Life and moderating

I spent the morning volunteer moderating on the open (ie: no registration required) post-moderated forums on F... (cough) where I work. Never have I seem such a parade of miserable racism. If anything, the action being post-moderated allows a forum (albeit hopefully brief) for those whose voices are rarely heard in the media. Reactionary (in the true sense of the word) people whose emotional response to a situation is to find an easy answer - an easy villain. In this case it seems to be all Muslims. Moslems. Towel heads. Pakis. asylum seekers. These are the search words used to try and get these messages off the forum.

Of course what deletion does is encourage the same reactionary anger to be turned against those deleting. "This is a free fucking country! Delete this you shit heads!" (the irony being of course that if it said "this is a free country! delete this one then!" it would of course stay up).

Curiously, on a personal level I swear like a trouper, but within agreed fora. I swore in a phone call yesterday and apologised immediately, although it was with work colleagues who know what I'm like. I personally have no problem with swearing. If it gets things out of the system then fine, but - like smoking, the action is socially unacceptable to many and therefore must take place in a mutually agreed setting.

In an "Express your views" war forum, saying "GET OVER THERE AND NUKE THOSE IRAQI BASTARDS" is, generally speaking, not really the done thing. Yes, a view is being expressed, no it is not appropriate. Whilst trying to remain entirely neutral, I am of course delighted to be deleting frightening and life limiting quips like that one. Someone wrote about being called up. "I can't wait! I wonder where they'll send me. Birmingham? Bradford?".

Paranoia slot of the day: I never know whether this is my brain giving me things to worry about or not, and 've also never heard of this in other people but perhaps it's so normal no one mentions it (or more to the point, notices it). Today when I was walking to the office from Farringdon, I had funny little pulling pains. Not big - barely whispers of tugs. Enough however to immediately switch my internal body-consciousness-alert to red alert. I get in to work and of course there's nothing going on.

I have to say, this week seems to have gone on for a century. Thank God I'm generally speaking calming down quite a lot. If it had gone on like Monday / Tuesday I'd be a nervous wreck by now.

Jobs for today: phone doc's to see if test results are back and go get more vitamin pills (for I have run out). I'll tell you about my pill regime sometime. I remind myself of a crank, I really do.