Some of you will have seen that John B has closed down Shot by Both Sides.
As far as I can make out from the comments of Crooked Timber, some fucking cretin took umbrage at the following statement, made in connection with the Livingstone “concentration camp guard” jibe:
Send the Board [of Deputies] to the gas chambers, that’s what I say (no, not for their ethnicity; for their fatuous whining. And obviously, the people who complain about Bob Geldof saying ‘fuck’ on the telly should be ahead of them in the queue….)
and reacted, not in the traditional and appropriate way, which is to call John a wanker, but actually complained to John’s employers, and threatened to contact his employer’s clients and the national press.
I would just like to take this opportunity say: what fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking scummy wankers.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
What sort of fucking cretin
(a) takes John’s invective seriously*?
(b) writes to somebody’s EMPLOYERS?
(c) seeks to blackmail an employer and employee for things that they have written on their own blog?
Bloggers are not politicians or public servants.
Blogs are not national newspapers.
The whole raison d’etre of a blog is that it provides an immediate – sometimes intellectual, sometimes visceral – response to events. Blog articles are not commissioned. Blogs are not sub edited. Bloggers are not line managed. Indeed, blogging only works if bloggers can freely write things which are accidentally or deliberately offensive. The hope is that gems of wisdom will shine through the muck. And they always do.
If you don’t like what you read on a blog, you simply stop reading it. Or you argue back: temporately or intemporately. But never forget that winning an argument on the internet is equivalent to winning a prize in the Special Olympics.
What sort of monumental, spectacular, loss of perspective can have motivated a SBBS reader to have grassed John up in such a shabby fashion.
Fuck them.
* well, OK, I once did: but in my defence it was a case of mistaken identity…