Nadira has been refused the hire of our local church hall in Ramsgate for rehearsal because Medea is “Greek” and “Pagan”. I had thought that the Church of England had come fully to terms with the classical world since before Gibbon. And we are talking the church hall, not the church.
It is a tremendous mistake for the Church of England to start taking an interest in religion. Promoting intolerance is not what the Church of England is for. It is still an established church – do we really want a state church that bans Euripides? I fear for some reason the CofE feels a need to compete with the lunatic evangelist establishments which attract large congregations and promote miracles, speaking in tongues and other arrant rubbish. Oh dear.
Alfred, I suggest you go into town and buy yourself a big chip to perch on your shoulder of similar size and weight to the one that’s now perched on your other shoulder; without it you may become dangerously unbalanced.
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I have no idea what the legal ramifications are for saying the Soviets killed the Polish officers in Katyn but I suspect that you’re either wrong about it, have been misled by some grubby “revisionist” site or are just lying.
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Also I very much doubt you will go to prison if you say that six million Jews were not gassed in the Holocaust given that no historian asserts this. Your wheeling out of Raul Hilberg is part of a typical “revisionist” two-step that usually goes like this: It is verboten to say that six million Jews didn’t die but Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg agrees with me as he says only 5.1 million Jews died. My only disagreement is that Hilberg was out by 5.1 million but he is in agreement with me.
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Either way, if you are correct about such illiberal laws in France then as a liberal democrat (small letters, please!), I have the philosophical justification to say that France should change its laws to make them more in line with the ideals of liberal democracy, whereas you – as a mush-head cultural relativist do not. This would also go for laws in Turkey against affirming the Armenian genocide, laws against women driving in Saudi Arabi, against women leaving the house bare-headed in Iran, laws against secular marriage in Israel etc… etc…
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If you don’t like liberal democracy then, in a liberal democracy it is your right to rail against it and dream up some better alternative. Would you like to tell us what your better alternative is? Attempts to pin you down on that one have often led you to twist and turn like a twisty turny thing and I don’t expect things to change.
Angry said “but I suspect that you’re either wrong about it, have been misled by some grubby “revisionist” site or are just lying.”
Call that an argument. Pfui.
The rest is of the same caliber.
Canspeccy – Angrysoba’s last paragraph was quite reasonable. You could rise to the challenge, and explain how social justice would be achieved in an environment quite different to the modern liberal model.
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For example: “Bring back the age of deference, corporal punishment, capital punishment, and ensure gays, foreigners and women know their proper place”. (I parody, but this is approximately what I am expecting. I am sure you can do better though!)
Here’s a quote from that grubby revisionist site Wikipedia:
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France
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In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.[21]
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So yes, denying German culpability for the Katyn Massacre appears to be an inprisonable offense, though since the Russians have acknowledged the crime it is doubtful whether any court would invite ridicule by convicting on this basis.
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There is more here on France’s Gayssot Act (1990) that seems to support the same view — in a book by Michael Ignatieff, one time leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and not the kind of person you’d generally think of as a grubby revisionist.
It is poignant to recall that in relation to the first Christians and matters English, European (whatever that concept might mean), etc., it is more likely than not that Jesus was a brown man, Peter was a brown man, James was a brown man, Mary (Mother of Jesus) was brown woman, Mary (Magdalene) was a brown woman, Anne was a brown woman, Joseph (the carpenter) was a brown man, Paul was a brown man, John (the Baptist) was a brown man, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (The Evangelist) were brown men, Simon Peter was a brown man, (Didymus) Thomas was a brown man, Barnabas was a brown man, Andrew, Nathaniel, Philip… and all the others were brown men. A ‘Temptations’ song! Oh yes, and Judas, of course, was a brown man. Not an original thought, right, but, you know, one which it is important to state from time-to-time, esp. when some attempt to depict Christianity as somehow an emanation of, and an ‘indigenous’ feature of, ‘the West’ (whatever those terms might mean; I’d have thought that Christianity itself exemplifies the weakness of such concepts as ‘indigenous’ when speaking of human populations. Here’s an interesting illustration of a fictional visage of Luke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_the_Evangelist
Conjunction, thanks very much, btw, glad you enjoyed the music! Of course, Arabic music draws hugely on Byzantine (Greek) music. Hellenistic culture was not thought of as ‘European’; that concept, in the way we know it today, did not really exist in those days. For ‘Western’ civilisations (Persian, Arabic, Greek, Roman), the world’s centre came to lie somewhere around Asia Minor/Syria. Greek influence extended from Iberia to India. Certain aspects of Classical Greek culture were appropriated and modulated by the nascent British Empire and so we have this idea of Greece as a sort of tranquil island in the Isis. But as you know, the historical and living political and cultural realities were, and are, very different. Hellenism was a synthesis of ‘Near’ and ‘Middle’ Eastern culture. In India and Pakistan, traditional practitioners are still known as practitioners of ‘Greek Medicine’. Asoka cut coins with Greek script on them. Greeks were the middlemen of the Ancient World, with Greek merchants galore in southern and western India. Greeks from what is now Pakistan were the first Buddhist missionaries to China and Sri Lanka. Taxila Museum and Lahore Museum in Pakistan contains tonnes of Graeco-Buddhist statuary and other artefacts. So, in essence, this idea of ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ as separate entities is questionable on all levels.
