This is essentially a free speech forum. I enjoy much of the banter which goes on between commenters, particularly the dedicated band of people who post on a daily basis. There is an important distinction between my writing, and the comments section. The proportion of readers who leave comments is well under 1%. I cannot know what percentage of the readers read comments, but I suspect it is not terribly high.
In social media I find establishment hacks – particularly journalists and Labour Party functionaries – dismiss my thoughts by referring to the comments section. “Craig Murray – have you seen the tinfoil hats comments on his blog!” being a genuine and very typical example. Well, if people wish to damn me by association with the views of other people, that is sadly an example of the low intellectual standards of the British nomenklatura of our time. The only views on here which are mine are those which I write.
I cherish the diversity of the comment threads and am fond of our little community, most of whom I have never met. I do not value people by the standard of how close their views are to my own. I am sometimes saddened by the personal animosities which arise between people.
We state some rules from time to time. This is the current set, which I just made up:
No racism. Any comment which is racist will simple be deleted immediately. The biggest problem we face is anti-Jewish comment, which I will not tolerate. We are not in the business of stigmatising anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish, but there are quite frequently distinctly anti-Jewish comments. I deleted one just an hour ago.
Similarly, no holocaust denial. I do not believe it should be illegal (I am against thought crime) but I do not wish to have it on my blog as those associated with it often have very unpleasant sympathies. That is not to say the subject of the holocaust can never be mentioned – it will never be possible to ascertain the precise number who were killed, and it is important we remember not only the Jews but the Poles, gypsies, gays, freemasons and numerous others who suffered. But the basic facts are not in doubt. It is surprising how often people attempt to insinuate holocaust denial.
Sockpuppetry. It is in practice impossible to outlaw sockpuppetry without a formal registration system, which I do not want. But the adoption of multiple identities within the same thread is not to be allowed, nor the creation of identities of which the purpose is to ridicule, attack or insult another contributor.
Fair Play. Play the ball, not the man. Address arguments, not people. Do not impugn the motives of others, including me. No taunting.
Relevance
Attempts to keep people on topic are hopeless, but do try.
9/11
We don’t discuss 9/11. There are plenty of places on the web where you can do that. It tends to take over threads.
Contribute
Contributions which are primarily just a link to somewhere else will be deleted. You can post links, but give us the benefit of your thoughts upon them.
No explanation.
Enforcing these rules is necessarily arbitrary and needs judgement calls. Moderators are precluded from explaining decisions online. If you want to complain use the contact button.
Moderators
We have, and have had, excellent moderators over many years. But almost all have found it not only time consuming but also surprisingly emotionally draining. If you are interested in volunteering and are willing for me to know both your real and online identity, please get in tough using the contact button.
I would just say that all the media organisations that criticise these blog comments don’t allow any open commenting on their own platforms, and that now includes the Guardian/HSBC bank.
The biggest joke of them all is the BBC, of course.
I’ve run forums in the past, and found that the best policy was always ‘anything goes’ (beyond the usual hate speech stuff, etc). I hope Craig continues with this policy.
“… it appears to me to tend towards saying it is OK to generally be anti-Jewish.”
If anti-Jewish can be configured as being anti-Israeli’s who are overwhelmingly pro-Likud then I’m anti-Jewish.
If anti-Jewish can be configured as being anti those British Jews who overwhelmingly voted for a pro-Zionist party for whom 80 per cent of its MPs are FOI, than I’m anti-Jewish.
John Spencer-Davis 17 Jun, 2015 – 12:29 am
Couldn’t do with a thousand CCs throbbing between my legs at my age. It’s the bicycle for me John. Well it always was really. Did about 30 miles this afternoon. 60 miles on Thursday where I nearly bumped into Prince Charles by coincidence.
Vladimir Putin has biker friends called The Night Wolves.
Daniel
There is a clear distinction between Jew and Zionist. You are against Jews who are pro-Likud. Fine. But it presumably is not because they are Jewish, but because they are pro-Likud. Presumably you are not against Jews who are anti-Likud, and you are against non-Jews who are pro-Likud.
The clear point is that objecting to somebody’s politics is fine, objecting to their ethnicity is not. It is a very simple distinction which both you and Monteverdi (assuming you are two people) seem to wish to obfuscate. If you are an anti-Jewish racist you are not welcome on this blog.
