Gang warfare

Yesterday I accused Tim Ireland of intellectual cowardice because he wouldn't debate the merits of sock-puppetry. On 26/11/08 [year corrected] I wrote in an email to him:

... Take a look at this picture Tim, and say what you see. If you really want to have a debate about sock puppetry, Hack's cartoon blog is exactly the right place to hold it.

http://hackcartoonsdiary.com/2008/11/25/of-socks-puppets-and-free-socks/

The day after I had invited him to debate the issue, he wrote that I was:

... currently dashing from website to website making a variety of attempts to confuse the Gilligan issue and/or mock Gilligan's accusers, without declaring (never mind discussing or defending) his own position regarding the use of multiple false identities.

The rub is in the phrase never mind discussing or defending. That was exactly what I had proposed the day before, and which Ireland has avoided for ten months. So not only is he a coward, he also tells lies about me.

Aside from not being a very great custodian of the truth, I am aware that Tim was once accused of behaviour that "smacks of bullying". It was to do with his online campaign to have Julie Moult labelled as an "idiot". Not only did he want to abuse her himself, he encouraged others to do the same. The latest example follows an an article Ms Moult wrote about Sarah Brown and twittering. The concept of bullying is of course dependent on the power relationship between the two parties. In the world of print journalism, Moult's articles get a readership of millions. In the world of blogging, Ireland's articles get an audience of perhaps thousands. Moult herself is not being bullied, but it appears that the world of blogging is being led by a would-be bully boy.

I want to offer a simple formula to help resolve this:

Either: Julie Moult is an idiot OR Tim Ireland is an idiot

My own preference is strongly for Ireland as idiot for the following reason. Whilst it could be argued that Moult writes articles which are shown to be false, she manages to hold down her job and is thus valuable to her employer. However, it is demonstrably true that Ireland writes articles where he seeks to demean others, and he gains no reward for this other than his own self-gratification.

Others may of course want to argue the balance the other way, but they have to overcome the passive-aggressive hurdle. This is that Ireland is using emotion to win his argument. Idiocy is not a current medical condition (it may have been once) so there is no objective test to determine that "Moult is an idiot", as Ireland claims. His argument is based on an objective view about the truthfulness of her articles, and a subjective opinion about Moult's corresponding worth as a human being. Moult has kept quiet about her opinion on Ireland. But her retort should of course be: "It takes one to know one!"

The case against Ireland is now mounting. In the last two days I have called him a pervert, a coward, a liar and an idiot. This is turning into an all out slanging match! Has he courage to face his accuser, or will he set his little gang of "liberal" friends onto me? I'm just about quaking in my socks!!!

On honesty

It's sometimes interesting to reflect on how other people see you, so I took a look back recently at a post Tim Ireland wrote last November.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2008/11/martin_wiesner.asp

Most of the biographical information is surprisingly accurate, but Tim gets into a complete muddle about how to spell my surname by the end. The various accusations he makes are mostly bonkers. Clearly I am an unapologetic user of sock puppets, but it now emerges that Tim maybe is too (see item 19. here). The picture Tim refers to as NSFW was taken by my wife whilst on holiday in Italy last year, and showed me lying on a bed, naked, but with my modesty covered by a paperback book. Jennie Rigg got the "no socks" joke, put poor old Tim didn't. Sorry if you want a peek, I took the picture down not long after Tim saw it, but at least several days before his post.

Tim refers to my ribbing of him as "bizarre". Here's an extract of an e-mail exchange that followed:

Tim: Oh, really? Got any more naked pictures that 'prove' how open you are about your identity? Rhetorical question. Please don't send me any.

Martin: Pervert!

I think I riled him. The following day Tim published his main post and demanded that I respond to it. I don't take kindly to people writing a lot of nonsense about me and then demanding answers, so I declined.

In the post, Tim calls me a coward and a bully. I can't really make sense of much of the "evidence" that Tim produces, so I took this as water off a duck's back. However the day before I had challenged Tim to debate the merits of sock-puppetry under a relevant post at Hack's Cartoon Diary.

http://hackcartoonsdiary.com/2008/11/25/of-socks-puppets-and-free-socks/

Tim has never responded to this, and for this reason I accuse him of intellectual cowardice.

