Look, Dale is a pillock, but Draper’s site is still shite. As I put at CiF, it is a shambles, because despite the rhetoric, New Labour cannot shake off its control-freakery. Only the narrowest spectrum of views is allowed there, and dissenting or disagreeing voices, let alone abusive ones are all moderated away.
New labour are both too thin-skinned and too cliquey to countenance genuinely open discussion: God knows, they don’t want to know what people who ought to be their voters think (that is, those of a left-of-centre disposition), because that would shatter their illusions/self-delusions of ability; they’d rather live on in their insulated la-la-land.
For active centre-left and left debate and discussion, and real engagement, I fully agree, look elsewhere.

I once described the British right wing blogosphere as a miniature online Death Star filled with angry Thatcherites, zooming around the internet zapping Polly Toynbee columns.

Reading this post, I realise that I forgot to include …With a tedious Tory tit at the controls.

‘Look, Dale is a pillock, but Draper’s site is still shite.’

Yep.

From Labour List…

“HERO of the day: Alastair Campbell is said to have turned down a peerage. Alastair, we understand if you want your role to remain informal, but you should still take a peerage – you deserve it more than 90% of those on the red benches!”

Pass the bucket…I want to fill it full of effluent and dump the contents over whoever wrote that…

Well the Times, Telegraph, Indy and CiF aren’t *that* bad, they definately outplay this site, Iain Dale and Guido in terms of quantity, and also, don’t you think Dale had a bit of a point when he said that certain blogs are a bit too humourless?

No, I don’t think he had a point. A site can be as humour-filled as Olly’s Onions without making a coherent political point, preferring instead to adopt a populist attitude. And that’s fine – I have no problem with the existence of such sites. I like a bit of humour in my articles now and again – generally very sarcastic. But if people want to make their point and don’t feel like joking about it, well, power to them. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t fit many jokes into a six or seven article series on Lukacs’ History of Class Consciousness, as our friends at AVPS recently wrote.

God, you people seem to disappear up your own arses almost as a default mechanism. Tragic.

Er, pot, kettle, black…we aren’t the ones pontificating about whether or not it’s a good thing that someone is advising Derek Draper to be the new you. I swear to god you wannabes are all the bloody same.

The generall bad tempered tone of this article just proves Iain’s point.

Now now Iain, just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you can use naughty words. You’re a bad boy.

@ Richard…

Which point is that? As far as his CiF article was concerned, his point was irrelevant what with all the “Aren’t I brilliant?” anecdotes and the self-obsession over how Iain feels about someone telling Draper to be Labour’s Iain Dale. It’s all vain preening – and if you consider a rather irritable reaction to be ‘bad tempered’ then so be it – but it doesn’t prove Iain’s point. Still less does it prove how we (not sure if he meant me, the other commenters or LC in general) disappear up our own arses. So we don’t have a lot of time for prancing about trying to look good. Big deal.

Calm down everyone, no need to get your beards in a twist.

Iain Dale is probably running scared. His site has been around for yonks and this one just passed it’s first anniversary. It’s already heading up the list of popular political sites, statto’s could probably do better, but I seem to remember LC was doing OK?

It’d take a heave and a grunt to displace Guido, who speaks to a Daily Mail audience or Iain Dale who should be the 5:30pm , Richard and Judy slot. But, if you want reasonably serious analysis this is a good place to be.

Iain, did you really mean to say @ 7:

“disappear up your own arses”?

How, err.. Conservative of you.

‘the Tories that do pick up the challenge are the trolls, ….’..gasp ,If you prick me do I not bleed ? He`s very passionate isn`t he ,this Semple reminds be a little of Violet Elizabeth Bott. Still I wish I had thought of saying this …” enjoy your smug, populist endeavours. The rest of us are actually trying to do something worthwhile.”…
Cripes better start doing something worthwhile , clip my toe nails perhaps , or hum Old Man River .Hmmhmm hmmm hm hmmmm hm hmm hmm hm hmmmm ..dedum de rolling h,mmm hmmmmmmm. There thats better

Newmania, constructive as ever, and nicely proving my point about how it’s the trolls who pick up the challenge. Thank you.

Have to stick my head over the parapet here- this whole post just goes to illustrate the humourlessness of Lib Con.

And that sounds trollish but it’s not meant to be. It’s just that it’s the only relevant observation at this point.

