Why I started this blog

Now that some of the less well-balanced types seem to have wandered off elsewhere, I thought that I might explain how and why I came to start this blog. Since it was largely to counter the activities of people like Lisa Amphlett that I began blogging back in 2009, readers might find this interesting. It will also not have escaped notice that I have recently been called a ‘creepy stalker’ and ‘bully’; these complaints too are worth examining.

      In the summer of 2009, before this blog existed, I found myself the target of a good deal of venom by Lisa Amphlett and others. Complete strangers were inventing all sorts of mad stories about me and spreading them all over the internet. I had no way of countering these falsehoods and since they were being related publicly, I thought that I should take steps to deal with them.  Before I started this blog, Lisa Amphlett was already telling people that I was dangerous:

https://twitter.com/untwining/status/2926565462

This was at a time that I had never even heard of her! I am tempted to ask in what way Lisa Amphlett thought that I was dangerous. Did she think that I was physically abusive? Was I a rapist or murderer? No, it was simply that I had a different view about home education than she herself had. Since I had at that time been home educating for eleven years, while she herself was not even  a home educator, you might find it a bit rich that she should choose to say such a thing.


What sort of stories were being fabricated and spread at that time? Well, that I was a former colleague of Graham Badman, for one. The general view among Lisa Amphlett and her cronies like Maire Stafford these days seems to be that googling people’s names is ‘cyber stalking’. They have certainly changed their view about this.  Maire Stafford, who by the way was also making offensive tweets about me at the same time as Lisa Amphlett; that is to say before I started this blog, was all in favour of this sort of thing. Before we look at that, let’s look at a tweet of Maire’s on July 30th 2009:


https://twitter.com/Maire52/status/2927163148

On the same day, some fool posted this on the HE-UK list:

There is a Simon Webb mentioned here as an Area Education Officer.... under
Badman! Listed is the 
CFHE Directorate Structure Chart which is readily available on the
internet.... .


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Like many others, this person  had been researching my life and googling my name to see if he could find anything interesting about me and my family. You might have thought that people like Lisa Amphlett and Maire Stafford would denounce this as ‘creepy stalking’ or ‘cyber stalking’, but you would be wrong. That same day, Maire Stafford said of this on the HE-UK list:

Brilliant research 

Oddly enough, nobody thought that there was anything creepy about the remarks being made about my daughter and the attempts to connect me with Graham Badman. Perhaps Lisa Amphlett did not know about this smear campaign? Of course she did, otherwise she would hardly have tweeted on August 7th 2009 that; ‘Simon Webb says that he is not badman's colleague.’ Lisa Amphlett was right in the thick of  the attacks on me at that time;


https://twitter.com/untwining/status/3175964397

This is why I started this blog; to provide a platform to tackle the rumours that these people were doing their best to spread. Those who have been talking  about stalking and bullying  might stop and ask themselves why they did not have so much to say about this when researching my life on the internet was such a flourishing cottage  industry! Of course, there was not a word of truth in the idea that I was or had been a colleague of Graham Badman's. Here's an idea, the next time that anybody feels like saying that I have been cyber stalking or bullying; don't bother. I cannot tell readers how revolting it is to see people like Lisa Amphlett now claiming to be upset. If she and others like here had not been so keen to dig into my life and tell lies about me in the past, this blog would not even exist.