This entry was posted on
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at
9:34 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Remember to never ever stand up for what you believe in, kids. The costs are too great! The blows are too crippling!

(cough)

Dennis Paul

Just under a month after ‘quitting’ his weblog, Dennis Paul has deleted the entry about his decision to quit and brought his weblog back to life (but not before deleting the link to it from his main website). He began quietly enough by doing his bit for local law enforcement officers before swiftly returning to form with this post where – under a number of hilarious pseudonyms, he carries on yet another lively conversation with himself that includes this subtle jibe: Pinnochio said… Wow! If I drink in the bar at 16, do I become a real boy? Or maybe even a man, like Chris!!

I don’t see what this can be other than an ‘innocent’ reference to the smears about Chris Ward published by Mike Chambers and propagated with the help of Dennis Paul.

He then follows with an entry that’s clearly designed to get up my nose. My ire isn’t raised, but my curiosity is… as this flurry of activity just happens to coincide with:

1. A renewed attempt to ‘bring balance’ to Anne Milton’s Wikipedia entry, the highlight of which is this edit.

2. Renewed publication of comments at the weblog that smears Chris Ward, including yet another attempt to pass off a comment about it being OK to have sex with kids as one of mine.

Charming… to the last.

Gareth Davies

What is it with this guy? Is he totally unable to conduct a straight debate? I’m going to pester you to take a fresh look at this:

“I have no need to defend David’s online activities. I don’t intend to. But Bloggerheads don’t seem to comprehend that if activists talk to each other, or get involved in activities they might regret, it’s not evidence of a conspiracy. It’s evidence of a passion for politics, for the business of ensuring that the party that represents your views wins. Sometimes supporters go too far. I think David has in this case. But it’s hilarious to read one of Blogggerhead’s anonymous ccommenters demanding that David put his name on the websites he publishes, when Bloggerheads went to town on me as a Labour stooge for suggesting much the same thing about the Backing Blair website.”

There wasn’t a single anonymous comment on Bloggerheads demanding that David Taylor put his name on the websites he publishes… Gareth made it up to support his ‘point’.

He’s also made a misleading suggestion about my being ‘anonymous’… something he does with baffling regularity (his most recent effort; referring to me here as “the anonymous Manic of Bloggerheads”).

The Backing Blair site was launched publicly, here at Bloggerheads and prominent links to myself (and others responsible for Backing Blair) appeared on every main page of the site.

While Gareth Davies, on the other hand, took a ‘moral’ standpoint against the Backing Blair website without declaring that he was employed by the Labour Party in a regional party call-centre.

I initially gave Gareth a few days to realise what he had linked to, but now I think he’s known all along and doesn’t care. During his purely moral objection to Backing Blair, he said this:

“The odd mix of ultra lefties, half baked trots and dilettantes behind the BackingBlair campaign seem to have got their underwear in an uproar over the faintest of suggestions that people who campaign for a particular electoral outcome on the Internet should be forced to play by the same rules as political parties. It’s not about censorship, or totalitarianism. It’s about having open accountable elections. That means knowing who’s placing adverts and running campaigns, and who’s paying for them. All I ask is that if a site wants to campaign for a particular vote at an election, or against a political vote,it should have a declaration of who publishes it, on whose behalf, who pays the bills, and that it should be a criminal offence to make false statements about who the publisher is, and about the source of the money to pay the bills. Now, that’s not complicated is it?

Well, yes, it *can* get complicated sometimes… especially when councillors who don’t declare their formal role with the Labour Party campaign team continually make false allegations about independent campaigners in an effort to undermine them.