I read this blog a lot from its inception, but lately I have stopped dialling in through my feed reader because it’s got so po-faced.

I wonder if it would take the sort of root and branch hubristic corruption displayed by Nu Lab since ’97 and for the 11 years since- but in a Tory administration- to enflame the sort of horror and passion among net users that has made the right wing blogosphere so dynamic?

Maybe Labour/left blogs are not the answer to the problem, because the general public already gets so much biased content from the BBC. One of the main reasons Guido and others on the right are so popular is because they provide the balance that the BBC is now utterly unable to provide, with the relatives of Labour peers as editors/presenters.

I make these points sincerely, and I hope there is enough content in this post to prevent it being dismissed as trollish.

Haven’t you proved Iain Dale`s point by being po faced sanctimonious bore Dave ?

* never ceases to be amazed by the contortions people will go through to pretend that Labour are anything approaching left these days *

I beg to disagree, LC is full of humour. Lame articles followed by earnest cheers of “hear, hear” are quite funny, especially because the humour is almost always unintentional.

Has it never occurred to the editors that articles titled “I am going to attack this” followed by an attack on “this” lack dramatic tension and fail to challenge your readership. Dale’s blog is funny because he is such a tory propagandist pretending to be nootral. But have you ever tried to critically appraise the content of your site and the comments it generates?

Politics is not about trying to get everyone to agree, its about putting forward an argument and trying to keep it standing in the face of an opposition. It’s laughable that every time anyone who is even vaguely right wing expresses a view here they are immediately labelled as a troll. Are your ideas so feeble that you cannot make them stand in the face of those who deride them?

Martin: tempted as I am to just call “troll ”, I fear you would not realise that I was joking…

AFAIK there is only one person who indiscriminately tosses about the word “troll”, and that person is not a contributor to the site.

Now now, Jennie, the plank in your own eye…

Ac256- thank god you stopped reading. Now if only a few of the other right-wing trolls did the same we’d be great

“AFAIK there is only one person who indiscriminately tosses about the word “troll”, and that person is not a contributor to the site.”

Using the pseudonym of a certain Russian revolutionary?

* never ceases to be amazed by the contortions people will go through to pretend that Labour are anything approaching left these days *

Heh very true.

“AFAIK there is only one person who indiscriminately tosses about the word “troll”, and that person is not a contributor to the site.”

Ah… and the Editor-In-Chief, obvs.

Evenin’ Sunny

Jennie, I’ve been called a lot worse, so I’m sure I can take it.

The word “troll” appears in the article above, are you sure you’ve got a handle on how often it appears here? Surely all it means is: “someone I don’t like”. If that’s the level of the debate that goes on here, that’s fine by me, but I do reserve the right to smirk.

I must confess to not reading every single comment thread on this site, Martin, sorry.

That’s fine Jennie, neither do I.

And your answer to my substantive point is?

You were making one? My apologies, I thought you just came here to point and laugh.

You were mistaken Jennie. And so it seems was I.

Whoah, Simon Fletcher is a lefty, and we have another one too.

When you say ‘when it comes to the crunch’, do you mean the prospect of an election defeat?

I’m an activist too Dave, but right now most of my effort, for all our imperfections, is focussed against the tories. For the next year and a half I expect this to continue to be true.

LL is as much a consideration of what the Labour left should be doing with it’s time as what it should be thinking and feeling about policy.

I had to drop Dale from my RSS feed a while back as it just got so insiderish. Meanwhile these recent ‘sex positive’ (i.e. will respect the right of consensual adults to engage in sexual activity) posts, plus Unity’s occasional posts, and Chris Dillow’s sometimes too, makes me think that for all my constant gripes, this place is probably far more interested in protecting people’s individual rights than the Tory mainstream.

@ac256…presuming for a moment that you’re not trolling, I have the following objections. This site isn’t po-faced, or at least I am not – I am neither piously nor hypocritically solemn. I beat the New Labourites with the same stick I beat Tories. If you called me iconoclastic, I’d accept that label. Secondly, whatever else the BBC is, biased it isn’t. It is muted in its criticisms of New Labour perhaps – but the Tory government will get the same treatment when it comes to power next year.