I call the Kyiv Post the Kyiv Comic because its reporting is even worse than our MSM for accuracy and with much bigger lies.
The Washington Post ran this article with information, I suspect, supplied by Kiev and Kyiv Post republished it purporting it to have been a Washington Times article.
https://www.kyivpost.com/content/russia-and-former-soviet-union/washington-times-night-wolves-biker-gang-a-key-element-in-vladimir-putins-political-firewall-391205.html
Daniel and Monteverdi
Perhaps I am not making myself clear. I view both of your posts as defending anti-Semitism by attempting to demonstrate that most British Jews defend Israel, and that this justifies anti-Semitism. I am asking you to make plain if that is not what you mean.
91 per cent of Israeli Jews in the Jewish State support Israel’s campaign against the people of Gaza. I don’t like those people.
69 per cent of British Jews support a party that closely aligns itself with the 91 per cent above. I don’t like those people either.
I like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Jewish teacher who supervises my little niece at her Jewish nursery.
Daniel
Encouraging racism is a stupid thing to do especially if its only point is an attempt to prove you are clever and can do sophistry. The natural construction of
“If anti-Jewish can be configured as being anti-Israeli’s who are overwhelmingly pro- Likud then I’m anti-Jewish.”
“If anti-Jewish can be configured as being anti those British Jews who overwhelmingly voted for a pro-Zionist party for whom 80 per cent of its MPs are FOI, than I’m anti-Jewish.”
Is that you are against all Jews because of the majority view in their community. If your intention was to say that you oppose Zionists, including Jews who are Zionists, but you have nothing against jewish people who are not Zionists, then you were very far indeed from getting that across.
Craig,
Your reasoning is solid. I feel really strongly about the plight of the Palestinian people and I’m the first to admit that sometimes my emotions override my ability to reason. It’s something that I’m battling with.
Craig, many years ago I commented on this blog that, just like any busy site, it would benefit from clear rules that could be found in a readily clickable place. However, if today’s bout of house-keeping has been inspired by any recent brushes with the mainstream press, I shouldn’t worry too much.
You have been ignored and ridiculed by just about everyone in the mainstream press for over a decade now, and tidying up the comments won’t change that. In fact, if by-lined individuals point to the comments section, it’s a good sign. It means they’re trying to justify their position, and not very well, either, because pointing to the comments is a transparently dishonest excuse.
I have never heard a columnist, editor or reporter critcised for the state of their comments sections.
Looking forward very much to the Burnes. I’ve written some biography myself, so I feel your pain (deadlines, cuts, etc). I am sure that no serious biographer ever feels in their heart of hearts that they have done their subject justice. Still, it’s probably better for the soul than politics, or less vexing, at least.
Best wishes.
And the Silence Kills, Genocides, Yemen for example/
BBc should be at the Hague for war crimes
Seriously?What,s the real problem?When is censorship not censorship.Are other commentators incapable of reasonable demolition of irrational and offensive comments.The word “Gatekeeper” springs to mind.
Do you believe your readers incapable of recognising bigotry or intolerance to the extent that you must act on their behalf.Are there any other issues which might move you to take the same action.Please inform us if so.
“The biggest problem we face is anti-Jewish comment, which I will not tolerate. We are not in the business of stigmatising anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish, but there are quite frequently distinctly anti-Jewish comments. I deleted one just an hour ago”.
Surely the best antidote to prejudice of any ilk is rational argument.To resort to the same censorship which you decry on so many other topics suggests that the end justifies the means.
Haven,t we heard that before.Do you really subscribe to the idea that free speech must be limited,and limited by editorial diktat.
Australians British & Europeans are “Americans” as part of the American Empire. We are the new Germans who do not know what is Happening – how we have destroyed Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Read Chris Hedges article.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_electoral_farce_20150616
excerpt
” And Curtis White in “The Middle Mind” argued that most Americans are on some level aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the grotesque excesses of their consumer society and the heartlessness of empire. White posited that most Americans do not care. They do not want to see what is done in their name. And the systems of mass media cater to this desire for ignorance.”
“To be a man of the modern West,” Pfaff wrote, “is to belong to a culture of incomparable originality and power; it is also to be implicated in incomparable crimes.”
It is hard but the people who do not care are our friends and family and workmates.
Sensible rules.
