THE MOST PROMINENT LEFTY BLOGGER (IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, MAYBE)

That's how Larvatus Prodeo's blog-daddy Mark Bahnisch describes Christopher Sheil. While Bahnisch might think Sheil prominent he obviously doesn't think Sheil capable of defending himself against us mean old RWDBs.

More on that later; first let’s take a look at what makes Sheil such a blogging colossus. His fabulously successful blog, Back Pages, ran for a year before he shut it down. In July 2005 he joined the Larvatus Prodeo collective, where he has authored 61 posts, or roughly two a week – a pretty heavy workload for a lefty.

Since his prominence isn’t quantity based, it must have something to do with quality. Hardly, though he is entertaining, as only smarter-than-thou lefties can be. His most recent post is about what he’s reading while lounging around on the holidays – 43 comments. The two posts immediately prior to that are about his hope that Bush will be impeached over the NSA intercepts – 59 and 44 comments. The post before that is about, er, I don’t know what; it bears the title "I will love you forever" – no-one else could figure it out either, 6 comments. Before that was a post on Lucinda Williams – 15 comments. Finally, as I’m certain you’re getting the idea, he tried to post like an RWDB – another ripper, 8 comments. (His LP archive is here if you’d like to have a closer look at his stuff. He averages a stellar 38 comments per post but this is skewed a bit by 4 older posts that got a total of 765 comments – these are the only posts garnering over 100 comments each. These comments figures have been included only as a guide to the size of Sheil’s readership, which as he has stated, is what blogging is all about.)

Sheil is obviously coasting; either that or he's over the hill. Regardless, he's the biggest name LP has and, considering the wordy lefty crapola they're trying to sell, Mark Bahnisch is keen to keep him. That's why Sheil has free reign to insult and incite fellow commenters with impunity. It also explains why Bahnisch won't discuss Sheil’s stealthy deletion of comments. And it's why Bahnisch hasn’t pursued the matter of link tampering – he's still playing dumb, telling me yesterday in emails he doesn't understand what the problem is.

Enough of that. LPer Phil Gomes, in another of his feeble attempts at intentional humour, has a post about John Howard titled “He looks like a beaver on acid”. I think making fun of the Prime Minister's looks as the topic of a thread is about as petty as it gets but, because I’ve had a number of run-ins with the LPers recently, was determined to stay out of it. But when Sheil made this comment:

I never said he looked like a beaver on acid. Rather, I tried to defend beavers. If you must know, I think he looks more like a rodent on the toilet.

Followed by this from FaceLift:

cs,
I hope your Caustic Sarcasm doesn’t come back to burn you.

I, well, sort of lost control and posted this:

Contrary to popular belief the beaver is not the largest rodent.

Bahnisch immediately deleted the comment – he must have been watching like a hawk because by the time I checked that the comment was up and then refreshed the page it was gone:

On the grounds that it was gratuitously and personally offensive to another commenter. To be more precise, it was about their personal appearance, with a link to a photo.

According to Bahnisch it’s Okay to ridicule the Prime Minister’s looks because he's a public figure but it’s not Okay to post a link to a public photo of one of his bloggers. In any event, I wasn't insinuating that Sheil looks like a rodent: it's more his behaviour that concerns me. (As an aside, when evil RWDB James Waterton observed that Sheil looks like Kamahl, or maybe Paul Simon, Bahnisch took this as an insult – scroll down to comments.)

Back at LP, Bahnisch then has a full-on cry about how mean us snarky RWDBs have been to his boy Christopher and to lefty bloggers in general. Here’s part of his boo hoo hooing:

… cs is one of the most prominent if not the most prominent lefty bloggers. For some reason, certain righty bloggers seem to take some sort of delight in pointless and personal insults against him, a practice that is obnoxious and also is frequently directed by the same mob at others - Margo Kingston and Antony Lowenstein in particular. If you want to get a sense of what I mean, have a read of this comments thread. You might like to note the refrain that “lefty chicks are ugly” and all sorts of vulgar sexual innuendo. Why these people take pleasure in making these sort of comments, I can’t understand.

This is from the same guy who recently suggested I needed to relax and lighten up but at the same time threatened payback when leftists get their hands on the reins of power – as if that's likely to happen, ever. But I am honoured that he obviously ranks me up there with Australia's most famous stalker, Tim Blair.

Bahnisch also has a sad in another thread about the attention LP's getting from RWDBs, noting that I'm obsessed. Well, if linking to LP in 6 out of 30 posts means I'm obsessed then I'm obsessed. I must admit being really pissed off that one of the LPers would stoop so low as to disable a link and therefore deciding to put more pressure on them to see how they react. And really, they haven't reacted all that well, have they? Surely 20 very intelligent lefties should be able to handle one obsessive, gutless, trash-writing RWDB.

Now that I've overviewed the situation you might want to take a closer look at the confrontation as it develops, unfolds and concludes. This will show you how insecure the LPers are and how their decision making has been affected. Take note of Bahnisch's refusal to discuss the matter in a public forum even though he was willing to discuss it by email. Also note that Bahnisch issued an ultimatum that I refused to agree to and that this should have resulted in me being banned from commenting but has resulted instead in my comments being moderated. Bahnisch didn't ban me because he knew it would make him look silly – Sheil has been a lot more snarky and abusive than I have and has suffered no consequences whatever. (I challenged Bahnisch to compare Sheil's comments to mine to see who's more abusive – if I'm the bad boy Bahnisch alleges, he should put my comments out there for everyone to judge.) Anyway, when Bahnisch had had enough, the thread was shut down. Free speech definitely isn't tops on the lefty agenda; unintentional humour is.