nourishing obscurity

What must be perfectly obvious is that my blogrules have to change. Having recently laid them down, they’ve been knowingly and cynically tested by one person a couple of weeks back, which I find it hard to forgive her for and now inadvertently tested by “one of my own people”, if he’ll forgive me using that term.

The left-liberal has no love for this blog for obvious reasons and even less does the hardliner Mandelson/Hain type. The right of politics shuns the blog because of my insistence on Them and perceived treachery towards the Tories and GOP. The libertarians are disgusted because I took on their god, DK and accused him of being no better than Cameron – plus they can’t stand my “inane witterings”, as their god called them.

So the socialist trolls get to come in and put their point of view, as long as they’re “polite” because this blog encourages “balance” and “open discussion”. When a more right-leaning commenter does come in, he has a tendency not to beat about the bush – Spidey’s style – he being from the great Eugenides/Obnoxio/Theo tradition, a tradition I’m quite partial to and I’m loathe to lose people like that because they’re good people.

I’ve obviously lost the women some time back – Devonshire Dumpling was honest enough to explain one reason but another is the female error of equating women with feminists – oil and water – which many women still make. I support women but attack their enemies, the feminists. Also, the women don’t seem so interested in politics on the whole and those that are interested, like Fausty, no longer come here for reasons only they can know.

Having said all that, this blog is fuelled by “neither fear nor favour” and so I’d rather have more open discussion than more rules restricting what people say. So I’m going to have to modify the rules in a more libertarian direction, which will have the genteel clicking out in droves, perceiving that I’ve lowered the standards. Well, what will be will be.

Regarding what Barking Spider said about Richard, I’ve left it in – and Richard has right of reply if he wants it – on these grounds:

1. It’s a fisking and that’s what this blog does – fisking. Spidey goes into detail about why and quotes examples. I don’t accept that it was mindless ad hominem and please don’t accuse me of hypocrisy because if Richard had done it, it would also have stood. I’d like to see his reply in that thread now.

2. Xxxl comes in, for example and fisks the whole time – people come in and state things and if my pesky rules are going to stop that, if those rules are going to kill off open discussion, then I’m on the side of the discussion, rather than the rules. I hate rules and will only tolerate those that are absolutely necessary.

I think you see where this is going and what I’m trying to do on the blog. Getting that balance is the hardest thing and it’s never going to please everyone.

Just on that burqa issue, what worries me, from a personal point of view, is that I find myself agreeing with both Richard’s last comment and Barking Spider’s overall take on it, which is what prompted the post in the first place. How can that be?

Filed under: Blogging