Married 30 years and neither of us looks a day older! Occasionally, the cob-walled cottage...
...where we stay in Cornwall is assailed by the stench of slurry from neighbouring farms, and all windows have to be shut for a day or two to prevent it seeping into the fabric of the house - but not this time. Instead, the only obnoxious odour I encountered while away was the unmistakable reek of troll-dung that escaped from my iPad on the two or three occasions I glanced at my emails to check that Grønmark Towers was still standing. I thought I'd leave the malodorous comments - from a variety of commies, snowflakes and anti-Semites - in place, in the hope that these unpleasant goblins would have returned to whichever circle of Hell they crawled up from by the time I returned to the Great Wen - but no such luck. With genuine reluctance, I've decided to take steps to guard the comments section of this blog against the noisome odour of troll-slurry.
What this means is that comments will be temporarily moderated - i.e. comments will be sent to my inbox first, and I'll decide whether to publish them or not. This means there'll be a slight delay between a comment being posted and it appearing on the blog. In a small number of cases, this will result in a comment not appearing at all.
I'm not generally a fan of censorship, or safe spaces, and I don't suffer a fit of the vapours whenever I read something I disagree with - especially not if it's well-expressed and well-argued. But I'm too old and tired to waste my limited energy fending off hysterical virtue-signallers, Jew-haters, and left and right-wing fascists. I've become increasingly convinced that arguing with these people is an utter waste of time - they're not interested in the truth, they're engaged in a constant battle against reality and human nature, and, as a result, they seem incapable of rational, evidence-based discourse. There really is no point in arguing with someone for whom truth means "whatever makes me feel morally superior to other people", especially when their supposed moral superiority manifests itself in an implacable hostility towards their country, its people, and their history, traditions and customs, and a general rejection of Judeo-Christian civilisation.
As Eric Hoffer argued in his marvellously wise book, The True Believer, whenever anyone feels compelled to surrender their individuality and rationality to support a mass movement defined by its hatred of one or more sections of society - e.g. the Rich, Tories, Jews, Blacks, Toffs, Infidels, Kulaks, Whites, Brexiteers - the motive for doing so is almost invariably self-hatred, a sense of personal worthlessness. I think people who hate themselves should try to repair their own damaged psyches rather than seek to punish their fellow-citizens for their own unhappiness. However they address their sense of meaninglessness, it really shouldn't necessitate them making unwelcome, ignorant and unpleasant contributions to blogs written by and for relatively well-adjusted people ("relatively well-adjusted people" being another of their target groups).
I really hope this doesn't prevent regular readers from sharing their thoughts, whether expressing agreement or disagreement with anything I've said. I'll remove the speed-bumps when the CAUCs have moved on.
As I am a bit myopic I misread the phrase "a sense of personal worthlessness" as "Perishing Worthless" and I thought you had launched a rogue torpedo. But no, the old "fish" is running hot and true.
ReplyDeleteTo remind you, Mervyn LeRoy in an acting note to Ustinov during the shooting of "Quo Vadis?" characterized Nero as " a guy who played with himself nights!" This description probably applies to the army of inadequates out there who find safety in anonymity.
ReplyDeleteUstinov, who sounded as English as Eton , was once asked where, given his Russian provenance , where his roots lay.
Came the reply : "In civilised behaviour."
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
ReplyDeleteS Rushdie.
I agree. Everyone has a right to set up their own blog and be as offensive as they like on it, within the law. And everyone who sets up a personal blog has the right to mute comments they don't like. Blogger automatically filters spam comments (some are harmless, but some include links to paedophile sites and sites offering illegal drugs), and the ability to choose whether one publishes a comment or not strikes me as just being a non-automated extension of that. You can say what you like - just not in my virtual living room.
DeleteNonsense. It's Mr Gronmark's blog and he makes the rules.
ReplyDeleteAs for Rushdie , his freedom to offend his fellow Third Worlders cost the long - suffering UK taxpayer millions in close protection expenses. The biggest waste of money since Tony Blair's Oxford tuition fees.
Thank you, A. Nonymouse. It strikes me as odd that many of the people who bleat the loudest about freedom of expression belong to the fascist snowflake New Left, who spend their time trying to curb the right to free speech of anyone who disagrees with them. Berkeley (or the University of California's Berkeley College, as one commenter identified it) had to pay $600,000 to protect visiting speaker Ben Shapiro and his audience from last week, having already shelled out the same amount when Ann Coulter spoke there earlier this year. So much for freedom of expression.
DeleteAs for Rushdie, I sort of disagree. Even though reading Midnight's Children was like spending 10 hours in a dentist's chair having root canal work done without any anaesthetic, I initially thought it was right to offer him protection against fascist Islamists, paid for the taxpayer - but when he failed to show the slightest gratitude to the government or the British taxpayers who were funding his protection, I began to question the wisdom of doing so. Tommy Robinson also writes books critical of and offensive to many Muslims, and receives constant death threats (including threats from the far right, who see him as a traitor) - I wonder how much taxpayer money is spent protecting him and his family? Then again, he's frightfully common and hasn't won the Booker Prize.
The fact that "freedom of speech" is a chimerical canard may be attested by these luckless individuals :
ReplyDeletehttp://www.christianconcern.com/cases