I will defend Nadine Dorries’ right to make a total and utter berk of herself…
So, Daily Telegraph lawyers take incoherent gobshite and toe-curling political embarrassment Nadine Dorries’ blog offline after she makes certain remarks about the newspaper’s methods and the ‘motives’ of the newspaper’s owners, the Barclay Brothers.
In the spirit of solidarity Craig Murray is hosting the offending remarks on his blog. Go and judge for yourself. It’s in no way comparable to the Alisher Usmanov affair that took down several prominent blogs and her supporters who say it is are trying to grab a little reflected honour for Dorries’ sorry fantasies.
Throwing lawyers at her elevates her to a high-ground she’s neither earned nor deserves. She’s no martyr however much she likes to make herself out to be one when she’s losing an argument (which is often). It’s good to see her increasingly shrill outbursts getting a hammering. She’s deserving more of laughter than litigation. Let her whine away I say – it’s one of the finest spectator sports there is.
Posted on May 24th, 2009 at 3:06pm under Human rights, Tories
| Related posts... • STOP SHOUTING, NADINE! • Gordon Brown is right on Afghanistan • Nadine Dorries: down and (hopefully) out |
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I’m finding it hard to rally behind Phil Hendren’s story that he has substantially ‘clarified’ three times now. Several common misconceptions would have gone widely uncorrected without a little prompting, by Hendren’s own admission. We even have David Miliband tweeting this…
“The Telegraph deleted Nadine Dorries blog?!”
http://twitter.com/David_Miliband/status/1897957508
… which is a wholly innacurate and misleading summary of events (its only saving grace being a question mark).
Tim, what are you talking about? What prompting? I have given updates to this story as and when I have had them. Today’s post came about through finding out what *exactly* had happened bar the original statement that a takedown letter was received and action was taken. Making out that there was some prompting is disingenuous at best and a display of serious ego issues at worst.
The fact remains that Nadines blog, however batshit one might think she is, was taken down after the classic ‘cease and desist’. As I said on my blog, I don’t think this is the same as usmanov, but it is similar in very general circumstance. Stop banging on about Miliband and making out that him twittering that is somehow my responsibillity, its idiotic.
This can’t be the real ‘Dizzy’. The real ‘Dizzy’ assured me that he doesn’t bother wandering out beyond his website and correcting people when they might have misinterpreted what he has said/done/published.
But, just in case..
1. Phil, are you saying that you ‘clarified’ your story more than twice now without being prompted?
2. You seem to be very concerned about people reading my site (or this site) and getting the wrong idea, but not so much about people reading your site and getting the wrong idea. Maybe you should think about that. (Just an idea.)
3. Dorries showed bad faith by closing comments, dumping yet another accusation and then skipping town. And it was poor form to leave that on someone else’s shoulders. I guess what I’m saying here is maybe she should have tried to publish her claims in the Mail on Sunday instead.
And I thought she closed her blog because of the news that David Van Day, (I’m a celebrity; get me out of here) is standing against her.
Bucks Fizz anyone?
“This can’t be the real ‘Dizzy’. The real ‘Dizzy’ assured me that he doesn’t bother wandering out beyond his website and correcting people when they might have misinterpreted what he has said/done/published.”
Oh look, you did it again. I didn’t say that at all Tim, stop making shit up. Go and read the thread again, I said I didn’t have a “responsibility” to do it. I didn’t say I would never do it, I simply pointed out that I am under no obligation to do it.
Furthermore, what I actually said was that “I have more important things to spend my weekends doing”. Hence the fact that I waited until Sunday evening, between ad breaks, to post the response above. So now we’ve got your – and I apologise for using your trademark term here and hope I don’t have to provide royalties – “false claims” out of the way, and it’s Monday morning, lets deal with your other things.
Firstly, lets deal with “prompting” which is an area you are slightly confused on. I did not do “Update III” because of prompting by you or anyone else. I linked to you because you had stated that the story was single sourced from me and could not be trusted, and then I went onto post a snippet of an email I had recently received which added clarity but was not a prompted clarification. It was a developing story. You are assuming cause and effect.
“Update IV” of the post was based upon the information in “Update III” which resulted in an edit by me, of my original post, after I reread the original and realised it needed to be changed. So I guess you could argue that I prompted myself.
