What are the ten most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th centuries? Oh Dear. Those aren’t all the ones I had in mind. Having said that, Mein Kampf makes sense. But it was not number one.
This, of course, is not surprising. Phyllis Schlafly is scared of The Feminine Mystique and The Communist Manifesto. They’re right up there with Mein Kampf. I mention Phyllis because I am happy to report I have not heard of most of these other distungished judges. Do look at the list of runners up, including such dangeous cats as J. S. Mill and Rachel Carson.
This reminds me of how G. Gordon Liddy is parading around in a little smokescreen talking about how horrible Deep Throat is–how he’s such a traitor and a criminal. Hello! G. Gordon Liddy is a criminal! Are these people mad?
(Don’t worry, that was a rhetorical question.)
And this reminds me of David Horowitz’s cranky “Discover the Network” website
where he profiles the members of “the Left”–everyone, in his mind, from convicted members of Al Qaeda to Louis Farrakhan to the Weathermen to Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Reading it is almost comical.
And Horowitz sets out to expost the left “networks.” You can even look at image maps of how everyone fits together.
Note, this did not work for me on Mozilla, which does not surprise me, since Mozilla is a commie pinko search engine. And it will take up to five minutes to load on IE. And once it loads, it will be well-nigh mind-numingly boring to wait for the “connections” to load, once you move beyond the Ford Foundation and try to find out about a group or individual. Too bad because I was interested in this mystical network.
Um, what do Sheik Omar Adbel Rahman and Roger Ebert have in common? Evangelical Lefty Jim Wallis and Barack Obama? Al Qaeda and Bill Clinton and the Weathermen? Jimmy Carter and Mumia? What Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has taught us is that it’s easy to link people if you’re trying to. Michael Berube has written a much more detailed and useful critique of the Networks site.
Think what would happen if we played connect-the-dots games with “Right.” As we all know, Bush would be directly linked to Bin Laden via the latter’s family. No hocus pocus or imagination needed. Funny that.
3 comments ↓
Kate – I’m still waiting for the network map to download (yep – I got Mozilla) but it sounds a lot like a piece Arquilla and Rondfelt did in a study they did for the military back on the Zapatistas. It was actually supposed to be about ‘netwars’ in general (title was “Cyberwar is coming”), but it focussed about 90 percent on the zapatista presence on the internet. It was actually a fairly reasoned, if lopsided piece, and featured as a piece de resistance on the main zapatista web site. Gee – I hope Horowitz hasn’t left them out! When will that damned page finish downloading …..
I think it is interesting to note that that list came from a conservative website. The list would definitely be different depending on which side of the political spectrum you are on.
this got passed around my office, to great hoots and guffaws. when did waxing poetic about nature’s beauty become dangerous???
and good point about connecting the dots on the right. i wonder if any of the lefty bloggers have tried this yet?
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