[UPDATE (1 April) – Oh, of course this was a joke. Happy April Fools’ day everyone!]
To be honest, this is not an easy post to write but I’m glad to finally get it off my chest, and I don’t really have any choice now that Justin has gone way, way too far with his sock-puppeting.
Yeah, you heard me… though it won’t come as quite so big a surprise to some people, I’m sure.
What started out last night as a friendly game of ‘sober blogger vs. drunk blogger’ ended with Justin making an inexplicable false accusation about me surfing porn and masturbating (!) while were arguing.
This followed his getting far too drunk and turning on me over Iain Dale’s stunt that followed Glen Jenvey’s paedo-smear.
Iain Dale gave an excuse for his actions that was extraordinarily pissweak, and then hilariously insisted that I accept his excuse *and* keep it confidential. I shared that excuse with Justin McKeating last night, which was a BIG mistake, because Justin was so pissed by that time that he took Iain’s side and attacked me in a dedicated post.
I asked Justin to delete the post, but he refused.
Then Justin McKeating had the temerity to accuse *me* of sock-puppetry while he himself was sock-puppeting on his own website (which is quite possibly the saddest thing you can do, and is itself pretty damn close to masturbation).
He produced as ‘evidence’ of my surfing porn a link in one of my comments on his website that he himself changed soon after I submitted it.
[Appeal to witnesses: please come forward if you watched the exchange last night and saw the URL change.]
Several other comments soon turned up backing Justin’s version of events (before and after he suddenly flipped moderation on), but these were so obviously sock-puppets that I had to say something.
And here’s the bombshell… this is not a first for Justin by any means. He’s been at it for years.
Many if not all of the major posts about sock-puppeting on this site have been aimed at least in part at Justin, in the dim hope that the thick-headed badger-faced twunt would get the message, but no. Instead, he would usually turn up and say “Right on, Tim!” etc. under comments or on his own site, and then go right on doing it.
This has really been weighing on my mind (and getting on my tits!), but I haven’t said anything before now, because:
1. We are political allies, and we have had an agreed policy of never criticising each other
2. I was genuinely worried that the lying manipulative two-faced blog-cheat Iain Dale would use it as ‘proof’ that he and his allies are innocent of all sock-puppetry on his website and others.
“How long has Justin be doing this?” I hear you ask.
Since before I was even accepting comments on this blog is the answer. Even before ‘Chicken Yoghurt’ existed. Oh, and well before the notorious blog-cheats Iain Dale and Paul Staines turned up and mastered the art of sock-puppetry themselves.
Fittingly enough, Justin used to run a website called ‘Bar Room Philosophy’.
[How’s the hangover this morning, sport? So sorry that it’s the least of your problems, but you brought this on yourself.]
Infuriatingly, the wanker used query strings in his URLs on BRP, so very few actual threads have been stored in the Web Archive, but here’s a glimpse of a rare comprehensively-archived page from 2003 that should also explain why I didn’t call him on it when I first caught him at it; we had anti-war protest to get on with, and I was not going to start slagging off allies over a few lousy sock-puppets (especially when I was so busy building/producing/pitching weblogs for others that I didn’t have time to finally sort comments for my own damn site).
‘Bar Room Philosophy’ came and went, but Justin returned in 2005 at ‘Chicken Yoghurt’ to fight the good fight in the general election that halved Blair’s majority.
Well, I say ‘fight the good fight’, but I was constantly forced to delete sock-puppeting comments on Bloggerheads *and* Backing Blair, especially as polling day came and went.
I’m holding back on evidence from my own website until Justin emerges (I don’t want The Privacy Princess bitching needlessly about my publishing old IP addresses) but here’s an example I remember on Justin’s own website that really takes the biscuit; it’s under a post accusing Tony Blair of astro-turfing!
I clearly recall having to delete an exact duplicate of this comment from my own website, because the IP address used to submit it matched Justin’s at the time, and my post didn’t even mention Celia Barlow. I’ll be asking Clive if any deletion logs exist for that example, but I have puh-lenty more; some from my site, and lot and lots and lots and lots and lots from Iain Dale’s.
At one stage, Justin was totally out of control and making ridiculous fake comments in *support* of Iain Dale and trying to make them look like obvious sock-puppets.
Not only is in unfair to frame another webmaster like that (even a blog-cheat like Iain Dale), it’s downright confusing to have to think the sentence; ‘Justin McKeating is pretending to be Iain Dale pretending to be an anonymous supporter’ (and that’s one of the more straightforward examples!)
So, enough is enough. I should have called time on this ages ago, but we’re finally here now, so let’s get this over with:
Justin McKeating is a sock-puppeting git… and I have proof.
Comments shall remain closed until such time that Justin alerts me via private email that he is (a) awake, (b) sober, and (c) ready to answer for his *years* of sock-puppetry.
And if he denies it, I have a pile of evidence ready to show the world.
[Your sock-puppeting ends here, Justin. Ditto for our friendship. But you still have one chance and one chance only to explain yourself at Bloggerheads, and then you are BANNED.]
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UPDATE (10:40am) – Justin is still ‘asleep’. This’ll wake him up: