I hate to bring this up one more time, but it seems that the Basic Haloscan Plan only maintains comments made in the last 4 months, I don't have spare money to expand it, and there's also one more thing, I can't seem to find on the posts some comments are being made on, and so, as another temporary solution, I've gone and done it bad ; restored the trusty and safe Blogger comments side by side with the fast and efficient Haloscan [hat tip to the esteemed Mr. 13], until they come up with a commenting service that can get the best of both worlds, it seems we're stuck with this.

Eric Cartman's Cartoon Wars

as I'm sure you've noticed, I've finally installed Haloscan. I've been meaning to do so since forever but there was some problems with the automated install, so yesterday I finally had time on my hands to do it manually.

Yay.

Now let us ponder for a bit the all-too-familiar problem of the limits of freedom of speech, as it I have run into this problem myself recently on this blog.

You realize, of course, that freedom of speech is a difficult principle to uphold idealistically, the foremost implementation of said principle is, in the words of the great Trey Parker: "Either it's all in, or nothing's in." because, once you've given a particular group of people a preferential treatment, you would have eventually to submit to the wishes of every other group. Now, while I have banned some people from commenting here due to their repeatedly racist attitude (which they are oblivious to, most horrendously) towards a certain group of people to which I belong, I am obliged hereby to delete any other racist comment offensive to any group of people in the criteria. Eventually, the constraints would be too much so that commenting would become an inherently futile feature.

Which is what everybody seems to be doing, I have noticed that most of the big-gun bloggers end up eliminating their comments forum altogether as an unsatisfactory solution to that problem. Raed Jarrar did it, Riverbend, and most recently Angry Arab. This solution is flawed, but I find no other one that completely eliminates the problem as this one.

The world is bound with flawed realizations of freedom-of-speech, ِِِAnti-Semitism, for all intents and purposes, favors a certain group over others, so what's wrong if I uphold this flawed Anti-Semitism model (arabs are semites too) to my own use? But of course, that is no ideal solution, it is justification for my own flaw.

Another solution would be to remove the ban, but I cannot bring myself to it. On a personal note, I cannot stand them, I totally abhor their views, their ongoing campaign to blame everything on the inferiority of Iraqis, their racist, sly mockery of Arab-Muslim culture, among other things. and here is the problem, because I am certainly not going to feel offended by people who are anti-Christian or anti-Jewish ,or anti-anything else for that matter, but this ban prompts me to act just the same towards them. I don't feel like continuously arguing them, because, as I said earlier, it is futile on the long run.

What do you think?
I hope u get the reference of the title's post.

R.I.P. BlogIraq

In general, back-and-forth intra-blog discussions don't end up with a positive outcome, they are filled with long arguments that are hard to follow, and both sides will stubbornly stick to their side no matter what, however, for the benefit of the general population I would respond to Iraqi Bloggers Central's recent post, which was in itself a response to my earlier mockery of their supposedly all-encompassing knowledge of Muslim culture.

Mister Ghost, in a swashbuckling-ly glorious representation of American values of freedom and glory against the deep darkness of Islamic bigotry, starts with a big slice of bigotry hismelf: "I would like to defend myself against a couple of points by the deep-thinking but Iraqi-flawed Abbas." As if being "Iraqi" in itself is a disadvantage to the logical circuits of one's mental processes.

He still doesn't get my point, my post wasn't really an objection towards Quran-burning or whatever Rotten Gods is doing, even though regular Muslims might find it appalling, just as regular Christians would find Bible burning the same, I was only mocking his smug all-knowing attitude towards Arab-Muslim culture, which he clearly finds of no particular use to mankind.

