Whale-watching update: No “shit storm” on horizon

Here’s a round-up of some blogosphere commentary on the Whaleoil (Cameron Slater) story.

[If you need to backfill on this, a qick review of this NZ Herald story will get you up to speed.]

Whaleoil has a true friend in Cactus Kate. Not only is she prepared to stick up for him, even wondering if there is either a) some kind of set-up involved with Slater being in court on the same day as a “kiddy fiddler” (her words), or b) if the police are reluctantly pursuing the blogger because of an agenda being run from higher up.

I am wondering whether the Police actually want to charge Whaleoil with this crime? There are several factors that Whaleoil will use in his defence that make me think that their heart is not really in it and other external forces are at play.

This is interesting if a little ingenious. Rightwing bloggers were forever accusing the Labor government of politicising legal proceedings; but really coincidence or conspiracy? It seems an easy choice. But one thing about Ms Cactus,  she’s also prepared to dish some tough love:

As I advise anyone who comes to Whaleoil’s attention, the best course of action is to be polite and either ignore what he has written or write to him in a manner which puts your side of the story and he will more often than not be reasonable enough to publish that. He has a short span of attention thanks to his depression and soon moves to a new target.

The worst course of action is to give Whaleoil opposition. He is mental. I mean this in a loving caring way to his friends, but to his foe he shows as much hatred as he does love for his friends. Whaleoil loves opposition, he loves conflict and more importantly will never back down.

This could be coded warning for people not to get in Whaleoil’s face about this, we’ll see. However, some are pointedly ignoring this advice and are getting stuck into Whaleoil. He has supporters and detractors in equal measure it would seem.

Legal letter freaks Big News – should the Internet be “Adults Only”?

A week ago I mentioned an interesting little blogwar breaking out in Wellington, now the skirmish has gone nuclear with one protagonist sending a lawyer’s letter to Dave Crampton host of  the Big News blog.

The row started when someone began to spam a Big News post suggesting that the media now back-off in the Tony Veitch case. Whoever the spammer was posted something like  40 comments in less than half-an-hour. The spammer used the names of Tony Veitch, Zoe Halford, Glenda Hughes, TV3 producer Carol Hirschfeld, Sailent editor Jackson Wood, big News host Dave Crampton and TVNZ’s Mark Sainsbury to put offensive and stupid comments into the post thread.

Now it’s come down to a threat of legal action. A threat that could have serious consequences for the blogosphere in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Tumeke boycott a red herring

I will not be joining the Tumeke boycott instigated by Whaleoil and now supported by Something should go here, maybe later and its stablemate Keeping Stock.

Tumeke’s mildly left-of-centre-ish in a libertarian pro-capital kind of way; Whaleoil is hard-right. Keeping Stock and SSGHML are variants of  some weird Christian intermediate thingy which both lean heavily rightwards.

The ostensible reason for the boycott, according to Whaleoil, is that Tumeke host Tim Selwyn is a holocaust denier because he dared to criticise media coverage of the walk-out during a speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN anti-racism conference in South Africa a few days ago.

Holocaust denial is actually a hard charge to sustain against Tim on any reading of his post. The main thrust of which is to have a go at New Zealand foreign minister Murray McCully for not attending the conference in the first place; to have a go at the soft coverage given to the walk-out and to point out that Zionism is actually a racist ideology.

Nothing wrong with that. Tim does not make any reference to support for the holocaust deniers and he doesn’t offer much defence of Ahmadinejad either. He mainly talks about how New Zealand is too close to the Americans on foreign policy – such as military involvement the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations.