re: #183 Aucun pays pour les vieux ennemis

Steve was an ass. I think he got more leeway than most here because of his health issues.

Many of that crowd, and by that I mean the more conservative types who were still around after the loss of the most evil cultie nutjobs, were contrarian in nature, which is a nice way of saying ‘troll’. I said once that steve was a troll in the purest sense of the word, ie. someone whose main goal in posting is to pick a fight, regardless of topic or position. The same was true of Walter and even Cato to some extent, though they were much more literate and veiled it better. Killgore was also somewhat contrarian, but I think he became more set in that way out of pure stubbornness when people here didn’t like how he reacted to OWS. He struck me as a quiet guy who liked his den and his garden and didn’t like his peace disturbed, and his hatred of protestors and demonstrators stemmed from that. When he realised that LGF as a whole didn’t share his hatred, he decided to become more contrarian about it.

There have been many people, over the years, who have clearly felt that the community here had a prevailing opinion that marginalised them personally. I’m pretty sure in most cases that wasn’t true as a whole, but for whatever reason, there have been many people who believed that this group, the LGF tribe, if you will, no longer included them and was now diametrically opposed. Some of that is the fault of cult politics - as I said, the cult demanded that Republicans endorse more and more extreme positions or you’re a terrorist who hates America. Some of that also is due to the impersonal nature of the internet - one bad interaction, even one cluster of downdings, and someone feels excluded, as if the whole community here has turned on them. reine, for instance, felt that somehow everyone here hated Southerners and decided to get offended at that.

It’s why I try always to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion, why I would defend DF when others demanded he quit the blog, even though I also would call him out on his badly thought out opinions. There are lots of good people here, and good people can differ without exclusion.