zzzzzzzzzzzz…

Because no-one from the Labour party would ever indulge in such behaviour

No Labour member has ever set up a website and used it as a front for other activities

There has never been encouragement to post postive spin about Labour behaviour on right-wing blogs

Get over yourself – this is the way the blogosphere works

Everybody does it – it may not be nice, it may not be pretty – but it happens.

You really cannot claim the moral high ground given the behaviour of Labour party members and officials over the past few years.

Did you really need to do an IP check to figure that one out?

To (badly) paraphrase Blackadder Goes Forth, there are as yet undiscovered tribes in the Amazonian rainforest who knew that was happening.

Has LabourList done these checks yet? Should be something like 50% of their commenters if memory serves.

I don’t quite understand why this is scandalous. Are Conservative Party supporters or staff not supposed to use the interwebs, or something? Or did you imagine that nobody previously used pseudonyms on blog threads?

I had always had an inkling that posters defending Kaminski were likely to be Tory symapthisers, so I am not all that flaggergasted, I must say.

I do think the site of the Hannan video and a plies of cash logo is funny. It kind of conjures up an image of Michael Ashcroft as a Bond villain, though suggests somebody at CCHQ with a sense of black humour is involved.

Registering it in the name of the party’s head of IT does seem a bit slack if it is intended for sock-puppetry and black ops.

I think Simon and John Meredith have missed the point but in doing so, prove the point.

There is a lot of ‘running interference’ going on over here of late, even if it is of the LOOK OVER THERE sort.

Ok it matters because:

1. Most of the comments concerned are trollish one liners rather than serious attempts to defend a policy position that can be discussed.

2. It brings the level of comments down to party political shouting matches, which puts off people with intelligent things to say as they have to wade through lots of nonsense to get to things which are interesting. (My view is this site works best when avoiding party politics and discussing policy instead)

3. It is dishonest – as covert PR strategies generally are – and further evidence of the conservative party’s attempts to copy the republican wingnuttery. Such a move destroys the chances of rational policy making in the future

4. It encourages a “race to the bottom” as other political parties do the same thing. When politics simply becomes name calling from supporters of each team, it is boring. Except the analogy of football supporters only goes so far, most football supporters are capable of being critical of their own team – and frequently are.

Sunny – I think you’re going to have to consider reviewing the comments policy again.

Hear hear Planeshift!

James Macintyre was in fact extremely close to Derek Draper and begged him for dirt to smear Tories.

Macintyre knows I know this and knows I have the evidence, which he has begged me not to publish.

You (and he) will have to wait for my memoirs.

[5] The cash are of course dollar bills. What’s that trying to say?

Yet more: “I have stuff on folks” and then it never bloody sees the light of day.

I think it matters because it means that anyone who does raise a legitimate disagreement with a post, for whatever reason, is now [more] likely to be suspected of being a Tory troll. A similar thing happened on ConHome quite some time ago when they realised that some of their more frothing commenters were in fact fakes whose job was to make the Tories look extremist (I certainly know of people from ‘our side’ who have done this).

To me, this suggests that commenters should have to register and should probably have some kind of ‘karma’ rating that stays with them. If it’s an anonymous poster or someone with low karma (whose previous comments have received negative votes), odds are they’re a troll. If, on the other hand, they’re someone who has had plenty of highly-rated comments but is now expressing legitimate disagreement, that needs to be taken seriously. Sorry for banging on about technical solutions, but there are some websites that have had this problem solved for years and I’m always amazed that mainstream blogs never try to catch up. It’s not for a lack of caring about the issue, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion, so I’m quite confused.

No forward DNS either. You’d expect someone to forget the reverse, but too forget the forward? Poor.

dizzy@sydney:~$ host host97.conservative-party.org.uk
Host host97.conservative-party.org.uk not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

dizzy@sydney:~$ host 194.203.158.97
97.158.203.194.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer host97.conservative-party.org.uk

“We’ve found four instances where someone with that IP address also posted comments here – in each case defending the party or its sympathisers.”

