Salt City Sinner

( This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here .) Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists . That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed...

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching. That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advanceme...

posted on 4/17/2013 by the Salt City Sinner ( Editor's Note : It goes without saying that what happened in Boston on Monday is horrific. Three deaths, countless injuries -- what motivated the attacker or attackers is not important. What is important is that we keep the people of Boston in our thoughts.) As I'm fond of saying, "there is no bottom floor in hell." Loosely translated, what I mean by that is that there is no situation in which conditions can't get worse, no level of stupidity that can't get dumber, no plumbed depth that won't look like a dip in a puddle compared to some inevitable later excursion into the watery abyss of crazy. With that in mind, I'd like to say a few words tangentially related to Monday's bombings in Boston, with a massive caveat: there's not much to say, really, about the bombings themselves other than "that is awful" and "nobody knows yet what the h*ck is going on." So this is less about...