Big Sticks and Small Carrots

There’s been a slight problem with comments in that I marked a whole wad of the most recent one’s as spam by mistake. Much as I’d like to blame Spam Karma, I’m afraid it was my own fault.

It’s been a bit of a pain but I think I’ve managed to restore them all and remove all the relevant IP and website addresses from the blacklist. If you do encounter any problems trying to submit new comments or notice a missing one, please it me know and I’ll try to sort it out.

(For the record, I’ve had to restore the two most recent comments manually so the date/time stamp on them isn’t accurate any more.)

If I believed in karma, I’d say it was payback for my lack of posting recently. But I don’t. Not that sort of karma anyway.

I will be back up to speed as of Monday though. Huzzah!

Here’s a brief musical interlude.

I think it’s made of straw.

Despite how it may occasionally look, I’m not really interested in getting involved in “flame wars”. There is a point to this post.

That said, I do have say that I’ve been thoroughly educated and entertained by Dizzy’s comments over the last two days.

Dizzy, as we’re all already aware, is a “net-libertarian who does what the hell he wants on his website”. When attempts are made to scrutinise certain blogs or bloggers, Dizzy can often be found arguing that such criticisms are pointless and/or unjustifiable. There’s even a sort of slogan:

If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

Dizzy used those very words in one of the many comments he took the time to leave under my post over the last two days. Very early into what became really quite a long attempt to criticise my post, he explained that he was leaving these comments because, as he put it, he was “getting sick of seeing people leap to to conclusive causes…”

I probably don’t need to spell out what’s funny about that.

And, of course, whatever I write about Dizzy now, if he wants to argue the point, I can respond by saying that rather than wasting his time obsessing over what some obscure blogger has said about him or his friends, he should adopt his own principles, quit whining and go read something else. He certainly wouldn’t be in a position to consider that provocative or wrong in any way. It’s what he believes in.

I’ll try to resist the urge to make (any more) hay with that though. As I said, I’m not actually that interested in a “flame war”.

It’s the principle of the thing which intrigues me. While it might be a clever intellectual exercise in property rights, the “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” argument simply doesn’t stand up in the real world. What you do in the privacy of your own your home is your business true enough but if you painted “My Neighbour is a Fucking Idiot” on the outside of your house in ten foot high red letters, that’d be a different story.

(Or “Gordon Brown is a…” Or “David Cameron is a…” Or “Eddie the Eagle Edwards is a…” Whoever, it’s a hypothetical.)

If your next door neighbour had painted something like that on his house, you’d probably be a bit miffed and rightly so. And as long as the words are there, you’re probably going to struggle to sell up and move elsewhere. People other than the owner can see the outside of the house so that brings up the whole thorny issue of externalities.

Like blogging. Unless you’re an incurable exhibitionist, blogging is not like the inside of your house. Other people can see what you write. It’s kind of the point. And because blogging is a public activity with externalities, there are circumstances in which it simply isn’t enough to say “It’s my property. If you don’t like it, don’t read it”. How would that line of defence work out for the guy with a 10 foot high swearword on the front of his house?

It’s just silly.

And what is the famous slogan used to defend?

Well, I can’t help but notice that Dizzy yesterday posted about Ed Balls refusing to retract an accusation and Gordon Brown refusing to answer a simple question.

[Aside: I don’t recommend availing yourself of Dizzy’s comment facility. He is quite open about the fact that he’d have no qualms about deleting any valid arguments you might make. As such, I can’t see the point. It’s up to you though.]

While I’ve not had the time to look into either post in much detail (but also, you’ll note, didn’t take the time to submit numerous comments trying to cast doubt on what he’s written or indeed critique his claims here), these posts do raise an interesting point.

I’m pretty sure that most ordinary non-partisan people (people with no party political affiliations) and indeed many party people are tired of the behaviour of many in the political classes. Obfuscation, half truths, misrepresentations, smears, spin and all the rest are used by all the main parties to one extent or another and people are fed up of it. Dizzy himself appears to be fed up of it. In certain circumstances.

There’s not a great deal us little people can do about that sort of thing when it happens in parliament or on TV but when it happens on the interwebs, things could be different. Out here, if politicians and their supporters play fair, the little people have a real voice.

When Nadine Dorries MP posted her ridiculous accusation on her website, it appeared that ordinary people (some of the readers of Ben Goldacre’s blog, for example) could point out that it was totally unjustified and demonstrably untrue.

And ordinary people could see what her reaction was. (although not her own readers, of course). The comments were not published, no retraction was made and the little people were no longer allowed to submit comments because Nadine was “too busy”.

