Zealots of any stripe are dangerous.
Zealots of any stripe are dangerous.
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And sometimes put conservatives in a bad light unintentionally; the following is an example of being so emotionally and personally involved with a story that you lose site of FR rules and principles. I was lurking on the TS thread with no intention of posting; just wanted a sense of the various viewpoints.
I was horrified to see that someone had posted what supposedly was a picture of TS on her 12th day, taken surreptiously by a cameraphone. Horrified yes by the picture, but more so by the link to the website that provided it, not a conservative, but a nutty white supremist racist, a creep who already garnered thousands of hits because of the many FReepers who went to the site to see the picture, so I will not repeat his name here.
Not more than a paragraph below the picture was some of this pondscum's screed--that it's a darn good thing the Israeli settlers are in conflict with the moderates, because now all the Jews can kill each other, which would be a great thing. And then he got uglier. I scrolled further down the thread, to see when it was realized what FR was now linked to a neo-Nazi white supremist wack-job; and found that no one had objected to it, either because they didn't read the website or were so wrapped up in the TS saga that they didn't care.
The picture and link were repeated several times further down the thread. Being a relative newbie I don't like to report people, believing that it's better to expose than stifle racists, but a link from FR to neo-Nazis could be used by our enemies on the left to discredit us, so I reported it and also pleaded with the original poster to denounce it and stop using it. Eventually the mods (who were having a hard time keeping up on that thread, there was much that had to be removed) read my report and removed it, but several times had to exhort FReepers who kept posting it to not reference this guy or his web site. There was total irony in the fact that the same people who threw around the Nazi references completely ignored a direct link to a real Nazi sympathizer because they did not take the time to think clearly and read what they were linking to.
This bottom feeder I refer to said on about Daniel Pearl "I could care less about the death of this Jewish pig". So if TS had been Jewish, or black, he would not have bothered to post the picture, which by the way was never verified to have been authentic. To link FR with his website was really appalling, and JR and the mods agreed, though it was done without malice or even awareness by the poster of what she was posting to (and she had the grace and class to apologize and say she was wrong).
The whole episode was very ironic. What bothered me along with having FR linked with this guy, was that his website got thousands of hits out of it that he would not have received, if the poster had been more careful and read the link she was posting to before going ahead and posting it. But, as she herself admitted, she was too upset to think clearly.
Any comments?