An email to Guin from someone who agrees with you is no proof in my book. Please provide us with some links to specific instances (other than on this board, which is impossible) where she makes libelous claims about you.
HERE is Jan’s guestbook, where I admit I let my anger get the better of me…
Lydia sent the same e-mail to me. :rolleyes:
HERE is what I said:
Good lord! You find much worse than that raiding through GD everyday!
BTW, Jan, I have saved some of the comments you made in regards to women and men and the differences in both. I don’t know if I should post them, as they’re no longer available at LAF and I only have them saved. I hesitate, for fear you may deny you said them.
:wally
Such as implying that men are more likely to be geniuses than women-women’s intelligence is more evenly spread out. That genius is exclusively male, and that women are inferior.
Not to mention your posts about how the white race is being polluted by being mixed with the black-unfortunately, I cannot prove this, as the posts are gone and I didn’t save those.
sigh
Ignorance, folks, is like the Energizer Bunny…it just keeps going and going and going…
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
That is all. Carry on.
(Guin, I’d jump in to defend you, but I have full confidence in your ability to handle this :wally .)
(letter snipped for brevity)
You almost had me supporting your arguments somewhat until you quoted this letter - if that’s your idea of solid, hard-hitting support, you’re not exactly making a case for yourself that you have well-researched and sensible arguments on your site.
Oh, and two things:
- See the Quote button under the right-hand corner of each post? If you’re going to quote people, use it. It’s way easier to read than the brackets you’re using and allows you to include the poster’s name.
- Slander is oral communication of false statements about someone, intended to harm their reputation. The word that you’re looking for is libel.
It’s a pity the original thread on the subject of JanL’s website is kaput. I had an email from Jan in early February after I made a post.
The site (and perhaps Jan himself) probably comes across as politically incorrect to some regular Dopers, who are accustomed to talking about issues of race in extremely couched terms and going to great lengths to avoid generalization or other sloppy or prejudiced thinking. Nothing wrong with intellectual integrity. Jan needs to remember that it’s an obsession with some Dopers - if he uses the word “race” to mean “that which is commonly known by 90% of people as “race”” - he’ll get half a dozen people reminding everyone, for the umpteenth time, that it “race” is a “social construct” blah blah. Some people on SDMB are uncomfortable when others fail to use the euphemism du jour. Jan’s #1 problem is being unaware of the politically correct terminolgy.
Everyone else’s problem is never having had Jan’s experience of seeing his country and, probably, livelihood destroyed.
I know a couple of white Zimbabweans - born and raised in the country - who had to flee for their lives after assisting (black) people being framed by Mugabe for sabotage. Anyone reading the papers recently will have seen what a tyrant Mugabe is. Anyone who has read any history of Africa in the last 50 years will have seen that the vast majority of African states have declined since independence. Nearly everywhere else in the world (Burma and N Korea come to mind as exceptions) has progressed, at least a bit. Many African states have gone backwards - Rwanda, Uganda, Zaire, CAR, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, etc have seen corruption, despotism and ethnic slaughter on a scale unknown in most other parts of the world.
Perhaps the only person who can get away with pointing out that governments formed by people of a particular skin color have failed miserably in Africa in the last few decades is a person of black African heritage himself. I would strongly urge anyone interested in understanding the inhumanity of Africa’s rulers in recent years to read Keith Richburg’s book “Out of Africa”. The author (a Washington Post reporter who was posted in Africa and then here in Hong Kong) was blasted by black American nationalists for saying he was grateful his ancestors had been transported across the Atlantic as slaves.
Anyone who has visited S Africa will have noticed that the place is pretty old-fashioned. It’s not a Californian university campus. Men are men, women are women, whites are whites, blacks are blacks. Language and attitudes are unpalatable to those of us from trendy liberal envornments. Translated into PC-ese, however, there are some valid points in Jan’s website.
You just don’t get it do you?
It’s NOT about the words, it’s about the ideas that the words convey, and the attitudes that are behind those ideas.
If you think one group of people is inferior to another, there is NO WAY you can dress that up in what some people call “Politically correct language”.
Describing differences between groups is a reasonable activity and is open to debate or disproof. Describing one group as inferior or morally worse, or less than human can’t be supported if we value human freedom.
NOT ABOUT THE WORDS - not even about correctness - about our common humanity.
Please.
Redboss
Go felch a dead goat, Hemlock. I never EVER defended Mgabe. Never.
:rolleyes:
Like I said, I have more than just Jan’s website to go on, such as some comments he made on a message board, but they too are gone, so I’m not even going to bother.
Statements like this make Baby Jesus colicky.
A “long and ongoing clandestine war” against you? Surely you jest.