SS said, “It is poignant to recall that in relation to the first Christians and matters English, European (whatever that concept might mean), etc., it is more likely than not that Jesus was a brown man…”
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Poignant. Poignant?
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What the Hell’s poignant about the alleged fact that Jesus, who almost certainly did not exist — or if he did, was not the man born in a stable, who walked on water, was crucified and rose from the dead, etc., since that man featured in many legends predating Jesus by hundreds of years — was brown?
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Who cares?
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What’s with this obsession about skin color?
Whether myth or reality,
Whether human, divine or both
Whether Word, or Flesh, or both
Whether Esau, Jesus or Issa
Whether Sun or Son
For two thousand years
Jesus has been on our minds
And the man on our minds
In the Houses of God of England
In the gutter of every stable
And in the palace of every duke
Behind the face of every painting with lily-white skin
And sky-blue eyes
Right at the heart of this green and pleasant land
Is a brown man
Oh yeah,
Jesus was a brown man
Sing it, people!
“Here’s a quote from that grubby revisionist site Wikipedia:
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France
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In France, the Gayssot Act…blah blah blah… typical revisionist whining… typical ubermensch self-pity…typical ressentiment…”
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As I thought you have completely misrepresented reality to serve your own politcal agenda. There is no mention there at all of Katyn merely supposition. As I also said, there is no mention of six million Jews being gassed given that that is not a claim made by any historian. And “Quelle surprise!” that Faurison pops up here.
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As I said, and Chomsky defended, in a liberal democracy, Faurison should be allowed to spout his neo-Nazi gibberish as should Zundel and Irving. It is illiberal – and that means “not liberal!” to you cloth-ears! – to make denying the Holocaust an imprisonable offence, although Faurison has never been jailed for his denial of the Holocaust as far as I know. Chomsky did of course defend Faurison’s right to spout his gibberish not on the basis that he thought it was true, i.e not on content, but on the basis of liberal principles. This is something I agree with also. Of course, Chomsky remarked that he had thought Faurison a “relatively apolitical liberal” when Faurison was, to put it mildly, “a grubby revisionist”.
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And you’ve shot yourself in the foot by pointing out that the liberal Michael Ignatieff also opposes the Gayssot Act on liberal grounds. In other words you aren’t arguing that France implemented anti-free speech laws as an extension of its commitment to liberal democracy but as a betrayal of it.
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So stop twisting and turning like a twisty turny thing and tell us what would be better than a liberal democracy…
“Jesus was a brown man
Sing it, people!”
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHvcSjGpIuY&feature=fvwrel
Oh, God, am I really “a twisty turny thing”.
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So I stand accused by a supposed liberal opponent of hate speech whose chief rhetorical device is hate speech. True, “twisty turny thing” is not as bad as “Kike-hater”, one of Angry’s earlier absurdities.
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But yes the device serves, I suppose, to divert attention from Angry’s sad failure to rebut my original claims, which I will repeat:
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“As for the home-grown blasphemers, they are subject to the laws of political correctness, which deny them the right to organize politically, to educate their children in the beliefs they hold dear, etc.
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And jobs can be lost over the careless use of language. One police officer, I seem to recall, lost his job or was threatened with the loss of his job for using the word “niggardly” in public.