All this talk of how the right-wing blogosphere is so dynamic…what does that even mean? That it has more commentators and more comments and more page views? Well, the thesis of this article was to ask, “So what?” The data is there for all to see but it’s a rather smug interpretation that rests on its laurels to say this makes the Right-wing blogosphere somehow better than the Left. There are right-wing websites out there like Newmania or a Very British Dude where almost everything posted is abrasive trollishness – and not even the occasionally discomfitting, amusing trollishness which sites like Harry’s Place get up to.

@martin…the difference between being right-wing and being a troll is that when engaging with argument, a non-troll actually cares about persuading the opponent. The troll is just out for point-scoring, to use wit or jingo in order to make the other chap look bad. Hence the comments by Newmania in this thread. I pointed towards a distinction in the article, but to be fair to LC, an enormous amount of the Tory commenters here are trolls. There should be signs up about not feeding them.

@Tom Miller…how exactly is Simon Fletcher a ‘lefty’? Ken can hide behind the “Red” soubriquet he won back in the 1980s, but it’s twenty years later – he’s not ‘red’, his tenure of the mayoralty wasn’t ‘red’ and his flipping chief of staff wasn’t ‘red’. So they mouth the right platitudes now and again; even Hazel Blears could do that when she was campaigning for selection.

There is no one on the Labour List qualified to speak about the Labour Left. You’ve decided to jump straight on board with (as has been referenced earlier) the most nauseating, loyalist streaks of piss in the entire Party and neither Ken nor Fletcher cut it. And if the next ‘star turn’ for the Left is Cruddas and Trickett, my point will be doubly made. Activism isn’t about self-promotion, or sitting on committees.

The one problem which this site has is the constant “thinking Tories – sounds like a contradiction (ho ho)” – or constant references to the Daily Mail – rhetoric with which many otherwise interesting articles begin!

cjcjc, in a world where Melanie Phillips looks likely to win an award for her online ‘journalism’ – only a few months after she was acting in a vile manner and spouting all sorts of crap about Obama – you’ll hopefully forgive us for postulating that there must be a large number of equally batshit crazy Right-wingers out there – and for linking the two when we see various articles on Guido, Newmania, Iain Dale or ConHome.

Dave, when you say “a non-troll actually cares about persuading” you indicate you know the intention of commenters, trolls and non-trolls alike, better than they know their own intentions. I think this is unlikely to be true.

Even if someone’s ideas might be repellent and they are put in a feeble way, they are still paying a compliment by trying to “argue” the case. If their argument is weak, tell us all something more useful than just “I don’t like it”.

I am perfectly happy to agree that Dale in the picture above has “the smug look of a toad breakfasting on fat marsh flies” (see http://www.answers.com/smugness ), but haven’t you got a responsibility to defend your own article from counter-claims of smugness?

When you say “in a world where Melanie Phillips ..” the cliché means nothing more than “I don’t understand how Melanie Phillips …”. Batshit crazy or not, those “right wingers” all have vote. If they all became left wing overnight would they be cured of their craziness, or would you not care as long as they all voted for the party of your choice?

Martin, I think intent can be inferred from tone and content. It’s fairly obvious when someone clearly doesn’t want to actually engage with the salient points, and similarly it is obvious when someone has taken on board an argument. Either they’ll change their mind or you’ll end up both deciding your viewpoints are irreconcilable – but that’s different to the actions of a troll. In the case of someone who genuinely thinks they are engaging but fills every post with meaningless jingo, they are a small, if vociferous, minority and we don’t need to engage with them to either win the argument or persuade the majority, which need not be synonymous. Simply being the majority doesn’t give one a default hold of the correct ground.

I spend as much time arguing with my own side, by which I mean the Left, as I do arguing with the Right (whether Tory, New Labour or whatever). In answer to your question, then, I’m not interested in votes – I’m interested in the arguments. On the doorsteps, I’ve met a small percentage of people with ultra-Catholic, even very racist worldviews who either vote Labour or who previously voted Labour and have decided to move on to the BNP. I suppose an unprincipled type would simply say “thank you very much” to those who were going to vote his way – but I’ve always argued the case. One elderly Irish gent living in Blackbird Leys threw me off his property because I said that the Labour Party doesn’t welcome homophobics.

When I talk about trolls I’m referring to people who won’t move the argument along. On “Though Cowards Flinch” now and again I get BNP supporters protesting my support of the No Platform policy of the NUS and the main political parties. They simply won’t let go of the notion that it’s about free speech, no matter what argument is thrown their way. They can’t beat the arguments to the contrary, they merely ignore them, sling a few ad hominem attacks and continue declaiming on the hypocrisy of the Left in standing for free speech for everyone except fascists.

