This is a little hard to swallow. Did no one take any ... er ... measurements? Have a happy New Year, Stephen and you know why I say that.

Can I use this one Stephen as content for my "This stupid country" Number 4 post?

Pathetic.

Happy New Year

"This" is not a regular on South West Trains, Stephen -- YOU (I gather) are. If you want to learn more about dangling modifiers and how to avoid them, I'm sure that your friend Oliver Kamm would be happy to instruct you. He would never be guilty of such a sentence.

I think Oliver Kamm might be a bit busy composing a grovelling apology to Neil Clark right now, as per the latter's recent demand.

Either that or training his thoroughbred flying pigs - take your pick.

I've just left this comment on Clark's blog - I thought I'd reproduce it here on the off-chance that it fails to get through Clark's draconian moderation for some unfathomable reason.

Incidentally, I should make it absolutely clear that I am neither George Courtney nor Admiral Cheddar - fun though it is to mock Clark on his own blog (there's nothing funnier than a truly humourless individual), I do draw the line at deliberately trying to wreck his career.

Anyway, here goes:

---------------------------------------
Neil, what exactly do you hope to achieve by reopening this particular can of worms?

Anyone even vaguely familiar with Kamm's writing can predict exactly how he'd respond to your three demands, assuming he can be bothered in the first place.

a simple posting by Kamm on his blog to say that he was wrong to make the unsubstantiated and libellous allegations against me which he did (namely that I did not read his book

He's already done that, nearly a year ago, in the form of an addendum to his post of 1 January 2006. I don't recall when it was added, but I'm pretty sure it was the same month, and certain that it's been up there for most of the past year.

It says: "Neil Clark has written to me to insist that, contrary to my inference from circumstantial evidence, he did indeed read my book before reviewing it for The Telegraph. As he says so, I believe him.

What more do you want?

As for point two:

that I deliberately misled my editor over one of my sources

I believe the jury is still out on this one. Certainly, you and Kamm don't seem to have come close to resolving this particular issue, and Kamm's arguments were backed by considerably more checkable evidence than yours were.

that he does not approve of people, using aliases, emailing my commissioning editors and repeating the untrue and libellous allegations.

Why should he? Unless you're suggesting that he was somehow behind the activities of Messrs Courtney and Cheddar, this has nothing to do with him. You might as well ask him when he stopped beating his wife.

But the main reason that it's an absurd demand is that one of your pseudonymous cheerleaders posted a claim to the effect that George Courtney was really David T of Harry's Place. So it cuts both ways, doesn't it?

But there's one absolutely crucial difference - which is that while you have no evidence linking Kamm to Courtney/Cheddar, your blog's comment policy means that you must have taken a conscious decision to publish the claim that David T writes pseudonymously to editors in order to destroy a writer's career.

That's a pretty serious libel by any standards (certainly much more serious than anything that Kamm wrote about you) and to date you have provided no explanation or apology for your decision to sanction its publication.

As I said: a can of worms. I suggest donning a pair of stout wellingtons, given that they're wriggling round your ankles right now.

Well, fair play to Clark - he did publish my comment after all, followed by a somewhat convoluted explanation that the post I was referring to can't possibly be libellous, since it only referred to 'David T' and no-one knows who he is.

Unfortunately... well, have a look for yourself.

Pure comedy gold.

Clark has this utterly bizarre and obviously very entrenched belief that Pollard and Kamm have conspired to bring him down by employing their enormous financial resources and vast network of shadowy friends. It really is like something out of a Hermann Goedsche novel. He doesn't seem to be able to get it through his addled brain that Pollard and Kamm have had next to nothing nothing to do with the vast quantity of opprobrium that has been heaped on him. Take me as a case in point. I have never met Pollard or Kamm. I disagree with virtually everything they have to say. I'm not sure I even like them very much. And yet I still despise Clark for all kinds of reasons. I loathe him for his support of evil men like Milošević, Putin and Saddam. I hope he burns in hell for his support of Hamas and Ahmadinejad. I have nothing but contempt for his fear of the present and future and his adoration of all the very worse aspects of a shabby and loathsome past.

Um, I hate to be a nudnik and I appreciate your gracious acceptance of correction, but... adding "to me" to the end of the stentence doesn't fix it. To have the phrase "As a regular on South West Trains" describe YOU instead of "this", you would need to write the sentence something like: "As a regular on South West Trains, I am not surprised by this:" -- in other words, the noun that the phrase is intended to describe must be the first noun that follows the phrase.

He doesn't seem to be able to get it through his addled brain that Pollard and Kamm have had next to nothing nothing to do with the vast quantity of opprobrium that has been heaped on him.

Absolutely. I myself first discovered Clark in the wake of the legendary chat with the spambot, when his blog was still pretty young. Glancing around it, it was obvious that its potential for unintentional humour was sky-high, which happily remains the case to this day.

And since it's Clark's gloriously oblivious response that provides the entertainment, it matters not one iota to me who he's actually having a spat with: it could be Arthur Scargill, Menzies Campbell or David Irving and the results would still be just as hilarious.

The basic problem with Clark is that his entire modus operandi involves deliberately going out and picking fights with people who are generally brighter, better informed and more astute than he is. Which is why he gets himself into these hilarious convolutions because he can't quite believe that these people end up running rings round him (when they can be bothered to respond at all), so he assumes that the resulting humiliation is the result of some vast and orchestrated conspiracy.

Whereas it's usually down to completely disinterested and unconnected third parties like me taking the piss.

(To be fair, the whole George Courtenay episode does leave a nasty taste in the mouth, and I do have a certain amount of sympathy for Clark there. But not that much, given his own attempt at silencing entirely fair and indeed strongly evidence-backed comment through the libel courts.)

"The basic problem with Clark is that his entire modus operandi involves deliberately going out and picking fights with people who are generally brighter, better informed and more astute than he is"

He is a textbook example of Adorno's "authoritarian personality." That's even true if we examine Clark in the light of Robert Altemeyer's theory of Right Wing Authoritarianism which drew heavily on Adorno's research. Just look at some of Altemeyer's correlations (these are all taken directly from an article in Wikipedia - see link below):

1: Faulty reasoning — RWAs are more likely to:

-- Make many incorrect inferences from evidence.
-- Hold contradictory ideas leading them to ‘speak out of both sides of their mouths.’
-- Use many double standards in their thinking and judgements.

2: Hostility Toward Outgroups — RWAs are more likely to:

-- Severely punish ‘common’ criminals in a role-playing situation.
-- Admit they obtain personal pleasure from punishing such people.
-- Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.

3: Profound Character Attributes — RWAs are more likely to:

-- Be dogmatic.
-- Be zealots.
-- Be hypocrites.
-- Be absolutists.
-- Be bullies when they have power over others.
-- Help cause and inflame intergroup conflict.
-- Seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive in situations requiring cooperation.

4: Blindness To One’s Own Failings And To The Failings Of Authority Figures whom They Respect— RWAs are more likely to:

-- Believe they have no personal failings.
-- Avoid learning about their personal failings.
-- Be highly self-righteous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Wing_Authoritarianism

In any event, if they do nothing else here, both theories give us insight into Clark's worship of tyrants and idealization of the past (as the Wikipedia article puts it with regard to that last: "Traditional ways are best")