The blogosphere has decended upon itself talking about very little other than the blogosphere itself – and I’m talking about me talking about the blogosphere talking about the blogosphere! Whole new level, baby!
I’m beginning to think poor Sunny’s feeling rather left out of the whole “Smeargate” scandal, so has decided to troll the whole blogosphere with this piece accusing blogs of promoting degradation of politics and destroying civility.
The title? “Blogging will only increase the sleaze – unless we stop it.”
Apparently continuing to expose sleaze and scandals benefits anti-politics types, reduces trust in politicians and, therefore, reduces trust in the state – which is the opposite of what Sunny wants. He implores to ignore this non-story and rise above the fray….
…Except the blogs are exposing politicians to a level of scrutiny that they’d not had to face before. Because blogs do not depend on access to politicians, they can say what they like. These scandals were simply a matter of time, and until politicians realise that their world has changed, that the only way to ‘stop Guido’ is to give him nothing to write about, this is only going to get worse. The idea that ‘the Left’ should get together to protect politicians from anti-politics types and libertarians? Oh sweet christ. You have fallen from the Zeitgeist tree, haven’t you Sunny?
It’s not bloggers generating the sleaze – it’s the politicians. Well, sort of…
Sunny, editor of Liberal Conspiracy, writes:
The British left, I think, has to take heed from the American leftwing blogosphere. They didn’t set up their own smear sites and spend all their times ranting like the rightwingers (Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, Faux News etc) – because they knew that it would lead to an even more degradation of politics.
Which is great, but then two stories after this one he publishes this nasty piece of crap that repeats smears against ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries on the grounds that ‘these rumours have been doing the rounds for months’.
And the title of that particular blog post? “Hypocrisy Rules Ok”
Yes. Yes it does.
And then it gets worse, with a progressive and friendly form of comment censorship:
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Why th HLL d 60,000,000 ppl d s thy r tld by mr 646 cllss dts?
Wht r y frghtnd f? Lsng yr Nctr pnts?
Y gt N lf. Lv t s Y wnt, nt hw Rth Klly r nn Wddcmb thnks y shld. Thy nd p n th sm plc s y nywy. Rttng n grv. nd lng tm dd.
Those open minded, pro-free speech liberals over at Liberal Conspiracy haven’t deleted comments. They don’t want to delete comments, because that might make them look like illiberal authoritarians. This way is much nicer.
So yes, Liberal Conspiracy is having a bad couple of days (although good in a ‘getting attention’ sort of way, which I suppose is the point).
