George Monbiot may be a self-confessed hard-hearted bastard, but along with David Leigh, Simon Jenkins and Marina Hyde he prevents the Guardian from being only a NuLab propaganda machine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/22/british-institutional-investors-sue-bp
to be fair, he told us he worked there, bot that it was Karimov’s lobbyists and lawyers. We knew that from many other sources. And to be even more clear, he siad he worked for the lady in charge of the Karimov account.
Craig – he has also asserted that he knows more about making “fission devices” than anyone else because he researched the subject when he was 11 years old. He could just be trying to wind people up by talking silly bullshit. The distraction’s the same either way.
I think he’s an all out AstroTurd. Revealing to observe; countless stupid little posts, constantly repeating tabloid 911 and war on terror mantras, impervious to any social engagement, never extends more than a paragraph of personal representation -which would be unnatural for a genuine troll so heavily involved.
I have found it disturbing to consider what sort of human being ‘larry’ might be. He must be the purely theatrical creation of a professional, or at least obsessed and fanatical, protagonist.
While comment lurking, many a time I’ve cheered right up at Suhayl and other’s theatrical replies.
“I think he’s …”
All he has to do is say something stupidly irritating, at more or less no cost to himself, and he gets all these people talking about him endlessly. Perhaps he just likes the attention.
But attention seekers invariably indulge in the odd soliloquy. These thousand odd booyahs from lfl have to be astroturf or some kind of mania.
sandcrab. All I can say is, people so behave in all kinds of weird and unconstructive ways, in situations and on subjects where no-one in their right mind would conceivably have any reason to suppose there’s any profit or advantage from it. So, Occam’s razor. Some people just seem to like hurling abuse, starting fights, disrupting things, whatever. The lack of a direct personal, face-to-face presence seems to allow some people to feel that they can behave in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be acceptable.
“Do not attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity”. “Don’t feed the trolls”. (And see also Suhayl’s constant patience in trying to encourage people to humanise themselves).
It seems, to me, to veer off into the area of “strange religion” – a Belief Thing. It’s just plain not provable either way, and what difference does it make, anyway ? It’s all pointless distraction; including this, and I have things to do ..
Thanks, sandcrab! Glad my stuff’s made you laugh! Cheers (or “Cheerie!” as thye say in the Western Isles) and all the best.
Richard, I guess it might have something to do with constructing character – Malcolm, the King of Welsh Noir, will know about this – so that even the most heinous characters can – indeed, must – be given more than a single dimension and equivocal and perhaps unpredictable emotional responses in order for the reader to view them as credible people. And since, on these blog-sites, we all are ‘readers’ of one another…
Suhayl – yes. We can’t talk, without some idea of who it is we’re talking with, where their comments come from and ours go to. A history. It’s a reputation economy, maybe, we have nothing here except the opinion people have of us. The rest is speechifying, or worse. A lot of people seem to prefer to settle for that.
I dont share this outlook at the moment Richard. Ideally comments can be read with no need to consider personalities. I notice unknowns putting great posts in and id like to see more of that (not people posting anon, but lurkers posting occassionaly without feeling obliged to persist). Some posters are consistently bright and some arent i dont mind. I know im flakey.
Its only when a certain amount of poor quality stuff from someone accumulates that there is a certain right of the group to figure them out.
It gets messy here, but it will always do without scoring/moderation etc. I hope people dont worry and keep chipping in according to the time and means they have.
sandcrab – “Some posters are consistently bright and some arent i dont mind. I know im flakey. Its only when a certain amount of poor quality stuff from someone accumulates that there is a certain right of the group to figure them out.”
Where you say “from someone” – that’s what I’m trying to get at (I think). The idea of stuff “accumulating” from a person, that’s what I mean by the idea of their accumulating a personality. What we gain, by people having names in the first place rather than everything coming out of great undifferentiated pile of anonymous.
Like, I know that it was sandcrab who said that thing I just replied to, and maybe that knowledge could shed more light on something else you say later.
“maybe that knowledge could shed more light on something else you say later”
I dont have a good attention span for doing that myself, as a general principle i try to keep returning to a clean reading of everyones ideas.
Personal reflections can be sweet or sour, ‘the net’ is a weird realm to experience them %}
Oh, I don’t mean I’m pushing anyone to get all Deeply Embarrassing. Just that, if you and I, and everyone else, were all identified as “”, a lot of conversations here would collapse, and it’d be harder to deal with.