May we know their names? Is sally one?

“Most of the comments concerned are trollish one liners rather than serious attempts to defend a policy position that can be discussed.”

Alas there have been often been condescending trolling one liners by leftie posters as well. I think it would be of great benefit to all of us if everyone, Left or Right, ceased with the wind-up posts (which isn’t to say we can’t have a laugh and a joke now and then).

Sunny – this is a serious question.

You ‘reveal’ that, since March, LC has received four posts from the CCHQ IP address out of a total of several thousand posts altogether.

Does an average of one post every two months really sound like an ‘astroturfing campaign’ to you?

There must be at least 200 people working at CCHQ. Very occasionally one of them reads and feels motivated to comment on your blog. They use the Tory IP address which is, as Sunder points out, a pretty strange way to conduct an astroturfing plot.

You and Will Straw need to find a slightly more convincing way of kicking the Tories because this makes you look slightly silly, even for a Friday.

I like Rob’s idea, and as somene who has had my identity stolen, it is far too easy to sockpuppet and pretend to be someone else, a log in and karma system would be great.

The website sensibleerection runs a good system like this.

wait? are you admitting to giving access to the information of a registered user to a third party (unity), was it only their IP address or anything else.

You (and he) will have to wait for my memoirs.

Does this ring a bell Staines?

I’ve seen the briefing paper done by Downing Street; “How to get Dale”

Derek Draper: Well, publish it.

Paul Staines: I will publish it this afternoon

Wait? are you admitting to giving access to the information of a registered user to a third party (unity), was it only their IP address or anything else.

Worried about something are we?

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a group blog which means that -

a) regular contributors have back-end access in order to write/publish direct to the site; and

b) some of us have moderator and/or editor privileges in order to enable us to help Sunny out with the housekeeping.

So, yes, I have access to posters IP addresses and to email addresses used when making comments and I’m pretty adept at tracing both back to source when the need arises, which is only when there’s a need to deal with a particular troll or spammer.

Who said Unity was a third party? That really is some laughable crap.

Cheap shot, 4 comments is hardly a mob with pitchforks is it??

Seriously, are you suggesting this is orchestrated?

@19:

What I like is that clearly the left wing Internet clearly runs on a new, secret Marxist version of TCP/IP where you can tell who a person works for just by fondling their ports.

I mean, if I were an astroturfer or a sockpuppet, I’d at least know how to do it through an anonymising proxy or similar.

Sorry for banging on about technical solutions, but there are some websites that have had this problem solved for years and I’m always amazed that mainstream blogs never try to catch up

I’m trialling a comments system called disqus over at my own blog but frankly I’ve not found it the easiest to deal with or for people to understand.

I want to combine simplicity and ease of use with functionality and not found the optimal situation yet. Generally we take people’s comments on trust, but I do see your point.

Also are you going to provide these comments for us to see?

I mean, if I were an astroturfer or a sockpuppet, I’d at least know how to do it through an anonymising proxy or similar.

I suspect many already do, but it is scary isn’t it? The SpAds to our upcoming overlords are technically useless.

I think we may ban comments via anonymizers anyway.

Looks like the Tories above are doing one over this.

Quick lads, rapid reaction, need to neutralise this one…

“I don’t quite understand why this is scandalous. Are Conservative Party supporters or staff not supposed to use the interwebs, or something? Or did you imagine that nobody previously used pseudonyms on blog threads?

I had always had an inkling that posters defending Kaminski were likely to be Tory symapthisers, so I am not all that flaggergasted, I must say.”

Er, right, an employee as a political party is leaving comments without disclosing who they are.

I mean, for a start, are they actually paid to do this? Secondly, why are they pretending not to be who they are? It’s a pretty big interest not to disclose really, isn’t it? Branches pretending to be roots.

