I’m far from obsessed with The Standard. I occassionally comment and get into discussions there. But with an onslaught of angst against me in my absence yesterday suggests some there have an obsession.
On Saturday I responded to a comment from Draco T Bastard who said:
You’ll find that that is the position of National and Act and probably a large part of Labour as well. They control inflation by keeping wages low through high unemployment. This is what gives the lie to National’s rhetoric about jobs while they attack beneficiaries. They don’t want more jobs but they do want more people in deprivation.
This sort of claim comes up often on the left. I think it’s nonsense that National or Labour want people to remain poor and ‘in deprivation’. Stephanie Rodgers joined in:
Of course having a lot of people living in poverty makes economic/business sense to short-term capitalist thinkers. Larger pool of desperate labour = drives wages and work conditions down = short-term profit.
This has been explained many times before, Pete, so your hand-wringing is utterly insincere.
Nonsense rhetoric. I’ve never seen it explained properly why ‘rich people’ – and National and Labour governments – would want to deliberately keep most people poor. That’s bad for business and bad for economic growth. Short-term capitalist thinkers? How many people want to be rich today, broke tomorrow?
I stayed in the ensuing discussion for about an hour and a half and then left for the day, I had other things I wanted to do. The discussion continued. One comment from Murray Rawshark:
The main purpose of the measures taken to encourage people on benefits to get employment is to make their lives hell. Neither party gives a damn about unemployment, except that it can be used to keep wages down. WFF was a great example, and was used to unburden employers even more of their duty to pay a living wage.
That was challenged by The A1lien but Murray stuck to his claim that the aim of Government to get people off benefits and into work is to make life hell for them. That’s nonsense but a common line from the left.
That was all Standard as usual, far left rhetoric and an intolerance for being questioned.
Then on Open Mike on Sunday morning Anne commented:
On behalf of all of those commenters and readers who come here daily to be intellectually titillated, educated and entertained… could I point out the endless, boring diatribes with that duplicitous dullard, Pete George is putting us off this site in a big way.
Why is he still here?
I wasn’t there and hadn’t been for nearly a day. But that didn’t stop a core of regulars from jumping on the bashwagon. Paul responded:
Totally agree Anne.
I stop reading a thread when I see it derailed.
Better things to do than watch puerile and pointless debating.
Anne again:
There is no point anyone wasting time and energy trying to argue with someone who constantly derails and distracts away from rational debate out of some kind of personal, perverse pleasure.
‘Derails and distracts’ is Standardese for expressing a different opinion. If you don’t just join the circle jerk you are deemed an enemy jerk and need to be shut up and shut out.
And a handful of them spent the rest of the day dominating Open Mike complaining miserably about me (and others) taking over and derailing threads. A couple of people pointed out that I wasn’t there, like Adele:
PG is not even in the room and yet he can cause random people to perform random acts of dullness in this space.
Surely the irony is not lost.
The irony was lost on most of them and it didn’t stop the outpouring of angst and the calls to ban. Sacha said:
It is not harmless, and nor is it accidental. When somebody repeatedly despoils a conversation place despite previous warnings, any decent community will eject them. He’s poisoning the well.
I was nowhere near the water. They were busy pissing in their own well.
Sacha again:
And the solution has not changed either.
He wants the final solution. Like he helped engineer at Public address. Shutting up inconvenient opinions is not confined to the left but it’s more common from the left.
It seems odd that so many at The Standard chose to spend their Sunday flooding the thread with bitter complaints about me being there when I wasn’t there.
Most of the claims and accusations they make are nonsense. I’m just one relatively obscure person who joings discussions occasionally.
Has the Standard’s labour left not got anything important or positive to look forward to in 2015? Apparently not.
I seem to create more havoc by staying away from the Standard. Wouldn it be less disruptive if I joined in more often? No. They seem to just like beat ups and I seem to have become a target of choice. It has become an obsession for some and a bandwagon for others who want to be seen as belonging to the labour left. That makes for a bit of a sad and sorry looking Standard.