Is hosted by Jackart.

Who somewhat ungrammatically draws attention to a lefty blogger’s poor spelling and grammar in her rejection of police handling of the student demonstrations:

HarpyMarx gives her perspective of the protests, and her spelling & grammar deteriorates as her anger rises…

Oops.

I never know quite what to make of persistent spelling and grammar blunders in other bloggers’ work. Occasional typos are one thing and have to be ignored – we don’t all have armies of proof-readers or even an easy Spellcheck.

But methinks Jakart can’t have it both ways: it’s not fair to poke fun at someone else’s feeble errors while repeatedly deploying the egregious priveleged onesself.

Or is it oneself? I can never remember.

Jackart also looks in a businesslike way at blog comment moderation:

The F-word deals with the fraught process of comment moderation. This is not something I have to deal with on this blog – free speech and all that. But some people think that words can hurt, and feel the need to censor others’ opinions, and it can become a lengthy and time-consuming process. Which is another reason I don’t bother.

A third reason to not bother is that as I understand it, if you moderate you ARE responsible for comments which are potentially libellous…

Because most readers of this site (a) sensibly agree with me, and (b) in any case are usually too senior and busy to litter the Internet with ad hoc thoughts, I do not have too big a job moderating this site. If some people are getting too strident or unpleasant in their comments, I drop them a private line asking them to ease up, which usually works well enough.

It’s not a question of ‘free speech’. More a question of aesthetics – just as some restaurants and bars go for a certain deliberate style and keep it that way (eg via dress-codes), so do websites.

That said, certain feminist and other supposedly progressive sites seem to have a policy of excluding comments from people who firmly disagree with them, even if politely couched. So they lose credibility accordingly, as far as I’m concerned.  

Anyway, here I am in Brussels. Every time I come here I struggle to get on the right train on the appalling Metro.

It astounds me that all major cities do not have some sort of Oyster card system. Here in Brussels there are no obvious reasons to pay for a ticket, or obvious obstacles to getting on and off the system for free.

So the service must be losing huge sums of money, one reason for the horrible state of the Metro station right by the main EU Commission buildings, like something out of a dystopian B-horror movie.

On the subject of Brussels, here is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard again exhibiting unseemly glee at the state of the Eurozone:

It is no surprise to eurosceptics that Europe should have reached this fateful point where leaders must choose between the twin traumas of EMU break-up or giving up their countries.

Nor is it a surprise to an inner-core of schemers within the EU system, who have always calculated that they could exploit such a crisis to catalyse political union.

However, it is a big surprise to Europe’s leaders, and they do not know what to do about it…

Back to BBRU. Jackart urges all readers to send in ideas for the Britblog Roundups, so I do the same.

If you spot a good piece on a British blog which deserves a mention, send the link to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Stop Press:  Drogba and now Rooney both miss penalties hahahahaha