Statsmut for September
A slight disparity in the statistics for last month. Google Analytics reports 689 Visits, with 584 Absolute Unique visits. Wordpress Stats however suggest a slightly lower figure of 522 views, although I am not quite sure how they reach this figure. Nonetheless this remains the highest month on record. I got a large number of visitors from the US after getting linked to on hotair.com regarding my post on Sarah Palin. The interest generated by the slight nod to the Atlantic might lead me to write a bit more about US politics, but I somehow doubt this would be of particular interest to my regular readers. If you feel particularly strongly about this either way, please let me know in the comments section.
Another good source of traffic was breaking the story on Luke Akehurst’s Labour Leadership facebook group backfiring, which even spurned a second facebook group to allow Tories their own special place to praise the Experienced One. Traffic from Tory Bear and Iain Dale therefore came in as new referrers.
My foray into the Facebook Blog Networks has also made me gains with new referrals and readers.
The top referrers then for me this month were:
1. Hotair.com
2. Letters from a Tory
3. Iain Dale
4. Facebook
5. Tory Bear
Blogging from Conference
Now that I’m settled in Conference I’ve got a set of measures up to ensure as much coverage as possible.
First, my Twitter Feed will have the most up-to-date postings of brief observations and thoughts.
Second, I am using a service called VR+ to do a form of podcasting. I make no guarantees as to doing this, but should I do so you can find the feeds here. I will make a post if that is the case.
Finally, I will be continuing to post to this blog as and when possible. I should be able to upload photos from my BlackBerry as well as write some more detail if I get the chance to.
So far after a somewhat extended journey spent sleeping, reading the papers and listening in on BBC journalists, I have arrived and am now writing from the official party internet café. I have the morning largely to myself to get acquainted with the layout of the conference centre and go to lunch with some of the senior people in Conservative Future. Following that my schedule is now slightly out-of-date. Because of the current economic conditions several events, such as “celebrating electoral success” have been cancelled to ensure that Ben Brogan’s “Tory Hubris Watch” and other similar activities are not the dominating theme. Given that I had signed today over to official events I now have considerably more free time than I expected.
Tomorrow I intend to attend predominantly fringe events, as well as a free breakfast, focusing around themes of social justice and excessive state intrusion into the private sphere.
Sphere: Related ContentIn Support of the New Blog
Scorn and derision have arisen from the attempt from CCHQ to establish a new blog. A blatant piece of propaganda, acting as little more than the sanitised mouthpiece of the Party is the opnion of Guido Fawkes, who has taken to exhorting his readers to calling it “Pravda 2.0″.
There is an element of truth to these accusations. The new Conservative Party blog is unlikely to be a source of candour, or the hotbed of debate and exchange of ideas that ConservativeHome is at present. Nor is it likely to undermine that blog’s readership or influence. That being said, this does not render it useless.
An official mouthpiece for a political party is no bad thing, provided that it is honest about it being such. Something that allows voters to discover what the party line is on an issue without having to go through the intermediary of the press is no bad thing. If one is an optimist, it could even be argued that such forms of direct engagement undermine the PR and spin games that have weakened the health of our political culture.
Providing editorial balance to ConservativeHome is necessary. This is not because of any particular disagreement with their editorial line, but because it s necessary to differentiate between the opinions of an independent publication and the official position of the Conservative Party. During the debate on 42-day detention Gordon Brown attempted to pass off a dissenting ConservativeHome editorial as an official party press release. Having an official party publication, however anodyne, at least prevents such confusion from arising in future. It may also do ConservativeHome a service by demonstrating that it is not a CCHQ mouthpiece to the casual reader.
At a time when people are complaining that politicians are out of touch and failing to communicate properly with the electorate, surely a party getting an official blog should be celebrated? It was not that long ago that Guido was complaining that the Tories were not web 2.0 enough.
Sphere: Related ContentNow Printer-Friendly
Should you suddenly feel the urge to print anything I’ve written, you can now find a printer-friendly button on the permalinks of my posts.
What was DailyKos Thinking?
Barack Obama has rightly condemned the vicious rumours peddled about Sarah Palin’s family life.
Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president. “And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.
Someone else on the blogosphere said it, but I can’t remember who it was, that bringing his own circumstances in there was above and beyond the call of duty. We can at least be thankful for his decency in the matter.
But now that the dust has settled on this rather ignominious episode of what has otherwise been an exhilarating campaign so far, we can start to look at the implications and consequences.
