Long-time readers of this blog, if there still are any, may remember Neil Clark, the eccentric British journalist most noted (by me, at any rate) for an article entitled "Slobodan Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience."
He once sent me an email from his aol account which concluded:
Learn from the mistakes of your great inspiration, the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Had he bided his time and waited a while before invading Poland he would probably have succeeded in his plan for total world dominion. But thankfully he failed, and so I think will you.(I admit, in retrospect, that he had a point. Any plans I may have had for t. w. d. have, to put it mildly, not panned out, at least not all the way.)
One of the most charming things about Clark is that his passion for his own contrarian views is matched by a disarming difficulty with ordinary things. He's not all that good at spelling or grammar, particularly when he is excited about something. He hasn't quite mastered the ins and outs of html, and it is only recently that he figured out (more or less) how to break his text into paragraphs on his blog. He has been observed attempting to engage a spam-bot in stimulating dialogue. The email quoted above was his third attempt: the first was blank, while the text of the second was incomplete. On the third try he managed to include the entire message. Even though he was mad at me, I was kind of proud of him, as I was when he finally figured out how to change his blog's banner so that it no longer registered his disapproval of "perpertual conflict." He is like the waitress who manages to drop a tray and knock over a couple of chairs and a table while trying to pour your coffee. Even though there is scalding coffee all over your table and perhaps even your lap, your heart goes out to her. You want to comfort her, tell her everything is going to be all right. You may even feel like giving her a great big tip. That's kind of how I feel about Mr. Clark, truth be told.
Anyway, it is, I suppose, in this grand tradition that his recent attempt to sue fellow britblogger Oliver Kamm for defamation or slander (or something) appears to have resembled nothing so much as a man tripping after having inadvertently tied his own shoelaces together. So it goes. I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds this kind of adorable. At least, I detect something of the same appreciation in this reminiscence from a Harry's Place commenter:
He once e-mailed me ordering me never to call him 'a charlatan and a bounder' in a public place again unless I could provide evidence that he was such!!!Good times. Posted by Dr. Frank at November 24, 2006 05:12 PM | TrackBack
I admire the way you just belittled this guy. Perhaps the best way to handle peddlers of philosphies so debunked that their is no longer any need for actual intellectual debate (people still consider themselves Marxists, WTF?), is to pat them on the head and, in all sincerity, say, "Good for you. Aren't you a big boy, now."
Posted by: josh at November 24, 2006 07:11 PMHere are a few links which one may wish to read so as to broaden their understanding of just how the world really works. We'll begin with a quote and videostream from a U.S. patriot, John Stockwell:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm
John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. He gives a short history of CIA covert operations. He is a very compelling speaker and the highest level CIA officer to testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6 million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980's.
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/7727/cia.htm
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/latin/x-july06-agee.htm
http://pdr.autono.net/levine.html
kb
Posted by: kb at November 25, 2006 12:18 PMGod save state owned bookstores, if we are still to find ecstasy in this land. I remember when my dear uncle was a diplomat in Yugoslavia back in the 80s and how his long communist past faded so quickly in touch with the real thing.
Posted by: Javier at November 25, 2006 07:31 PM