Muttering

From The Spinoff:

Cameron Slater, founder of Whale Oil, is stepping away from his creation and has filed for bankruptcy. This follows an earlier announcement that the blogger had suffered a stroke, and that recovery was not coming along easily. Being tangled up in a series of protracted defamation lawsuits at the same time cannot have helped. 

Slater has many enemies. Decent people, however, will be wishing him well. Whatever you think of him, he is a family man. There are people who depend on him. That base level of empathy should trump the feuds of the past

Liam Hehir, allow me to introduce you to M.R.X Dentith:

Dentith's Text in full:

So, there’s quite a lot of muttering about the state of Cameron Slater’s health, & whether he’s as dehabilitated as he & his representatives claim, largely because (I suspect) it’s easier to imagine him still practicing the Dark Arts of Politamancy than being honest about himself 

(“Politamancy” is not a real word; yes, you can use it if you want to, especially when referring to “Dark Arts”) 

However, no matter what you think of Slater and his health, this @nzherald story about his bankruptcy certainly looks suspiciously like someone trying to get out of having to pay the legal and financial cost of running smear campaigns for third parties 

Especially since it refers to the legal cases against him as “vexatious” and how Slater might return to running the “Whale Oil” blog should his health recover sufficiently (which reads a lot – to certain minds – as “When the legal dust settles I can get back to politamancy!”) 

I mean, why should Slater have to deal with the fallout of writing smear posts on behalf of others? It’s certainly very unfair to someone to be held responsible for things printed in public under the guise of investigative reporting!

Bailterspace: