24/12/2007

Have Your Say - as long as your say is something nasty about brown people *UPDATED*

Ah, the Daily Express website's 'Have Your Say' section. Where would we be without it clearly signalling what the idiot goons of BNP territory think about things? I don't know where I'd be without knowing whether they think fat people should stop eating or how much they hate immigration. The bunch of divs who regularly post on there - probably ruining a great number of keyboards in the process from the drool literally pouring from their mouths - can usually be relied upon to give us their ill-informed and usually completely predictable comments on anything. My favourite was the one that said immigrants should be sterilised after their second child. Took the mods weeks to get rid of that one.

They'll tell us how much they hate immigration in response to almost anything. Except the paper's two most recent questions, 'Can Alesha become the British Beyonce?' and 'Is Alesha the best ever Come Dancing winner?' None of the dribbling mob seem to care about that. It's pretty unusual for a topic to go 24 hours without a single comment. I wonder why this one has. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the two questions are attempting to solicit praise for someone who is - gasp - mixed race could it? Surely not!

Now listen to me, the Daily Express. You can't have it both ways. If you pander to racists by giving them opportunity after opportunity to vent their garbage on your message boards, handing them questions like 'Is the immigration crisis getting worse and worse?' and 'Has Labour lost control of the asylum crisis?' (both assuming there's a crisis from the get go), you can't expect to be inundated with comments of praise for people with brown skin. See, a lot of the people you're pandering to will look at the 'British Beyonce' thing and think that Alesha isn't actually British because she's half Jamaican. They think British is a race, you see. Because they're racist. That's why they can be relied upon to get red in the face and scream about immigration and extol the virtues of the BNP in the first place.

To borrow a crap slogan from the far right about Muslims and terrorists and change it a bit - not everyone who thinks immigration is a bad thing is racist, but every racist thinks immigration is a bad thing. Clumsily giving crap made up stories that lie about how bad immigration is will attract the racists along with the non racists.

I would like to start a countdown for how long it takes for someone to comment on either of these questions, but I'm sure the work experience youngster will get made to send in a fake one soon enough. Especially if anyone from the Express reads this.

*UPDATE* 'Is Alesha the best Come Dancing winner ever?' has been disappeared from the site. Perhaps two threads on the subject with no comments on was proving too much. Still, there are no comments on the one that's left. There have been a few comments today (24th) on the two 'crisis' stories, and the one about the 'asylum crisis' is up to 113.

*ANOTHER UPDATE* I had been wondering if the reason for the lack of comments on the Alesha story was that the mods were away for Christmas, but there is a new question that went up on the site today (26th). 'Should immigrants be made to feel welcome?' There are 7 comments there so far. Unsurprisingly none of them say they should. Still nothing but tumbleweeds on the Alesha question.

5 comments:

Phil BC said...

I've been thinking about spending some of my time lurking around the Hate and the Express's comments boxes. Is debate of any sort possible, or do they screen out off message commentary?

septicisle said...

Debate is possible, as long as you fancy being outnumbered by around 20 to 1 by knuckledraggers.

Neil said...

It gets filtered; I tried to add something to the effect that people visit Brussels to see the Mannekin Pis to this story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=494427&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments

It never appeared. What hope for a serious comment?

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Sorry it's taken a while to answer these. Like Septicisle says, it's possible to get virtually anything published on the Express Have Your Say sections, but you will be outnumbered by about 20 to 1 by BNP supporting goons who prefer namecalling to actually bothering to read a word you've said.

The Mail does filter its comments quite seriously, and it's all but impossible to get a critical message published. The odd one here and there pops up, but you'd never be able to sngage in a serious debate.

v said...

I suggest that people go on there and take them to task. i have been doing so for a couple of months. the result has been that the advertisement of political parties (i.e. the bnp) is being banned. and many of the more radical posters on the site have been banned.
make it an uncomfortable place to express racist views and they will eventually leave.