Policywonk's MN rep at 'Commentariat vs Bloggertariat: who's winning?'

[GeraldineMumsnet]

It's on Monday evening and the panel line-up is: David Aaronovitch (Times commentator), Martin Bright (New Deal of the Mind founder, and blogger), Iain Dale (political blogger and publisher), Mick Fealty (political blogger) and Anne Spackman (Times' comment editor).

Any points you'd like PW to make on your behalf?

I mean, the interests we pursue here (perhaps unlike those we pursue in rl) are inherently social, so it can't be claimed without argument that the individual explains the social. So we wouldn't necessarily need social constraints imposed on us by a Leviathan.

MNHQ - Apparently sophable said on the other Waitrose fish webchat thread (that seems to have disappeared) that Waitrose were invited to do the webchat by Mumsnet and had NOT paid. I know sophable asked you to comment on that on that thread (but I can't find it any more - has it been removed for some reason?) and I'm just wondering what was the outcome?

MNHQ - Scratch that last post, sorry. I've found it now, it was in webchats and not in site stuff.

It would b e really difficult to find 20 thousand plus people who would all play by the same rules on an unmoderated, anonymous forum. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice, just a bit idealistic rayther than pragmatic.

My politics. Based in liberalism but without adherance to the militant ideologies. I believe politics should work for people, not the other way around.

LOL. I would Wittering? All human interaction is game theory, as well as lots of other things too. It's just one of many lenses to understand phenomenon. It's not always rational - depending on your persepctive.

You know equilibriums. When one reaches its zenith, it's then paradoxically most vulnerable to cheater strategies. That's all I mean. If most people play by the rules, there will come a time when someone will reaslise how to expoit the system to their gain - whatever system that is, MN or anything. MP's expenses for example.

any ideolofy that puts itself before the people it claims to represent, GU.

or one that refuses to be self critical and progressive

'progressive' is one of those capricious words whose meanings can be entirely opposed to one another, isn;t it. It's claimed by both left and right. Probably centre too.

I usually think of it as a euphemism for 'pragmatic but treacherous shift to the right'

lol re progressive treachery.

wrt the webchats, how are they actually done?

is Daisy G logging on from her well-appointed office? has she actually been given those questions we asked in advance?

should i actually start a proper thread about this? i don't like the way the chats work at the moment, i think that the guests have no respect for MN tbh and that we show them little in return. when tanya byron came on, all was fine because she didn't have an attitude and she plainly isn't an attention-seeking nobboid whose PR has said 'there are these silly women on the internet, just be yourself, they'll LOVE you'.

Thread would be good. They don't work well, do they.

I liked Swedes' idea of a panel. And why can't the guests be expected to do a little homework -- to write answers to early questions beforehand?

Plus, I think that we shouldn't have product-placement livechats in the same category as 'political' livechats. Or if there is a chat that necessarily straddles the two, some conventions ought to be in place to mark exactly what the terms are.

Except for Waitrose. They showed much respect to the Great MN, even if in the end they didn't answer all our questions. And they may/or may not have paid. But they have actually followed up and engaged with the sophables and us intelligently.

I have mixed feelings. DG is not anonymous and therefore allowed to be rude; we're anonymous and therefore we're not? I don't really get that bit, Swedes. I think I'm pretty easy to identify if someone was really cross with what I was saying. And - as with the religion thread - tone is so difficult to convey in any case: my pointed question is someone else's jeering.

OK, I think I probably jeered at Daisy. But why is it OK for her to publicly jeer at us collectively? I imagine that legacy will have a much more lasting impact than my being ever so slightly rude to someone who is paid to be in the public eye. If you don't want a pointed response, don't write for a national newspaper...

I agree however that the point is getting lost in the bunfight. But the chatters often clearly don't do their research, as Aitch says. Waitrose started off thinking we just wanted nice recipes for salmon en papillote. And ended up gaining a bit more market share because they took some tough and intelligent questions seriously.

i have started a thread

but YES, lupus, i thought that was a bullshit point. her name goes out to her constituency, for which she is paid handsomely, the lucky besom.

we read, form an opinion, and comment on here, on our community, our consituency. if i were to suddenly say that she is a cock sucking whore (i wouldn't, i'm sure she's very nice indeed) then i'd have fifty of you wrestling me to the ground AND i'd have made myself look like a cruel twat in front of my own community. my posts are not anonymous, in fact they're less so because this is a smaller community than her daily mail readership. i know most of you, most of you know me. this is not an anonymous forum.

