As one of the people likely responsible for Jack’s offer to leave (trust me, he’ll renege) I’ll explain.

Upon happening on this site, I saw people making statements not based in fact, and giving opinions that I thought were derived from misinformation. (“Obama is a Muslim, Socialist” etc.) I was immediately greeted with a barrage of vitriol. I tend to respond in kind, and I’m not apologizing.

Jack has on more than one occasion mentioned that he wished me dead, and at least once offered to help me get there. I advised him as to the legal ramifications of making terroristic threats. Those exchanges were, understandably, pulled from the site.

That’s about it. I think the site is extremely one-sided, and I try to compensate for that, simply, as the record shows, by asking pertinent and pointed questions. This is the key to an open exchange. Jack’s first sentence says it all: “…this is no longer a forum for those that agree with what your writers write.”

I hope that it never was SOLELY for those who agree; what would be the point of that?

As David Goodis, I probably share some of the blame too. My intentions in visiting this site were to understand the thoughts of people on the other side of the political divide and, like Dave, found that many writers merely repeated the misrepresentations of the McCain campaign. And I wanted a chance to work through those misconceptions, since they seemed to prevent us from finding common ground. I also think that we can’t communicate with each other (as real bipartisan thinkers) if we’re hamstrung by cliches and prejudices about “people on the Right” and “people on the Left.” In many cases I found areas of agreement with posters here, including Jack, and that has led to many rich experiences. It seems to me that that’s what grassroots democracy is all about—constructing a notion of the common.

As far as Jack’s objections are concerned, at times he has lashed out at things without real provocation. Reasonable counterarguments are met with death threats, hopes for our “reeducation,” or outright torrents of abuse. When I presented Colin Powell’s reading of issues pertinent to AIM posters I was told my gestures were “brainwashing,” “communistic” and “corrupt,” charges that still baffle me (he also made wild assumptions about what I do in my classroom).

As long as we have room to comment, this website will be set up as a forum to express multiple views, and not simply be the reflection of a single outlook. But maybe that’s what Jack wants—the infinite repetition of one set of unchallenged “truths,” I don’t know. Despite the areas of disagreement I have with views that have been expressed on this site, I think its openness to conversation has ultimately been positive.

I thought you might like to know just how bad the English-language newspaper – the only one, at present – in Jakarta really is.
Yesterday’s issue 27/10/08 contained a typical example of its left-lib bias, an article entitled ‘Race Issues in the the race to be US president.’ It was written by somebody callled Sin-ming Shaw, who was said to be a former Visiting Fellow in History at Oxford and Princetom Universities.
It describes how Bill Reilly ‘talked down to Obama in so condescending a manner that some viewers were reminded of the images in an old Hollywood movie putting a young black upstart in his place.’ Shaw also scolds Sean Hannity for asking ‘repeatedly’ if Fareed Zakaria thought ‘America to be the greatest nation on earth.’
These are offered as proof that the campaign is race-based, and Shaw also rants wildly that ‘four more years of republican rule will further degrade and bankrupt the country.’
She graciously concedes that ‘in any civilised society ignorance is not illegal and being moralistic is anybody’s inherent privilege.’ From there. she leaps on to say ‘what is alarming is how private religious beliefs and morals have increasingly shaped the secular agenda of America.’ She thus misconstrues the Founding Fathers. whose readiness to separate church and state was surely aimed at not having an establshed Church of England-type denomination, in order to rave against how ‘today’s Republican Party represents a large segment of the population that believes that abortions and same-sex marriage are immoral, that God sent America to Iraq and that bailing out Wall Street is ‘socialism.’ ”
Shaw winds up with a jab at Sarah Palin’s obviously accurate staement that Obama ‘is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.’ Shaw in cowardly fashion hides behind un-named ‘many observers’ who thought Palin was carrying ‘a racist undertone.’

This kind of garbage is typical Jakarta Post fodder, and hardly the most rabid.

A few days ago, 21st October, we had some twerp called Charles Lawson, Professor of Literature would you believe, at American University in Washington, whose gems of literary merit included the following;
‘the John McCain/Sarah Palin campaign has brought out the worst in the remaining right-wing xenophobes, agitating them even further by employing racial slurs and outright lies that even Joseph Goebbels wouldn’t have used.
The angry corwds at McCain rallies have become so dangerous that few doubt a lynching would take place were the situation possible…’

Clearly this guy is heading for the funny-farm, but the JP’s editors are so far left it just keeps coming. No conservative articles appear to balance this pink diarrhoea.
How be some of you email your objections to Indonesia’s ultra-lib pains in the neck?