As for the post on Sunday which outlined the timeline, there was no prompting for that. I simply pieced together further information I had received and made a post out of it.
Now, as to your second point, the issue is not if someone reads my site and then, second, third or fourth hand uses the word “deleted”. As I made clear, I have no responsibility to correct that, and I do so only if I choose. You say,
You seem to be very concerned about people reading my site (or this site) and getting the wrong idea, but not so much about people reading your site and getting the wrong idea. Maybe you should think about that. (Just an idea.)
OK, I think I will deal with this in reverse and take the second point you make about me not being concerned about people reading my site and getting the wrong idea. SO let’s start with a question, what is the wrong idea you are actually referring to here? From what I can see on your website and Twitter, the only thing that you have thus far said that “is not fair or accurate” is the Foreign Secretary’s Twitter statement. Leaving aside for a second the manner in which you wrote it, which I will come back to, the argument that someone got the “wrong idea” from my site is predicated on the assumption that they sourced the story from my site before commenting. For all we know David Miliband might have found out second, third or fourth hand, either by reading Guido/Iain or verbally from someone else who had.
There is another problem with your argument – which is essentially driven by pedantry about what is a “fair and accurate” description of what happened – is that with a little technical and lexicon based pedantry your own statement about what was “not fair or accurate” can itself be seen be shown to be “not fair and accurate”. Starting with the technical, when the blog first went offline, it was reporting that the blog.aspx was missing. The virtualhost in IIS was still up and running at this point. This means that initially someone either moved the file, renamed the file, or deleted it. We don’t know of course, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that it happened, and, thanks to the wonders of NTFS, the file was simply dereferenced in the filesystem.
Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not saying this did happen. I’m simply noting that it is possible that it happened given that during Saturday the webserver was issuing a 404 file not found error, and one could, if they visited the address, draw the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the blog.aspx file had been deleted. Personally speaking I would go for the rename/move option because that is what a decent sysadmin would do, but I wouldn’t discount a bad sysadmin doing something more drastic. As I say we just don’t know. It was only on Sunday that the webserver was issuing a 403 instead, suggesting serverside scripting for the virtualhost had been disabled.
In respect of lexicon based pedantry, delete can mean “to remove or to make invisible”. Nadine’s blog was removed in terms of its presence online, and was, in effect, made invisible. Admittedly it’s probably not the best choice of word to make, but the meaning of the word is loose and does not have to mean the technical erasing of electronic data from magnetic disk. You understand of course here that I’m just being a pedant to highlight your pedantry. I;m not saying that this was what Miliband meant, I’m just noting that there is way that his comment can be fair and accurate.
So, in response to you saying I don’t seem concerned about people getting the wrong idea from my site all I can say is this. Firstly, I never once used the words deleted, nor did I even allude to it. Secondly, I cannot and do not know that the single “wrong idea” to which you refer came about as a result of reading my site. And thirdly, the “wrong idea” is based on assumption of certain definitional meanings of words and assumptions that what TDMWeb stated they did was all they did when they took down the site. As such the argument that people got the “wrong idea” from my site is only plausible at best and specious at worst.
Now, in relation to be concerned about people reading your site, or this one, and getting the wrong idea. This is because technical and grammatical pedantry aside, the only misleading impressions of the story created anywhere that I can see came from you and your suspicious speculating upon whether any of it was even true. These stemmed around you misleading your own readers about what I had said in Twitter updates.
In the morning you said that I hadn’t done myself “any favours by attempting to build on Nadine’s conspiracy theory”. If you actually read what I wrote, I noted that the actions of the Telegraph fed into the conspiracy theory, which they did, because that’s how conspiracy theories work. Likewise, the UKIP piece in the paper would provide further evidence for those wishing to adhere to such lines. As I made clear, “conspiracy theories breed conspiracy theories, its how they work sadly”.
As the day progressed you then wrote a post that conflated what I had said with what Iain had said. When you finally put an update you did so in a way that essentially acknowledged you’d done this, whilst simultaneously repeating it through the use of obfuscated rhetorical sarcasm and circumstantial ad hominen fallacy. It effectively read along the lines of “I conflated two things, mea culpa, but hey these two have form so I still think its likely they colluded to deceive”.
