewenstein over a simple mis-spelling. Why? Because he is utterly incapable of actually arguing any point with Loewenstein. The very best he is able to do is pick him up on a spelling mistake and hope that is enough to somehow stop Loewenstein doing what he does.

Well, at least Beck’s reading Loewenstein’s stuff and then linking to it – even if it is just over a spelling mistake.

Or maybe Loewenstein is deliberately inserting spelling mistakes knowing that Beck will link to him.

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