They’re giving out the line and pretending to be the public. Astroturfing is widely recognised to be a dishonest practise, and CCHQ appears to be sanctioning it.

It’s a sanctioned policy of organised and blatant dishonesty, unless of course someone is doing something they’re not supposed to.

If that is the case, who is responsible?

Sunny has responded to Guido but has no answer to my point: his accusation of a CCHQ astroturfing campaign is hysterical, juvenile and unsupported by the facts.

In short, Sunny – grow up.

@ Richard

May we know their names? Is sally one?

At last, some support for my theory that Sally is a Tory troll !!!!

@DHG

The website sensibleerection runs a good system like this.

Looks like at least this time you’ve been cloned by someone with a sense of humour.

TORIES! Hiding in the walls and lurking in every bush. TORIES everywhere I look. TORIES.

Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to this situation: why would CCHQ give a flying one what a few hysterical trots on a blog nobody reads think? Delusions of importance are fine, but not when it’s turning into psychosis.

Time to increase the dosage on your anti-paranoia happy pills, lefties…

CCHQ astroturfing campaign is hysterical, juvenile and unsupported by the facts.

Sorry, what facts are you claiming don’t exist? Is reading comprehension a problem for you?

Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to this situation: why would CCHQ give a flying one what a few hysterical trots on a blog nobody reads think?

Funny, that doesn’t stop you from trolling everyday.

It’s amusing that when you present the evidence then Tories claim there is no evidence. Stupidity doesn’t even cover it.

For the record I should just point out that Martin (above) is actually a lurking Tory.

lol

I’m interested in what Unity means about ‘tracing… to source’. My guesses would be:

1) E-mail address. Does it contain your name, the name of your employer or any information someone could reasonably use to infer your name? It’s not hard to guess who dcam66@hotmail.com might be, for example.

2) Google. Try googling your own email address. Chances are, if you’ve ever posted to a mailing list or similar, there’s a hit which does contain some identifying information, so even if your email address looks quite nondescript, it might not be.

3) IP address. If you’re commenting from work, it might be possible to trace your workplace from the IP address. Certainly big workplaces like CCHQ could be identifiable. Even if your specific employer isn’t identifiable, perhaps your office building is, and if you throw in a bit more detective work, that could give you away. Try this site to get an idea of what information may be visible, amongst other things.

4) Analytics and others. Google Analytics can be set up to record extra information about site visitors e.g. comment name, IP address etc., and that information is possibly also recorded in web server logs. This could be cross-referenced with information that GA already stores (e.g. referring site) to build up a picture of who you are. It might also identify any other names you’ve commented under. The referring site is worth remembering – if you’ve clicked through to LC from evilsecrettorylair.com, that might show up in Google Analytics or web server logs.

I can’t think of any others OTTOMH, but I might be forgetting something.

I would be willing to bet all parties do this (the BNP seem to spend most of their free time doing so)

I’m not sure whether it’s the delusions of importance or the hysterical paranoia that’s more entertaining.

Shall I applaud and toss Sunny scraps?

You amuse me, lefties. For this small grace, your deaths shall be swift and merciful.

Like I said – wait for the book.

Ask Macintyre yourself if he begged Draper for dirt on, forinstance, Cameron. He wanted to know if Draper had any cocaine stories from back in the day.

Now why would he ask Draper about something like that?

Bet you Macintyre doesn’t deny it on the record.

Did you actually read this blentry before you clicked “send”, Sunny?

Are you aware that it makes you sound a even more unhinged than you normally do?

Sunny – four comments out of several thousand over an eight month period doesn’t remotely add up to an astroturfing campaign.

Can’t you see how daft you look?

hmmm – the progressive alliance seem to be showing all the paranoia brought about by feelings of impending doom.
I’ve just been twitaccused of “sailing close” to sock puppetry because I posted on a blog with only my first name (a face book default I understand) despite a rather nice picture of myself accompanying it.

Must be a plot!