Everyone knows 9/11 was an inside job, so why worry about the details.
Likewise the Holocaust. The Nazis hated the Jews, who fully reciprocated, declairing war on Germany in 1933. Thus, when the opportunity arose, Hitler got rid of Jews by all available means. There seems no point in worrying about the details now when attention might be focussed on ending genocides currently in progress.
Craig, I have no objection to the guidelines but I hope this is not prompted—as suggested by the tinfoil hat reference—by an attempt to sanitise the blog to appease the gatekeepers in the mainstream media? They may use the comments section as a justification for not taking you seriously but surely you realise this is not their real reason to ignore you, just an attempt to find a dignified excuse for their bias? The real reason they don’t question official lies was identified long ago by Chomsky. They are simply psychologically incapable of it. The sort of people who ask the awkward questions don’t rise to the top of the career ladder. I think the truth of this finally came home to me a few years ago when I presented some evidence regarding 9/11 from a serving United Airlines pilot to a journalist friend of mine. He was, of course, free to disagree with the pilot’s views but he didn’t engage with them at all. He simply dismissed him as one of the ‘green ink’ brigade. A serving airline pilot? I realised then, the MSM is the State’s immune system: it springs into action at the first sign of an outbreak of truth. Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on them any more, this site and thousands like it are—in the words of Leonard Cohen—letting the light shine in.
KOWN
It is simply not true that the MSM do not challenge “official lies” – just because it gives very little time to often preposterous theories about 9/11 doesn’t imply that there is a complete absence of any challenge to the official position. Even with the Sunday Time’s latest missive there has been a challenge from the Guardian – which others linked to earlier. The position is rather more complex and less black and white than either you or Chomsky make out.
As for people not asking awkward questions because they want to rise up the career ladder – such behaviour hardly amounts to a psychological incapacity, and anyone who says so clearly knows very little about human psychology.
Res Diss
‘It is simply not true that the MSM do not challenge “official lies” – just because it gives very little time to often preposterous theories about 9/11…’
Of course, if you pre-judge something as ‘preposterous’ then obviously you would not expect the msm to waste time challenging it. That’s a straw man. I was referring to the remarks of an airline pilot, still serving with United, that were reasoned and reasonable. So much so that no reasonable man would call them preposterous. My friend the journalist would have been perfectly within his rights to disagree with the points but he was simply incapable of engaging with them. It was a psychological issue not an evidential one, whether you like it or not.
To your wider claim, here are a few major official lies that the msm did not challenge or scrutinise at the time and still repeated long after they were revealed categorically to be falsehoods:
The Iraqi babies incubator fake atrocity story. (I still hear it repeated on the BBC, years after Washington PR firm Hill Knowlton won a prize for it and wrote a book about it).
The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. (A psyop)
The burial at sea of Osama bin Laden. Obvious bollocks but never challenged.
Satam al-Suqami’s miracle passport.
‘As for people not asking awkward questions because they want to rise up the career ladder – such behaviour hardly amounts to a psychological incapacity, and anyone who says so clearly knows very little about human psychology.’
It’s you who lacks the necessary understanding of psychology as evinced by your failure here to understand the point and the way you misrepresent what I said. It’s not a question of refraining from asking awkward questions in order to progress up the career ladder, the point is more subtle. Those who do ask such questions do not rise. The ones who rise are the ones who have internalised, unconsciously, the boundaries of acceptable discourse. They do not feel themselves to be censored in any way, they unconsciously self censor. Thus they are always surprised and indignant when anyone—such as Medialens—suggest that they are biased. AS the saying goes, You write what you like because they like what you write.
Surely the best antidote to prejudice of any ilk is rational argument. (Ceemac)
Have you actually read the comments sections?
As for people not asking awkward questions because they want to rise up the career ladder – such behaviour hardly amounts to a psychological incapacity, and anyone who says so clearly knows very little about human psychology. (RD)
YES. To often people get criticised for just being human. Still and all, it suggests the system could work better. People who question are often innovators, and they are institutionally sidelined.
The simple point I was making was that “one swallow does not make a summer” – just because the MSM do not give much air to alternative theories about 9/11 (and similar – I am sure you can add even more) does not mean that they dismiss all alternative theories about everything.
Re progression up the career ladder and psychological incapacity – I think it is a case of you making the straw man and my setting it alight.
