So Christopher Hitchens is dead and we have to instantly *this second* decide what his legacy will be; because if we don’t the thread will be locked and imagine the utter horror if the other side got the last word! Those who held Hitchens in high regard have given their predictable eulogies on his importance but the dramallama appeared on twitter this afternoon when the World at One invited Tariq Ali to give his opinion on Hitchens life.

It’s fair to say his assessment of Hitchens wasn’t wholly sympathetic.

Cue twittermob. Bizarrely one of the most vocal was Richard Madeley who variously accused Ali of ‘patronising + attacking him (Hitchens) and hijacking the agenda’. I’m unsure what the agenda was exactly but Dick had a plan to counteract ‘the hijacking’ and it involved getting Caitlin Moran to not only call Ali an ‘ass hat’ (seemingly before she’d actually listened to the clip concerned) but to think about writing a column about it.

Oh Tariq. This is what happens when you spend decade upon decade merely ranting; the Dicks and Caits of the world eventually size you up to take you down. I bet you already miss Hitch.

Personally as someone who found both Hitchens and Ali to be wrong, thought provoking and interesting even though ninety per cent of the time they gave the impression of comparing penis sizes (‘no I’m right my argument and intellectualism is literally 4 inches bigger’): I don’t think Hitchens would have felt offended, attacked let alone patronised by those who hold true to their negative opinions of him in death as in life. Quite the opposite he almost certainly would have supported them against the veneer of agreement that we tend to apply once those we disagree with pass away.
This NY Times article about the death of Mother Teresa and criticism of ‘beloved figures’ when they die is especially pertinent now.

That kind of reticence was not shared by Christopher Hitchens, who quickly agreed to interviews in the aftermath of Mother Teresa’s death. He is the author of ”The Missionary Position,” which was first published in 1995 and is a critical examination of Mother Teresa that decried her association with Haiti’s Duvalier family and other dubious donors.
On his answering machine in Washington, Mr. Hitchens left a blunt statement about the famous nun. ”She believed we were all miserable sinners conceived in iniquity. She made no exception, I believe, for herself. She was a lifelong friend of the rich and powerful, a lifelong lecturer of morals to the poor. So the details may be found in my book, ‘The Missionary Position,’ available in paperback at fine bookstores everywhere.”
Following the nun’s death, Mr. Hitchens’s publisher, Verso, immediately ordered the printing of 5,000 more copies of the book, which until then had been fading away, according to Mr. Robinson.

He would have found those that advocate a false ‘niceness’ towards him simply because he has died to be the ones who were patronising. Those that don’t wish Tariq Ali to voice his opinions on Hitchens in the immediacy of his death simply have not read nor understood what Hitchens was all about.

Now, the first part of that is obviously true. More intelligent ppl than me have pointed out to me that the second accusation may get me into trouble. So, before my ass gets sued, a clarification. Delingpole writes comment and doesn’t know much climate science at all. He admitted he interpreted interpretations by other people. But I can’t find any instance of him apologising for lying about anything, so if people wrongly got the impression I had accused him of worse, I withdraw the accusation. As he mostly opines on various issues, technically he cannot get factual stuff wrong. I don’t want to accuse him of stuff he didn’t do.

He is however still a nasty person. Last year he published the name and details of an innocent member of the public who had contacted their MP with questions about the environment. After Delingpole’s readers started harassing this individual, the Telegraph took the post down. Neither the website nor Delingpole issued an apology for that as far as I know.

In an interview with the Evening Standard today he says:

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

Is that meant to be a joke?

Jacobson looks at an Asian person and thinks they might be terrorists or want to kill Jews? What is he smoking? Has the paranoia got to him?

Does he look at me and think ‘Hmmm, this guy has brown skin. Maybe he wants to kill me. I better run and hide!‘. Perhaps he should stop reading Jihad Watch or something. Idiot.

Update: a few people on Twitter say he’s saying it positively.

Let’s try a thought experiment. If I say: “Isn’t it great we can stop thinking of these white people as morally degenerate savages for a bit and see them as nice people who cleaned up after a riot” – that wouldn’t be highly patronising?

This was Friday night – and don’t say anything about the shirt I was wearing!

The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.

I’m going to stick my neck out and predict tonight will see a lot less trouble than yesterday. I think this has peaked.