Andrew Boff dob:14/04/58 – 6ft 1in male caucasian and very very Tory
(or is it?)

Well I can’t speak for them, but I’d probably be doing it for fun. I don’t think it is that good a use of staffers time:)

“Ask Macintyre yourself if he begged Draper for dirt on, forinstance, Cameron. He wanted to know if Draper had any cocaine stories from back in the day.

Now why would he ask Draper about something like that?”

Probably because he’s a left-wing journalist? Do you have an alternative suggestion?

“Sunny – four comments out of several thousand over an eight month period doesn’t remotely add up to an astroturfing campaign.”

I don’t think anyone is claiming that this amounts to a campaign. But it is certainly a practice.

I can’t think of any others OTTOMH, but I might be forgetting something.

Yes, all those methods come into play, and a couple of others besides, and yes they can be circumvented to a considerable extent by using anonymous proxies, etc. if someone really wants to remain anonymous – although if push really came to shove there are people who’s assistance I could enlist that are more than capable of cutting through most of the more common methods of maintaining anonymity.

Thankfully, its never come to that yet, either here or at the Ministry, and its something I’d use only in the most extreme circumstances, i.e. if it became apparent that a particular troll posed a genuine risk in the real world.

Let’s try and get some perspective here – as moderators go I’m one of more permissive people here (and MoT is almost entirely unmoderated but for spam) and inclined to let things ride even if people are throwing in ad-hominem attacks or just being plain offensive unless its creating so much noise that its affecting everyone else.

If someone is determined to make an arse of themselves, then let the world see them for what they are.

So, any moderating I do here tends to be focussed on keeping the signal to noise ratio at a acceptable level.

Any spam that the automated trap misses gets killed off as soon as its spotted.

Trolls get blown off if they make too much of a nuisance of themselves without contributing anything of value or if they’re found to be sockpuppeting – in the last week or so, one idiot had something like 140 comments dumped in the spam bin for precisely that reason – and as far as party workers go, I’ve got no problems with identifying them if they decline to identify themselves as a matter of transparency, and that goes for people working for any of the political parties.

If someone’s trying to pretend to be something they’re not then I’ll happily call them out on it, but I’ll do so openly,

That’s, personally, how I go about things.

I try to keep a reasonably orderly house and let everyone else get on with commenting with as little intervention as humanly possible.

@40

“If someone is determined to make an arse of themselves, then let the world see them for what they are.”

That would appear to be Sunny Hundal’s official motto in this place.

I’m not sure about this. You’ve identified posts coming from a tory office and assumed that this is somehow co-ordinated. It seems to me it is at least possible that you have outed a bored employee who may not even be permitted to do this. I’d hate to see this reduced to the sortof paranoia you see on right wing sites where every dissenter is assumed to be working for Labour

Until last autumn, I used to post occasional comments in the Conservative Home blog. The experience yielded instructive insights.

There were some counter-comments about enemy/alien intruders – I didn’t vote in the last general election – but it was the censoring and removal of a non-abusive, critical post about John Redwood’s (daft) claim that interest rates had been kept too high for too long that led me to conclude it was impossible to have an open informed online debate there.

There had been an earlier omen. Someone started a thread with a direct quote from Cameron saying that there was such a thing as society but it wasn’t the same as the state.

Oh, I posted, how many societies are there in Britain and how can we tell?

The thread was shortly closed for further comments thereafter.

FWIW I think online debates benefit from open, informed participation.

Hi Guido, is there a slim chance that you’re mixing up the words ‘begged’ and ‘asked’?

pagar:

sensibleerection, name aside is a group blog where anyone can post but posts are moderated by all the readers, as are comments, which means that people gather karma and develop reputations as good bloggers and people wanting to genuinely comment.

Bob B:

Open is fine unless it is abused as happens here occasionally and informed is tougher to come by.

@41

‘grabcocque’ by both name and nature I see…

The real right wing conspiracy runs much deeper than this paranoid prattle about astroturfing.

