I’m going to reveal my technical idiocy here, but I can’t think of any other way around it.
Legal Eagle and I have had a few requests, both online and offline, for a post on the legal issues arising out of the ongoing Spin Starts Here/Lulz Starts Here imbroglio. Yesterday, we thought we pretty much had the whole caper licked, but now the National Library of Australia’s internet ‘Pandora’ archive of the old TSSH site has been locked (presumably at the request of Caz and the Hack). We’d just started to trawl through it for a bit of background research - Legal Eagle had started to look at the site’s disclaimer, for example - and now the whole thing has vamoosed.
I tried using the wayback machine, but keep getting some second-hand music dealer. I presume there is a way of telling it to choose the blog over the music retailer, but I don’t know what it is, and with Finals coming up (on top of some local legal work I took on when I seemed to have a little more leisure, hah!), I don’t have the time to figure it out. LE is also flat chat with marking and conference paper preparation.
We’ve discussed doing the mother of all blogging evils posts before, and thought this would be an interesting starting point. After being the target of one particularly venemous troll/sockpuppet over at Catallaxy, and having watched both Jeremy Sear and Andrew Landeryou have their blogs hacked and stolen, we figured there’s something in this whole snark phenomenon that’s worth considering in a legal sense.
Ideally, what we’d like are links to the brouhaha between Jeremy and TSSH, and the material on Samuel Gordon-Stewart. We both suspect that the attacks on him represent TSSH’s nadir, and are representative of a wider Australian tendency to dislike intellectuals who are happy to be geekily intellectual (there’s an excellent profile of Samuel here illuminating this point). Many Australian intellectuals deploy their cleverness at other people’s expense, probably as a defence mechanism - they don’t want to be the butt of Jamie and Caroline’s nasty funnies. It’s long irritated me (which is why I engaged in the English national pastime of having a good old moan about it to the SMH’s Good Weekend last month), and Samuel’s refusal to play the game strikes me as interesting in its own right. That said, I chose one of Skeletor’s pieces for Best Blog Posts 2006. And I still think it’s pretty funny. Not everything about TSSH was teh evils.
If you could leave relevant links in the comments, we’d be very grateful. Don’t feel constrained by the topics we’ve flagged, either - remember, we only started looking at this a couple of days ago, and now the main archive has gone. Don’t despair if your comment doesn’t appear straight away - since I was foolish enough to post on the Bill Henson thingy, our spaminator has become a mite tetchy. One of us will set your comment free in due course.
[A few people have decided to contact us offline. That's fine too, although due to the time difference I may not catch up with your emails straight off]
9 Comments
SL,
The google cache is always useful for things like this. Try doing this search:
site:thehangover.blogspot.com thehangover.blogspot.com
It returns lots of useful results if you click on “Cached” rather than the link to the page. Better hurry, though - Google does not keep the results forever.
Have you tried talking to the NLA folks? They may be able to release stuff to you as you’re not trying to stir up unnecessary shite.
I felt pretty sorry for S G-S during the TSSH vendetta against him, but there’s no way known he can be described as an intellectual, I’m afraid that’s just a simple mistake.
Caz & the Hack got friendly towards me and my partner when we ran a little blog for a few months about the municipality we lived in, which they used to live in I understand. It was a strange and rather unnerving experience.
I think those two, and some of their circle, Skeletor and Desci especially, were / are as clever as anybody you’d find. Many of the people they hung shit on actually were self-sabotaging fools and/or tools. (anyone remember Nige54??) But they did it with such toxic meanness.
I think you’re right - which I was trying to get at in the post, and probably haven’t made clear enough. It’s sometimes as though - if you’re really clever - you turn into Caz & the Hack, or you finish up S G-S.
The latter, to my mind, is clearly taking baby steps towards intellectualism (and that’s certainly how he’d be viewed in the UK, with his ‘enthusiasms’ - the category of ‘intellectual’ is not closed by any means). He’s only young yet, but give him time. At the same age I was pretty similar, with one exception: I had physical size and strength on my side, which - sad to say - counts for a great deal.
Jacques, I hadn’t thought of that. If I can’t round up enough info otherwise, I’ll pursue that avenue further.
FYI - I note that Jamie has got his brother in law, Michael “Hambo” Hamilton, to set up a fake “lulz” website at thelulzstarthere.com (which reveals it’s Jamie’s camp by arguing in favour of his intervention order using material only he’d have access to) and then Hambo has faked the hacking of his own website (mysteriously hosted from exactly the same address as the new tlsh.com one).
Looks like Jamie’s going to pull every dirty trick he knows of on the way down.
I feel a bit apologetic because I made the initial call for you to blog this, and you are so busy. In the light of that I would just embrace the limitations as a blessed relief
, read the material on The Lulz Started There (which includes quite a few screenshots of material they’ve saved) and comment on the legal issues arising from the various actions discussed there.
I feel a bit dirty being so fascinated by this trainwreck, but yes I was pretty disgusted by their treatment of S G S. He was by no means an intellectual (unless he’s undergone some spectacular development since); just a vulnerable teenager, and they went after him like hyenas.
I thought they were blogosphere shock jocks, albeit with the occasional funny post and witty turn of phrase, but way too nasty for my liking. And the comments section always looked like crank phone call transcripts to me. Can’t see how that Skeletor post would have got into anyone’s best blog posts of 2006 (so much better around) but there you go.
Skeletor wrote a very nasty, ignorant, Irish-bashing piece on St Pat’s Day 2006 which turned me off forever. I wasn’t aware of their treatment of SGS but it looks like picking on the disabled kid to me - the lowest in schoolyard bullying.
He was also one of those “Baby boomers are all rich bastards who should f*** off and die” geniarses.
Oh dear. No wonder I’d never read that blog before.
I can’t stand bullying, particularly where multiple bloggers gang up on one person. It does have unpleasant schoolyard connotations…
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