Of course there is a good chance people will read this later tonight and laugh. But that is the whole danger with predictions.

My thinking is this. Whatever ‘alienation’ and ‘dispossession’ these youths feel from society (and why are they mostly men?) – the looting has flared up mostly because there is a widespread perception that the police cannot do much about it, and this is their chance to get some free stuff and have one over the police.

This has become a socially driven event, where the expectation that they can get away with it drives it further. Without that expectation, it should in theory die quickly.

I say ‘in theory’ because the other problem is that a lot is dependent on flash-points. Without the spark, a tense situation can easily dissolve into nothing.

The police talking up their numbers and showing shots of them suiting up in heavy armour should have an impact. So will the raids last night on some of the looters.

If London is much quieter last night – it will show that the flare up of the London riots (following Tottenham on the first night) was driven more by the sense of weakness with the police (or ‘shorting the law’ as Alison Charlton called it) than by deep rage (though I accept there is low-level rage present regardless).

Going through the BBC News website yesterday, I discovered Muslim comedian Humza Arshad, AKA ‘Badman’ for the first time. What I didn’t know then was that he has already had literally millions of Youtube hits, been on BBC Asian Network and will soon be starting his first comedy tour, joined by several well known British Asian comedians including Jeff Mirza.

After a hilarious half hour, during which I was mostly literally laughing out loud, I found out all this and more. Humza Arshad- sorry, ‘Badman,’ has a Youtube channel through which he runs his comedy video diary. It’s called- you guessed it- Diary of a Badman. The caption of his first Youtube video describes him as ‘a badman with seriously good looks.’

According to BBC News, Humza hopes his comedy will not only entertain, but also challenge perceptions of Islam. His videos are filled with moments of fun about everything from the iPhone 4 to the Asian woman’s Tupperware obsession- something that all British Asian children of a certain age know only too well!

But what makes Humza Arshad stand out is that each of his videos ends with a serious message connected to Islamic teachings. In the first, after a fight with his mum, he ends by recalling the Prophet’s words about respecting mothers. In his Eid video, he explains that the festival is all about sacrifice and in the latest, he makes sure to thank Allah, along with his fans, for his success.

If Humza Arshad’s comedy sounds like your cup of ‘chai,’ you can watch his whole series of Youtube videos here. He also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. And he now takes bookings- he can be emailed at badmanbooking[at]hotmail.co.uk.

I, for one, can’t wait for his next video.

Muslims abroad and far-right parties such as the BNP and EDL come a joint distant second in the poll by Comres.

They were asked: “Which one of the following groups, if any, do you think is most to blame for Islamophobia, fear of Islam, in the UK?”

29% of Britons blamed the media. 14% blamed Muslims abroad and 13% blamed far-right parties.

Just 11% blamed Muslims in the UK for ‘Islamophobia’, with politicians getting the same amount of blame at 10%.

Around 1% agreed with the statement: “I do not think that Islamophobia exists in the UK”. They’re the ones who spend most of their time trolling websites.

Another question by ComRes asked whether people thought the Qur’an justified use of violence against non-Muslims.

Around 14% thought it did, while around 65% disagreed.

In each case, they’re not fussed about the argument itself, however nuanced it may be, but that it was actually published on Libcon. How dare you! WHERE IS THE SOLIDARITY YOU SCAB! I’ve given up trying to debate such idiocy.

But it seems this kind of thinking is not just limited to some hard-lefties.

Yesterday, a whole bunch of people were annoyed the Guardian gave space to Jonnie Marbles to explain why he tried to pie Rupert Murdoch in the face.

I thought the stunt was idiotic and counter-productive, but if he had offered that article to me I would have published it on Liberal Conspiracy without a doubt. The whole point of building a platform is to give space to a wide range of people. No, that does not automatically mean you chuck in Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis, as someone suggested to me. There is a slight difference between throwing a pie in someone’s face and hardcore racism.

Jonnie Marbles was already a big story before the Guardian gave him space: Google News recorded mentions in nearly 10,000 articles. Just because you don’t like a view doesn’t mean it should not be out there. And yes, that includes the BNP and Muslim extremists (after all, Newsnight, Today regularly give the BNP / Anjem Choudhary a space. What I object to there is giving them excessive space).