The real conspiracy involves Dale and Guido giving a certain amount of credibility and status to Hundal via their blogs.

They know he is a paranoid aggressive who will be an electoral liability to the Labour party in opposition, so tactically it is a good thing for Lib Con to be ‘the most popular left-of-centre politics blog’. It improves the fallout.

Unity @ 40:

Yes, all those methods come into play, and a couple of others besides, and yes they can be circumvented to a considerable extent by using anonymous proxies, etc. if someone really wants to remain anonymous – although if push really came to shove there are people who’s assistance I could enlist that are more than capable of cutting through most of the more common methods of maintaining anonymity.

I’m genuinely curious about what the legal/data protection implications of this are. If someone is using an anonymous proxy, you’d need something pretty special to be able to pull any further information about their identity. I’m sure there are people out there who might be able to find some way of compromising the proxy server, but assuming that no logs are kept there then it’d be hard to go any further (and you’d already have broken the law by this point).

My worry would be that if you’re capable of doing this kind of thing and the only thing stopping you is your good sense, how many other people out there would have the same capacity but considerably fewer scruples?

@47:

TBH, I doubt I’d come here if it weren’t for Hundal’s periodic lolsplosions.

@48:

If somebody goes to the lengths of using, say, a trusted anonymous proxy or some kind of onion router, there’s very little you can do to uncover them.

If people truly want to remain anonymous, they can.

@47:

Wait, are you saying that Sunny Hundal is a right-wing conspiracy?

That explains a lot.

This sort of thing happened to me during the Stop Boris campaign. Adam B wrote it up here:

http://torytroll.blogspot.com/2008/04/boris-johnsons-pundits-for-pay.html

I expect they’ve got better at it now. Back then I just stuck the bloke’s name (extrapolated from the e-mail address he’d used to submit comments) into Google and found his unprotected MySpace page with the details Adam quotes about his job at Back Boris on it!

Until I confronted him – http://www.stopboris.org/blog/2008/04/06/dirty-tricks-in-the-telegraph/#comment-197 – I had a steady stream of comments from him and others from the campaign, which suddenly dried up (accompanied by a panicked e-mail from “jeh” asking me to remove all his comments from my blog, and the sudden securing of his MySpace page) when I outed him.

Still, “jeh” did OK out of the whole thing. He was listed for a month or two as employed at taxpayers’ expense as part of Boris’s “transition team”, with no details ever provided of what work he did (which was also the case with most of the rest of this mysterious team). I guess that means the only person who helped with the Back Boris campaign and has so far gone unrewarded from the public purse is Veronica Wadley. If only there was some job he could offer her, eh…?

@51 yes, Hundal is an agent designed to make the left blogosphere look like a late 20th century student Labour meeting.

‘Dizzy’ has been caught sock-puppeting while slagging off my professional conduct/reputation (he now claims he only did it the once as a joke). ‘Guido’ has also been caught sock-puppeting by Adam Bienkov. ‘Tory Bear’ tooted his own horn and slagged off his critics using sock-puppets in college. They’re all at it. Little wonder they’re all here trying to muddy the waters on these findings.

To better Paul Staines at his little game, I’m holding back on evidence that proves that *Iain Dale* hides behind anonymous comments written by friends on his website if he has not been making those anonymous comments himself, and I have every intention to publish that evidence when the time is right.

Also, it cannot be stressed enough that Conservative MP Grant Shapps (billed as the Tory expert in e-campaigning) was reduced to sock-puppeting the opposition personally.

Finally, while Paul Staines is here…

Paul Staines: I’ve seen the briefing paper done by Downing Street; “How to get Dale”

Derek Draper: Well, publish it.

Paul Staines: I will publish it this afternoon

(more)

When DO we get to see this document you promised on live television all those months ago, ‘Guido’?

“Does an average of one post every two months really sound like an ‘astroturfing campaign’ to you?”