Agree or disagree with that point of view, and I know some of you will agree, if the Left genuinely believes it is not a matter of free speech since it does not involve the powers of the state, then the Left is not hypocritical. You can assert that the Left doesn’t genuinely believe that, which changes the argument, or you can ignore the point and continue down a propagandist road. The latter is simply trolling; mouth open, mind not. I enjoy discussion – and I frequent a number of sites with views that oppose my own, and on my site people will have heard praise of Hayek, Popper, Berlin and other authors not of my view. They won’t hear much about the adherents of Ayn Rand or the Cato Institute.

On the matter of smugness, do I come across as smug? I’m not pleased with myself. I think, on the other hand, that Iain Dale is – and I think the content of the article I linked to, in CiF, which sparked this whole debate, backs up my point. Now Dale might claim that this means I’m up my own arse, but actually one doesn’t have to be uptight to react in an irritated fashion to the verbose and pompous swaggerings of those apparatchik wannabes of both Labour and Conservative. Dale has caught my ire this time around, but it could just as easily have been NOLS, which I’d happily drop-kick into the sea.

I think most bloggers and commenters of whatever persuasion contain a hefty dose of self-righteousness and smugness.

They wouldn’t blog and/or comment otherwise!!

On the matter of smugness, do I come across as smug?

No more than Rik Mayall in the Young Ones

If they all became left wing overnight would they be cured of their craziness

No, if they peddled racist conspiracy theories in a mainstream paper they’d still be batshit crazy, regardless of political affiliation. It just happens a lot more on the right. Furthermore, just to let you know all your further comments will be deleted, as they were in the past.

38 – guilty as charged

[38] I fear so. There’s something self-important about all this blogging, isn’t there?

I fear the Left is destined to fail in the world of online and social media. Success is dependent on having a conversation – a proper open and transparent conversation – with anyone. 30 years of “no platform” attitudes (which always extend over time from real dangerous extremists to just anyone you don’t like) have altered the DNA of the Left to such an extent that real conversations are impossible. As evidenced by the pathetic and illiberal comments policy on this site.

And, success is measured in how many people you reach with your message. Listening to people on this thread saying that it would be succesful to have a smaller, but more ideologically pure, audience is like listening to the Labour Party in the early 80s saying it was happy to be in opposition without any power as long as it was ideologically pure. Pointless.

At its heart the Left seems to despise ordinary people. They are ideologically suspect. The Left describes them as “vulnerable” but what they mean is that they want the ideologues and the state bureaucrats to take from them their freedom to decide for themselves so that the decisions can be made according to “acceptable” ideology.

This is at the heart of the failure of the Left to prosper online.

The online world is a wonderful free market of ideas. If you don’t know how to operate in a free market, because you have ideological problems with it, you are going to find it hard to attract people who have complete freedom to choose which site to visit.

Most Left Wing blogs and sites are the online equivalents of Eastern Bloc factories that would make shoes with the heels on the toes. There was no real and meaningful contact with the customer that enables a virtuous feedback loop. Enclosing yourself in an ideologically pure bubble in the way that most Leftish sites, and it seems LabourList want to, will only result in the equivalent of an Eastern bloc factory.

Change that and you will win. Trouble is, you would have to change your political ideology too.

Dave S:

thanks for responding in the way the post was intended. To your points, I think you are giving the Beeb far too much credit. There is an acknowledged left wing bias at the Corporation, and it is not going to just evaporate when the Tories get in. The BBC shouldn’t even operate some sort of swinging bias, it should be neutral which is what people pay for.

Sunny:

Noted matey.

Lumping Liberal Conspiracy and LabourList together, as if they are political allies, is nonsense. The Labour gobvernment want to destroy our civil liberties, which LC wants to protect them.

Too many of you fall in to the left wing/right wing trap. Do you really believe there is so much dividing the parties? Is it not more a spectrum of 0% govt to 100% govt?????

I’m a libertarian conservative voter. I know Maggie signed us up to Mastrict and brought in the Police and Criminal evidence Act in 1984 (plus amendments) but overall they offer a smaller state option and as such offer greater freedom from state control (in my opinion).