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LOL. Liberals can be not only ridiculously bigoted but unbelievably stupid.
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Even membership of a legal political party can be a firing matter, as in the case I recall of a school teacher who belonged to the entirely legal BNP.
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And in much of Europe is it not an inprisonable offense to state many things that are in fact true?”
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In fact Angry is using precisely the technique of “hate speech chill” that I referred to. Is he too thick to understand what he’s doing? Or is he determined to make it work?
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CSeemingly, with his constant references to figures of general liberal hatred, Angry’s is working up to libeling me as a holocaust denier or some even more disgusting “thing,” but hasn’t yet quite figured out how to do it with any plausibility.
SS seems to believe, like Angry, that constant reiteration of an unsupported proposition is as good as an argument, especially if set in rather primitive verse which is made to rhyme by the brilliant technique of ending each pair of lines with the same word.
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But as for the black messiah, SS has him mis-identified. He was not Jesus and could not have been since he was known and worshiped thousands of years before the birth of Jesus.
The other intriguing thing wrt Greek cultural/political history is that quite a few historians and other commentators in India deliberately have played-down the impact of Hellenistic culture on northern India. This applies both to a number of anti-imperialist/ nationalist and Hindutva (Hindu Fundamentalist) commentators. In part, this is because they associate Hellenism/Greece with specifically the British Raj (as suggested in an earlier post, the British elites associated themselves with ‘The Greeks’ – and fascinatingly, later, this contributed to another historical association, that of the USA with the Roman Empire) and thus with ‘farangi’ (‘Franks’), ‘goras’ (white people), etc. However, in part it’s also a reflection of a sort of chauvinism which attempts to posit an ‘indigenous’ culture/history located in caste-based Hinduism (itself in fact a relatively late accretion) and which will bend and twist and turn history to suit that very narrow, hyper-politicised narrative. All accounts which do not fit that narrative are seen as ‘invasions from the north-west’. Of course, there is no such thing as objective history. Yet I note that similar cultural tendencies at times, have come to afflict even gardening, where Indian garden experts have attempted to define which flora is ‘indigenous’ and which ‘foreign’. The Green movement – mostly laudable – does have some disturbing roots, in 1920s proto-apartheid South Africa (specifically, Jan Smuts, advocate of racial segregation and author of ‘Holism and Evolution’), who brought the term ‘holism’ back into modern parlance, and in the (now thoroughly debunked) concept of stable, unchanging eco-systems. And so, in India today and in certain aspects of European thought during C20th, we can study the manner in which deliberate perversions of both science and history were constructed in pursuance of various supremacist political agendas. We’ve come a long way from Ramsgate church hall, yet in essence, it is this same desire on the part of religious authority for artificial ‘purity’ of (in this case, Christian) narrative that has driven the exclusion of Nadira Murray’s performance of Medea from the public space.
Good song, angrysoba, thanks very much!! Reminded me a little of The Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’.
I’d like to state, for the record, that I totally support Craig Murray’s attempt to have his wife’s performance of a classical play staged in a public space in the town where he lives. In my view, actually, it would be entirely appropriate for the church space, since it deals with concepts of good and evil, moral choice, fate and so on. Only a very narrow view of drama and religion would think otherwise. Hope you find somewhere more tolerant, Craig and then that the play is sold-out!! I’m sure the readers of this excellent blog can help with spreading the word wrt ticket sales! Go for it! Argonauts set sail!
Jesus isn’t referenced in any historical sources of the time, apart from a couple of texts accepted by theologians to be later interpolations. However it’s hard to say he didn’t exist: Jesus was (and is) a common name, and Messiah was a popular profession. As well as being brown he was of course also Jewish. On a first date with a Jewish lady I took her to the Burrell Collection in Glasgow – it has a few religious paintings. She stopped in front of a ‘Jesus’ likeness. ‘But he’s a Jewish boy’ she said – ‘what’s with the blond hair, and where’s the yarmulke?’