Then, he condescendingly outlines White Man's superiority over mainstream sandniggers Iraqis, including:

a) That all Iraqis were cowardly cogs inside the Baathist Caliphate. Mister Ghost, who has lived all his easy, comfortable life somewhere so removed from pain and suffering, has no real understanding of those concepts at all, he has no ability to understand that human beings might act differently in other environments, I wonder what Mister Ghost would have done if he was born and raised in as a German in Hitler-era Germany, or a Russian in Stalin's Russia, or an Iraqi in Baathist Iraq, the latter was nothing like present-day Iran, or Jordan, or Egypt (where people are actually trying to act up, btw), a country where you, your father, your entire family would be executed for the simplest joke. I don't think Mister Ghost would have acted anyway different, he would still rather live and make ends meet.

b) "Would anyone disagree that Iraqis have deeply-ingrained prejudices? LOL" That statement alone made me wonder about how old Mister Ghost actually is. How different are Iraqis from Germans, Americans, Russians, South Africans, Chinese, Tibetans in terms of having prejudices? He pontificates further:


c) Iraqis are expelling Christians. Funny, what does "Iraqis" here mean? it's as if not a single Muslim is being killed or deported in Iraq. What is the difference between Muslim expulsion death and Christian expulsion? Apparently, in the eyes of Mister Ghost, only Christian expulsion is worthy of attention.

d) That we are calling Christians "collaborators" and are expelling just like we did to the "Jews", here, Mister Ghost falls in several problems: first, I have never heard one Iraqi calling a Christian a "collaborator", actually, before I came to Amman, my pretty religious family's neighbor was an Iraqi Priest with his family, my mother (who wears a jubba) sent them a cake on Christmas and my brother and sister frequently played with their children, they got along with them much better than our current Iraqi Muslim neighbors, how is that for being flawed with terrible prejudices?
Also, he conveniently ignores the fact that Iraqi Jews were pretty much living quite the same as everyone else in Iraq until the state of Israel was born, i.e. the expulsion had a logical reason - not to mention that Jews were treated better in the Muslim Caliphate than they were in Medieval Europe, also, many Iraqi Jews actually wish to go back to Baghdad, which they miss as their true home, I would cite the Jewish author Samir Naqqash as an example. I also advise you to read some of British-Iraqi Jewish author Elie Kedourie's work.


I have called Layla Anwar a bigot previously, I apologize terribly, if she is a bigot, then at least she is direct and honest about it, and like I said about the whole Wafa Sultan thing : bigots balance each other out.
Personally, I don't tolerate bigots, so, and while I have previously issued a fatwa against their blog, it was slightly in jest, as of today, I ban all members (although Rhuslancia wasn't really bad, but I'm sorry) from commenting at my flawed, prejudiced, cowardly blog.

New Blog

A newly-discovered blog by Baghdad Kassakhon [Storyteller], who is a journalist in Baghdad, has a post about the suffering of the Iraqi staff of the Associated Press.

About The Blog

Some of you are probably wondering about the things that are happening to me, and the changes of the blog and what prompted them. Here's a quick explanation.

When SCIRI/Badr first started assassinating Sunnis in Baghdad left and right, I couldn't hear anyone reporting it for a long time, people would show up on TV and talk about national peace and unity while Sunnis were being killed everywhere, there was absolutely no mention of the story anywhere, but it was the talk of the town ; I felt as if nobody would hear our voice and that made me so afraid, in fact, it was the only reason I voted for the Sunni Islamic 618 bloc and not the 731 Secular Allawi one. It was about a month later when the story began to unfold on TV and Newspapers.

What I want to illustrate here is that things might change on the inside quite a long time before they do so visibly. The changes that I implemented to this blog and the desire to do so have been long thought of, I just didn't know how I would finally impart with the name I've been using for quite a long time now, after all, "Konfused Kollege Kid" was a gimmicky name for a gimmicky blog, as you can read from my earlier posts, I had totally different aspirations then, kinda like a more articulate version of Pentra.
People have been telling me how black hurts the eyes, and I must say I agree with them ; I'm not so satisfied with the headline picture, all the time I have the urge to fill the spaces to the left and right, what do you think?
As for the name, the Arabic signifies that Arabic language is going to play a more prominent role here, I can't decide whether I will dedicate another blog for it or just throw the whole thing here.
Shaqshaqa is taken from a famous Shiite sermon in which the usually reserved Ali throws a fit and rants about his lost caliphate title in a very angry, but articulate manner, after he is interrupted one of his companions ask him to continue but Ali replies to him dramatically: "O' Ibn `Abbas it was like the foam of a Camel (Shaqshaqa) which gushed out but subsided." Meaning he has calmed down now. I've always loved the word 'Catharsis', which basically means a similar, but less Camel-inclined, thing in English.
So people, don't worry, I'm really feeling quite okay.