One thing that has always surprised me about PooterGeek over the years is how good-natured and reasonable most of the comments here have been, compared to many ‘Blogs. ‘Bloggers have linked here commenting specifically on this strange phenomenon. Admittedly, PooterGeek is not a forum for free speech. I have deleted thousands of spam comments, suppressed one libel directed at someone very rich, removed a whole thread after a contributor admitted she had gone too far in attacking me personally, and barred one commenter whose “contribution” linked to a program designed to make visitors’ PCs dial a premium rate phone line.
David Duff has now collected the not-very-impressive honour of being the second person I have barred from PooterGeek. Last night I hoped to head off the problem with a long and silly Duff parody I briefly posted. One of the reasons the debate is healthy around here is that commenters usually take my hints well, but I realised he wouldn’t, so I deleted the jokey post and the single (neutral) comment it had attracted (sorry, Timbeaux).
I thought about banning Mr Duff a while back when he made a false and appalling insinuation about me and my father. He still hasn’t apologised for that. Instead, like a chav caught on CCTV, he pretended, as usual, complete ignorance of an offence plain to everyone else’s eyes. This week he started using the comments here to make excuses for racists. I pay for PooterGeek. I’m not paying for that. For your future reference neither will I pay for people to deny the Holocaust, incite violence, or promote Morris dancing here. Everyone else is welcome to write about everything else, and (especially) to continue criticising, mocking, and abusing me as usual. From now on there’ll be a slight filtering delay after you post before your comments appear on the site.
(Anyone who knows me will know that I do not deploy the words “racist” or “appalling” in print casually and I haven’t been casual about this decision—not that I expect to be besieged by The Friends of Duff any time soon.)
[…] ime. If only he could deal with his Dark Side… I was intentionally unfair to him in the comments of my banning post. This was because I have felt, in dealing with his unreasonableness, ha […]
Is there an exception for violence against Morris dancers?
Non-black, non-Jewish Morris dancers, yes.
Well, that’s your story, Damian, but we know why you really banned him: orders from your Israeli masters!
I’ve come across this Duff guy before. It’s about time he got his own blog so that his bile is easier to avoid.
Well, I’m glad you posted a reason for the self-censorship, I was more than a little curious. I’m not sure I saw his rhetoric to be quite as inflammatory as you do, but defending that poster was certainly trailing into the realm of sophistry. Personally, I’d be having a load of fun with it (which is what I thought you were doing), but “it’s your dime” as we say. The intelligent good-natured discussion is definitely why I check in most days.
BTW, what the Hell is a Morris dancer? Sounds like I’m not missing much…
David Duff’s rhetoric and sophistry are just deeply annoying, particularly his Irving-esque tendency to require a far higher level of proof for every modest claim his opponents make while offering none for his own extreme assertions—about this Labour government, for example:
“I have never known an administration that has lied, and lied, and lied again on just about every conceivable controversy!”
in the course of a supposedly disinterested discussion about what might make Labour voters vote Tory. My problem is with the causes he deploys his “debating” techniques to serve.
[Incidentally, I am not insinuating that David Duff is a Holocaust denier; that was just a handy beyond-the-pale reference to draw on.]
These are Morris dancers. I’m sure you can see my problem.
Yikes! That reference is a little below the belt, huh?
It is indeed, and deliberately so. Eventually I get tired of playing fair with people who won’t.
In case you haven’t spotted it yet, he’s just been banned from the Virtual Stoa as well – and in the process of banning him, Chris discovered that he’d been posting there under at least three other pseudonyms.
Well — “mikey”, posting from a different IP address, denies that he’s also “David Duff”. People more technically clued-up than I am can tell me whether this is plausible or not.