Thread Wars 3:

MR taking it to the threads, stepping-it-up and further cultivating strategies, noting successes, charting obstructions to bringing nativist nationalism to public acceptance.

Continuing with the second thread wars post (March 30, 2013) from GW:

The thread wars: what next?

So the political threads of the Daily Telegraph are to be available on a restricted basis to non-subscribers to the print or on-line edition.  Whether that basis will be generous enough to preserve the site’s utility for us (that is, as a site where we can offer nationalist analyses without the deadening influence of pre-moderation) remains to be seen.  Regular readers of the DT on-line will be well aware that the journalistic output suffers from Red Bus Syndrome.  Whenever some event of interest occurs, half-a-dozen articles appear about it within an hour.  A restriction to twenty articles a month will considerably hamper selection, and have a scattering effect on our collective presence.

A schwerpunkt is as virtuous in a war of discourse as it is in a war with guns and grenades. The huge progress that has been made over the last couple of years in liberalising speech on the DT threads is largely a product of the weight of nationalist sentiment, not of individual argumentation - excellent though much of that has been.  Individuals are easily dealt with moderation-wise.  It is when everybody is freed to speak inconvenient truths that the moderators’ battle is lost, and this has been the story at the DT.

One can always subscribe, of course, and then there are no restrictions to access.  But what would be the point if the general readership plummets as it did at The Times:

  Since July 2010, News International has required readers who do not subscribe to the print edition to pay £2 per week to read The Times and The Sunday Times online.

  Visits to the websites have decreased by 87% since the paywall was introduced, from 21 million unique users per month to 2.7 million. In April 2009, the timesonline site had a readership of 750,000 readers per day. As of October 2011, there were around 111,000 subscribers to the Times’ digital products.

Whether we can remain at the DT or we look for new journalistic soil to till, it is surely worthwhile maintaining the collective presence we have built up.  I think that is possible.  It may need a site secure from prying eyes as an organisational base.  MR is a public medium.  But at least we can have a discussion here and now about that and the other options that we have in our war for the freedom to state unambiguously that our people must live.