I bet someone will now try to dredge up some supposed instance of me contradicting myself. Even if I did that in the past – this is my stance now. People complaining about being subjected to alternative views they don’t like – especially when they haven’t paid for reading it – really need to get a grip.

As it happens, my own view is that Rupert Murdoch is one of the few genuinely great men of our times, a man who has done more to enrich our lives than any other single human being of the past generation and who should be a hero for his commitment to freedom.

Awesome! HE IS THE GREATEST, WHY CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT YOU EVIL LIBRULS?!

I want to clarify one point though. I said earlier that Brendan O’Neill was at Living Marxism magazine when it accused ITN of fabricating stuff and lost its legal battle and ran out of money. What I should clarify is I don’t know if he played a part in that scandal. I don’t want it to look like I’m insinuating he was part of that legal battle (he most likely wasn’t). I have little time for the RCP / Living Marxism / Spiked Online crew – but to accuse them of something they didn’t do would be wrong. And I don’t want it to look like I’m doing that.

I was involved in a minor one a few years ago, when I off-handedly tweeted that I welcomed that right-wing demagogue Rush Limbaugh ended up in hospital. Immediately, Conservative Home and Iain Dale were furiously trying to whip up outrage against me. No one outside their circle took the bait and the pitchfork mob never came. I survived.

But it usually works like this: (group 1) there are some sensible people who make valid criticism. In the case of Johann Hari, there were some journalists and professors who thought it was unethical. Fair enough. (I thought what he did was wrong but the “scandal” had gotten out of hand by noon… it was still going strong at 6pm).

(group 2) Then there are other prominent tweeters who just like to get on the bandwagon and offer their opinion on the issue. The bandwagon starts to roll apace. (Group 3) Then there are people who really hate the person in question. Hari has a legion of haters out there who think he’s too much of a softy liberal. Their politics isn’t necessarily leftist, they’re just nihilists. They rage at anyone and pretty much everyone. Twitter is there for them to rage at, and if they can join a mob to rage with, all the better. They love the opportunity to point out how principled they are.

(group 4) Then there are the right-wingers. They usually want the bandwagon to gather pace before dipping their toes, partly because they’ve complained about lefty Twitter mobs in the past. But they don’t like missing opportunities to lay into political enemies. So when Harry Cole, Iain Dale and Toby Young start to become sanctimonious about journalistic ethics – it’s an unstoppable bandwagon with every man and his dog on it. I’m surprised YouGov didn’t do an instant poll.

The whole Hari hate-fest became an unedifying spectacle of immense proportion that took up most of the day. Before anyone accuses me of being biased – I’ve objected in the past when some tweeters were raging against a writer at the Daily Mail complaining how difficult life was for the middle class. That became really unedifying too.

I was accused of leading a Twitter mob against Rod Liddle too, but that was just Catherine Bennett complaining that I’d blogged about his racist crap a few times on Libcon. (I stupidly used the line “I’m part of the mob and I’m proud of it” at the end of that article – not again).

We all make mistakes and sooner or later I’ll say something stupid on Twitter too. This will not doubt be used by people who hate me (I also have legions, possibly even more than Johann has because I’ve been blogging for six years) to whip up a Twitter storm. Today brought me a step closer to deleting my Twitter account. Some things are not worth the hassle.

All I’m saying is this. If you’re one of those people who gleefully participated with your pitchfork today – just hope it never happens to you.

Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders was acquitted of inciting hatred of Muslims in a court ruling on Thursday that may strengthen his political influence and exacerbate tensions over immigration policy.

The case was seen by some as a test of free speech in a country which has a long tradition of tolerance and blunt talk, but where opposition to immigration, particularly from Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries, is on the rise.

But its a fallacy that Geert Wilders is just a critic of Islam as a religious doctrine – he frequently makes a jump from criticising Islam to demanding discrimination against Muslims. The idea that Geert Wilders believes in free speech is also a fallacy.

Both myths keep getting perpetuated by a media that pays no attention to what Geert Wilders says nor make any attempt to pay proper attention to the issue.