Forgive me for reading the original post, but no one is saying there’s a ‘campaign’, merely that people from IPs linked to the Conservative Party are winding things up on left wing blogs repeately and in the same way when stories damaging to the Tories/Policy Exchange are published. I’m quite willing to accept that this happens on their own initiative and is hardly discouraged by the antics of senior party figures who should know better*, but would need more proof that it’s a campaign sanctioned and planned at high levels in the party.

* It’s one of the things one notices about the modern Tories that for a party dedicated to the individual there’s a good deal of follow my leader mindless echo-chambering amongst the younger members.

no one is saying there’s a ‘campaign’

Classic example of these jokers attempting to set a false easy-to-meet threshold, which they then go on to ‘meet’ as if they’ve addressed the issue (which they haven’t). It happens often.

Sorry guys, this is desperate.

If you had 4000 instances, this would be a story. 4 is nothing.

Tories – like any partisans – defend their party. I just don’t see evidence of astroturfing here; only partisanship.

If you want conspiracy, you can have me theory that Channel 4 colluded with CCHQ to make ‘When Boris Met Dave’ – but this here is a none story and it makes us look paranoid and daft.

Sorry, but friends need to speak the truth at such times.

4 comments in several months? Pretty intensive campaign the next government have got going there. Ahem.

LOL get a certain amount of this but I don’t bother to track or out ‘em. Certain Lib Dems too. And dissident Labour (or ex-Labour) also. But with quite a low comment rate they probably don’t bother in any systematic way. Guido and Dale come and leave their sad stains every now and then. Guido normally in his own name, Dale sometimes.

The question here is whether this individual or individuals is being paid to do this, or if an intern being officially tasked with this, or just stealing off their employer, not doing their real job/task, daydreaming and twiddling. If they are doing this as part of their job we’d have to assume also doing it on CiF and indeed many other MSM comment streams which may have more readers, and which do feature fairly ridiculous defensive comments.

Sometimes I feel I get more adverse attention when I post at Speccie or CiF or whatever than on my own blog. Also get accused of running fake twitter feeds quite a lot. Which I don’t have any inclination to do. Also comment openly in my own name. But every time shane greer or nadine dorries accuses us righteous bods of running fake twitter accounts I do assume that this is psychological projection and that they, or their close friends, are at this themselves.

@47 Yay! Flaming!

@57
Nothing wrong with partisanship. Everything wrong with not declaring an interest in it knowing full well that people will assume you’re just a member of the public.

It’s not the behaviour itself. It’s the fact that it’s manifestly dishonest.

Tim’s point about Grant Shapps is highly important. Some of the sock puppeting in the Ealing Southall campaign was outrageous. I even caught some of them pretending one of the candidates had died overnight on the eve of poll.

It goes without saying that any policy Shapps announces is probably nothing or the sort e.g. Council house swaps as if this is a new phenomenon.

Tom,

my point was that I see no good reason to believe there is any mass deception going on; that the partisanship is simply that, not an orchastrated campaign to employ anonymity in order to disrupt.

I caught Tory activists who worked on Anne Milton’s 2005 campaign sock-puppeting on my site. I then caught them anonymously smearing a political opponent as a paedophile.

As CP notes about projection and sock-puppeting gits in general, they too made repeated baseless accusations about my somehow being a sock-puppet for the Liberal Democrats, or the Lib Dems being just as bad. I saw no evidence of this myself, and I was looking.

David Cameron’s office was made aware of the smears but handed it back to the locals, who took no action. Both of these activists went on to run for council, endorsed by the Conservatives; one attempted to use their sock-puppeted smear again on the eve of the election (which they both lost).

To this day, Iain Dale refuses to look at the evidence proving that these people were responsible for the paedo-smears; probably so he can claim elsewhere that he’s “seen no evidence” to support my claims or some such nonsense.

