Saturday Evening Posts Worth Reading.
Jamie Palmer on Hashtags and Virtue Signalling in the wake of Nice.
£10,000 damages awarded against an on-line troll for falsely labelling a Tory politician a paedophile. Or the cost of replying “He received a prompt reply from an administrator…”F**k off LOL,” to the complainant?
I did Pokémon Politics, now Richard Bartholomew does Pokémon Religion. What next? Pokémon Sex?
Moor Larkin’s 529th post culminates in a curious modus scatterandi!
If you are not yet following Hoaxstead Research – do so before Monday! Final day of the Troll-y Dollies…
Finally, a link with a difference. I had read the book, I had seen the documentary, so I wouldn’t have chosen to spoil the memories by watching the ‘fictionalised’ film – but last night I did. I was spellbound. Exceptionally believable characterisation by all the actors, a brave choice considering 9/11, and you are a better man than I, Gunga Din, if you can watch every second of it without covering your eyes.
On Sky On Demand this week, or available on DVD. ‘The Walk’. Brilliant!
- Bandini
July 16, 2016 at 12:04 pm -
The damages against the ‘troll’ is a bit odd – no one even knows who is behind the avatar:
“The troll – known only by his pseudonym Kiwidynastia – was given 14 days to challenge the amount of the award.
However, Mr Justice Green said he would only be allowed to do so if he now publicly reveals his name and address.”Hard to see the offer to reveal his identity being taken up!
In keeping with the idea of the internet being ‘like the Wild West’ the winner of the claim has offered a bounty of half his damages – a cool £5000 – to anyone offering up the details of the avatar behind it all.Hmmm, best hold yer horses: “The amount may be less if it turns out that the full amount can be recovered, for example if Dynastia is very poor and does not have £10,000 of assets. In that case it will just be 50% of whatever is recovered after fees.”
On the site behind it all (and the scamp behind the site) we read “everyone knows that Kiwi Farms is run by Joshua Conner Moon, who lives in his mother’s basement in Pensacola Florida” so it may end up being 50% of a phyrric victory.
http://matthewhopkinsnews.com/?p=3870 - John Galt
July 16, 2016 at 1:34 pm -
The judge went on to award £10,000 damages against one of the trolls, the maximum allowed following summary judgement in a defamation case. He also granted an injunction restraining further similar publications. The troll – known only by his pseudonym Kiwidynastia – was given 14 days to challenge the amount of the award. However, Mr Justice Green said he would only be allowed to do so if he now publicly reveals his name and address.
It’s all very well winning an award, but without even a name and address of the defendant whereby settlement could be sought, it’s all a bit moot surely?
- The Blocked Dwarf
July 16, 2016 at 2:41 pm -
I am, so I am told, a descendant of the Collingwood-Smith , painter of watercolours of the Chocolate Box lid school of art. As I may be vaguely related to SCS I am rooting for him ….despite deeply regretting he felt he had to take this precedent setting action, which will only be misused by those seeking to curtail all our freedoms of speech.
Back when I was better known on the interweb, there were some really quite vile and hateful things said about me & my family on ED and I admit my first instinct was to demand ED take them down. I didn’t because I know where that kind of thing leads and as I was a moderator at the time on a web forum dedicated to, and regarded by as many as the last bastion of, Free Speech I felt it would be hypercritical of me to grizzle (especially as I am, or was, quite capable of ‘dishing it out’ and my “Kung Fu” used to be good enough to have taken down a couple of sites without needing pesky warrant thingys).
Don’t get me wrong, I am so not saying I am in anyway a better rounded person, a more mature spirit, thicker skinned than SCS. Words can and do more damage than baseball bats and rocks and I’m sure SCS was right to take the action he did…right for him and his…but maybe less ‘right’ for the rest of us. - Don Cox
July 16, 2016 at 8:09 pm -
I had never heard of whatever it is that is going on in Hampstead, but there seem to be some crazy people there.
Perhaps Mao was right, during the Cultural Revolution, to drive all the urban intellectuals out into the countryside to dig and hoe for a while. Places like Hampstead seem to be culture dishes for folly.
- tdf
July 17, 2016 at 1:27 am -
@Don Cox
I think that’s a bit of a stretch to be honest. The bunch behind the Hampstead SRA hoax are a rum lot to be sure, but they don’t strike me as having a heck of a lot in common with the traditional Hampstead liberal, politically, ideologically, intellectually or socially.