In a completely under-reported speech by Geert Wilders a few years ago, he laid out a “ten point plan to save the west”. These were the ten points:

1. Stop cultural relativism. We need an article in our constitutions that lays down that we have a Jewish-Christian and humanism culture.
2. Stop pretending that Islam is a religion. Islam is a totalitarian ideology. In other words, the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam.
3. Stop mass immigration by people from Muslim countries. We have to end Al-Hijra. 4. Encourage voluntary repatriation.
5. Expel criminal foreigners and criminals with dual nationality, after denationalization, and send them back to their Arab countries. Likewise, expel all those who incite to a ‘violent jihad’.
6. We need an European First Amendment to strengthen free speech.
7. Have every member of a non-Western minority sign a legally binding contract of assimilation.
8. We need a binding pledge of allegiance in all Western countries.
9. Stop the building of new mosques. As long as no churches or synagogues are allowed to be build in countries like Saudi-Arabia we will not allow one more new mosque in our western countries. Close all mosques where incitement to violence is taking place. Close all Islamic schools, for they are fascist institutions and young children should not be educated an ideology of hate and violence.
10. Get rid of the current weak leaders. We have the privilege of living in a democracy. Let’s use that privilege and exchange cowards for heroes. We need more Churchills and less Chamberlains.

Only a fool would call those demands the hallmark of an advocate of free speech.

Saying that, I think Muslim organisations in the Netherlands are making a mistake by making this about discrimination, when they should point to these speeches and make it an issue about free speech.

Far from showing any sympathy however, Harry’s Place regular contributor “Libby T” is crowing over his death, calling him “insane to the end”, a “nut”, “lunatic”, “mad” and a “political quack”. I’m sure the fact that Haw opposed a war in Iraq that bloggers at Harry’s Place keep defending (like a bunch of inbred disease-ridden rats) has nothing to do with it.

Gimpy, who blogged about Brian Haw’s condition is right when he says:

Mr Haw’s cancer was almost certainly incurable, but rather than spending his final days being cared for by medical professionals in the UK, he was sent to Germany by conspiracy theorists, offered the false prospect of a cure, and was subjected to unnecessary and ineffective treatments.

There is certain to be a resurgence of debate about Mr Haw’s principles, politics and behaviour as a result of his death, but probably little on the circumstances surrounding it. Regardless of what you may think of Mr Haw, perhaps the greatest injustice he has undergone in the last decade is not the disruption, court actions and parliamentary discussion surrounding his protest, all of which have been debated and ruled on by a transparent democratic and legal system, but the falsities told to him by supporters of alternative medicine in denial of the facts.

Homoeopathy is dangerous when it gives people false hope. Maybe Haw believed that it could help him where conventional medicine couldn’t. Desperate people do desperate things.

But all this is irrelevant to bloggers at Harry’s Place. What matters there is the willingness to use the death of a person to advance the convoluted argument that people who opposed the war were “mad”.

Fellow blogger Neil D defends the blog-post in the comments below by asking: “Are we to remain silent while Penny and Benn wax lyrical about him?“. No, clearly you’re meant to react by dancing on his grave. Just wow.

He says:

There is no attempt to properly convey cause and effect, to report the misery, violence and pillage that demean and deny freedom to the Palestinians and provoke their (limited) actions.

For example:

>> In the bulletins they examined, the BBC gave 421.5 lines of text to Israeli explanations of why they attacked Gaza: the “need for security”, “enemy rockets”, “to stop the smuggling of weapons”. The BBC devoted 14.25 lines to references to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories and 10.5 lines to the blockade. The BBC repeatedly stressed the word [Israeli] “retaliation”, and also implied that police stations bombed by the Israelis were military targets, describing other casualties as “civilian”. It described these civilian installations as “targets”. Newspapers such as the Guardian did point out the distinction.

>> “The offer that Hamas was said to have made, to halt this exchange [rockets v shells and air strikes] … was almost completely absent from the coverage,” say the authors. They cite a BBC reporter saying: “Israel feels itself surrounded by enemies, with reason.” They add: “We have not found a commentary noting that ‘Palestinians feel themselves to be subject to a brutal military occupation, with reason.’ Israel’s official view is given as fact, they say, but the Palestinian view, on the rare occasions it is found at all, is not. Israelis “state”, Palestinians “claim”.

