For the record…

“Moderation at The Standard” may seem like an oxymoron at the moment.

After seeing vitriol and abuse run rampant at The Standard this week it would be easy to assume they don’t moderate behaviour. But they do use moderation in some circumstances. I’ve been banned a number of times, and earlier this week I was permanently banned. For this:

• Pete George …

  13 August 2012 at 5:04 pm

  micky, you may not have noticed but the overwhelming majority of flame wars are one sided attempts, and often with only one aim, to attack me regardless of what I post. If you look just below here I posted something and the usual trolls attacked, and the exact same topic was deliberately re-raised and discussed.

  If you want to be an exclusive club of hard lefties that harrasses off anyone you take a dislike to then you need to be more upfront.

  Why “The Standard”?

  The Standard newspaper – from where our masthead comes – was founded by labour movement activists in the 1930s. They used it as a vehicle to share their views with a broader audience – a perspective they felt the mainstream media was representing poorly. We think the same is true today.

  Maybe the blog has evolved since that ideal. If you want to be narrow minded and nasty don’t try and pretend to yourselves you ‘re a flagship for the broad left.

  Much of the active comment here would not appeal to most potential Labour or Green voters. Nor would the behaviour.

  Negative attack politics seems to be the core activity, in posts and comments. I just happen to attract some of it, but it’s far more pervasive than that. If that’s how you want to be then fair enough, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy many of you, this place oozes discontent and bitterness.

  You’ll attract better if you act better. If that’s what you want.

  [lprent: Re-read what you quoted. Even after all of this time and for that matter bans for it, you appear to be trying to spin what this site is about.

  We're not trying to talk to "potential Labour or Green voters". We are trying to spread the perspective of "labour movement activists". You appear to be such a political newbie that you have realized that these are two radically different things.

  We simply don't care except in general terms about getting the voters voting because we're not a political party and that isn't our task. Sure some of us do that in other roles. But this site is here to allow people on the left to play with ideas and argue. We make it public so that people can see what we're interested in and are arguing about. We rather enjoy having people of other political bents coming in and arguing provided that they can argue and follow our site rules.

  What you seem to fail to understand is that as well as putting up ideas for criticism, there are objectives of the site includes pointing out the flaws of political policies, flawed economics, political idiots, brown-nosing journos, and outright thickheads like yourself. This is because those are also part of the political process, which is something that you seem to prefer that others do not do. Most people around here have long since concluded that is because you hate mirrors....

  I'd ask if you get the point, but it is quite apparent that you never do think on what others say. For some reason you appear to think that examining and expressing your own unthinking and often bigoted ideas about the left is a preferable technique to listening to others or actually thinking.

  Permanent ban for yet again trying to tell us what we should be doing with the site. I'm tired of it and I really don't think you're capable of either learning or holding your end up in any kind of discussion. ]