Okay, so maybe just MAYBE you’re not a racist.
However, if you truly believe I am deliberately setting out to destroy and libel you secretly, well, then you ARE a conspiracy nut and you need to have your head examined.
sigh
I sometimes wonder if Cecil ever thought in the beginning that the war against ignorance would be so painful.
What a tortured and grotesque thread… The story of Guin, well meaning uber-liberial and internet danger-girl who meets Jan, troubled webpage host and possessor of a perspective few could understand [I won’t presume to argue if he is or is not racist] in the shadowy realm of the web. But fate is quirky and cruel. Their threads destroyed, scattered by the whims of hackers [that’s right I said hackers], Jan registers on the SDMB for the sole purpose of pursuing the elusive girl that has captured his imagination. Naturally, they fall in love.
I shall unite all the tribes of the Pit, and we shall ride down upon the fertile plains of Great Debates. We shall drive their warriors under the steel-shod hooves of our warhorses, and our blades will drink deep of their blood. And then, their riches shall be ours! A king’s ransom in abortion threads, creationism debates, and political acrimony! The forums of the Straight Dope will run crimson with our fury!
-Miller, Khan of Khans
YOu people are really pathetic.
I love you guys!
A few things:
1 - Mugabe is a thug. I think we can all agree on that one.
2 - SA appears to be reasonably well run and on its way to becoming a first world country at some point over the next, say, 50 years.
3 - I saw Angola mentioned on jan’s list, so: On the Fox News Channel, no less, on an investment show they had, none other than Jimmy Rogers, a money manager who retired in his 30s because he’d made enough to live on for the rest of his natural life, stated that Angola was now the best investment on the planet, in his opinion. I have no idea if he’s right or not, obviously, but this guy is far from being anyone’s idea of a leftist, and if he’s willing to do business in Angola, I think that pretty clearly states where that country is headed.
Being the world’s only living liberal gold bug, I get to read this drivel a lot. It’s right wing conspiracist pap, the kind of stuff they feed to each other all the time. See the Nyquist link on the top of jan’s site for a look at the standard view on Russia, which this man states in just about every article he writes, that Russia is still communist, and still our enemy. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not communist, and it’s also pretty clear that their interests and our interests are not terribly well aligned in most areas of foreign policy. But you could say the exact same thing about the French, after all.
Jan’s website from my brief review brings to mind the hysterical Ian Smith and his Apatheid era Rhodesian double-talk.
But it’s far too tedious to read through to make me come to a judgement.
As for couched terms…
What ‘euphamism’ dipshit?
There’s a history to the word, a history to how it has been used and a history to the evil that was the Apartheid regimes of the region.
Given that actual history, one should be careful about usages which have implications, nasty, dirty ugly histories.
Or you can keep your head firmly rooted up your anal canal and mumble on about “PC” or other fucking bullshit like that.
[quote]
Jan’s #1 problem is being unaware of the politically correct terminolgy.
[/qutoe]
Oh no, he’s very aware of a politically correct terminology, one has but to look at his coded references via ideology.
Boo hoo. They stole the land at gunpoint, expropriations in the 1950s, ugly Apartheid regime etc. It’s a pity that it all has gone to hell, but Ian Smith’s Apartheid regime, his inability to reach just compromises with the rising Black opposition created Mugabe. They created their own devils.
Now some folks in the past decade have worked to heal all that, and it is a deep shame for all around the Mugabe is determined to drag his country into hell for his old senile phantasms…
Well they actually took off in the 1960s in aggregate, things went badly around 1975ish with the oil shock, and of course the growing involvement of the Cold War in Africa.
Well, if one abstracts away from the 1960s which showed an opposite pattern…
And this is to argue what?
One might equally note that nowhere in the world did the yoke of colonial rule hang quite so heavy and with quite so much disregard for local institutions, setting the seeds for a lot of today’s problems.
Rwanda - Burundi are reaping the results of the cynical divide and conquer politics of the Belgian state and its ugly spreading of hatred to keep the pop divided.
As well as post independence issues, of course.
Uganda is on the rebound after the Amin disaster. Looks not bad, all things considered.
Congo, its Congo now. Zaire is the classic case of Western guilt. Mobutu Sese Seko was the very creation of French-Belgian and American intelligence services, and existed with their help. Never mind the horrors that was the Belgian colonial regime.
Rubbish. SE Asia has seen far worse slaughter. The transfer of pops in the division of India killed more people.
Africa is a mess, that’s quite true, but the scale is hardly unknown. And of course one abstracts away from fairly peaceful places like Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire (although they’ve had a rough spot of late), Senegal, Gabon, Tanzania, Kenya, Mali in the past decade…
It’s all well and nice to list the problems, but let’s not put the dishonest spin.