That, in my view , is a misleading thing to do so I take issue with it. It’s not a direct lie, but still has the insinuation that you’re still right on the point you are correcting. Then you threw in the Miliband quote – but did so in a way that for the person who was just reading and not following through links – would draw the conclusion that either I or Iain had brought up the word “deleted”, a term that has already been dealt with above.
The conclusion here essentially is that the reason I paid attention to the wrong ideas you were creating rather than the wrong ideas I had created is because, (a) I hadn’t created any wrong ideas, and (b) you were creating the wrong idea that I had created the wrong idea through assumptive reasoning and pure pedantry which ironically is itself flawed.
As for your third point, I do not understand what relevance it has to me. However, I will say this. When comments are turned on on her blog she has moderation on. As such, turning them off is little different in its potential result of comments not appearing. In the first case she, or whoever does it for her, can moderate out comments anyway, and in the second case no one can leave comments. The implication of “bad faith” is therefore as valid for turning them off as it is for having moderation turned on, because the ends can both produce the denial of someone to express their view.
Now, I have spent more than enough time this morning responding to you and I have an article on Linux to write, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t respond to any further questions you might have. As far as I am concerned, the claim that I created a wrong idea is flawed because of the reasons given above, and even if I had, I am obliged to correct them nor spend my weekend monitoring every word uttered to ensure no one misinterprets my words. In your case however, it was not that you misinterpreted me, it was that you made flawed deductive leaps because of the personal issues you have with me, Iain and Nadine. Basically you can;t see the wood for the trees sometimes.
I have nothing more to say on the matter.
Jesus Christ.
“it was that you made flawed deductive leaps because of the personal issues you have with me, Iain and Nadine”
Interim reply: Are you aware that Iain Dale – as part of a legal threat that is as long and rambling as your reply – has accused me of being critical of you and Nadine Dorries just to get at him?
http://bit.ly/JF8We
[In that same letter, he also accuses me of libel without specifying what that libel might be or even where. (Ooooh, maybe it's one of them new Secret Libels. Does one get them from the same shop as Secret Excuses?) For the record, I'm happy to specify examples of Iain Dale libelling me when it is worth my time to do so. While he's playing this game, it is not worth my time. IF you cannot find examples of Iain dale making damaging claim aboutme that he can not back with evidence then you are not looking hard enough or prone to his delusions of unjust persecution.]
Are you also aware that Nadine Dorries broke the rules, then declared that the rules didn’t apply to her or anyone else (and put the nation on suicide watch), and then acted in bad faith by closing comments on her site before making yet another unsubstantiated accusation that she obviously planned to leave in place, unchallenged, throughout the 3-day weekend? I’d happily voice my agreement with you on the issue of UK libel law if it weren’t so obvious that this is just another example of Dorries (and her allies) seeking to draw attention away from the central issue, which is as follows: she broke the rules!
http://bit.ly/w6Vl5
(PS – For the good of others who use the system, please attempt to keep to the thread system here.)
Guys, I don’t think that’s the foreign secretary’s real twitter page. The “website” section links to http://www.innit24.eu. It’s still bloody good though, and if it were David I’d actually pay good money for him to keep doing it.
I didn’t say it was real, and the point stands regardless. It’s one of many examples. Search for ‘dorries’ in Google Blog Search or Twitter to see many people summarising the event as the Telegraph ordering the removal/deletion of the entire not-a-blog and/or of The Telegraph unfairly stepping past Dorries to bully her host.
Whoops. I did (above, in this very thread) word this as if it’s Miliband for sure. My apologies.
YAWN!!
Linux article now written so I just want to point out that where I said “I am obliged to correct them” it should have read “I am not obliged to correct them”.
That’s twice you’ve tripped over that assertion – earlier: http://bit.ly/1d16ns – Paging Dr Sigmund; your slip is showing!
(Psst! Threads!)
Sweet Jesus, who is this self-important ‘Dizzy’ character?! My scrolling hand has RSI now …
I think this: http://xkcd.com/386/ says it all!
Look, seriously. You may THINK you’re engaging in the kind of political banter not seen since David Frost interviewed Nixon, but really, to the uninvolved, the kind of people who might not give a shit about politics most of the time but who are maybe starting to get it because of all this expenses madness and who stumble across websites filled with this kind of pram-toy-evacuation, to those people, you make yourselves look very odd indeed.
Just a thought. Please don’t respond with numbered lists in triplicate…