Isn’t it a given that people from each end of the political spectrum look at eachothers websites / blogs for conversation or amusement?

That this might include people working for all the parties is hardly surprising.

You’re not going to get a bunch of Bebo members hanging around here (unless they are experiencing a very troubled childhood).

Or should comments be limited to people who agree wholeheartedly?

As far as wind up merchants / imposters go – this site doesn’t identify the posters beyond their sign in name, so I’m surprised there aren’t more here.

Bloody hell, this has brought plenty of right-wingers running interference, including ‘Deep Stoat’ trotting out tired old mis-steps.

And bloody hell if Martin Coxall is getting a gush of the verbose, there is plenty to be done to secure the quality of people commentating here by developing a decent account and identity system, it is not impossible.

Nice to see StopBoris and Tim Ireland providing some further context and evidence of this behaviour.

And nice to see so many people miss the point that the article does not call it a campaign, some people are not reading and showing up their partizan nature.

kojak:

You’ve missed the point, it is not about limiting comments to those that agree only, where had that been said? It’s about people being paid to run interference.

And I’m not a massive fan of people from opposite ends of the political spectrum trolling others blogs, it doesn’t create debate, just tedious back and forth.

But I do agree that I am surprised there isn’t more sock-puppeting here.

Let’s have a Left vs. Right drinking contest.

Guido can drive all the Tories home afterwards…

Re: comment 66

*Standing ovation*

@65:

“Gush of the verbose”? I like that. It would make a good name for a blog. Can I has it?

Perhaps the Tory party is not so confident of winning as they make out.

Entering into shabby backroom deals with Murdoch to give away the farm in return for a bit of Brown bashing and now this.

Never mind , now Guido has signed up as a Cameron stooge, there is no end to their unpleasantness.

[deleted]

[deleted]

#9 “You (and he) will have to wait for my memoirs.”

Guido, that just won’t do.

You make a big thing about how you are such a lauded “libertarian”, and that you are safe because your publisher and hosting are offshore, so it just won’t do to say that you have information that you won’t publish. It sounds rather cowardly. If you have information then publish it, if not then don’t claim that you do.

#61 Chris Paul

“I even caught some of them pretending one of the candidates had died overnight on the eve of poll.”

Reminds me of when I was at university and a Trotskyist friend was standing for Union president. One morning at 5am an undertaker knocked on his door asking for his (deceased) body. That was quite funny, the numerous pizza deliveries were just tedious. The perpetrators were, of course, the Federation of Conservative Students. And lo and behold, Guido was a leading light of the FCS.

#66 Cheesy Monkey

“Let’s have a Left vs. Right drinking contest.”

Cheesy, I’m up for that

“Guido can drive all the Tories home afterwards…”

Phew, thank god that I’m not a Tory…

::grin::

#73

Oops now that I have done a google search and found the 1986 Guardian article about Staines that seems to be making people nervous* I suddenly realise that my comment (#73) was strangely accurate.

[*] It ain’t difficult to find, just find out the name he used at university (see his wikipedia page) and google it and 1986. Staines behaviour over this is hypocritical.

I graduated in 1986, but I remember that during my undergraduate years the FCS were a despicable, arrogant lot. One member was thrown out of the university half way through his first year for spray-painting a swastika on the side of a halls of residence (the 1986 Guardian article reminded me of this incident). The reason the university gave was that he had been thrown out for “vandalism”. That action caused disquiet amongst students because, of course, a swastika is more than just vandalism. The same student started again at the university the following October. As an FCS student he wore button-down shirts and suit trousers (I don’t know if he went on his ‘community arts course’ dressed like that). At the beginning of the following October he approached me in the student union bar, now wearing dungarees and t-shirt, and told me “I’m one of you now, I changed my mind over the summer”. Twat.

Basically clowns like him were the cream of the FCS at the university I attended, and it appears that Staines was a second rate version at Hull.