>> Any Israeli casualty is headline news, shown in high quality images. BBC teams are based in West Jerusalem, de facto Israeli territory, and are on hand. Arab casualties may be shown in reports of a funeral, usually agency film, the victim anonymous. The Israelis, it seems, are for the BBC “people like us”. The Arabs are “the other”.

>> For example, the BBC consistently describes illegal Israeli settlements as “held to be illegal”. But they are illegal. Even the Foreign Office says so. The BBC always adds “Israel disputes this.” Well it would, wouldn’t it? Why these caveats?

Shame on the BBC for not improving its coverage of the Middle East.

And I’m sure people will say ‘just watch Al-Jazeera instead’, but that ignores the BBC not only has a duty to proper journalism but also reaches vast parts of the country in a way al-Jazeera can’t.

Ms. Penny, more than any other writer, attracts a tidal wave of hate-filled abuse. In the comments on one critical post, her death is called for, her looks are dissected and scorned, she is called a ‘cow’ and ‘bitch‘ various times and attracts other comments too unpleasant to link to.

And that is just under one post. Posts frequently emerge attacking her, often leading to a plentiful supply of hateful comments, especially those focusing on her appearance. Much of the abuse is sexual/gendered in nature, and I can’t see a male blogger attracting the same sort of vitriol.

The other frequent criticism of Ms. Penny is due to her privileged background. She is quite open about this, and it is unclear why having a privileged background should stop an individual from taking the stances that Ms. Penny does (as long as she practices what she preaches). Would her critics prefer that she ignores the issues she cares about and instead revels in the advantages her upbringing has given her?

Some people manage to criticise Ms. Penny without resorting to either of these tactics, as they should. Those who can’t manage to criticise Ms. Penny in a civil way should hold their tongues, as they are nothing more than bullies.

ANJEM CHOUDHARY! The guy who leads about 50 nutjobs and has been banned from almost every Mosque in the country. The guy who is constantly ridiculed and pilloried by other British Muslims for his attention-seeking stunts and promoting his extremist minority sect. This is the guy BBC Newsnight decide should be part of a two-man panel representing British Muslim voices!

It boggles the mind how patronising some people at the BBC still are. They aren’t interested in representing a broad range of mainstream Muslim opinion: they just want to see the ethnics argue.

At one point Jeremy Paxman turns to Taj Hargey and says, “What do you think of that response [referring to Choudhary] when you hear it, purporting to represent your community“. – oh FFS! Paxman, we’re not in the fucking British Raj any more.

No one owns or leads entire ethnic or religious communities. It boggles the mind that this is 2011 and this is how BBC Newsnight still conduct their debates.

There’s an excellent blog post by Ethan Zuckerman here that gives me some pause for thought.

In 1986, Hallin introduced the idea that we can understand journalistic ideas in terms of three “spheres”, widely recognized, though rarely articulated. The “sphere of consensus” includes ideas that are so widely agreed upon that they are generally uncontroversial. As Brooke puts it, “Democracy is good, slavery is bad, all men are created equal. Here truths are self-evident and journalists don’t feel the need to be objective.” Then there’s the “sphere of legitimate controversy”, issues we are used to arguing over, like taxation policy, abortion, gun control and capitol punishment, where reasonable people can disagree, and where journalists generally focus their attention. Finally, there’s the “sphere of deviance”, where ideas are deemed unworthy of a hearing. Brooke offers the “pro-pedophilia” position as an example of the deviant sphere

That’s a good way of thinking how thoughts are organised. But then how to forced ideas to go from being ‘controversial’ to a ‘consensus’? That’s the big question.

With increasing polarisation, which is the environment we are in now, this job becomes harder because people have different spheres. Hardcore libertarians think taxation is like violence, while ultra-socialists may consider it as key to a civilised society. I think political discussion on the internet can exacerbates polarisation.

This means the clash of spheres is intense. This leads to even more conflict for two reasons. Firstly, because people end up congregating in areas where others agree with them. That confirmation bias is fed daily and it creates a sense of solidarity and community. People like that. But they start thinking most people in the country share those spheres of thinking.

So when they encounter someone of a different ideological bent, that frustrates and angers them.

