Hmm… one the one side B4L broke its all-time hit record today, previously set – not too surprisingly – on May 5th last year, when well-intentioned people would have been searching the blogosphere looking for coverage and analysis of the General Election results.
On the other, most of this bubble has been from idiotic commenters posting things like this:
Will this “political education” involve torturing people who disagree with your views, or will you outsource it to the Uzbeks?
PS – are you paid to be a torture collaborator, or do you do it out of love?
Ha! Vichy!
Certainly this website seems to have a touch of the Vichy about it… What’s really funny is that Nu Labour have finally cottoned on to the fact that it’s now embarrassing to admit in polite company that one is a signed-up member of the Labour party :0)
How do you think the Uzbeks feel about being boiled to death by Jack Straw’s pal Islam Karimov?
Might it be best to try and get all the killings out of the way before the next Euro elections? Don’t want all those dead Iranian kids to have too great an impact on the Labour vote now, do we? In twenty years time, do you think you’ll be proud of what you did or do you think you’ll have to lie about it? What will you tell your kids? Will you want them to know, or will you try to hide it from them? Do you ever wonder what it must have been like to have been a minor official in the Vichy government?
in response to this. I’ve decided to keep all comments that were added to that particular page, if only to stop them spilling over onto other pages, but remove variations that turned up elsewhere.
The commenting policy at B4L is – still – that I won’t just let anything go. If comments fail the racist, sexist, or homophobic test, then they may well be summarily deleted, entirely at my discretion. In general, though: if people I don’t know posts something that is neither relevant, nor constructive, nor even humorous, then it’ll be deleted as valueless, a waste of my bandwidth, and a waste of readers’ time.
Obviously events in Uzbekistan and Iran are important, but there’s no chance of a sensible conversation arising out of the above, and I don’t believe that is even the intention.
There’s no political motivation to this, and no B4L participant, or indeed 99.5% of the other bloggers I have encountered over the past few years, need be concerned. Even anonymous commenters are often well-intentioned but – let’s face it – we know junk when we see it, and if people want to make pathetic jokes, I’m more than happy to remove them, one by one.
I’m sure that any reasonable person, on either side of the Iraq fence, will be quite able to come to their own judgments on reading the hysterical, pompous and self-serving rants you received in response to your calm and considered comments.
I totally agree that as your blog is private property, you have the absolute right to decide what is and is not appropriate in the comment section. I have taken a similar line here http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2006/05/our_house_our_r.html
However I am a bit surprised (albeit pleasently) to see such an attachment to private property rights on a Labour blog.
There is that, but the fact that it’s ‘my’ blog in the sense that I created it and pay for it doesn’t mean all that much to me.
More importantly, I’m providing a service to allied bloggers, which I feel would suffer if I allowed junk to build up, and attacks to get through. If I couldn’t do that, I’d be less likely to want to invest my free time in the service, which might also lose credibility. So there’s also a slightly shaky kind of paternalistic point here: that by applying what I deem to be universal, liberal standards of decency (e.g. no hate or abuse), as well as ‘value/worth’ to the comments, I can ‘up’ the quality – on the whole – of what my intended audience reads. How New Labour is that?