As a less drastic attempt to get the toothpaste back in tube, would everyone agree with my apology to Martin A on 13th November?

You [Shub] should have begun a separate Discussion if you disagreed with something on the Nic Lewis [thread], rather than interrupting this one. I won't discuss it further here. Apologies to Martin for not drawing that line before.

I don't think the argument should have come here at all - it should have gone straight to another Discussion. Anyone with me on that? And, even if not, do you agree at least that I was right to apologise to Martin A?

Sorry, meant to give the link to that. A thorough answer will require a bit of background reading.

I agree with Martin that the comment he's referring to was way, way out of order. The one that bothered me, before that, was by Dung on 12th:

Richard

You are inconsistent; today in the Tony Newbury thread you praised Andrew Montford and friends for the job they were doing and believed at some point that they would get recognition. On the same day in this thread you accuse a large part of the "friends" of being a mob hiding behind anonymity.
You make these accusations without any knowledge as to whether any or all these people would be willing to reveal their true identities if asked. At the moment you are, on a daily basis insulting the majority of people who post on BH.

That really hurt, the bits in (my) bold particularly. And Dung was basing this opinion on my description of an anonymous mob that attacked Alistair McAlpine. He took those words to mean the mob I hated here, which I suppose conveniently fitted what he had come to believe. Quite rightly (if that had been my meaning) he started to lay into me about this. Except it wasn't my meaning, as I tried at once to make clear. Nobody listened and the dung/shit/crap soon hit the fan in this thread too.

I've just tried to find one of the threads that I'd been reading a week before that had had such hateful, anonymous accusations against Lord McAlpine and his political allies - from 4th November onwards, the day of the BBC Newsnight broadcast with Steve Messham. One I noted in my personal wiki was at the blog of someone of the hard left called Ian Bone. I was stupid to look for it now of course. Not Found. But you can tell what it was called from the URL and you're gonna have to take my word for it that it contained the foulest rantings, imaginings and rejoicings possible, with this single contribution I noted down in my wiki a veritable oasis of good sense and calm:

Lord Mac may well be the high ranking Tory paedo mentioned by Watson MP in the Commons but just because he bank-rolled Mrs Thatcher’s party in the 1980s does not mean that he confided all of his sexual predelictions or pecadillos to her. I doubt very much that she was aware of his evil doings.

That was someone anonymous, like all the rest, and it was responding to others that were vile in the extreme. That (and a lot of other similar horrible stuff I forced myself to read) was what I meant by a mob hiding behind anonymity, as I described it on Martin's thread. Dung taking this to mean the beautiful people of Bishop Hill (as I consider them, by comparison at least, on a normal day) was a disastrous step. It was a massive mistake and it has had extremely bad consequences ever since.

I don't see why my original comment about the Lord McAlpine stuff should be deleted but it was certainly partly about anonymity so I presume Shub is advocating that it should be disappeared. Shit happens. It's nobody's fault. Delete the lot. Just like Ian Bone in fear of a libel action for the Lord A.

Consider me just a tiny bit unimpressed.

Richard, Dung et al:

Like Shub said, your obsessing over this topic is going nowhere. Give it a rest, agree to differ and to stop analysing in tedious detail who said what.

So if someone tells untruths about you publicly that greatly damage your reputation and they don't admit their mistake when you try to correct them and go on to spread their false picture (however sincerely held) then it's obsessive to care about this?

I don't recognize splitpin as a name but the unknown anonymous commentator who turns up in a crisis and pronounces judgment, apparently from a great moral height, but giving nobody a clue as to what gives them the right and wisdom to make it ... oh yes, that I do recognise.

The situation I just described isn't symmetric. If Dung didn't obsess about putting his defamation of me right he'd be a irresponsible cad. If I didn't obsess about the damage it has done to my reputation I'd be an idiot.

This isn't about anonymity any more retireddave. It's about something Dung accused me of on 12th November 2012 that was totally false. I would feel exactly the same if the false accusation had been from someone using their real name. Please everyone get that into their heads. I'm looking for something that Dung said about me on 12th to be retracted. Just to be totally clear.

Because Dung came to believe his version of what I'd said on 12th, and refused to believe mine, he became more and more outraged and went on say of me on this thread:

If I am banned I can not think of a better way to go than to tell you how arrogant, how bigoted and how nasty a person you are.

That was all based on a false premise. It's not helpful for people to get the wrong end of the stick about what someone else is saying. Paul Matthews has said that he would prefer this whole thread was deleted. But I think there could be something valuable to learn here. To be careful to listen when someone tells you they've got the meaning of their own words totally wrong - or you could end up causing significant, unnecessary trouble.

Again, I stress that all these points are independent of whether either person is using a pseudonym or not. They are some of the basics of how a blog avoids falling into anarchy and meaningless.

Mike Jackson: your WTF is uncalled for. This interaction between Shub, myself and Dung has already moved twice, first by Shub's initiative, then by Dung's. I've already (above) quoted myself saying that I originally thought Shub should have put anything he wanted to continue from the Nic Lewis thread into a Discussion other than Martin's or this one. When the Bish asked everyone for more politeness on Martin's thread Dung chose to berate me here, based on the same false premise he arrived at on Martin's thread. Putting that original defamation right matters much more than where that happens. And this isn't just about Dung in the end either. Shub's involvement was important and unhelpful. He could have nipped the untrue meme in the bud but chose not to answer my clarifying question. And once Dung's highly pejorative version of my view was allowed to stand various others like Chris M and RKS came out of the woodwork with some strange as well as disruptive contributions.