Phenomena like confirmation bias (a tendency to overweight information that agrees with our preconceptions) and disconfirmation bias (the tendency to discount information we disagree with) contribute to a pattern of “motivated reasoning”, where our emotions distort and shape our “rational” thinking. Mooney suggests that there’s deep neurological reasons for this behavior – we literally have a hair-trigger “fight or flight” reaction to types of information that challenge our belief systems.

As a result, confronting a highly polarized argument with facts frequently backfires.

So not only is there a problem with polarisation, but people of different ideological bent are highly unlikely to be persuaded easily. Especially when approached with ‘facts’ or ‘logical argument’, which lefties are prone to try.

So there’s a point here about polarisation, another one about how that leads to even more conflict, and why it makes persuading people difficult. I’m just thinking out aloud here. But it does also offer a glimpse into the mindset of people who become intensely polarised.

Instead of dealing with these misogynistic and deeply offensive comments, CiF allowed them to dominate the thread.

The editorial team must be aware of the power of their online platform, and their trusted name, and how damaging it is when set to promote an agenda which is discriminatory and founded upon misleading facts and lies. So, why is it doing it?

As a writer for CIF (but I criticise the Guardian enough so I’m not doing this merely because they occasionally pay me for articles) – I’ve also had similar comments being chucked my way. So I sympathise.

But ultimately I sympathise with the CIF crew, partly because I face similar complaints at Liberal Conspiracy.

I think there are a few ways to approach this.

A conflict of rights
Big blogs have to weight up the right to free speech and a mix of views (which we believe in) within the boundaries of the rules. The rules are that misogyny, racism, homophobia, ad hominem abuse etc is deleted. But the line is not always clear-cut and I constantly get abused for being a ‘censorship nazi’ (which I relish). Most of my co-moderators are more afraid of deleting comments in case they get it wrong and are criticised over it heavily.

So it becomes a tricky balancing act to ensure that people are allowed to say things that others find uncomfortable or distasteful but are still within the boundaries of civil debate and not bigoted. I’m not saying this line is always navigated perfectly. But there will always be some comments that people find racist, homophobic or misogynist because the intention is inferred rather than written outright. In those cases we have to judge the intention of the commenter, and this is not always straightforward.

The numbers are large
CIF gets tons more comments than Libcon does, which makes it harder to police and harder to quickly judge whether a comment is out of order or not. I’m not always around to moderate comments – and even then its post-moderated. This means people don’t have to wait for comments to be approved before carrying on a debate.

This works on LC because most people are well-behaved (and I’ve rooted out trouble-makers) and on CIF it would be difficult otherwise as they have so much debate going on. But its near impossible to police debates so tightly that all debates go in the right direction. It frustrates me as it frustrates Natalie Hanman of CIF when debates get hijacked. But its difficult to justify deleting a comment that does not strictly adhere to the direction the editors want it to go into.

But it is neither about just feminist topics (any topic can get hijacked, and lots of debates turn into arguments), nor is it that we encourage such people. It is the nature of popular sites that they attract a range of readers.

It is also my view that left-wingers prefer ‘safe spaces’ more than right-wingers: and so they end up dominating on Twitter (which is why I add Twitter trackbacks to articles on LC to reflect that), while right-wingers spend more time commenting across blogs. Our posts on the economy for example turn up right-wingers who work in finance. We can’t ban them nor stop them from spouting right-wing economics. The job of lefties should be to argue back (in a civil manner of course).

There will never be a happy medium
Those hoping the situation can be resolved if enough pressure is put on the Guardian are wrong, I think. It won’t happen. However there are technical solutions I would say they should take up (a popular one is where comments flagged up as ‘offensive’ by enough fellow readers) automatically gets a negative ranking and is then ‘hidden’. It can be viewed by people who want to view ‘all comments’ but won’t appear by default. Slashdot.org had this version of commenting.

Gawker and others also implemented a version of this last year I believe, which gave long-time loyal commenters some extra power in being able to ‘hide’ offensive comments. There are several variations of this.

In the end I would say this. Neither CIF nor Liberal Conspiracy are, by the nature of their popularity, ‘safe spaces’ where one side can just talk amongst themselves with given assumptions (though LC rarely hosts articles by right-wingers as CIF does). I also think engaging with right-wingers sometimes makes them more sympathetic to leftie positions than if they were banished to right-wing websites.