This entry was posted on
Monday, November 19th, 2007 at
11:59 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

For a while there, it appeared – after all this effort – that the only real bitch was Paul Staines’.

(Psst! You’ll need to copy and paste that last link into an address bar; Paul is still carrying on with his redirection hissy fit.)

The comments are worth noting, though. Paul needed his sock-puppets to explain why his joke was so funny… and to cleverly assure us that satire is reality and sarcasm is sincerity.

On *that* note, yes, I have now seen Rachel Joyce grabbing a firm hold of the wrong end of the stick and hitting poor Sim-O with it.

Tch. And she started out so well…

According to Rachel, I’m clearly “anti-women, very misogynistic” in my comments about Nadine and herself.

In her post, she assures us that “I don’t make judgements based on half facts”… and then proceeds to make all sorts of judgements about the actions and intentions of Sim-O and myself when she’s clearly operating on very little information.

Rachel then goes on to insist in comments that;

“… it appears that you and bloggerheads have been trying to smear and manipulate facts. I presume Labour are worried at Nadine’s popularity and openness and at Iain Dale’s possible selection in Maidstone. I can’t see otherwise why you want to spend so much of your time attacking them and then trying to involve me – someone you don’t know and who hasn’t smeared anyone.”

Until now, that is.

Now, I’ve submitted a comment refuting that and asking her to back it up, but what this post is about (as these posts usually are) is the *process* of deception/manipulation in weblogs, any worrying level of effectiveness, and the damage done along the way.

This latest matter began with Nadine Dorries launching a personal attack with no basis in fact. When she was called on this, she then decided that she was no longer going to accept feedback via comments on her website. She then (much later) claimed victim status and suggested that comments were being refused because they were by and large…. personal attacks.

Ellee Seymour was initially disappointed by this state of affairs, but soon changed her tune when she picked up the ‘victim’ narrative and/our found out that I was involved. She responded to polite requests that she take a closer look at the some of the facts that didn’t fit into that narrative… by launching a personal attack and then playing the victim.

It was at about this time that Dizzy popped up with his usual diversionary tactics (i.e. avoiding the issue while doing everything he can to undermine the evidence).

And here I would ask Rachel especially to pay attention:

1. Dizzy was later caught red-handed trying to feed his readers only half of the facts.

2. About half an hour after Dizzy was banned for trying to waste my time, a particularly nasty anonymous weblog was created. A rather obvious trail involving publicly accessible tracking (that appeared to show the IP address of the creator) plus a neat little footprint in Wikipedia (ditto) was laid out, and repeated attempts were made to post links to this item via the comments facilities of Ministry of Truth, Bob Piper’s weblog, and Liberal Conspiracy. Dizzy can stamp his little feet about insidious insinuations all he likes, but the fact is that he was stopped from toying with my site while banging on about how easy it is to falsify evidence, and then suddenly this blog appeared in the early hours, complete with a neatly presented ‘evidence’. If it’s not Dizzy’s own work, it’s clearly someone trying to fight his corner. And therein lies the nub… the resulting weblog is – quite frankly – an appalling and deeply personal assault on Nadine Dorries. That’s one hell of a stunt to pull in support of someone. It seems to me that some people are out to win a fight at any cost, not stand up for the rights of poor, vulnerable women everywhere.

(Sorry. No links. But if you doubt my word, ask Nadine Dorries and/or her staff. I brought the attack site to her attention and warned her of the false trail last Monday.)

[UPDATE – This helpful effort was in fact created by John Hirst as a ‘joke’.]

3. Here, I documented Praguetory happily running with the ‘Tim bullies women’ ball. He turned up in Rachel’s thread, too…. assuring her that she was spot on.

He doesn’t himself believe any of this, of course… it just suits him to have others believe it.

And the only thing that really upsets me about it is that people can look right at this kind of thing in action and either not see it for what it is or happily play along.

Which is why – as an emergency measure for Rachel Joyce’s benefit – I’ve been forced to suspend sarcasm and satire up until…. *now*:

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I’ll be targeting a particularly vulnerable right-wing woman for no good reason and will attempt to scare the living shit out of her.