But the damage for me started with Dung on 12th. I don't care where he puts that right but I'm demanding that he does.

However, let me add one thing to that. If Dung wants to email me with an apology - rdrake98 on the gmail label - then I'd be happy to talk it through with him and agree a public statement between us and the Bish that would be placed on a new Discussion thread, linked to from here. That would be fine.

Shub, in my earlier comments about Twitter I explicitly referred to Andrew Montford's exploits with the genre - that the people Andrew was tending to relate to in tweets, by his own choice presumably, were very largely known individuals. I've followed him quite a bit since April in his conversations there and I'm even more struck by the truth of this observation - and by the brilliance of his answers to his critics, may I say, very sincerely, in passing.

So this needs really careful treatment. I never said that the whole of Twitter was free of pseudonymity did I? Or that the nyms there might not one day be used for evil, through their own pride or foolishness? I'd be very interested if you could point me to that kind of blanket statement if I made it. It was Andrew Montford on Twitter - and those he regularly interacted with there - that I remember being very struck by.

Regarding the McAlpine smear: any pseudonymous person, in the end, can speak only for himself/herself. You have the good behaviour of anonymous commenters here, and an episode of possibly orchestrated tarring-and-feathering by pseudonymous users on your former role-model of a social medium Twitter. You are free to decide which of these two exemplifies the virtues of online anonymity.

Absolutely right - except I'd prefer if you don't mind to say most of the anonymous commenters here, most of the time. And my deep concern is that you did not let me make that key distinction, that you glossed over Dung's defamation of me on 12th, when he took the following, which was explicitly my reflections on Boris Johnson's commentary on the McAlpine debacle:

That's the wonderful thing about the Internet. You can accuse a person of the vilest crime but because you're doing it in a mob and cannot be traced, nobody can blame you.

to mean the pseudonymous here, not the individuals on blogs and twitter who chose to libel McAlpine, because they thought they could get away with it (and I was in my mind including a number using their real names in that regard too, by the way, especially once the mob had grown to thousands).

All I'm asking is that my reference to an irresponsible, accusing mob is acknowledged to be referring to the thousands of critics of McAlpine, not the gentle giants of Bishop Hill, as Dung wrongly assumed. That's why when the very next post you came up with the cryptic response

"That's the wonderful thing about the Internet. You can accuse a person of the vilest crime but because you're doing it in a mob and cannot be traced, nobody can blame you"

Yes, Richard, ... we can't throw the boy who cried that the emperor has no clothes in prison, can we?

I came back immediately with

Shub, to be clear, are you saying that McAlpine is in fact a paedophile and that those who said so on Twitter and blogs were equivalent in moral stature and accuracy to the little boy in the fable?

You didn't answer - and not long afterwards Dung let fly with his more precise and damaging defamation of me instead. As an example of the 'good behaviour of anonymous commenters here' it left a little bit to be desired, from where I was sitting. Does this point of view make any more sense now?

Dung: I ask that you read my posts on this page very carefully before launching into further criticism of me. You clearly defamed and damaged me in your post of 12th November. Whatever the validity of your other criticisms you need to put that right first. I'm not going to initiate email conversation but I will respond to yours if in it you admit that you might have been wrong on 12th November. It would be much better to do that discussion privately but the ball is in your court. Please re-read your post of 12th November and think carefully if you might not have been mistaken in the view you ascribed to me.

Dung, there were no dates in your post of 12th November, quoted in full above, with the most damaging and incorrect parts in bold. The moment I read it told you you had badly misinterpreted me, in a way that was bound to damage both my reputation and my ability to maintain friendships here. Why did you not listen to me then? Why not admit you made a mistake now, then, if we must, let's return to any other criticisms you may have, once we've both taken stock.

Dung: I have nowhere threatened legal action today. I have used the term defamation, just as I did on 12th November (in a response I begin to wonder if you even read - did you read it?) The term was accurate then and it's accurate now but it doesn't constitute a thread of legal action. On legal action to sue I share the view of Thomas Sowell in April 1998. So you can rest easy on that score.

Now here's a little test for you. Do you still think I am threatening legal action? I've just told you I'm not, that my words were not to be taken that way. Doesn't that settle the matter for you?

And why not take my word for it that when I said on Martin A's thread

You can accuse a person of the vilest crime but because you're doing it in a mob and cannot be traced, nobody can blame you.

I meant the McAlpine mob and not any group of people on Bishop Hill. You were wrong to accuse me in the way you did, because that was not the meaning of my words. Why would I change my mind on such a thing, within the same day?

Whatever any other casual observer thinks, who hasn't looked into it, I came to the realisation, when I woke suddenly around 1am, that this was the moment where you went badly off course. Your other criticisms may have validity but this one didn't. It was also this point that your anger seemed to explode, from my perspective, though I'm willing to be corrected by your gentle manner in email on that.

Let me make one other distinction. I'm not really bothered about an apology. I am asking for a retraction: that you admit that your post of 12th November was factually wrong (in the phrases in bold) and should not have been posted. And that's it. Story over or game on, whichever you prefer.

Of course it could be taken as patronising, because you evidently failed to read my post of 12th November, and take it seriously, and all the ones that have made the same point since. You made a mistake here that Mensa cannot help you with, a mistake that really hurt and damaged me. But the difficulty you are having with your response is not with the size of your brain but that of your heart.