“AS the saying goes, You write what you like because they like what you write.”
Well that clearly doesn’t apply to me.
Craig
Well done. Your guidelines have obviously upset some people (Monterverdi, Daniel and Ashraf refer) but I welcome them.
There will be problems of implementation because some people will devote effort to sailing as close to the wind as possible. Your Mods must be on their guard.
BTW, I have been saying something simolar – but wider – almost as soon as I came onto this blog (guilt by association – unfair but it is a factor):
“I find establishment hacks – particularly journalists and Labour Party functionaries – dismiss my thoughts by referring to the comments section.”
“People who question are often innovators, and they are institutionally sidelined.”
Depends on the institution – it is just plain silly to paint everything as black and white.
It is also worth making the point that the pressure to conform is rather stronger in totalitarian societies than in western democracies – but of course it is a life survival skill there rather than any “psychological incapacity”.
BTW – I shall consider seriously whether to respond to your call for volonteer Mods (probably after the summer break). Is it possible to specify in broad terms how the system works (eg, there are rotas?) and how much time would need to be set aside for the task?
I do not like all this “psychologically incapable” stuff – it tends to reduce people to the level of sheep which they are not – and then the next thing you know is you get someone who claims not to be psychologically damaged (but invariably is) coming along to try and lead the “sheeple” to his promised land.
very poetic Gyanne, thank you. The thread is rather superfluous as the situation on the ground is rapidly disintegrating in Israel, as settlers, I could have called them rabid at this point, are vowing to expand and take more land from indigenous Palestinians.
Those who feel that the quality of debate here is not to their standard, please stand up and debate what they regards are. The irregular comments are guided with the precise, the mondane is rattled by the overwhelming, the schoolmaster is berated by all and sundry, far too regular, they spam their way through a thread with mere critic and nowt to say.
I will try my best to adhere to these very lax rules, but I’m only human and prone to mistakes. That the global narrative is right wing and that this is being used by Bibi to further his own aims and objectives, regardless of the Apartheid he is creating, then that is one hell of a good reason for more British Jews to comment here, pronounce their objections and speak out.
If they don’t, I will do it, like I would speak up against fascism everywhere.
BTW. Going by your logic we should have left Mussolini alone, poorly misguided by the Arian crap he was only supporting Adolf. There were only a few Stauffenberg’s working away in the background to stop him doing what he did, did they get any support from the allies? SFA is the answer.
If British Jews can’t speak out and are silent, how many spoke out publicly over the Mavi Marmara massacre? are those who quietly take it in and are today still supporting Israels aims and objectives and how it goes about it, are they not guilty by association?
Reflecting on one self is a good thing now and then, but its not just about the navel fluff, its how it got there, what its made off, and more importantly one has to have a look around and see whose watching this exercise.
Taking the ‘babies in (out of) incubators’ story, as this piece makes clear, the fraud was reported in 1992 by the MSM outlet CBC-TV – realisation having reluctantly dawned on the rest from then on*:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html
It was a conscious deception by the Kuwaiti government, unconscious as far as the MSM were concerned, who were in feeding-frenzy mode supported by a total absence of fact checking, as the piece also indicates.
Moral, don’t believe all you read in the papers. Even truer now than it was when I were a lad.
*WE GOT IT COMPLETELY WRONG! is, strangely, not a headline you often see, despite it’s all too frequent truth…
*its*. I hate it when people do that.
@Craig “The proportion of readers who leave comments is well under 1%.
How are you able to measure the proportion?
How about the emergence of the ‘Trolls for Moderators’ partei? YCNMIU
PS one on here who shall be nameless admitted to be a troll.
Depends on the institution – it is just plain silly to paint everything as black and white.
Obviously, but if you can’t generalise a bit here, where can you? More interested in the general concept than the classification of the situations to which it applies, anyway.
the pressure to conform is rather stronger in totalitarian societies than in western democracies
I’ll take that as a generalisation….personally I’d say that while the pressures are more physical in those societies, and calculatedly economic in ours, there’s not much to choose in terms of coercive power and its application.
“BTW – I shall consider seriously whether to respond to your call for volonteer Mods (probably after the summer break). Is it possible to specify in broad terms how the system works (eg, there are rotas?) and how much time would need to be set aside for the task?”
That made me laugh Noddy. A blog in the control of the trolls. 🙂