Blog attack

Sorry for not posting - I'm just so busy with my day job I can't spare the time for thinking through new posts properly.

Tim Worstall has a slightly different concern: what happens when newspaper attacks could mean a blogger loses his day job entirely. A Civil Servant called Owen Barder has been attacked by the Mail on Sunday over remarks made over a longish period of time in his blog.

From what I have seen (the blog is now offline), I'd personally lose little time in criticising Mr Barder's sentiments but the notion that he should be able to express these in a private capacity is, as Tim says, an absolute principle that should be defended as strenuously as possible.

Timmy:

I have to admit that I think this piece in the Mail is really rather extraordinary. As above, you can see that it's a mixture of gross distortions, garbled (and wrongly attributed) quotes and in general a hit job.

Which is really something that all of us other bloggers might want to start thinking about. If they hound Owen out of his job on the basis of the above farrago and tissue of innuendo and misquotation then that's rather going to be the end of this enjoyable pastime for most of us, isn't it? Anyone writing tens of thousands of words over the years is open to such an assassination of the character.

Quite. Because this is important, I have nipped in to help publicise this as widely as possible, and to link to Tim's post on this subject.