Blogs

Support Dave Osler in court

Blogs, Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties
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As noticed last year, Dave Osler has had a libel suit brought against him. This Friday he has the chance to get the case dismissed and he wants your support:

A STRIKE-OUT action designed to kill off the libel case brought against me by Tower Hamlets Tory activist Johanna ‘Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte’ Kaschke will be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice on Friday 23rd April, probably before Mr Justice Eady.

If any of you are available on the day, I would appreciate it if you could get along. As the Simon Singh case demonstrated, a visible display of public support can be helpful in these matters. What’s more, the proceedings might well prove to be not entirely unentertaining. Oh, and the first round afterwards is on me.

I’ll post details of room and time on this website as soon as I get them, which will probably be on Thursday afternoon. Thanks, good people.

What Tory blogs do better

Blogs, Meta, Wingnuts
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Or, how we must learn to stop worrying and start loving our fellow lefty bloggers:

Which is not to say that the left can’t learn from the right. Some of the bigger left-of-Labour blogs have much higher traffic than specifically Labour-identified ones, but there are still bad old leftist habits. One thing that’s impressive about the Tory bloggers is that, though they have disagreements, they don’t escalate into nuclear polemic – they do recognise each other as being on basically the same side – and also, they link to each other assiduously. Compare that with the far-left blogs, where in some particular cases, a mixture of sectarian dogmatism and personality clashes leads to long-running feuds, and in one or two cases putatively socialist blogs that do little except run furious denunciations of other socialists.

I’m not that familiar with the toffosphere, but I wonder how much of that supposed unity isn’t an optical illusion. From what I’ve seen of the American wingnut sphere there as a high degree of lockstep as well as long as their “movement” was on the ascent — once the Repubs started to lose the rats started to bite each other. Furthermore, much of their unity was also centrally directed, with much of the traffic being vertical, top to bottom rather than horizontal between equal(ish) partners/blogs. If you get your talking points from the RNC, disseminated via the bigger blogs & mainstream media, then reinforced by the smaller blogs linking back (and being linked to as examples of “grassroots outrage”), it’s no wonder there’s a greater degree of communality amongst rightwing blogs.

But even before the lost presidential and congressional elections there were schisms. There has always been the paleoconservative, libertarian and isolationist right (Pat Robinson, antiwar.com, Jim Henley, etc), subjected to almost as much wingnut hatred as the socalled liberal left for their anti Iraq war stance. Then there were the high profile apostates like Balloon Juice or Andrew Sullivan, once part of the wingnut right until they sobered up (latest example: Little Green Footballs). And currently we have the Teabagger/Palin fanatics trying to purge the unbelievers and vice versa. So much of what makes the rightwing blogs look so united is a ruthless attack of anybody on their side who doesn’t adhere to orthodoxy. So I’m skeptical about how nice the Tories really are towards each other and how much of it is –at least for the moment– enforced from above.

All of which doesn’t take away from some of the more self destructive tendencies of the non-Labour left, it’s true…

How newspapers die

Blogs, Media
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I don’t like blogging triumphalism or gloating about the death of the “print dinosaurs”, but it is true that a large part of the difficulties many newspapers find themselves in is due to their own actions. Or, in other words, who would want to pay to read George Will when you can have your intelligence insulted for free online:

And most bizarrely, no one has forced folks to create a star system of punditry, despite the fact that the only unique advantage major media possesses over the digital wild west is a knowledge of journalistic craft and the institutional infrastructure that supports sustained inquiry and local and or investigative reporting.

But that’s a disastrous miscalculation. Training up an institution to do real reporting well is hard — and would provide one distinctive competitive advantage over independent knights of the keyboard. Opinion writing does not. Anyone, even yours truly, can take a whack at it; over time big, fixed cost dinosaurs can compete on neither quality nor quantity (or, as we say in my house — both Rock and Roll.)

Wish Dave Osler good luck with his libel defence

Blogs, Meta
Published on 1 Comment on Wish Dave Osler good luck with his libel defence

Centrist left blogger David Osler will have to go to court next month to defend himself against libel charges brought against him by Johanna Kaschke, over whether or not, as David puts it, “simply listing her affiliations, entirely accurately, denies her the right to freedom of association under the European Convention on Human Rights”. Also, a commenter on his site called her “one cherry short of a Schwarzwalderkirschtorte” which she maintains is also libelous. It sounds layughable to bring a case on these grounds, but she did and now David has to defend himself, with the danger that if Kaschke wins the trial, this will bankrupt David. It would also set a nasty precedent, making it easier for nutcases to sue bloggers over nasty things they said about them. So wish him luck.

