Rick Gekoski gobbing away, Bernard-Henri Lévy spitting chips, and how you have to think of it all as a kind of torture ...

(Above: BHL in the land of black gold).

With a header like Blogs get all the yobs to open their gobs, it's surely a blatant invitation for some yob to punch the writer - metaphorically at least - in the gob.

Yep, it's hapless Rick Gekoski getting agitated about readers daring to respond to his blog with any views to contrary to his own, and sssh, sometimes indulging in mindless abuse and using the cloak of anonymity.

There is of course a simple solution, which is to moderate and delete anyone who gets up your nose, but Gekoski seems intent on following a most peculiar path to cultivate rational responses in his readers.

Here's how he does it, with carefully chosen words: offensive, splenetic, snide dismissal, full-on rant, angry and self-righteous, anxious to spit out their insults, spitting is what it is, one can feel spat at, I like to call this phenomenon Gobbing, multitude of gobbers, presumably from Spitalfields, show up like viruses, peculiar names, rarely a picture, perma-rage, like sarcasm, eschew irony, if answered back, they spit harder, expressing hostility, and so on and so forth, evocation of beware these commenter llamas, they spit ... until Gekoski comes to the disturbing understanding that perhaps, just perhaps, he might be wrong about it all.

Actually he's just another troll, happily trolling away, gobbing and spitting, a common enough feature these days in the mainstream media, and not at all confined to blogs.

For another example, look no further than Bernard-Henri Lévy's contribution to the debate over the allegations in relation to Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Bernard-Henri Lévy Defends Accused IMF Director in The Daily Beast. The Beast isn't a blog of course, just a latter day Huffington Post aggregator with delusions of grandeur, but publishing Lévy's views hasn't done much for truth, justice or insight in the digital world.

Lévy starts off by saying he doesn't know what happened that fatal day in the Hotel Sofitel in New York. Amen to that. Neither do I. I know what happened in another hotel room in New York that day, but that's between me, my conscience, and the long absent lord.

And that, so far as it relates to the facts of the matter, is where it should rest, perhaps with a few banal cliches, such as let the courts handle it, and let's hope the American system of justice is up to the job (which it sometimes isn't), but in any case when the facts of the matter (and the opinions and the conjectures and the defence) are led in court, there will be time enough for considered opinions. In the case of Assange, you might even be allowed a few comments on the peculiarities of the Swedish judicial system and Swedish law.

That's not enough for Lévy, who is portentously identified at the bottom of his piece as one of France's most famed philosophers, a journalist, and a bestselling writer. He is considered a founder of the New Philosophy movement and is a leading thinker on religious issues, genocide, and international affairs.

Which doesn't stop him from being a goose.

First he immediately beings speculating on the facts of the matter, wondering how a chambermaid could have walked into a room alone, when apparently, according to him, the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels is for the maids to always double up.

Well I wasn't staying at a grand hotel - though it did front directly on to Central Park with grand views - and the chambermaids worked the rooms in singles, as has been the custom in many hotels I've been in while visiting New York (at least it didn't have bed bugs, the subject of a little street theatre outside the rather less grand Hotel Wellington).

So what's the point of Lévy's point, since it's just another easily contested bit of irrelevance?

Lévy is of course intent on spreading FUD, and he lashes out in ways remarkably similar to what we might know call "the Gekoski factor" or "the Gekoski style".

Everybody is an enemy. Dime store psychologists, thrown to the dogs, handcuffed figure, wife exposed to the slime of a public opinion drunk on salacious gossip, obscure vengeance, crowd of photo hounds, tabloid press a disgrace to the profession, nauseous, angry, and so on and so forth.

Lévy writes out of friendship for Kahn but he does his friend no favours, especially when he jumps the shark:

I hold it against all those who complacently accept the account of this other young woman, this one French, who pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television.

Uh huh. But what does Lévy know of Tristane Banon's complaint, which apparently she shared with her mother, who for party political and personal reasons counselled her not to pursue the matter? How does he arrive at the conclusion that she is "pretending"? I have no knowledge of the matter, nor does Lévy ...