Vronsky, that’s a brilliant vignette! Indeed: Yeshua in Pollok Park. Of course, it’s all speculation and in the end is of little consequence (the portraits of Jesus throughout the world have been very much a projection of those who have painted them and in some ways that is appropriate), but I think it’s fun! Let us say, then, that Jesus may well have looked a little like Alan Yentob, Mahmoud Darwish, Amir Peretz, David Suchet or Tariq Ramadan. He probably wouldn’t have resembled, say, Bjorn Borg or, indeed, Jemima Khan. Yes, truly, I see it now (as did Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne, when he was the Centurion)…
“So I stand accused by a supposed liberal opponent of hate speech whose chief rhetorical device is hate speech. True, “twisty turny thing” is not as bad as “Kike-hater”, one of Angry’s earlier absurdities.”
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Nobody has accused you of “hate speech”. And knock it off with the melodramatic “So I stand accused…” It impresses nobody.
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“But yes the device serves, I suppose, to divert attention from Angry’s sad failure to rebut my original claims, which I will repeat:
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“As for the home-grown blasphemers, they are subject to the laws of political correctness, which deny them the right to organize politically, to educate their children in the beliefs they hold dear, etc.”
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I don’t know what you are talking about. Could you provide an example?
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If you really think liberal democracy conspires to deny the rights of people to educate their children in the way they see fit then tell us what kind of political system you favour allows or affirms that right.
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“And jobs can be lost over the careless use of language. One police officer, I seem to recall, lost his job or was threatened with the loss of his job for using the word “niggardly” in public.
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LOL. Liberals can be not only ridiculously bigoted but unbelievably stupid.”
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Who says that liberals can’t be stupid? Who says I approve the sacking (or, more happily, the threat of sacking) of a police officer using the term “niggardly”? Why does this type of thing make you snigger (LOL!) anyway?
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“Even membership of a legal political party can be a firing matter, as in the case I recall of a school teacher who belonged to the entirely legal BNP.”
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Again show me where I approve of people being fired from being members of legal political parties… And show me a system which isn’t liberal or democratic where you can join any party that they like… [ball’s in your court, Alfred!]
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“And in much of Europe is it not an inprisonable offense to state many things that are in fact true?””
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You were telling me that liberal democrats have no right to preach the way that people in the Middle East “want” to be governed and have been governed for thousands of years [sic] and yet you presume to dictate how other parts of Europe enforce their laws.
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Like I said, for me it is no difficulty. Being a liberal democrat I can dispute laws of other countries and decide that they are wrong just as I can do so for my own country. But it is you who has the problem of making a coherent and consistent argument. But we all know that…
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“In fact Angry is using precisely the technique of “hate speech chill” that I referred to. Is he too thick to understand what he’s doing? Or is he determined to make it work?”
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I am against hate-speech laws. I find it far more satisfying to allow hate speech so that I can say that I hate Nazis, Islamists, Stalinists and “revisionists” without being taken to court.
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“CSeemingly, with his constant references to figures of general liberal hatred, Angry’s is working up to libeling me as a holocaust denier or some even more disgusting “thing,” but hasn’t yet quite figured out how to do it with any plausibility.”
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And there’s the irony. Alfred has, according to my count, threatened either me or Craig Murray’s blog with libel three times now. Some might say that this is in order to affect a “chilling effect” that he accuses me of doing because I mention Holocaust deniers in the same breath as him (notably Faurison and yet only after Alfred brought him up the first time.).
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I should warn you that if you really do decide to take legal proceedings against me then you may end up in as much of a silly place as David Irving did when he took Deborah Lipstadt to court.
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I should point out that it would at least make you as hypocritical as you accuse me of being.
“Good song, angrysoba, thanks very much!! Reminded me a little of The Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’.”
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Funny you should mention that Stranglers song. I actually put it in a blog post to a tongue-in-cheek review of a Trotsky biography by Robert Service I had recently read. As much as I am NOT a fan of Trotsky I do think that Service went too far in equating him with Stalin or even Lenin. Service was, to my mind, correct in pointing out that when you have a radical form of politics you only have two choices: persuade or repress but I think Stalin’s form of repression must surely have outdone any possible attempt that Trotsky would have made. Indeed, the fact that Trotsky – for all his faults – never succeeded like Stalin did could be testament to that.
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But enough of this, let’s listen to the Stranglers…
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg2np37JNEg
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Oh well, if that’s what we’re doing now, listen to this. Contains the greatest lyric lines in the history of popular music.
