Blah blah blah... FLUX, I rarely read beyond the first 2 words of your posts.

Dorian, I would love to become in the forum moderator. What do you think? LOL

f:lux, you're just amazingly altruistic, don't the Samaritans have a place for you? I like that you can spell; I don't like that you think you're some sort of seditionary.

Eh, I'm just about to give a SHOWstudio lecture to the students of Singapore and am just grappling with projector adaptors and power converters. But I will pause from my too-busy-to-moderate schedule just long enough to say that you will be pleased to hear that revisions are being made to the FORUM (and structure of the site) currently, which may well resolve a lot of the above. You'll have noticed we've been a bit quieter than usual of late and that's because we've got noses to the grindstone with said redesign. All will be revealed shortly.

It's still likely, nonetheless, that we will never be in the position to take the nannyish, Stalinesque position you suggest Lucy for reasons Dorian has outlined. But we have still got all your interests at heart and there's room for everyone: now, how New Labour is that?!

Hi Penny, I realised how busy you are even when you're not giving lectures in Singapore so thanks for taking to respond even if you didn't really have time to read my post.

And if you ever give a lecture on the History of World Politics, could you let me know? I'd love to understand how you link Stalin and Blair ideologically. I might then better understand how S/s is supposed to function.

Hmmm...where does she link Blair & Stalin ideologically. All I can see is reference to third-way, lifestyle politics a la Giddens et al.? You know the notion that we can accomodate anyone regardless of economic status etc. - load of bullshit, really, and one of the primary reasons, I feel, that our culture has become so stale & throw-away. Likewise, though, there are points of conjuncture between Stalinism & New Labour, primarily in their interpretation of socialism & their authoritarian stances. Bov'?

F:Lux, I'm not in a position to make editorial judgements on the quality of Chris's contribution to the SHOWstudio forum, and I never jumped to Gareth Pugh's defence. I've simply asked people to play nicely.

The fact that I've been busy building a new website for SHOWstudio, including an improved forum, and also on holiday means I've had little time to sit going through the forum looking for venomous posts. I asked people to alert me when things came up, and I've heard nothing. I spotted this topic had raised it's head again by chance.

Even if I had been told of something I would simply say what I've said before which is, put simply: play nicely. I'm not going to start contacting people about their posting habits as I believe if people are going to say something they should be able to look out for themselves.

I'm here to make sure the site works, not to make sure people are nice to each other. I've tried to instill a sense of respect, and explain that people need to think before they post, but that respect has to be mutual, and reasoned. It seems that Chris hasn't respected other people's requests within the forum, but I don't know for sure as I haven't sat and read through the 950+ posts he's made to the SHOWstudio forum since it started, or the 600+ threads that are in the forum which he might have contributed to, therefore I simply can't - and therefore won't - make a judgement on it.

I will say that SHOWstudio is not a space to post random observations... it's easily possible to find self-publishing tools on the internet if one want's to do that. www.blogger.com, www.myspace.com, www.typepad.com, www.livejournal.com ... any of these can be used to publish in a space where one is free of criticism and can say what they like. and all of them provide help and advice so simple that even the most un-technical web user can set them up.

Finally, I don't think Penny's off hand political references are any indication of how SHOWstudio works. And more importantly SHOWstudio IS NOT it's forum. It's forum is simply a view of SHOWstudio, so understanding how SHOWstudio works would not explain how people behave in the forum, or why we don't have the time to moderate every topic.

Get rid of all this perplexing drivel about pennys throwaway comments about new labour, dont be so cerebral about things.

Im not here to have the last word but as I mentioned before in the thread on newquay there are options for Chris to post his ideas and observations, everyone tried to tell him nicely that his board is not really for this purpose and poses nothing more than noisy threads that no one really reads until they turn into the the second type of thread that seems to be prevalent... trolling bun fights.

I would say that I am leaving a fresh batch of buns in a large locked bag on my way out this forum today, the combination is easy enough to guess.

Its up to everyone to say, fuck that, lets gets some more buns and stick in this stupid behavioural pattern of having to argue for an aruments sake, or wait a minute... these buns are really nice (gluten free, no dairy and still taste fuckin excellent!), lets have these with some nice green tea or a soya chai and actually talk about something thats a bit more interesting or that matters to people.

The choice is yours... and the combination is the number of posts sebastian/chris has posted so far on this forum.

Good luck, i'll be back in a week and hopefully my buns were eaten instead of being thrown on the wall.

Ciao and aloha as they say in lake como...

Hi all,

It seems my post above offended Chris Summerfield and he took it as a direct attack on him, which he's emailed me about. Therefore I want to set the record straight, say sorry to Chris, and make clear that the above stands for all.

Please remember: You perpetuate topics you aren't interested in by responding to them. Please just ignore them. And if you post a topic and no-one replies to it it's in really bad form to follow it up again (and again). This is a discussion forum, not a place for people's monologues.

Thanks

Chris, the email address you contacted me from doesn't work - hotmail says no email box with that address exists... this is the same email address as the one you've registered with on the forum, which is why you can't log into your account as we don't have a valid email address to send a password reset to.

Sorry about posting this publicly, but I've no way of conacting you without a valid email address.

does moderation mean bland?was it asquiff? the old english pm who was observing american politics re very simmilar to english politics saying theres two partys the republicans who are like our conservative party and the democrats who are like our conservative party.
you could make a point of women-only mp prospective selection shortlists as a stalinist aesthetic adopted by tony blair and now cameron as a centralization of power and against the wishes of democracy..vizavee the ousting of the bethnal green mp oona thingy by the local populace at the last election.
....the point is does everybody want a cookie cutter uniformity or is it vive la difference?