And the governments which have done well, formed by folks of a particular skin color, that would be black, what about pointing them out, asshole?
He’s an idiot.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean you fucking moron?
Meaning prejudiced macho assholes? (No offense to SA, I am replying to the idjit, not characterizing you)
Fuck off, moron.
Meaning what?
Oh really, what are “whites” – you seem to have a sense of their essence, whiteness that is.
Wonder how the coloureds fit in, or are the coloured, coloured?
Fucking moron.
Trendy liberal environments?
Shove up your ass you ignorant racist fuck. Whites are white indeed.
Look upon his beers, ye mighty and despair.
Harumph. Last guy that tried to take what was rightfully mine ended up with his head sitting atop a pyramid of his followers’.
Khan of Khans, indeed .
- Tamerlane
Ah janl, I feel your pain. You and yours came from Europe and made this land yours. The whites took these backwoods, primitive blacks and dragged them into the good life. When the whites ran things everything was good. The whites gave them plumbing, TV and lucrative diamond mining. All the blacks had to give up was their land, their pride and their rights.
And how were you repaid for your largess? With sullenness and violence. And now the blacks are reaping the seeds of this sullenness and violence and the whites have to pay the price.
Why? you rail and the skies and,–by means of your website-- anyone who will listen, why is there this racial strife? Why is a madman like Mugabe in a position of power? Wasn’t it better when the whites were running things? When socialism was mashed to nothingness and electric lights brightened the roads that lead into the Townships?
Well, fuck that shit. Things may have been better for you back then and certainly things could be better now. But to couch your rhetoric in seeming inocuous terms does not make you any less the racist.
I know Guin a lot better than I know you. I know that she can be rash. I know that her enthusiasm can and often does get the better of her. I also know her “liberal” heart is in exactly the right place. You want to defend yourself against claims of racism to me? Show me how you think your country can improve itself without portraying your fellow black countrymen as ingrates who didn’t know when they had it good.
There does seem to be racial overtones to the site. The ‘poor whites’ attitude. After seeing the pictures (which i wish i hadnt of seen) i dont know, i kind of feel like a ‘he said, she said’ argument takes the back burner. lt makes me incredibly sad to live in a world where one person can hurt another so terribly…well i’ve just sat here for about 10 minutes not typing anything so i guess thats all i have to say.
Collounsbury - I’ll ignore most of your comments since they’re a waste of bandwidth, but I’m intrigued as to why you say of Keith Richburg - who’s not a close friend of mine, but I have met him - “he’s an idiot”. He’s a hundred times more coherent than you.
My family is white South African. I dearly love the country, and I wish it the best. We left in 1978 because my parents felt that they could not raise children in such a regime.
South Africa in apartheid was bound to fall apart. It was socially untenable. Yes, life was wonderful there if you were white. My family there (a few uncles, my grandparents, and a few cousins) is still doing pretty well. But it was gonna come apart, and it was only a matter of time. You can’t keep 70% of your population repressed forever.
It couldn’t have come apart any better, though. I think Desmond Tutu and Mandela deserve all of the praise that can possibly be heaped upon them. They are some of the most noble individuals this world has ever seen, and the insistence on staying away from redistribution of wealth and on reconciliation has kept the country together far longer than it would have otherwise.
I’ve seen Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island. A thoroughly unjust regime locked him for 27 years. He then came out of jail, walked the streets of Cape Town, was elected and proceeded to shake the hands and make up with the people who held the keys. The man deserves sainthood.
But, Mandela is unfortunately old. And the situation in Southern Africa is about the worst on the planet, from poverty to social turmoil due to AIDS to drought to refugee/immigrant/unemployement.
Mugabe is a thug, we all know. The ANC aside from Mandela may have its share of thugs. The situation is still going to get real ugly. But none of this is due to skin color anymore. It is a simple story on a priveleged minority clinging to wealth as the country goes to shit around them. These are the exact conditions that breed violence and revolution, and nobody should be surprised to see it coming a mile away. Mandela his designated successors are trying to keep the wheels on, but face it, they are not Mandela. There have not been many Mandelas. And it is inevitable, the wheels are coming off. No country in any situation could stand the turmoil of Southern Africa for very long. You see it happening in Zimbabwe. It won’t be long for South Africa. I am glad I was able to take my wife there two years ago so we could see the country still in relative peace.
Heh.
From JanL’s very own message board, his very own words:
Oh, Jan, Jan, Jan! You ignorant slut. You’re not racist, right?
So, I suppose the word “Jap” is meant as a term of affection?
:rolleyes:
Oh, I’m going to enjoy this!