Moon, June, There Is No Spoon

Blogs, Culture, Women
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spoons

June again, wedding season. I do love a good wedding, though it’s deeply unfashionable in a professed socialist.

But I don’t care; I love the whole hoohah, the sentimental tears at the first careless rapture of young love (or the umpteenth of mature love) the boggling at the hideous bridesmaid’s dresses and the style of the invitations and the colours of the ribbons on the cars. I like to see a wedding done well, but because they mostly aren’t weddings are a glorious opportunity to bitch to my heart’s content, behind a discreetly held service sheet. Ooh – have you seen her shoes? Vile. Not sure I would’ve chosen lilies for a wedding… oh my, her sister’s butt ugly.

But I’d never, ever do it in public and most certainly not in print or pixels. Despite the blog’s hunger for content I hardly ever write personal stuff on the blog. Why? I know what a cow I can be. No-one’d ever speak to me again if I did.

I don’t do over our friends or family for blog hits or – unlike Guardian lifestyle hack Tanya Gold – for money:

Three weeks I ago I received a wedding list from a friend. Let me be more accurate. She used to be a friend, but as her wedding looms she has been replaced by a shape-shifting, John Lewis-icking monster. She wants ice-crushers and cookbook holders and spoons. Give them to me, she squawks through her John Lewis proxy, because I am in love – and that means I get consumer durables for free! I demand a new kitchen – and you will pay for it!

Wedding lists were designed to help a young married couple build a home, in the days when everyone got married aged 12 and a half, and were totally spoonless. But today, you are not buying your friends a new life. They are 30 years old and rotting. wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons. You are buying them an upgrade.

They don’t want a deep expression of your friendship, which you have chosen. The message is – your input is not required. Kill your imagination. Destroy your sensitivity. Give us the spoons. Or you will not be invited to the wedding and you will not get to eat lukewarm mini-pots of risotto

I bet getting the cheque for that felt good.

Awful to read that about yourself in the daily paper and worse still, written by someone you thought liked you. “They have wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons”. Ow, nasty. Just sheer unwarranted bitchery. The key phrase seems to be “….- your input is not required”. Bitter at not being the centre of attention much, Tanya?

The former friend and future bride didn’t take it lying down and had the editors put this at the top of the comments:

joholland

10 Jun 09, 1:08pm

As the bride referred to in the piece I should point out that Tanya was invited to my wedding but no wedding list was included in her invitation because I know how much she hates them.

I do have a wedding list at John Lewis which I can appreciate is bourgeois but we decided that it would be practical, though by no means compulsory. The irony in all this is that I really, really don’t care about gifts and have never even brought the subject up with Tanya (my dress, I concede is another matter). It might sound trite but all I want is a happy unforgettable day surrounded by people I love. My wedding is less than a month away and frankly, Tanya I don’t want any spoons but I’m not sure that I want you at my wedding either.

And that’s the end of that friendship, which is why I don’t do personal stuff for public consumption.

I can remember my own and my sister’s and friend’s weddings and the enmities and angsts thereof, when all the sibling rivalry and buried family resentment came bubbling to the surface and rows abounded. It was horrible. My younger self would certainly have blogged about it had a blog been available – it would’ve helped vent the tension. Hah! That’s told her.

Getting paid for it by a national newspaper I would’ve seen as pure bonus. I’d’ve gone out and bought shoes with the money. Like Gold I would’ve thought nothing of the permanence of my words or considered they might follow me around for ever, souring potential future friendships.

My older self knows better. I’ve been asked occasionally why it is I rarely blog about anything personal, or keep a LiveJournal or Facebook page. I could and do waffle on about privacy, which is political. But the primary reason I won’t ever write about anyone I know is encapsulated in that bitter, sub-Bridget Jones-ish post. For Gold that’s a friend lost forever and a reputation as a journalist, such it was, sullied for the sake of a bit of paid bitchery about weddings and the chance to let off a little steam. Was it worth it?