- tdf
- Sean Coleman
July 16, 2016 at 8:21 pm -
Virtue signalling seems to be the latest phrase ‘du jour’. I first consciously noticed it only a few weeks ago from the pen of Mary Kenny. I agreed with the first paragraph of Palmer’s piece but cooled after that. Perhaps I didn’t read it carefully enough. He talks about virtue signalling on the social media from the Right and the Left. I see it only from the Left, not just on the social media but everywhere. The Right may be exasperated, over-critical, unsympathetic or just bad mannered but surely ‘virtue signalling’ can only be used with the broad support of the consensus, not to the point where it takes it to the same extremes as the virtuous signaller, but assured of its sympathy nevertheless. Thinking about it, the virtue signaller is merely putting himself at the head of the winning team, like the fellow I heard of at university who always got himself in the photograph at the head of the demonstration, pushing it ever further in the winning direction. So even as the consensus moves ever Left-ward there is always an extreme where the virtue signaller can occupy.
The discussion of ‘trolls’ is similar. The word is negative by definition (like the word ‘too’) and I try to avoid it as I am not sure it means any more than someone whose views you don’t approve of (as Orwell wrote about fascism). The websites of fevered conspiracists and their all-night manic depressive readers have many and obvious faults I think you can distinguish them, in the main, from the online-mob, led as it is by the virtue signallers. The former can be mad and bad but the latter are authoritarian, intolerant and more dangerous. (I changed my FB profile picture to Nigel Farage because of an on-line campaign to prosecute him for racial and religious ‘hate crimes’.) The last time I bought the Observer (some years ago, just out of curiosity) it contained an article about the need to take measures against ‘internet trolls’, defined as dangerous men who make life miserable for outspoken, confident and sassy feminists. (There was also a mention in there, an odd coincidence, about the ‘liars’ who call themselves mediums.)
- Sean Coleman
July 16, 2016 at 8:48 pm -
I am watching this at the moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVUJ7mQmM0Q
Like Jimmy Savile, it took me a while to get round to Dr Andrew Wakefield but there are lots of warning lights flashing over his treatment. He is caricatured as heartless in his treatment of helpless child patients (‘Abuser!’), greedy (‘He wanted to discredit the vaccine and developing his own one to take its place!’ and his Wiki entry is even more censorious than usual (the wikipedes have a special tone for those who dare sin against Science). The parallels with the Global Warmists are striking.
Around 39 mins his interviewer, talking about the General Medial Council’s judgment, says, “How could any rational or logical individual come to that conclusion? It doesn’t make sense, it’s just an irrational response. Do you have any theories or understandings as to what [why] this conclusion was reached? This verdict?” Wakeman suggests their failure to understand the intricacies of the matter, or that they were put under pressure (but he doesn’t want to believe the second possibility as he would prefer to believe there was still justice in the world). Carlos Cruz (Casa Pia case in Portugal) was asked a similar question in a tv interview (Voce na TV – Carlos Cruz diz estar inocente – 1:2). If he wasn’t guilty then why did these people make these accusations? Again, he is baffled.
Readers of this blog, Webster’s and others are of course ask themselves the same question.
- Sean Coleman
- Bandini
July 17, 2016 at 12:31 pm -
Totally off-topic, but couldn’t resist this offering on the crusade to ‘break the binary’:
“Girls who have gender dysphoria will be able to wear a tweed blazer, tie and trousers, while dysphoric boys will be able to wear a skirt, bolero jacket and open-neck blouse.”
- Sean Coleman
July 18, 2016 at 12:36 pm -
That rings a bell. The Irish teachers union, INTO, said something similar a few weeks ago:
‘The rollout of a national policy on the issue is urgently needed… I was speaking with a principal teacher who is waiting for the child to tell them which pronoun to use when addressing them.” To tell ‘them’?
We already have a journalist on the state radio who is ‘gender fluid’ which means his identity changes from minute to minute and (s)he has received widespread support.
This is Basic Human Rights 101 and it is a mystery why it has taken them so long to get round to doing something.
- Nic
July 19, 2016 at 10:11 pm -
And when I was at school I would have worn “The other uniform” just to be different.
I recall hearing John Lyndon (Johny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) arguing in favour of school uniforms because “tweaking” the uniform gave one opportunities to show ones individuality.
- Sean Coleman
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