Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
More from Napoleon's Golden Bridge
By the way, the ongoing meltdown of the BNP, being reported on by Chris, is a wonderful example of how blogs are great things. Blogs are rather like sodium pentathol or Stella Artois in their effect on social inhibitions, so when you add them to a scene which is largely composed of people with poor impulse control at the best of times, then you are basically lighting the blue touch paper. I wish I'd thought about this, but I should have made the prediction that the mainstream adoption of blogging would more or less spell the end of extreme right and left wing politics in the UK. Blogs generate flamewars - that's what they do, it's all they do. So it was ensured by the governing power law that sooner or later, the BNP-bloggers and the SWP-RESPECT bloggers would end up throwing up a rilly rilly big flamewar.
Now when a flame war starts up, the only thing that will stop it is one or both participants deciding to stop being so silly and swallow their pride. Therefore it's a pretty easy prediction to make that a flame-war among a bunch of people self-selected for fragile egos and stubbornness, is going to be very difficult to end and is going to be very destructive indeed in the meantime. Bang bang.
Meanwhile, we're trying to block and censor jihadi forums and blogs in order to stop the internet from being used as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. How mad is that? Of course the jihadi sites are going to recruit bored British teenagers into extremist Islamism. Specifically, they're going to recruit the Walter Mittys, halfwits and loose cannons that will end up destroying their movement. I really don't think it's a good idea to put any obstacles in the way of Hizb ut Tahrir's drive to recruit the Mark Colletts of the future.
Personally, as discussed here and in a few past posts on the subject, I'm broadly in favour of the existence of the BNP as an at least moderately functional organisation, perhaps even with some national representation. The basic reason for this is that it would discourage the mainstream parties from playing silly fucking games like this in a vague half-witted attempt to try and shore up a few "white working class" votes that aren't worth chasing.
this item posted by the management 12/20/2007 06:33:00 AM
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