Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Lucky 13

Thanks very much to BenSix in the comments, for the heads up on Dave's appearance at the Editorial Intelligence blogging debate thing, in which he gives us a shout-out! Big up yourself Dave man!

One of the other comments DA makes is that his main problem with the blogosphere is not so much the criticism it makes of the commentariat as the fact that, to quote "in one single comment thread at Guido Fawkes, I was called a c**t 25 times" (the asterisks are the typographic equivalent of the bleep inserted by EI's web editors). With this in mind, I thought I'd see how we score on that metric:

Pretty well! We called Nick Cohen a c##t once (by allusion), Rod Liddle a c##t once (directly) and Chris Woodhead an "unspeakable c##t" once. We've also upbraided Nick Cohen for "calling everyone who disagrees with you a crpyto-fascist and a c##t" (perhaps hypocritically in context) and suggested that he would only be happy with Newsnight if Jeremy Paxman were to call Ming Campbell a Saddam-loving c##t.

We suggested that Niccolo Machiavelli's advice could be summed up in part as "be a total c##t" (I think fair enough, although political philosophers might suggest there's more to it than that) and adapted a Peter Cook sketch in order to put the C-word in the mouth of a personalised "Euston". We also reported on Rod Liddle having, possibly (quoted in a Guido Fawkes post on the Spectator party) called Dave "that c##t Aaronovich[sic]". I think this might have been the comments thread he was talking about. I suggested that "the project of being a c##t about the war" was a part of Decency that Aaro didn't take part in, and we suggested that a picture of Norman Finkelstein could be found in the Dictionary of British Colloquialism under the heading "do you have to be quite such a c##t about it?".

Unnaccountably, we described AA Gill as "the noted drama critic and c##t" (untrue - he is a restaurant and TV critic; we apologise unreservedly) and suggested that Tom Conti "called Aaro, at length, a c##t", in what I maintain is a reasonable summary of the relevant Ham & High interview, but where our Readers' Editor found that Conti did not actually use that word and so censured us.

That's it. I'm surprised that I've haven't used the word in the context of the Prime Directive and suspect that this is because the site search only picks up front page posts rather than comments.

Update: Mindful of our younger readers (and also to avoid having to change the post title to "Lucky 25"), I have redacted the relevant words from this post. Readers wishing to enjoy the original unexpurgated version can copy it into word and do CTRL-H to replace "##" with "un". Apple users, you're on your own.

7 Comments:

Blogger paul said...

A classic "yes..but..." piece today

If you bump into a psychiatrist, ask them about the 'yes,but' problem.

6/23/2009 06:07:00 PM  
Blogger John B said...

command-H, for Apple users

6/23/2009 10:24:00 PM  
Anonymous organic cheeseboard said...

aaro says 'I use bloggers - my favourite bloggers - quite a bit, as sources of information I can't otherwise get'.

He goes on to call the emergence of blogs 'an unreliable democratisation', and says that 'nobody's going to fire them if they get it wrong'.

also - is 538 really a blog? He cites it as a place he went to for info on the Iranian elections. Strikes me it's more of a factual website than a blog.

He goes on, as well, to say that the worst columnists are better than the worst bloggers. Which is a moot point, but the comparison really doesn't work, does it?

He bemoans Guido Fawkes's blog for its 'lack of civility' too. all well and good.

but what's his favourite political website again...?

and his conclusion is bloody awful - he couldn't go to the times political meeting because he had to go to interview amartya sen. And then gloats about how that wouldn't happen to a blogger.

very poor show really.

6/24/2009 10:59:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

6/25/2009 11:45:00 PM  
Blogger Comment Moderator said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

6/26/2009 06:18:00 AM  
Blogger The Rioja Kid said...

he couldn't go to the times political meeting because he had to go to interview amartya sen. And then gloats about how that wouldn't happen to a blogger

that is actually quite hilarious btw; Aaro doesn't seem to realise that "blogger" isn't a category it's possible to generalise over. I would hazard a guess that between us, the editorial staff have had more than a dozen serious and in-depth conversations with Amartya Sen.

6/26/2009 09:15:00 AM  
Blogger ejh said...

Incidentally, you can lose unwanted comments permamently using "Delete forever", if you wish. Removes unsightly spam and abuse, leaves no trace.

6/26/2009 04:29:00 PM  

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