When Conservative political activist Ellee Seymour later attempted to sell a new improved “I’m under attack” version of Nadine’s explanation for closing down comments, it appeared that ordinary people could point out that Nadine had not published comments which were pointed but polite regarding an untrue accusation she had made. It appeared that it would be possible to raise legitimate questions about the behaviour of the MP without coming under personal attack yourself and then having your own replies to these attacks disappeared into the interweb ether*. But as we know, that didn’t quite work out either.

What people certainly didn’t get was honest engagement.

I believe that most ordinary bloggers don’t want this medium to become just another place where the disingenuous games of the political classes play out. At the moment, thanks to the activities of certain self-proclaimed top political bloggers and their supporters, that’s the way it’s going. As a little person myself, I have to say that I think that would be a great shame.

Dizzy may or may not attempt to deploy the straw man about “demands” and “property rights” again but you need to strip away the sophistry to see what the argument he makes actually defends. It defends the right of politicians and their activists to obfuscate, use half truths, and misrepresentations, smears, spin and all the rest on the internet. It says that we should not expect politicians and their activists to conduct themselves in an honest and forthright manner on the internet and should have no cause for complaint if they do not do so.

That doesn’t sound like the kind of democracy I want to live in.

* I’ve still not received any reply as to whether I can submit further comments. Jherad has tried but hasn’t succeeded and one of mine was not published so I’m operating on the assumption that any I submit now wouldn’t see the light of day. Read the rest of this entry »

To whoever it was who got here by searching for the term “removal of word “gullible” from OED”, can I just say that it’s absolutely true.

Can you believe it?

I had originally intended to add further thoughts to this post once the conversation I’d started with Iain had come to an end but given the length of time that has elapsed and the results of the conversation, it’s probably better to put this in a new post.

I would ask you to bear in mind that Iain’s parting shot was that “people can form their own judgements on what I write”. As such, I’m sure he can have no complaints if I draw attention to what he has written. Likewise, if others choose to share this conversation.

Somehow, however, I doubt he’ll be doing the same.

The conversation took place under this post on Iain Dale’s Diary. In the post, Iain warned readers that they could not “say anything they like on a blog and get away with it”. This seemed like the perfect place to raise certain issues about the way the author of that warning conducts himself on blogs. I do always try my best to stay on topic.

Feel free to read through the whole thing if you have the time. It starts with this comment (I’ll also post it in it’s entirety below the fold for easy reading).

To be strictly accurate, the conversation didn’t quite start with the comment linked above. I started by submitting a comment with a link to this Bloggerheads post which discusses the way Iain behaves on blogs. Iain had participated in a comment exchange with Tim Ireland on IDD. In the exchange, Tim had asked Iain (again) to remove his images from IDD and the linked Flickr pages. These comments were visible for a short time but Iain then decided to delete the exchange without explanation. I set out to see whether Iain would explain the reason for this deletion.

To start with, I did borrow the journalistic technique of attempting to phrase my comment in a way which was likely to elicit a response. Iain has a busy blog which means that he can often avoid being challenged by simply posting and ignoring comments he’d rather not respond to. Here’s my first go:

Moderation on again? How tedious.

Still, I’m sure the reintroduction of comment moderation is entirely because Iain is feeling jumpy about this exchange which he subsequently deleted.

Nothing at all to do with that. At all. Move along. Nothing to see here.

A nice juicy carrot there just begging to be bitten, I though. And it did elicit a response; it got squashed in the moderation queue. This wasn’t entirely unexpected but I had thought it’d probably go through. I may have misjudged the extent to which Iain didn’t want his readers to read Tim’s post (this was back when Iain’s post was still high up his front page).

I complained about the deletion of my comment and asked why it wasn’t allowed and that comments did appear on the thread. I waited a while for a response and then tried to submit the original comment again, adding that in the absence of an explanation, it was possible that my comment might have been lost.

That comment didn’t get through either but it did elicit a reply from Iain. Our conversation had begun.

Here’s a summary of the result of that conversation.

1. Iain’s first reply is inconsistent with an earlier claim he made on the same thread. He then falsely implied that I that I had called him names. A “bitchfest”, he called it.

2. When I tried to discuss the deleted comment exchange detailed in the Bloggerheads post, Iain falsely suggested that it hadn’t happened. He said he had made it clear that Tim Ireland had been banned from IDD for “several weeks if not months” and that “he will never get a reply”.

3. In that comment, he also suggested that scrutiny of the activities of other bloggers was somehow unacceptable - “People visit the blogs they like and ignore the ones they don’t” - and that I was off topic. Neither of these claims stand up. He’s a high profile political actor who claims to have political influence and therefore a legitimate target for scrutiny. He’d written a post about standards of behaviour on blogs and that’s what I was writing about too. He then attempted to shut down the conversation.

