With all the recent talk of LGF “then and now”, burning Korans, “Bigot Brigades”, and scrubbing posts, I just couldn’t resist the urge to come out of retirement. So, I’ve decided to tie this all together, starting with a trip to the deep, dark forests of The Google, resurrecting a (seemingly) innocuous front page sentence that was presumably lost forever:
I’m setting up Mr. Shmulevich with an LGF account, and you’ll be able to discuss it with him in person.
Stanislav Shmulevich, as you might remember, is the Pace University kid who decided to piss off his Muslim classmates back in ’07 by tossing a school Koran into a toilet. Local law enforcement and the university -which is undoubtedly sensitive about their image as a hate-free educational environment- threw the proverbial book at him. In a tough spot, Mr. Shmulevich hopped on his computer…and called LGF to the rescue (naturally!):

Oh snap! Something is missing….the last sentence! (the wayback machine missed it on it’s periodic flyby, but luckily the frothing freepers had grabbed the original version as I remember it)
But why scrub that?
Looking to the source recently, explanations for the belated use of the front page eraser have involved instances of misleading statements and/or inaccuracies (however weakly executed). But this wasn’t the case here. CJ really did enthusiastically give the beleaguered Koran desecrater a coveted LGF account (“StanS”; still active), and he appeared in the same thread:

Now, I’d like to think that the post-180, enlightened LGF would be embarrassed by all this, and CJ went back and decided to edit out that little detail. He might have been convinced that today’s lizard hive-mind couldn’t possibly handle the cognitive dissonance resulting from the realization that Bigot Brigadiers were invited into an LGF of not so long ago. Or at least thought that it wasn’t worth the chance, should someone stumble upon it.
But in reality, I believe that this sentence was deleted not long after it was penned (I can say that it wasn’t there as of Oct. 20 ’07; less than 3 mo. later). This was a light bulb moment, and CJ figured that if the kid was wacky enough to stick a Koran in a toilet, then he was wacky enough to incriminate himself further on a very public blog. And while the sure solution would be to just undo it, euthanizing the account would have been deemed too unpopular at the time. So that leaves hiding it, telling him to shut up, and hoping that the other side doesn’t make the connection between “StanS” and Stanislav. In other words, the scrubbing was for Shmulevich’s protection. (shortly after, a pro bono LGF legal defense team sprung into action!) The question really is how long it took for CJ to realize that he was being a bonehead.
Exit question: What happened with Stanislav Shmulevich, anyway?
More Memory Hole Adventures coming soon!
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