Kevin Bonham Leaves Tasmanian Times (2012)

It has come to my attention that the Tasmanian Times website no longer includes my lengthy 2012 rant where I wrote about why I was leaving it as a regular writer and poster, and also the thread where the TT audience (plus one sad interloping chess troll from Melbourne) debated my departure.  (A very limited relationship persisted after that, which I completely ended earlier this year.)

The deletion of these articles, some time since January 2017, was never requested by me and I was never informed of it.  My request to TT, given that they were unwilling to publicly apologise for Ted Mead's garbage to my satisfaction (or publicly at all) was "remove the link to my site from the sidebar immediately and please cease linking to my site in future."  Even if it resulted from a misinterpretation of my request as a request to remove all existing links to my site, numerous other old articles linking to this site are still up.  

Tasmanian Times has every legal right to remove articles as it sees fit, and its decision to do so (assuming that it was a decision rather than a very strange technical issue) is in no way an issue of free speech, and in no way an act of censorship.  However my reasons for leaving the site belong on the public record and may still be of interest to those who have issues with the bias of Tasmanian Times, with its posters, or with its poor moderation standards.   

They may also be of interest given that an article by Richard Flanagan on "the courage to listen to different ideas" is now topical.  I have down the years had some different ideas about Richard Flanagan's political comments and about his supporters, but if anyone on TT wants to have the courage to listen to those, they can't; they've been deleted (again!)

TT at one stage prominently quoted Leonard Cohen's lines "There is a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in".  In this case that crack is the Wayback Machine!  And if they are de-archived from Wayback, there will be another crack. Fortunately, we don't need pipes passed around on bits of paper anymore; we have Twitter for that.

So here they are then, such as they are, for anyone who ever has reason to read them.

Bonham Leaves TT

(My response to some comments on that thread occurred here.)

'The Rise Of Non-Consistency And The Departure Of Bonham'

(This article was published with quote marks in the title, but the quotes were not in my original.)

TT now prominently quotes a passage from Nietzsche about the individual being overwhelmed by the tribe, one that could not be more utterly lost on its resident pack of conformist deep green Flanagan-worshipping ignosheep and SWERFs.  Fritz must be rolling in his grave.  (UPDATE 2019: It's actually a misattribution from Kipling.)

Update (October 2018): Weirdly, following a redesign of the site, the articles have now resurfaced.