This is what we find, this is what we find, this is what we find
– the hope that springs eternal, springs right up your behind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPNAWNUsKcU&playnext=1&list=PLFF35D96B554C8EED
This is a really good book on Christianity that I am reading. Admittedly, I may only think this because I am largely ignorant on the subject, but I started reading about John Wyclif only a day or two after Anno mentioned him here on this blog. He sounds like the kind of guy Anno would like, to be sure. That is to say he was a harsh and uncompromising man who thought the mass of humanity was Hell-bound but also thought that there was a “true Church” invisible to almost all and a Church run by a corrupt class of clergy and liars. I personally think Wyclif was half-right there.
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Wyclif is often seen as a fore-runner to people such as Luther who would probably have ended up burnt at the stake like Jan Hus if it wasn’t for a rich benefactor in Witten but MacCulloch points out that before Luther there was also William of Ockham who is something of a hero to scientists and skeptics and philosophers (and those who consider themselves combinations of those identities).
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Interestingly, around this time there were people that MacCulloch refers to as “humanists” who were not “humanist” in a secular sense but who essentially invented archeology and also a forensic analysis of the Bible. People such as Erasmus were instrumental in this. One amusing fact is that “humanist” researchers of the Bible discovered that Jerome had made a translation error in his understanding of Exodus in which he mistook Moses’ “face shining” for “having horns”. It is because of this that Michelangelo scultped Moses with horns.
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Now while that may be amusing or of little consequence it turned out that there were very many major translation errors of similar type that led to people being burnt at the stake.
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BACK ON TOPIC: My personal view is that it is terrible that Craig’s wife wasn’t allowed to perform at the village hall for such silly reasons as given. My more objective view is that what with the C.O.E being a body of arbitrary rules it is quite within its rights to behave arbitrarily.
Vronsky: “Oh well, if that’s what we’re doing now, listen to this. Contains the greatest lyric lines in the history of popular music.”
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I like it, Vronsky.
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Now, let it never be said that I won’t give the Soviet Union its due. I am no musician, unlike Vronsky, but this kind of thing does do it for me…sometimes…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_c_BUm7Bo&feature=related
I am sorry there has been no response by Yugo to my question as to whether he is as contemptuous of Israel’s support for religious institutions as of England’s.
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It seems to me that undercutting religious education in Israel and teaching Muslim and Jewish children in the same schools would be the beginning of the end of Israel’s apartheid system of government.
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But then Jews generally are opposed to destroying Israel’s unique Jewish culture just as Christian Europeans are opposed to destroying the unique cultures of the European nations.
But the argument against state enforced integration is most clearly understood in the Israeli context.
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One can understand how Jews would feel that forced integration in Israel would lead to what Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, called genocide: the destruction of a nation’s identity, religion, culture and unique heredity.
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But exactly the same process is occurring in Europe. In Europe such integration, stimulated by mass immigration, is aggressively promoted by many Jews and by all liberals. But it is still genocidal.
Jon said, “Canspeccy – Angrysoba’s last paragraph was quite reasonable.”
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Quite reasonable? LOL
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This is what he said:
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“but I suspect that you’re either wrong about it, have been misled by some grubby “revisionist” site or are just lying.”
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So without offering the slightest evidence, and being wrong on every count, he manages in one sentence to smear me as an ignoramus, an habitué of “grubby “revisionist” sites” or a liar.
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And you expect me to respond to that kind of intellectual thuggery?
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If so, I have to conclude that you are an auxiliary provocateur.
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But that’s about what I’d expect from someone who was, or who offered to be, the moderator on this site.
Jon is a superb commentator and an excellent moderator. Thank you, Jon, for your hard work on this site. And thanks also to Clark for his excellent work. Angrysoba, wrt the C of E rules, etc., yes, I agree. Vronsky, angrysoba, great music! Sounds like an engrossing book, too. Indeed, words – mistranslations or otherwise – have led to the stake. Now, for some light amusement, let us determine who has horns and who, a shining face.
@CS – well, we will have to agree to disagree on that. As you’ll see from elsewhere, Angrysoba and I disagree on plenty, but he’s not here to be disruptive, imo. On the other hand, it is my view that you oscillate between productive discursiveness and very difficult to pin down. You are sometimes at pains to be polite and other times abrasive enough to destroy a conversion completely (you said, when I defended you against charges of being a provocateur last year: “and I don’t think you’re a serial rapist”. Great!).
