Has anyone been "otherwise dickish" today?

You may well have seen by now that there's an expletive-ridden post on Better Nation attacking Stuart Campbell for his supposed "misogyny", and also berating Robin McAlpine for speaking up in Campbell's defence. It's written by the blogger Glasgow Sex Worker, who I have absolutely no problem with - I've read her blog over the last couple of years and found myself agreeing with a reasonable amount of what she writes, and she even left a kind comment here once. But it does have to be said that it's extremely unlikely that James Mackenzie would even have allowed Stuart Campbell's name to be mentioned on Better Nation unless it had been in the context of a full-on character assassination. Subtlety on the Wings question isn't an option in Mackenzie-world - he presents his readers and followers with something akin to the moronic George Bush choice of "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists". Anyone who doesn't think Stuart Campbell is an unspeakable monster unfit for human interaction is likely to quickly find themselves "unpersonned" by Mackenzie (although I'm not sure how much that matters anymore - he did it to me last year, and only a small handful of others unfollowed me on Twitter in a subsequent show of 'solidarity'). His obsession with RevStu has reached the point where he just assumes that anyone disagreeing with him from a certain angle must be motivated primarily by "Wings love" - in my case it just never even occurred to him that (self-centred though it sounds) I was far more troubled by the deeply unpleasant and untrue things he had said about me than I was about his anti-Wings rants.

Recently, Better Nation has dropped all pretence at being interested in debate, and has barred comments on most posts. Curiously, though, today's post is allowing comments - albeit probably only on a highly selective basis. So far there have been two which defend Stuart Campbell, but it must be severely open to question whether Mackenzie would have let those through if they hadn't been written by a woman (they doubtless will still have infuriated him, but his self-image as a feminist would be inconsistent with silencing someone who is verifiably female). Although he's claimed in the past that individual authors have control over moderation on their own posts, it emerged that Jenny Kemp hadn't been responsible for deleting dissenting comments on her post about domestic violence. We'll see whether any dissenting male voices ever make it through today - my guess is that, at most, Robin McAlpine might be permitted a right to reply (followed by a one-to-one 'tutorial' from Mackenzie, naturally).

Incidentally, you might remember that Mackenzie was strangely indignant last year that I referred to him as the "Better Nation supremo", presumably because it didn't buy into the fiction that BN is still a group blog with no single person in ultimate editorial control. Intriguingly, he's recently started to tacitly acknowledge that the distinction between the blog and himself is largely bogus - the Survation polls he has co-commissioned are now referred to interchangeably as "our polls" and "my polls". And in the STV report on the most recent poll, he was billed as the "Better Nation founder", presumably because that's how he described himself. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that he's a former media chief for the Greens, or even that he's a Yes supporter - and that shows the potential benefit for the Greens in using Mackenzie as a proxy when commissioning these polls, which is what I strongly suspect may be going on.