About two or three months ago, I changed the blog so that I would have to moderate every single comment which appeared on it. I did this because there are a handful of sad bastards with no lives to speak of, and who regularly attempt to post, get rejected because of prior abuse and keep on trying, under new identities, and continue to insult me, as if that will help their cause.
Others get rejected because what they post is just off-the-charts nuts.
Today, a discussion degenerated into a free-for-all of these people trying to push their ideas on others on the comments.
So I turned the comments off. They will say I’m censoring debate, but these people have nothing to debate.
They spread misinformation and lies.
Let me talk for a minute about off the charts nuts.
This is a football blog. If I talk politics on it occasionally, that’s my prerogative I run this show, and because Celtic, whether some people like it or not, is a social and political entity.
Our club was founded on a charitable basis. We are from one of the most deprived areas of Europe.
The economic climate we presently inhabit has forced hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people into poverty in the last five years alone. As a club set up to feed the poor there is nothing more political than that, and in this day and age where so many people need foodbanks I will not apologise nor back down from arguing from a left-wing viewpoint.
There are people who don’t like my politics. That’s fine.
But the comments section is not the forum for a political debate. Nevertheless, in the next few months I am going to attempt to provide just such a forum, if a political discussion is what people want.
But let me tell you where I’ll draw the line; I’ll draw it where I draw it on Twitter and in my daily, day-to-day life. I will not debate conspiracy kooks with theories which originated on the websites and forums of the far-right whether they know that, whether they recognise that, or not. And just so we’re clear, let me explain to you what I mean by that.
There are basically two areas in which I am not going to engage at all, no matter what the forum and if people don’t like that I’m holding to this then too bad.
I will not, for one second, debate the growing band of lunatics who believe that COVID was a hoax, that the vaccines are a One World Government plan to poison the planet, or any of the other ancillary bullshit that goes with that.
It’s not only manifestly untrue, it’s offensive … and in a world where the next pandemic might be right around the corner this anti-science lunacy is actually dangerous.
And I’m not debating global warming.
If you turn on the news on any given day you see the scientific case that we’re heating the planet to dangerous levels, then I don’t know what to say to you if the problem isn’t clear.
The evidence on this isn’t just iron clad, developed and added to and updated year on year since the goddamned 60’s but it’s obvious in everything from our own changing weather patterns to the ash filled skies of North America and elsewhere where the people who live in the new reality have never seen nor experienced anything like it in their lives.
I’m not debating those things because there is no debate on those things. The pandemic was real, and we only got out of it because of the magnificent efforts of the scientific community.
It killed 500,000 people in this country and everyone arguing that bat-shit case that it was all a big hoax is insulting the memories of all of them including my uncle. Global warming is also real, and I am not interested in what “alternative theories” people have … all of it has been utterly debunked and ought to be the subject of nothing but ridicule.
I apologise to the people who read this blog for football and who endure my political points with good humour and who shouldn’t have to read this today; this is to the handful of cranks and nutters who think my comments section is the appropriate place to push absolutely barking bullshit. It’s not, and because it’s not I will continue to moderate comments for the foreseeable future.
And for the next week I’m not allowing any at all on the site itself.
Blame me, blame “wokeishness” … or blame the people responsible for that, a handful of eejits who insist on banging their heads against the wall that the rest of us call reality.