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Anyway, Angry has asked you for a template of society that works differently from the modern liberal model, and you can answer it if you wish to. I won’t chase you further on it.
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Yes, I have moderation capabilities, and I use them carefully. We had an influx of disruptive and racist postings that were making the site much less useful for everyone. Moderation has really helped in that regard, imo.
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@Suhayl, thanks, although I have very little to do these days – Clark does a great deal more 🙂
I don’t know if it’s already been posted, but on the “niggardly” issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22
I should think that if the word is used without racist intent, then it shouldn’t be an issue, and no-one should lose their job over it. As Angrysoba says, liberals can be stupid, since they are human just like anyone else, and humans are frequently stupid. WP says that the word is etymologically unrelated to ‘nigger’.
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I don’t personally use the word, but it’s not because of the race issue – it’s just not in my usual lexicon. I’m in favour of moderate political correctness, as I’ve noted before, but I agree that some specific examples are excessive. I say “blackboard” and “whiteboard” without people blinking at me in disbelief!
[Jon/mod: abusive, deleted]
Jon said: “Angry has asked you for a template of society that works differently from the modern liberal model, and you can answer it if you wish to. I won’t chase you further on it.”
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Is this even a reasonable question?
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Did any society that has ever existed employ the modern liberal “template” until that disastrous mindset infected Western society in the late 20th century?
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Perhaps Rome is an example, and look what happened to it. Rome went the same way we are going. Rome became a decadent, depraved and decaying hulk, easily knocked over by a horde of Asiatic horsemen.
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Perhaps Soviet Russia is another example. True the modern liberal would not see himself as, say, a General in the GPU, but the intolerance and tyrannical tendency of liberals today is palpable and growing. This manifests itself in the technique of argument employed by Angrysoba. Defame your opponent with complete freedom from the obligation to speak truthfully, and then attack them as blasphemers against the cannons of liberal democracy: holocaust denier, revisionist, racist, etc.
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But, anyway it’s really not hard to think of a social model other than a modern liberal democracy. Virtually all other societies provide alternatives to the modern liberal “template.”
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What makes a liberal think this is an interesting question is that he suffers from the delusion that he is one of the chosen people, the enlightened, the “good guys” and that on every question he is right and anyone who disagrees with him is sadly wrong and that such people must be treated either with condescending tolerance or, if they’re really annoying, with a carpet of bombs, as Craig Murray seems to feel is justified in Afghanistan.
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I am sorry if I have at times seemed to you to be disruptive, but to me, the modern liberal mindset appears so much closer to insanity than a serious political ideology that there is little I can say in a liberal forum that would not be seen as disruptive.
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I hope this helps more than it disrupts.
LOL, I suggested SS was flattering the moderator and my comment was immediately deleted as abusive.
Very funny indeed.
Jon, are you paid to moderate this site?
But I guess you’ll delete the question rather than answer it.
Yeah, the word, ‘niggardly’ has nothing to do with the word, ‘nigger’, though I’ve occasionally used the former and noticed slight astonishment and disappointment on the part of the listener, but then I enjoy puncturing the balloons of excessive and inappropriate political correctness. It’s like ‘history’ has absolutely nothing to do with ‘his story’, but for while variegated semi-literate eejits were suggesting that it did. Language is dynamic and powerful and ought to have its boundaries expanded but ought not to be policed beyond what is clearly abusive – and of course this will change through time. There was a time, not long ago, when the ‘f word’ was deemed beyond the pale; now it’s in common parlance. Context is everything. Naturally, liberals can be as stupid or as clever as conservatives. In the West of Scotland, for instance, sadly, ‘orange’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’, used in certain contexts, can have connotations beyond the chromatic.
I am not “flattering” the moderator, or at least if I am, it seems entirely justifiable to acknowledge someone’s good work when that work has been real. I venture that it would be likely to be a consensus view that Jon and Clark have been consistently positive influences on the tone and content of the blogging discourse on this site, both before and outside their roles as moderators and in the context of those roles. Judicious moderation actually has allowed freedom of speech to be more manifest than before. Praise where praise is due. Nothing wrong with that. Whether or not they are paid to moderate is of no relevance to me, nor, I suspect, to the vast majority of those who engage regularly with this site. It’s simple: I respect their work.