This Just In: People Lie On The Internet

Let's just clear this up straight away: Sordel is not [repeat: not] a gay half-American girl called Amina Abdullah who lives in Damascus.

And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.

McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.

Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."

Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.

The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.

Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.

Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.

Inevitably, Margate

In the absence of anything untoward happening this week at Harrow or the Derby County F. C., it is to the BBC's Resident Intellectual that we must turn for the latest in our occasional but ever-popular series "Serendipitously Geographical Scandals of Our Times."

Andrew Marr (for it is he) has caused the entire blogosponge to seep & reek menacingly in his direction for some unguarded remarks he made recently dissing the Nerd Collective and accusing (what I am forced to refer to as) us for living in our parents' basement and suffering from acne.

Much of the considered response to this has been of the who-you-calling-ugly-Jugears? variety, which does sort of cede the high ground, but if blogs were written with pencils then a rainforest would by now have been thrown away as they were whittled to an ever-more-lethal sharpness for the purpose of bursting the R. I.'s balloon.

Yet the contrarian Sordel suspects that the hidden purpose of Marr's attack may have been missed. In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev wished to repudiate Stalin, he did so in closed session of Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When Ed Murrow sought to denounce the U.S. Television industry in 1958., he did so directly to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago.

The Resident Intellectual, noted historian that he is (despite actually being an English graduate), could scarcely have overlooked these precedents. One braves the lions not from behind the bars of their cage, but in their very den.

Presumably this is why he excoriated us not on his Sunday television show, but at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, where you can hardly throw a shoe without hitting full in the face someone who has been nursing a modest commentary on Google.

(After all, The Times is virtually the patron saint of writers of unsolicited opinions.)

There they were, suckling at the teat of literary wisdom, composing quietly in their heads the Cheltenham Festival installment at which they would doubtless issue a stinging rebuke to Melvyn Bragg and pass a cruel but apposite comment on Mark Kermode's leather jacket when - Bingo! - the probing searchlight of the Resident Intellectual pinned them to their seats.

In a moment of Brechtian alienation, the audience was suddenly upon the metaphorical stage, lampooned and vilified like the celebrated men & women of letters that we all so long to be.

Yet once the Great Magician had pulled this rabbit from the hat, he had one more elegant trick to play upon us all. He looked us tenderly in the collective eye and gently, reassuringly, told us: "not you, constant reader ... not you, middle aged office clerk raging against the dying of the light."

"I do not inflict this cruelty upon you, but upon the spotty teenager drinking cider in his parents' basement."

Whew, for a minute there I was feeling wounded.