This entry was posted on
Friday, August 24th, 2007 at
9:56 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.
Quite often you’ll see some of these new(ish) Tory bloggers flapping their lips about how the right dominates the blogosphere, and that’s because they have the most interesting things to say, and Labour can’t hope to challenge them in an open and honest arena, blah blah blah.
Well, it’s bollocks; there are civilised and sensible Tory bloggers around, but there’s also a bunch of cheats that misrepresent the opposition’s position, let fly with the most outrageous (and all-too-predictable) abuse, manipulate comments and/or retro-moderate with shameless abandon… oh, and typically they also make good use of multiple personalities… presumably so they may better represent that silent majority we keep hearing about.
But, of course, if anyone from Labour or the Lib Dems tries anything like this (or appears to) this same crowd will jump up and down and stamp their little feet and demand that action be taken.
Because they’re cheats *and* hypocrites.
The best example of this is Iain Dale trying to feed the public the line that Grant Shapps was hacked and then having the audacity to complain about suspected sock-puppetry from Ken Livingstone, but there are many, many others; Dale in particular has a very bad habit of condemning sock-puppetry and/or abuse consistently only when he suspects that it’s being used against him and it’s a pattern that many newbies who learn at his feet follow.
Now, currently (but probably not for much longer) we have a very good chance of sorting a little issue for ourselves; identifying the dipshit who saw fit to impersonate the MP Norman Lamb on Facebook.
But so far, all we’ve heard from Iain Dale is “I didn’t do it!” (Not that I expected any better; The Shapps affair showed that when it comes to sock-puppetry, Dale will choose party ahead of principle.)
Hell, there are several clear indications that whoever did this is a strong supporter of Trevor Ivory, but there’s no mention of this affair at all on Trevor’s website; I’d be expecting a “Sock-puppeting is bad kids, m’kay?” message at least… perhaps even a dose of “Whoever is doing this… you’re not helping!”
Why aren’t Tory bloggers like Iain Dale helping to look for the person responsible? They stand to do the most good, as they’re the ones most likely to have received an email or comment from the culprit under their own name or main ID, but still using the IP address 82.118.116.193
Sock-puppeting is wrong, right? Or is it only wrong when ‘Nu Labour’ do it?
If you’re not going to take a stand against sock-puppets, you lose the right to bitch about them when they turn up on your website and/or start impersonating you.
