Hello, A couple of days ago I received an angry letter from Israel. Apparently, the author of this letter had read a post I had written a year ago which you have posted on your site--the basketball post.I want to let you know that there's a reason the post is so extravagently stupid. It was intended as a parody.
If you kept any of the similar posts on alt.politics.white.power from that period you will notice that this post was part of a series of exchanges between myself and a hilarious African-American guy named Pyramid, who was creating havoc on the newsgroup at that time. He was positively destroying the white supremacists, through basic, competent arguments and virtuosic displays of utterly withering abuse.
I started posting (on behalf of the "white race") responses to his posts in the style of the a.p.w.p. mainstays, which were not very subtley concealed admissions of defeat for the white-power movement. Things like "this is why blacks shouldn't be given internet access: they come onto these newsgroups and kick our asses...etc." The basketball post was the most extreme of these posts.
I'm certain you believe that this sort of thing is miles and miles over the line of acceptable taste. It is. The reason I did it anyway was because the atmosphere there was so uniformly revolting to me. On one side you have a crew of semi-retarded, rebel-flag waving bedroom dwellers spewing some of the shoddiest "thought" ever seen in any medium. That's the obvious part.
The other side is almost equally sickening: a bunch of self-deluded pseudo-civil-rights-crusaders posturing amidst all this outlandish race theory rubbish. What were they trying to do? Talk it out with these race freaks and find some common ground? Hear what the white-power guys are saying so they can protect the world from their seductive arguments?
All that really goes on in there is insults and posing. The anti-racists are there to get nice, easy, trivial kicks. So that post was also ridiculing the anti-racists for resonding to all that crap and then having the audacity to feel righteous about it.
The level of nuttiness that group represents is fringe. (It's not even a reliable indicator of the fringe; there is a lot more farce on that group than anyone realizes.) The proponents of white-power on that group make horrible ambassadors. Nobody will ever want to be associated with them.
The real conflict is a lot more subtle. There is so much zealotry on the left right now that it is causing a serious backlash. It feels oppressive to clear thought. No one is allowed to seriously entertain the possiblity that there are organic differences between people of different race or sex. Words have been roped off. It feels like mental manipulation. (Yes, I am one of those stock anti-PC people. If I were convinced the PC tactics were necessary to achieve societal health I would support them. However, they seem excessive and rooted in sentiment.)
The neo-nazis and klansmen are too remote and inept to affect my life. Over-fervent, intelligent, educated idealogues, on the other hand, could easily make their dogmas into policy.
The basketball post was a land mine designed to offend specifically the people who would be likely to happen upon it. I was sorry to see it placed out of context.
Sincerely, S. Taylor
----------------- S. Taylor sttaylor@mechanon.com