Labour Epilepsy Smear OUT OF ORDER

The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog are no strangers to health smears, although in the past they had restricted their attacks to indicating their intellectual inadequacy by making claims about their targets’ mental health, which, like most Fawkes claims, they made up on the spot and would have been unable to stand up had someone taken the SOBs to the cleaners for it.

Behold he who sits in moral judgment on others

Now, The Great Guido has broadened this front to take the experience of one Labour member and use it to attack the whole party. And as Staines is himself of less than perfect courage, this task was delegated to apprentice sandwich monitor - oops, sorry, “Senior Reporter” - Ross Kempsell, another Fawkes minion of no discernible principle.

Sue Jones had watched a promotional video for next month’s Labour Live event. The video, which contained flashing images, did not come with a health warning. Ms Jones, who has a form of epilepsy, suffered a visual reflex seizure. She contacted the Labour Party partly to warn other sufferers, and partly to ensure those producing the videos understood the effects that certain kinds of images can have.

Ross Kempsell - another creep pretending to be a journalist

The response she received was swift and sincere. “I am more than happy with that swift response, because it indicates a party that cares about inclusion, and is more than willing to take responsibility for ensuring their material is up to a high health and safety standard”, she noted. But by this time, the Fawkes massive had latched on to the issue.

Their take was as dishonest and insensitive as it was ill-informed. “The Labour Party’s promotional video for its troubled youth festival Labour Live is causing people to have seizures. Activists have complained on Twitter about suffering seizures and migraines after viewing the flashing Labour Live graphics, which come without a warning”, they told, grandly following that with “Guido is not publishing the video for health reasons”.

Guido is full of shit. As Ms Jones says, “Visual reflex seizures induced by complex stimuli may be triggered by patterned and flashing displays … in susceptible people, seizures can happen because of the properties of video displays, the triggers are identified as perceived brightness, pattern, flicker frequency, and colour contrasts”. The Fawkes post included both a flashing image, and plenty of colour contrasts. Moral high ground my arse.

She also correctly noted “Fawkes is a nasty gossip-mongering vulture, who will use anything he can to promote his vicious right wing views”. That’t putting it mildly. Staines and his pet creeps - Zelo Street recently covered their propensity to lie and smear HERE - have also claimed erroneously that the Labour Live video “is causing people to have seizures … Activists have complained”. Plural. More evidence-free claims.

Sue Jones didn’t “feel it’s appropriate to use someone’s illness and misfortune to make a tenuous attack on the Labour party … In fact it’s a despicable thing to do”. But a request to remove the Tweet signposting their attack has gone unanswered, and as she observed, “Some of his equally virulent followers commenting on the thread under his post thought my seizure was hilarious”. That’s the level at which The Great Guido operates.

Once again, the Fawkes rabble is bang out of order. And once again, there will be only schoolboy sniggering in response, and more of the same later. That’s not good enough.