Guido’s standard response when cornered is to claim he has top secret information that would completely demolish your argument if only he could share it. He’s been to that particular well far too many times by now.

I think it’s quite amusing that anytime you accuse Tories of mud-slinging, astr-turfing, smearing or lying, with the evidence presented, a whole bunch of trolls turn up randomly with ad-hominem attacks. Oh, or it’s somehow that they’re going to crush / kill the left by the virtue of the astro-turfing comments they leave on the site. It’s most endearing.

[deleted]

In a way it’s a pity you deleted the most recent comment by ‘Grim Reaper’, as it included another great example of a false threshold. One does not have to declare that they have “never commented anonymously or under a pseudonym on a blog” to criticise those who clearly should have declared an interest, but didn’t.

@MadFrankieFisher

Thousands of astroturf comments? Proof? Tamuchlybyesies.

I guess the Tories have so much money they’re bound to waste some of it on people trawling blogs & making silly comments. What’s amazing is that they apparently make so little effort to cover their tracks.

It’s not exactly a secret that they do ‘black ops’. Indeed, one Tory of my acquaintances was quite happy to boast about it having after a couple of drinks…

Sunny deleting my posts again? Now there’s a surprise. Have you commented anonymously on blogs before or not? If you were from the Right, Tim Ireland would be calling you around 20 times per day and emailing you as often in order to get an answer to the question. If the likes of Ireland does genuinely believe in fairness and all sides being heard, he’d be wanting answers.

Incidentally, “Lassie” spoke about declaring your interests. Here are mine – I’m not a member of any political party, nor do I ever wish to be one. What about your interests then, Tim? You’ve worked for all three major political parties at one point or another, yet I don’t see you declaring that. Why not?

Coxall:

It’s all yours duck.

Sunny deleting my posts again? Now there’s a surprise.

Well, the comments policy is quite clear. If you can’t read it’s not my problem.

Thousands of astroturf comments? Proof? Tamuchlybyesies.

MadFrankFisher chats out of his arse so much it’s a surprise he can see out of it. It’s typical of this idiot libertarian types to assume that anyone who says something different to them must be astroturfing. Who needs proof eh?
Anyway, Fisher, can’t you take the hint and fuck off when you’re asked so many times to stop polluting this blog? Don’t have any friends eh?

As I’ve already pointed out, ‘Grim Reaper’, that threshold is false (as are your further implications and claims, based on the word of a liar). Sunny does not have to declare that he “has never commented anonymously or under a pseudonym on a blog” to criticise those who should have declared an interest, but didn’t.

Further, neither he nor anyone else here should feel answerable to you on the issue of sock-puppeting at all; you have clearly stated that you enjoy following me about and taking every opportunity you get to slag me off and call me a ‘c**t’, attacking my reputation without risk to your own. That is classic sock-puppeting and even if anyone here HAD made a comment anonymously at some stage, it is nowhere as bad as the crap you admit you pull. (If you’re going to chuck Bible quotes about like you did earlier, have a quick look about what it says about motes and beams.)

What you have stated as fact above is incorrect and all ass-backwards, but I will point out that I have been open about my work for every MP, party and interest group I have done work for. The best you can offer is that you’re not a member of any given party, which does not stop you working for a lobbying group, for example, or a government department (not that any reassurances on these additional fronts would mean anything from an anonymous attack dog like yourself).

Oh, I know that you’re not Iain. Tom.

So hang on, the Tories get in bed with a group of European Right Wing headbangers and antisemites, and they lie about it?

Surely that’s what you’d expect from the Tories?

It is a pity that the Tories need everyone else to explain why their European allies are a sick bunch….

Which I suppose means that the Tories are thick as well as unscrupulous.

A bit late on this, but you can understand why our rightytroll friends on this thread might be a tad pissed off: Wouldn’t *you* be annoyed to find you’ve just done a load of work for free – for the love of it – when someone else might be getting paid to do the same thing?

Never thought of that, good point Neil.