On 7/14/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/14/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
I think there is some motivation to discredit his political viewpoint.
Pointless. The monday club has been pretty much insignifcant in british politics since the Conservative Party seathered links with it. He doesn't really have any links with the more recently sucessful parts of the um hard right (say UKIP). As a target he makes no sense.
I do have to agree with Geni here; he's a fairly insignificant figure nowadays, and frankly his political views manage to discredit themselves quite well enough without help. Ed Chilvers and a few other contributors appear to be politically opposed to him, but Ed at least appears to be motivated by a desire to not let the hard-right of the past rewrite their own histories, rather than wishing for a hatchet job.
I think a bigger motivation has been the behaviour of his supporters (some or all of whom may be GLF himself; it's hard to tell) who wrote the articles up originally into such pieces of puff-journalism and have a habit of viciously laying in to anyone who dares disagree with them, with such virulence in fact that they have made enemies of quite a few normally unbiased contributors.
This is human nature; if someone treats you as an enemy and accuses you of malice and hatred towards them, you will begin to oppose them, especially after you try and clear up the misunderstanding and get slapped for your trouble.
The irrationally nasty tend to get articles biased against them - there are other examples, e.g. Daniel Brandt. Nobody would have cared a whit for Brandt had he not behaved as badly as he did.
Legal threats also tend to get Wikipedians worked up; GLF's supporters took the attitude that they could make legal threats with impunity as long as the threats were of GLF suing, not the supporters. In fact, given that User:Sussexman at least claimed to be a solicitor, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the nasty lawyers' letters were drafted and sent by the same people contributing to Wikipedia on GLF's behalf.
-Matt