When you attempt to present a factual alternative to a narrative (in this case, The Narrative About EEEVIL Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©) in a forum run by the BBC, you should expect to be shut down, muzzled or otherwise gagged.
But Charlie Spedding nevertheless tried, and was of course shut off:
The website moderators informed me that my post had been deleted because it broke their house rules: ‘We reserve the right to fail comments which . . . are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others, are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable; contain swear words or other language likely to offend.’
It will come as no surprise to anyone that absolutely none of the above applied to what he tried to post, but that didn’t matter:
‘In this instance, we believe the moderator made the correct decision so we will be unable to uphold your appeal. Due to the volume of correspondence we receive, we are unable to discuss this matter further.’
And that, as the actress said to the bishop, was that.
The problem, of course, is that some people still think that the BBC still behaves in the WWII-era of trusted news source, whereas they are more like the Soviet-era Pravda than anything else.
At least with Pravda, though, they had reason to fear retribution from an actual hostile government, whereas in the U.K. the government isn’t involved at all: it’s the BBC who are the censorious (and self-censuring) types.
Which of course is why the Beeb is at the forefront of all attacks on independent media (like Twitter and no doubt TCW) who dare to give a voice to the unruly members of the public whose views (the BBC considers) are either “fake” or “disruptive, provocative, offensive, racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable”.
That “freedom of expression” thing? That’s just so American, and therefore vulgar (from the Latin word vulgus, a crowd).