First, this highlights the danger of the new medium of the internet: a rumour based on little more than the uninformed opinion of someone looking at a photograph spread across the internet like wildfire and led to a completely unwarranted invasion of the private life of the Palin family. I know Guido thinks that the mainstream media exercises too much restraint, but this shows that this is not a binary question, but one of drawing a line. Where stories risk severely tarnishing the reputation of someone else, there should at least be a degree of fact-checking before we hit the “publish” button.
News media has followed an inexorable trend towards ever-faster news. It is however acknowledged that such progress also brings with it pitfalls.
I am not a fan of outside regulation of the internet: its status as a bastion of free speech is too precious to be spoilt. That does not however give us free rein to publish whatever we like with no consideration for other factors. The right of free speech has always entailed the duty to exercise it responsibly: if bloggers wish to avoid calls for outside regulation, they must learn to self-regulate. Getting the news first at any cost is not of benefit to the public discourse.
What worries me about this incident is that stories such as these have little public interest, yet massively damaging consequences. Public morality does not come into it: if you really wanted to preserve the morals of the nation, you would not be publishing this information.
The rumour bears an unpleasant resemblance to the ones that dogged McCain in 2000. Then, you may recall, the Arizona Senator’s adopted daughter Bridget, was accused of being the product of an affair. She only discovered this upon googling herself. No parent should have to have such a conversation about their child like that, and no child should be subjected to such vicious mudslinging. Imagine what Bristol Palin will have to say to her child on the day they decide, innocently enough, to google herself?
DailyKos owe the Palin family an apology. There was no public interest in this story.
UPDATE: The Spectator has picked up on the story, pointing out that the McCain campaign are planning on a “with friends like these” counter-attack. This may yet become an even bigger own-goal for Democrat bloggers.
Sphere: Related ContentDelich Further Discredited
Harry’s Place have had the last laugh in the Jenna Delich saga. After reporting that the Sheffield academic had linked to David Duke’s website on the UCU activist list, they were threatened with a vexatious lawsuit and had their site taken down for a couple of days. The threat of a libel case evidently failed when she admitted to actually posting to the website. That numerous blogs from across the spectrum jumped all over the the case and disseminated the information far further than it would otherwise have gone may have helped as well (and it’s quite nice to read something saying “Even the Tory, Benjamin Gray, gets it”). The Samizdat is alive and well.
After its restoration other activists jumped to her defence claiming that while the article itself was indeed hosted on the website of a former KKK leader, the article itself was not racist. Having been rather discredited on that front, pointing out that the article claimed that Jews control the media and was penned by someone who thought 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, the UCU activists retreated to the next barricade. Jenna Delich, we were told, was not someone who happened to dabble in anti-semitic conspiracy theories, but a rather credulous individual who had no idea what she was linking to and did not have a racist bone in her body.
This, I argued at the time, does not really stand up to criticism. A lecturer on education management ought to have some basic understanding of checking sources for reliability. The idea however that this was a failure to perform some academic due diligence on a source further diminishes upon Harry’s latest story. Delich did not simply post to a single conspiracy theorist’s article absent-mindedly, she in fact has prior form on this issue. In May this year she posted a link to another article, on another website, by another author, which claims “the initiating 9/11 atrocity was actually committed by the US CIA and Israeli Mossad in the interests of US and Zionist hegemony”.
Can we please stop pretending that she made an innocent mistake? To, on two separate occasions, link to articles with broadly similar anti-semitic conspiracy theorist views is not negligence or absent-mindedness.
Sphere: Related ContentVictory of Sorts
Harry’s Place is back up and Jenna Delich has been removed from the UCU activist list.
This is obviously a step in the right direction, but to read some of the responses you start to realise just how ingrained the anti-semitic attitude of some of the boycott campaigners is. Here are some prize picks:
Diarmuid Fogarty
the fact that the link was actually to a webpage whereupon was published an article that was not at all racist
Sue Blackwell
Jenna did not post a racist article nor even a link to one. She posted a link to a perfectly reasonable article
This being an article that insists that Jews control the media and are psychopathic oligarchs who have no qualms killing unarmed women and children. The author himself believe that the Madrid Bombings were a Mossad Plot.
“Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous “conspiracy theory” actually be closer to a conspiracy fact?”
If that statement is “perfectly reasonable” then either you haven’t read it, or you are an anti-Semite. The person on Engage who defended its author started ranting about Jews poisoning wells.
The Right knows perfectly well that we have had to contend with the racists in our ranks, as the likes of UCU and the NUS will never fail to remind us. It is however absolutely galling for the Left to do this while burying its head in the sand about the racism on their side. Racism is not an issue of where you lie on the political spectrum, but your attitudes towards other people. It’s one thing to criticise the policies of the Israeli government, quite another to extrapolate such attitudes to an entire country and the demographic upon which it is based despite having no allegiance.
At least this episode has forced UCU to acknowledge that some of their activists are racists. This is not the last we will hear of this business, and hopefully it will gather enough momentum for UCU to take the issue seriously. I fear however that that may just be wishful thinking.
Sphere: Related ContentUpdate on Harry’s Place
It seems that Jenna Delich has actually admitted to posting the link to David Duke’s website, but denies having any knowledge of what the site was about. Any libel suit she cares to fight will be utterly nuts and counterproductive. If Harry’s Place’s lawyers use disclosure properly, some very nasty things about the UCU could come out. The theory now is that her supporters may have caught Harry’s Place out by pointing out their reporting of the post linked to a far-right site, which is often against a host’s Terms of Service.
For Delich to claim that she had no knowledge of the far-right links in this article, or to have not a shred of anti-semitic tendencies, is beyond belief.
First, she is of an academic background. According to her LinkedIn profile she went to a good university and teaches education management. It ought to follow that she understands the concept of checking a source for authenticity and reliability. A quick perusal of David Duke’s website is more than enough to see that the guy is a racist nutjob. There’s a prominent link to a book called “Jewish Supremacism” in the article, if that was not enough. If you google search him his Wikipedia page appears before his website, where it clearly states in its first sentence that he is a former KKK member. One would think that Delich’s chosen career of teaching how to teach would involve a basic understanding of checking a source. If she claims she did not then she is either incompetent or a liar.
More importantly however is her failure to even question the contents of the article. That she claims “No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves”, means that she would have accepted the contents of the article without demur. That the article repeatedly refers to a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate the media ought to set off alarm bells. That it did not suggests that Delich’s supposed “anti-Zionism” is in fact rather closer to anti-Semitism than she has led herself to believe.
In her admittance of linking to the site, she goes on to write that “none are saying that Joe Quinn (the author of the article) is a racist or anti-semitist [sic], and the article is quite interesting”. The only way you can draw that conclusion is if you close your eyes, cover your ears and shout very loudly. In various articles, Joe Quinn claims that Mossad perpetrated 9/11 and that Jews are “psychopaths” with a predisposition to bloodlust. If she does not consider this racist or anti-semitic, then you have that wonderful phrase “I’m not a racist, but….“.
I suppose she’ll claim that some of her best friends are Jews next.
Sphere: Related ContentAcademics Against Free Speech?
The bloggers over at Harry’s Place have been forced offline after a threatened libel lawsuit.
If you don’t know already, Britain has some of the most outmoded and ridiculous libel laws in the world. They apply to anything that could possibly have been read by a British citizen, and work on the presumption of guilt. There isn’t even a protection against public-interest criticism. They have been used for years to silence and intimidate critics, and they’re frequently used against the careless blogger. As a result, Britain has a booming industry in “libel tourism” where non-British citizens use British courts to sue non-British citizens.
You would think that an academic would consider themselves above such methods, but apparently not in the form of Jenna Delich, who posted a link to the website of former KKK leader David Duke, and is now apparently suing Harry’s Place for reporting it.
Here’s what Harry’s Place have to say.
Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with.
We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters.
Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.
This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain.
Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS.
We would like to assure readers of Harry’s Place that we are doing everything we can to prevent a disruption, but that - of course - we will not concede any ground. We have posted nothing defamatory, and we stand by the information we have supplied.
ISPs often run scared of UK libel law and malicious complaints are thus common. Sadly, it is a well known - and usually successful - way of censoring websites which publish truths that they’d rather not be generally known.
We ask our readers and supporters in the meantime to publish this information as widely as possible. The disgraceful tactic of dishonest and malicious complaining should not be allowed to succeed.
Those on the UCU list, please also make this know there.
Please spread the word.
If we go down, email us at harryblog at gee mail dot com for updates.
I haven’t linked to the material myself as I don’t have the inclination to fight a libel case. You can find the original post here.
Sphere: Related ContentGet Updates on Your Phone
I’ve set up another twitter account that converts my article headlines into messages. It can be found at:
http://www.twitter.com/bengrayfeed
Register an account, and you can get notified of all my posts on your phone. It also includes updates from my Travel Diary.
Sphere: Related Content