That is a good point -- it only becomes anonymous, in that sense, when its contents are taken out and reproduced in a paper. Where MNers don't have right of reply as she has here.

I dunno. I don't think any slebs have subjected MN to a sustained, bitchy, personal attack over entirely trivial matters, but we sure have done it to some of them (Scherezade Goldsmith is the case that always makes me wince). It doesn't serve any purpose, and it's thoroughly unpleasant. And it makes us look like a bunch of tits - even those of us who didn't participate.

On a wider point - people do say libellous stuff on here about slebs. I'm constantly reading things that make me think, 'Can you say that?' You couldn't say these things in a paper. So in that sense, the journos are right to be pissed off at the double standard.

But that double standard, if it exists, isn't between print journalism and blogging, is it? Because blogging doesn't just mean chatting on the internet. A blogger who was abusive in that way would just be a really rubbish blogger. No one would read that person for political info or interpretation.

(Though if a blogger were cleverly and entertainingly abusive they might be read in the same way as a newspaper cartoon is viewed by the newspaper's readers. Steve Bell, for example, is incredibly abusive in the way he depicts politicians. To that extent abuse is legitimate.)

I do think that sustained demolition attacks of public people on MN are embarrassing and unhelpful, though. And perhaps there ought to be a distinction between just fooling around in Chat and participating in a more responsible convo in a 'livechat'. That's one reason why the livechats ought to be renamed what term would generate the proper moral seriousness? Mumsnet Commission of Inquiry?

lol Onebat. Like there could be nothing worse than a bit of national conservatism/protectionism in an otherwise liberal system that has been decimated by cultural reletivism.

I think I defined what I meant by progressive. Nothing trecherous about self analysis and criticism. Kind of based on the scientofic meathod. Nothing tretcheous about that kind of progressive - or is there?

Re the web chats, if many people have serious issues they want to address with someone, why not get 'together' beforehand, form a lobby, define your focus, choose your questions and then choose a rep to ask them. Otherwise the person gets inundated by a baying mob.

It's true that there are things that could be worse

Just pointing out that one can exhort a group to be progressive and self-critical in order to refine its position and respond to changing contexts.

Or one can demand that a group is progressive and self-critical, in order to effect a fundamental shift to the right (or indeed left, but less frequently I think).

It's always interesting to watch how interest groups 'claim' language and use it to set the terms of the debate, and ultimately to make their own position appear to be the Common Sense one.

You are right. But a slight shift to the right (still left of centre) gives you an important new perspective - much needed in these rapidly changing times. That is the phenomenon in so called neo-conservatism, it's not Tory in the least. It is progressive 'liberal' (have to be gareful as these terms have different nuance in the US) values with a conservative slant to defence and national identity. It's a corrective to the post-modern project of nullifying western identiity as all bad and imperialist. Its happened because of a very specific threats that face us.

We are very much protected from the violence in the world here, we forget that we have deadly enemies, and not just in the abstract. Like issues of immigration;It is essential that liberals grasp the pros and the cons of immigration. It's not a betrayal of liberal values. Relegating these issues to the sidelines as a 'far right' issue will only mean the middle ground is not explored. . Nature abhors a vaccum and if patriotic liberals don't fill it right wing extreamints will.

We will have to disagree MT. As with previous discussions, I can't buy into your description of this as a minimal shift to the right.

I wonder whether I'd characterize the liberalism to which you refer as liberalism at all, but rather as a specific form of conservatism which has been historically, erm, conflicted about its own identity; in order to bridge the gap between self-image and reality, it clings to the language of liberalism to describe itself to itself; the meanings which that language attempts to signify, however, are essentially conservative.

I don't think I believe that its possible to section off 'defence and national identity' from the whole. These values form the core of a politics.

That's fine. But it's kind of illustrative about what I'm saying. I grew up in a mining village, staunchly socialist, not from any understadning of socialism which I thought, in my naivety was a benign, humanitarian movement. And who wouldn't be for that?

But I've since learnt the socialists used the miners for a wider political aim. That to the left, we have to be wary of totalitarianism, and to the right, facism - whcih are basically the same things just reached by different ideologies.

I have taken a step away from party politics but not politics as such. Old manifestos and teleological ideologies do not serve us well in the modern age, where we face many unique challenges and threats.

I'm a humanitarian most of all, and if that means I have to 'betray' my roots and test some new ground so be it.

You probably won't read it, but this is pretty close to what I'm talking about www.henryjacksonsociety.org/