4. When pressed to explain the inconsistencies of his previous response, he misconstrued one of my comments in such a way as to take great offence at something I hadn’t said and attempted to use that to shut down the conversation. The point I was actually making was that others who had attempted to press him to answer questions on certain issues had been labelled obsessive. Bear this in mind for later.

5. In his misconstrued outrage, he said “You people never know when to stoop low enough”. When I explained that he was mistaken in his interpretation of what I’d said, Iain felt no need to offer an apology.

6. Pressed again to explain his “he will never get a reply from me” claim, he then said that he’d meant he’d never reply to an email. This, despite the fact that he’d written “…and leave as many comments on this site as he likes, but he will never get a reply”.

7. When this inconsistency was pointed out, he changed his story again. The comments had been deleted because of the “vitriol” directed against him, he claimed. Having read the deleted comments, I knew that wasn’t true either. In that same comment, Iain again tried to shut down the conversation.

8. When pressed again to explain why he won’t discuss his own behaviour on his blog despite writing about how others should behave, he claimed that “it is not me who is lecturing others on how to behave on the internet”. The first two lines of the post these comments are under reads “Just a warning to those ‘anonymous’ commenters who think they can say anything they like on a blog and get away with it. Well you can’t.”

9. In the same comment, he claimed that the images Tim asked him to remove from his site several months ago were not easily identifiable. I visited his Flickr pages and found several images clearly marked with Tim’s Backing Blair logo in the space of a few seconds. I pointed this out. Three day later as I write this, they are still there.

10. He also claimed that Tim has “obsessions” and attempted to suggest that my questions had no validity because I read Bloggerheads and am “a close friend/ally”. This may be some new strain of McCarthyism I’ve not yet heard of. He attempted to use this bizarre argument to again shut down the conversation.

11. Pressed again to explain his use of the word “vitriol”, he had a sudden memory loss and forgot what it was we were talking about.

12. Iain then posted five blog posts over the course of that evening the next morning but no further reply to the question I’d left at 6.29 pm on the 24th. Starting at lunchtime of the 25th, I submitted one comment every five hours or so, three in total, pressing for an answer. Iain then claimed that he hadn’t replied because he hadn’t “posted on the blog since this morning”. This would have made more sense if the question hadn’t been asked at 6.29 pm the previous day. He also implied that I was being impatient. More than 48 hours had passed since I first started trying to discover the reason for the deletion.

13. In that comment, he again had an attack of memory loss and failed to address the question I’d been asking.

14. Twelve hours after my next polite reminder of the question, Iain replied. He accused me of acting as a sock puppet for Tim Ireland and said “If you want to lower yourself to that level that’s your decision.” Charmed, I’m sure. The truth is that I read Bloggerheads and IDD and make up my own mind. No-one prompted me bring this up with Iain. I just thought that it was relevant to the post he’d written.

15. In the same reply, he said that he’d written a long explanation but deleted it without posting. He then deployed a textbook “I can’t win” gambit saying that “whatever I say will never satisfy you”. Well, yes and no. I have to agree that dealing with someone who provides demonstrably untrue answers and refuses to provide an explanation or withdraw the untrue claims is not a hugely satisfying experience. Whether Iain could have supplied a satisfactory answer if he’d wanted to is another question. It’s not possible to come to a definitive conclusion on that as it didn’t happen.

16. Also in the same reply, he claimed that questioning the behaviour of political figures was not an appropriate topic of conversation for a political blog saying that “Political blogs are supposed to discuss politics.” He wrote this less than two hours after he’d blogged a post called Ashcroft accuses Labour minister of being “cowardly”.

18. Again in that same reply, he accused me of focusing on “email exchnages which are of no interest to anyone beyond three or four people who seem to obsess about such things”. This despite the fact that I’d repeatedly made it clear that I wasn’t asking about email exchanges. Now he had called me obsessive too. Who could possibly have predicted that? He then tried again to close down the conversation.
19. I politely asked him to withdraw his unfounded accusations and this elicited his final reply. He conceded that I had dealt with him politely but refused to withdraw the spurious accusation that I’d acted as Tim’s sockpuppet. He also refused to withdraw his claim that I was acting obsessively.

20. And, of course, he refused to answer the question. Again.

At that point, I had to admit that there was no chance that Iain was actually going to explain the reason why he deleted the exchange or apologise for the numerous snide implications and underhand insults he’d directed my way over the course of the conversation so I left the building.

As I said at the start, Iain himself wrote that “people can form their own judgements on what I write” so do feel free to take him up on this offer and read the whole thing. I’ve done my very best to not misrepresent any of what was said in my summary but you are perfectly entitled to judge that for yourself.

