This needs to be prefaced with a confession. I started this blog (and you, too, can have one up and running in about five minutes, so it does not require a great deal of thought) under the impression - the misapprehension - that I would somehow forever be bothered about the fate and fortunes of
Comment is Free (or
CiF to its friends).
The simple truth is that I now could not care less, to the degree that it hardly ever crosses my mind to make the one idle, thoughtless click which would take me back to its pages, teeming with the furious activity of people living life on a tiny scale.
CiF was buggered and bludgeoned, beaten into senselessness, neutered and strangled by
Matt Seaton and his imbecile acolytes, all obsequiously aided and abetted by the clamouring wannabes of
WADDYA and those achingly desperate to acquire a blue sticker to prove that they had become the monitors and gatekeepers of the
CiF ideology.
In wanting to iron and hammer out the imperfections, they smashed out all the character and quirkiness it once possessed - the very reasons which made people want to go there - and skimmed the surface into ultra-smooth bland banality.
The first time I had a comment deleted, the initial reaction was not affrontedness or outrage, but simple curiosity. Why would they bother to delete something which was just a poor joke as an addendum to an earlier, more detailed post about an article besotted with the virtues of a Victorian woman, who happened to be what could very loosely be described as an explorer?
The reason the joke was deleted became clear. If every one of the six billion people on earth read the comment; if they all studiously avoided and ignored the obvious humour; if they were all, each and every one, rabid, swivel-eyed and frenzied followers of a particular religion; if they utterly missed and misinterpreted the flow and context of the comment; if they blew it up out of all proportion, egged on and bribed by invading aliens - then, it was possible, (remotely, statistically vanishingly and stretching the robust elastic of probability to snapping point) just possible that perhaps one person over the course of a million years might be slightly offended.
The other fact was that, in the earlier and longer comment, I had stupidly suggested that, rather than lauding the dubious achievements of an aristocratic female from another age, perhaps we should look at the plight of ordinary people in the here and now.
No wonder I was done for. Wimminz, class and rubbing the nose of
CiF in the fact that it basically hates the poor.
Anyway, that has been a roundabout way of saying why I am not bothering much - well, hardly at all - with this blog.
A few days away from CiF and you wonder why you ever cared. A few more days and you forget it exists.
However, I do look at
The Untrusted and it has been noted there that
CiF has had to close
WADDYA for the weekend.
I do not yet know why. After all,
WADDYA is the flagship of the sinking
CiF and
Guardian fleet. It is the place where
Kiz and
Bru daily display their viciousness and spite and challenged intellects and then run screaming to
JessicaReed if anyone says anything they dislike.
People have said that
JessicaReed has had a fit of pique and has taken the
WADDYA ball away from the ruffians below the line to teach them a lesson.
The lesson they might learn is that there is a great deal more to life than posting inanities and publicly displaying your own stupidities, obsessions and bigotries on
WADDYA.
It may work for a day or two, Jessica, but anything longer than that and people will just wander off in droves.
Which is something which
CiF and
The Guardian really cannot afford, either financially or in terms of saving the gulping, glugging, gurgling
HMS CiF from sinking beyond the heroic salvage of whoever is going to replace the disaster of
Seaton.PS I will post here some of the comments from UT about this.