You lot are rather serious. Be a bit more offensive, less PC, hey why not use your right to free speech as far as you can before they install a chinese firewall on the web.

I find this site interesting but not entertaining. I think it’s because you can kind of agree with some things that a conspiracy theorist screen licker on the right might say but few would agree with an extreme left/communist viewpoint. Of the two extremes the right wing nutter is prefereable to the stalinist pig to most of the UK population………….But then I fall into my own right wing/left wing trap by accident….

Part of what annoys the hell out of me with right-wingers is their complete detachment from reality.
The left keeps getting accused of being authoritarians even though its mostly lefties organising this:
https://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/01/13/join-us-at-the-covention-on-modern-liberty/

Stop confusing us with New Labour.

And other thing is – I’m not interested in a jokey website. You want jokes, go to Melanie Phillips’ blog! All right-wing blogs do is whine, what’s so funny on ConservativeHome?

[43] The Admiral (Admiral of what? a fleet of toy boats in a bathtub?) refers to the pathetic and illiberal comments policy on this site – so what in particular is objectionable: why would anyone want to defend the right to be abusive?

Has Iain Dale updated us on who – after his GOTV efforts for Lucy Pinder – he is now championing as the Tory candidate on celebrity big brother.

And did he learn nothing from the DD for me leadership campaign car crash?

http://www.nextleft.org/2009/01/is-it-because-she-is-tory.html

Martin, you’re a dick. Do go away.

_____________

It’s amazing how rightwing bloggers think we give a toss about what they think of us.

Humourless? Someone has to say it… Guido’s just not funny. Just being a nasty bitch isn’t humour, people. I know, I’m absolutely hilarious. Just ask my wife.

I like the photo of Iain Dale in his nice stripey pyjamas.

I think that LabourList has made a big mistake in employing Schillings to stifle criticisms.

@ the Admiral…you are distorting my words.

I’m not interested in an ‘ideologically pure’ or ‘smaller’ party. It is my firm belief that the arguments of the anti-capitalist, anti-statist, socialist Left will carry people simply because they are the only accurate way of explaining and understanding and evalutating the events which shape the social relations from which so many of us derive ‘common sense’ understandings. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a socialist.

Yet that very belief, which explains how ‘common sense’ opinions are just as ideological as the most ultra-Left Spart rants, demands more than a mere ‘argument’ – it demands a structural engagement, with the strategic objective being the destruction of the in-built, institutional bias in favour of pro-capitalist politics. Whether that be the mainstream media or the wealth-driven PR apparatus which feeds it, the politico-bureaucracy derived from the elite universities or the most powerful businesses and their union-busting strategies, it doesn’t matter.

Our efforts to engage with these questions wander off into specialist vocabulary, that’s true enough – but the more political the environment in which people have grown up and live, the more political their vocabulary, the more capable of grappling with these concepts. Not for nothing has the word “capitalism” fallen out of favour (until recently) with media outlets, in favour of the seemingly less ideological word “economy”. Yet this drive to depoliticisation is itself political; it is an expression of the victory of the Right over the Left.

Our immediate goal is to reverse that – and if we start small, with limited audiences, or using ill-fitting practices that no longer have reach, it is because we’re working from a deficit built up by eighteen years of Thatcherite monetarism and ten years of Blairite Thatcherism. This ‘free market’ concept is rubbish; the market of ideas is far from being free: even the internet does not make the transfer of ideas free – and those things which are discussed by the free blogs are often derived from a source with a vested interest, whether directly from an MSM editor or indirectly from a puff piece put out by paid PR consultants, using contacts they made at Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or Bristol.

In the meantime, the subject wasn’t the deficiency of the Left blogosphere, it was the smugness of the Right.

48 Mike Killingworth

” so what in particular is objectionable: why would anyone want to defend the right to be abusive?”

And there we have it. What is objectionable is that you prefer to censor people’s views (because you don’t like them) rather than a) engage with them or b) let them wither in the full glare of public opinion if they are abusive.

It is easy to defend views you happen to agree with. The bigger test is whether you are prepared to defend those you don’t.

And the comments policy here goes much much further than “abusive”. Sarcasm is apparently a hate crime along with silliness. These are such loose terms that frankly they can mean anything you want them to. And this is VERY New Labour, Sunny Hundal. Its the same problem as local councils using ant-terrorism laws to snoop on people’s bins. Authoritarian policies expand to fill the space made available to them, that is why they are in principle bad. “Unintended consequences” doesn’t begin to describe their malign effect.