Truth to tell Lévy doesn't give a whit or a jot about the views of the women who might have been victims of an assault. He fills in the rest of his piece by blathering on about the political impact of the matter, and the impact on the French left, and on Europe, and the excellent work that Strauss-Kahn was doing by way of favorable treatment of proletarian nations. And how at the eleventh hour he was snatched away from pleading Greece's case to the German chancellor ...

Yes, but did he assault a chambermaid in a New York hotel? And did he assault the other woman? Did he break the law?

Who knows, he's innocent until proven guilty, and there, apart from conspiracists and dissidents, the matter should rest while the matter is dealt with by the courts.

But I do wish instead of trolling away about trolls, Gekoski might have spent his time talking about the special pleading on view in Lévy's piece, a kind of sensationalist rhetoric all too common these days in the media.

It reminds me of another recent debate, recently articulated in the New York Times by Arthur S. Brisbane in The Other Torture Debate.

One of the more disreputable sights to be had in the wake of the bin Laden assassination was Fox News wheeling out the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, to claim credit for the kill and to boast of the success of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in providing intelligence that allegedly lead, years and years later, to the kill.

Rumsfeld is perhaps one of the more wretched figures floating around, and unlike Robert McNamara, who came to some kind of honest understanding of his mistakes in The Fog of War, it seems unlikely he'll ever bring himself to an understanding of what he did, and what was done in his name.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" - at least in the case of waterboarding - is just a euphemism for torture, an illegal activity for which German and Japanese soldiers were given hearty prison sentences at the end of World War 11 (as the waterboarding wiki notes here).

In the Vietnam war, the United States had the grace to court-martial and discharge a soldier guilty of the practice. There are no greys in relation to the matter in relation to international law (again the wiki here), and yet while in America, there was the peculiar sight of a Fox presenter saying, head bowed as if to hide his face while he said it, that the practice was 'legal' during the Bush years.

And returning home, what's to be found but Miranda the Devine blathering on about how wondrous and effective the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were in the hunt for bin Laden, (Bin Laden died a failure), and getting upset by the usual suspects at the ABC who happened to mention that the process involved torture.

Well it's possible to live with an extra judicial killing, especially if it's a loon who's indulged in his own form of extra judicial mass murder, and it's equally possible to live with torture, if that's your thing. But don't dissemble, don't fudge, don't use mealy mouthed words and half-baked equivocations, as did any number of newspapers, including the New York Times, as well as the kool aid drinkers at Fox and Murdoch, as does the lime cordial sipping antipodean Devine, who sees the whole thing as a justification for Blair and Bush, and nary a word for Obama.

What else can you expect of people who thought Inquisition techniques were a way to bring people closer to the truth and to god?

Brisbane wraps it up with this quote:

Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said: “The techniques are legally torture. The fact that the Bush administration said they weren’t doesn’t change the law.”

And this opinion:

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.

Yes, and not before time. Let's have an honest use of words, instead of the mincing and the equivocating and the mindless verbal avoidance techniques, but it does help explain why there's some agitation, some gobbing and spitting going down from people as mad as hell and not prepared to take the hypocrisy any more in the alternative world of blogging.

Which brings us back to Gekoski and his bleat about getting a few hash words from the Gobbers and the spitters at the bottom of the pieces he scribbles, instead of the fawning and the simpering which might please him more.

Harden the fuck up man, there's a hell of a lot worse happening in the world than is dreamed of in your little patch of the world ...

Now if someone was giving you a little 'enhanced interrogation technique' or perhaps you were involved in a dust up in a New York hotel room, you might have some cause for complaint.

Instead return to your blog (which you cleverly advertise in your opening line), while reciting three times "I will not troll this week", nor even during writers' festival week in Sydney ...

(Below: and speaking of Sydney and with memories of Gerard Henderson yesterday, here's a map of Sydney for those who can't understand the place. It's been doing the Facebook rounds, so no original source, but it's so accurate we can even forgive the spelling error. Click to enlarge).