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Oh for god's sake…

With regard to the people who are slamming my comments on ‘the power of the incoming link’ [1 & 2] – could I just clarify that I was not talking about Stephen Den Beste… The theory – that the non-specific warblogger that I’ve referred to recently was Mr Den Beste – was first taken up I think by Flit and has now spread to a number of other sites, including Instapundit and Bitchpundit. Each of these sites has its own particularly charming stance on what I’ve said. But it’s all based on a false assumption, I’m afraid, because I wasn’t talking about him at all… As such I’m going to take Flit’s statement at face value and accept that the misunderstanding was not intentional and accept his pre-emptive apology…

There are a few things that I clearly still have to clarify… I’m talking about individuals having a different way to campaign for what they believe in – whatever ‘what they believe in’ might be. The fact that I’m left-of-centre clearly informs the things that I feel strongly about – the things that I’m prepared to campaign for. But essentially all I’m looking for is a way for a community of individuals to have more influence – more, but equal influence – on each other because I think that there have to be campaigning techniques that operate in addition to argument or debate… If you’re not convinced by the techniques I suggested, then that’s ok… I’m not trying to present a fait accompli

One of the things that people have talked about is how I’m trying to restrict people’s freedom of expression so that only people who agree with my particular brand of politics can be heard. This is simply, bluntly, once and for all, just wrong. I believe that everyone should be able to stand up for what they believe in – I’m just suggesting a way in which people can do that. The approach I’ve suggested might be hideously flawed, but it doesn’t stop the individual concerned writing what they want on their site, nor does it stop anyone else linking to them. So i can’t see how it interferes with their freedom of speech at all, or how it isolates them. All it does it give some people a public way to register their protest without writing about it (and thus in a way promoting it) on their own sites.

I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of this stuff, and it’s been fairly mixed – the more sober stuff has been the most interesting – some people view it as a useful and poweful kind of protest, others think of it as against the idea of the web as a discursive space, and others think that such a view gives legal credibility to people who want to control incoming links to their commercial sites. Some of these I agree with – some of them I don’t… I’ve been less thrilled with the responses from people whose level of argument has been to criticise my teeth though or who describe anything they don’t agree with as “Saudi-Arabian-style”. My favourite one of these comments though has been the one that describes me as having, “a serious inferiority complex when it comes to learning from [my] moral and intellectual superiors.” I quite liked that one…