Its your blog, you can do exactly what you want. But if you close your ears and hum loudly when you hear things you don’t like, if you get very prescriptive about what is or isn’t “acceptable” then a) you are illiberal and b) you can’t complain and whinge when your blogs and other social media outlets are less popular than those on the right which (generally) are much less concerned with policing the thoughts and utterances of its contributors.

Create another echo chamber for all I care but don’t act all mystified when it impacts your ability to connect with the UK population.

[53] Well, having recently written a post that almost no one agreed with, I’m hardly likely to recognise your characterisation of LC. Why don’t you start your own blog and we can all cross over to it and play by your rules there? And I’ll send you £50 if you can find one thing I’ve written here in praise of NuLab – I assure you, you don’t despise them more than I – and I suspect most Conspirators – do. Oh, and there’s plenty of sarcasm on this site, too, even if it is the lowest form of wit…

So many commenters have such a deluded idea of LC.

I understand that knowing what you’re on about isn’t a prerequisite for entering into political debate, but it probably should be.

LabourList should probably be drowned in the bath. That said; the rapid and vicious descent of übermoronic Tory trolls onto the site, proves just how utterly unpleasant and pinheaded the average Tory boy is.

I’m pretty certain it is possible to be funny/witty/amusing without being offensive.

Pretty much all right-wing blogs – nah, fuck it, *all of them* – are about as fun as a blind toddler inadvertently waddling into a threshing machine while nearby James Blunt sings “You’re Beautiful” in his wellies…

I wish I wasn’t such a bed-wetting, do-gooding PC Brigadier at times, I really do.

“Activism isn’t about self-promotion, or sitting on committees.”

Very harsh Dave. I’ve turned up to my fair share of demos and the like, spent plenty of time and money doing things for various pressure groups, and I’m also active on behalf of my local party (I’m an activist for Labour as well as within it, and I have absolutely no shame in admitting it). I think that your definition of activist is arbitrarily narrow, and that this is rather revealing.

I think Simon Fletcher is left on the basis of the opinions he holds. I’d say the same about Ken (and of course point out that they’re not the same person); been reading any of his socialist economics stuff? How about his foreign policy things? And as for his mayoralty, he has been far more green and generally left under the remit of his powers (renationalising London overground, Oyster cards… remember how radical and controversial C-charge was at the time? Opposition to terminal 3? How about the porsche and 4×4 issues? Venezuelan oil? a New Labourite would have been too cowardly or generally mistaken done any of these things). Ken, for me, is clearly left of the central line within Labour (though of course I share your view on some of his dealings with the city, and in part on the RMT – often stupid strikes, but stupid responses from Ken).

I don’t understand how I am any more ‘self-promoting’ than you, or indeed any other person who runs a blog. I have views I like to get off my chest, and a means to broadcast them. That’s about it.

Further to this, in my interpretation, your comment is designed to wound rather than to make any serious point, and I believe it to be beneath you, particularly as you are extremely competent at making arguments without having to resort to that sort of chatter.

This is the second time you’ve attacked me on a personal level, despite me having done nothing of the sort to provoke it.

Once again my New Year’s non-sectarianism resolution hangs perilously close to the edge.

(

Further to this, in my interpretation, your comment is designed to wound rather than to make any serious point, and I believe it to be beneath you, particularly as you are extremely competent at making arguments without having to resort to that sort of chatter.

I agree, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make Dave S, wrt Tom and the Compass left.

You said I was trying to split the left when I attacked John Pilger for his stupidity, and now you’re happily trying to portray the centre left as sell-outs. That’s a touch hypocritical isn’t it?
I think its pretty obvious to me, though maybe not to you, that if the left wants to regain more control within the Labour party then they have to engage and put our their ideas.

By the way, regarding LabourList, Draper’s being q. testy on a ‘hidden-away’ (i.e. it’s really about Politics, but is in the tech section) thread on CiF http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/jan/14/labour-peter-mandelson, but also pleading for clemency as his site’s in beta, so he alleges. All that hoo-ha for beta? Bollocks to that, he’s launched without knowing what he’s doing and has deservedly taken a pasting, one from which he seems determined not to learn, calling the blogosphere parochial and/or negative