Having got my own accusation out of the way, I wanted to close by saying overall I find most of the exchanges between Tim and I as quite humorous. He seems so eager to cast me in a bad light he inflates his charges and lets his anger show through. Whether enjoying this is a good trait in myself is open to question. However, I won't let it worry me. I have no idea if Tim followed through with a threat to dob me in with the Green Party (I suspect they would have politely ignored his nutty accusations, as many others seem to do), but it does expose his tendency to expect others to fight his battles for him. If I get amusement by goading him along the way I suspect this is not an altogether bad thing.

A Short Poem

Cats?

Cats!

Cats are like humans, but just turned inside out.

Car Crash Watching

"Meanwhile, we can just watch this slow motion car crash continue to happen."

So says gossipologist Iain Dale about LabourList, whilst failing to provide a link because Derek Draper has said that Dale condones racism and won't apologise. Without the link, by what means does Dale think we shall be watching, or is he acknowledging that LabourList is already so well known it needs no introduction. In which case, why not link? Does he want us to watch, or is he suggesting we look away. Who knows, and even more aptly, who cares what Dale thinks?

Personally I would say Draper has done a great job getting "A" list Labour politicians to engage in a UK political blog, and seeking comments from as wide an audience as possible, whilst moderating the inevitable "monstering" that some right wing blogs feel is the correct way to address issues or bloggers of whom they don't approve. It doesn't make me want to vote Labour, or even to change my views on how Labour policies are being implemented, but it is clear that Draper's project is breaking new ground for a political weblog in the UK, and that Dale & Co are sore as hell about it. I've added LabourList to my blog list, if you are serious about bringing politics to the internet it is the way to go, and aren't all those nay-sayers just about as jealous as hell that they couldn't create something similar for themselves.

Filling In Time

Not sure quite what I am going to type here, as I am just filling in time, waiting for a cup of tea to brew. It's almost as if I feel I don't want to write something, because I don't want my inner feelings to be examined, I don't want a reader to know how I am feeling, at this moment in time. Which is absurd, because a) I don't feel that bad, and b) I couldn't ever get to the point of fully describing how I feel.

Must go now as that cup of tea beckons.

Two Forty: What a rip-off!

Woke up after tossing and turning in the bed for a while, and noticed the clock showed 02:40. Thought that I should try to get some of my thoughts down on the blog, as a way to bore myself back to sleep. Two people read this blog yesterday, so I fairly sure that Gordon Brown is not a reader. What a bastard, he can't even be bothered to read my blog.

The proper way to number prices in Britain is to keep the pence in multiples of five. £1.99 is just not on, £1.95 is far superior. The reason is quite simple, because for multiples of five, both you and the shopkeeper need only only handle silver. Imagine handing over two nuggetty pound coins, and getting back a single brown penny. How cheated you would feel.

The same goes for £2.40, of course. How much finer it is to demand 2 guineas, 7 shillings and sixpence, ha'penny, than two, thirty nine? My mum used to call the copper coins "black money" and Alison step grand father once told us a story about how he and the other kids in his neighbourhood would chase down the local squire in his horse and trap whilst shouting: "go on! throw us your mouldies!".

Must grab my cup of tea now, will write a little more in a moment.

£2.40 reminded me that our local Woolies lies empty. How do you get hold off one and open it back up? My local branch has been open my entire life, so its silly to think it could never make money again. My best bet is to run it as a small department store, something like Carrefour in France. You could even rip of the name and call it Crossroads.

Measuring Concepts

Take two straight lines, which are infinitely long, at right angles to each other, and do not intersect. These are "Time" and "Space". If an observer (ie a conscious being who exists in space and time) wishes to observe any other "Concept", then to the observer it is as if the concept is a dead-straight line observed along its length. In other words, the observer sees the concept as a singularity. Imagine that the line of concept is under tension, created by a twisting between space and time. The "straight" lines of space and time will become distorted by the concept into curves, and the concept under tension will exist at the closest intersection between the space and time lines.