SOMETHING ROTTEN?

In the rapidly growing blogging sea I am, and always will be, a minnow. I blog as a hobby and don't write particularly well. My academic credentials aren't much – a BA from a party school in the University of Texas system. I am an "average" Australian family guy with no claim to fame. I'm definitely not in the same league as a high-powered man like Christopher Sheil.

Sheil is, just in case you don't know, one of the crew of lefties at Larvatus Prodeo. Like most of the LPers he's well educated, and is also very well connected. He's an opinionated, self-confident, take charge guy.
Sheil is, however, notoriously thin skinned: he is particulaly sensitive to critical comments from certain RWDBs. In the course of updating the post immediately below, I discovered that Sheil is possibly even more sensitive to criticism than I imagined. You see, a link I placed in a Sheil thread at LP has gone "dead". Is this merely an amazing cosmic coincidence or did someone at LP purposely disable the link? Read on and come to your own conclusion.

For one thing, the now dead link – it worked fine when posted – is to a known Sheil nemesis. Sheil's almost immediate reaction was to kill any interest in the link by opening – within three hours of the link being placed – a new thread on the same subject. This new thread neither mentions nor links to the old. A subsequent Mark Bahnisch post on the same subject mentions and links to the second Sheil post but ignores the first. A purely circumstantial case seems to be building does it not?

Take this premeptive strike on commenter Evil – who the LPers found so difficult to refute he was eventually banned – as another example of Sheil's sensitivity:

OK, you get one comment Evil. Any repetition and you’re deleted, with relish, ol’ buddy.

Sheil's reaction to my rather bland initial comment is also worth noting:

Ah, Mr Beck. You live under a rock, I believe?

Since personal attacks seemed to be the go, I responded in kind. Sheil reacted by stealthily deleting at least one of my comments. Sheil is also known to have stealthily corrected his blog after being caught making silly errors. These same errors appeared in comments at a sympathetic lefty blog and were also stealthily corrected. The link to this thread is also, coincidentally, dead. Anyway, when it became obvious to Sheil he'd lost control of the LP thread he shut it down.

In case you're wondering, no, I haven't emailed Mark Bahnisch about the dead link; it would be pointless: I emailed Bahnisch about Sheil deleting my comments and he didn't want to know about it, so I figured, why bother?

Another example of lefty insecurity and intolerance or simply a coincidence? You decide.

Update: Thanks to Tim Blair for again linking to me. Larvatus Prodeo has opened a general discussion thread in which I've suggested the mysterious dead link as a topic of conversation. Please take the time to drop in at LP and leave a comment. I'm sure Mark Bahnisch will appreciate the traffic.
Update II: My comment at LP has proved, so far, to be more of a conversation ender than starter. Funny that.

Update III: The LPers have had ample opportunity to account for the link that went dead but choose, for whatever reason, to remain mute. Maybe they think it's no big deal. Maybe, deep down, they're not the free speech advocates they claim to be. Maybe they're so far above a guy like me they just can't be bothered. Who knows? But, no matter how you look at it, the situation reflects badly on them.

Update IV: Recent developments are here.