Another excellent Post by Neil Clark, this time on the Guardian's Comment Is Free site, where I trust he will soon become a regular fixture following his Victory in the British Blog Awards - assuming, that is, that the Guardian respects the wishes of the Majority.
Here, Neil writes of the some four Million scribes in the UK who now write blogs, and notes that they (we!) are: overwhelmingly middle class and male, London-based and university educated. An extraordinary percentage of them seem to work, or have worked, in financial services.
Possibly because of the financial services/City background of many British political bloggers, free-market/libertarian dogma predominates.
This, alas, is, in my experience, indeed, the case. One could not state for Certain that all four Million UK bloggers are employed within the confines of the Square Mile, but it does, alas, indeed, appear that a significant number of them are, indeed, so employed. Those of us who Refuse to toe this line are subject to Malicious attacks, Falsehood and Innuendo. Nonetheless as I have previously Noted, the tide is Turning.
As Neil points out, just one such of our number has "won, in a free public vote, the title of "Best UK Blog" in the most prestigious prize in blogging". Predictably, a tide of Sour Grapes has poured forth. One commenter writes that:
Neil Clark's blog is every bit as badly written and unlikeable as this article would suggest. The only reason he won this award is that unlike all the other contestants he went out of his way to do so, informing his small band of supporters that they could vote for him every 24 hours and repeatedly urging them to do so. To see him then crowing about how this supposedly makes him in tune with the general public is as absurd as it is nauseating. He's a crank.
Crowing, indeed! If one of the pro-war blogs had won this Award, we'd never have heard the end of it. As it is, Neil has only written two posts (so far) hailing this (in his words) "enormous and humiliating defeat to the warmongers, the bully boys and the smear merchants", plus the piece on Comment is Free, making three posts in total, plus any I may have missed. It appears that the WMD fiasco has yet to dim the Neocons' penchant for exaggeration.
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Extraordinary, isn't it? They are even saying that he only got it because they organised voting for him as a "comedy meme"!
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It's both extraordinary, and yet, paradoxically, at the same time, not extraordinary at all, because their Arrogance is such that they appear genuinely baffled at having been so resoundingly Defeated.
Therefore all manner of excuses must be invented. The main one is that it was a minor award of no real importance, which only a tiny handful of people voted for. But you could say the same thing about the Booker Prize! The judging panel for that number far less than the ONE THOUSAND people who voted for Neil Clark. So surely on that basis the Neocons should be insisting that Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize is of no consequence! But no, of course, their Sheer Hypocrisy knows no bounds, so on the rare occasions when one of their Heroes wins an award it must be presented as an Overwhelming Victory.
The next excuse, it seems, is that nobody took it seriously. Try telling that to Neil Clark! Again though, this just shows up their Arrogance; they cannot even imagine the existence of an opposing view to theirs, which as you have Noted is currently Hegemonic, and therefore they have to pretend that such views are somehow a joke or a spoof. How glad I am that we shall soon be seeing that this is, indeed, very far from being the case.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Oliver Kamm works in the financial services/the City!
The next excuse, it seems, is that nobody took it seriously. Try telling that to Neil Clark!
For the record, I'm happy to concede that Neil Clark took it seriously.
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