Moving On

Iain will now either ignore this post or flatly contradict his own words yet again and complain about the fact that I’ve highlighted what he’s written. He might even suggest that this post is further evidence of my “obsession”. If that was true, every decent journalist in the country would also be suffering from a personality disorder and Iain would prefer every political interview to be conducted in the style of Andrew Marr. Somehow, I doubt he really thinks that. It seems more likely that there is another explanation for his behaviour.

I think it’s unlikely that I’ll attempt any further conversations with Iain on his blog. In my experience, the suggestion that Iain can be held to account for what he writes in the comments to his blog is a fiction. And, as I’ve said, trying to nail jelly to butterflies is a time consuming activity.

I will continue to write posts about Iain just as I will with various other political actors. As and when the opportunity arises, I will continue to write posts like this one when Iain has made himself look particularly foolish. As you might appreciate if you’ve got this far, these posts may well be written in a mocking tone.

It is, after all, my blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just as I was about unplug for the night, the first spam comment appeared on the new blog and it was indeed for the little blue pill.

It’s not on. After reading of other bloggers experiences of spam protection plugins and remembering that Unity uses it and knows a thing or two about such things, I’ve installed Karma Spam 2.

It’s on default settings at the moment. If it gives you any problems, my email address is in the sidebar. Feel free to complain loudly and vigorously.

After prolonged procrastination, I’ve finally got round to getting my own domain name and what can I say? It’s comfortable, spacious and maybe even an improvement on my old place.

Importing my previous posts from Blogger was so ridiculously easy that it was almost churlish not to do it. Comments too. One click for the whole process. Nice.

There might be some minor changes as I work out how to host images and things like that but I’m pleased with the layout so far. Do let me know if you’ve got any problems with it or with anything else on the new site.

Thanks

Garry

I’m going to make a few minor changes on the blog. Cue navel gazing.

The most significant (not very, then) will be the laying to rest of the “CuriousHamster” moniker. The reasons for the name are far too dull to go into but I’ve decided that it’s not really suitable. It’s only the fact that changing my Blogger name will retroedit every comment I’ve ever made on Blogger which has put me off doing this before now. For example, anyone who happens upon stumbles upon Iain Dale’s suggestion that “go and play with [my] friend Richard Gere” will now be rather confused. Nevertheless, it’s got to be done. I’ll be rewriting the “About Me” bit to reflect this change (including the fact that I did previously blog as CH).

I’m also intending to finally sort out my blogroll. I tend to think that a blogroll should include the bloggers who you read regularly and hold in high regard and mine had become too long for this principle; it simply wasn’t possible to find the time to read them all regularly. A while back, I decided to start again from scratch and deleted the old blogroll. A combination of factors, but mostly my ability to procrastinate to a record breaking degree, have meant that I never got round to rebuilding it (apart from a small number of blogs who were absolutely automatic inclusions).

The problem is that there really are a lot of good bloggers out there; it’s difficult to draw the line when so many people have something interesting to say. It would so easy to be back to square one in no time at all so I’ve avoided the issue altogether in the way that an Ostrich doesn’t. No longer. My first target is to add the twenty bloggers who most fill the criteria I described above. This is a purely subjective judgement on my part so please don’t feel put out if you’re not on the list. There are only two bloggers who will not be on my blogroll due to a failure to meet the second condition. No prizes for guessing their identities…

I might also make some minor cosmetic changes to the blog. If anyone has any suggestions on that score, feel free to let me know.

And relax.

We apologise for the temporary break in our normal programme schedule. Gazing outwards will resume now.

First of all, I’d like to offer an apology for going completely missing from the interwebs for the last wee while. It wasn’t a planned absence and I’m slightly shocked to discover that it’s been literally months since I last posted. Extra large apologies to those who’ve emailed or commented and not received replies during the hiatus. Also great big thanks to those who’ve offered kind words.

Without going into the gory details (which are neither particularly gory nor particularly interesting), let’s just say that a combination of factors led to an overpowering case of Wonko the Sane syndrome.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, depending on your point of view, it does now appear to be passing. Proper posts on the way.

In the meantime, here’s an article from the Gran:

The British government granted asylum to about 100 Iraqis between 2003 and 2005, but figures since then are unknown. It has refused to consider applications from among the 2 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and other neighbouring states.

And here’s a related campaign to pressure the British government to offer asylum to Iraqis who have worked for the British government since the invasion and are now in grave danger as a result: We can’t turn them away

The British Government response has come from the Home Office, which has suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for British troops ‘register with the UN refugee agency’.

It’s a shameful state of affairs. The campaign aims to make sure that MPs are unable to avoid facing up to it.

Spread the word.

Update

My email is away. Moved house so I’ve got a new Liberal Democrat MP, one Robert Smith. (Not the one from The Cure unfortunately.) I’m told he’s a decent chap.

You might also want to sign the petition set up by Davide.