I think I’ll close this thread off and start a new one in the hope that changes the atmosphere.

“Teacher! Jase said a bad word!”
“Mr Banisch! Look! He’s pulling faces at me!”
“But Mr Blair said it was alright for me to do that.”
“Sir come quick! Joe’s fallen off the monkey bars on his head again!”

I wasn’t following this thread on the weekend, and still haven’t read all of it. When it became clear that people were making abusive comments, I posted a comment reminding people of the comments policy. I didn’t go back and delete or warn everyone who’d transgressed it, but informed people that it would be enforced from now on.

As it will be - regardless of who uses language that’s unacceptable.

But I don’t want language like this to become a regular occurrence on this blog.

You aren’t a grown man. You’re a wuss and a lying bigot.

Don’t feel too sorry for him, Mark. He once banned a comment of mine for using the word “lie.” Then he deleted a second comment rendered as something like ‘untruth that rhymes with pie.’ Said it was pursuant to his comments ‘policy.’ He himself once used the word “liar” to describe me at my own blog and regularly implies everyone from Tim Blair to Trent Lott to Mark Steyn is untruthful at some level. This from the man who stole Tim Blair’s entire blog and still denies having done so. Even people on the left regard this as hilarious.

A lot of the nonsense here began with his intellectual inability to respond thoughtfully to this considered and respectful comment of mine - which was, by the way, a response to an assertion from him that was - according to his own comments policy - “flamebait.”

At the end of that comment, I threw him a bone on DDT because I know he’s obsessed with it. What pleasure he’d take debunkng Blair and Bunyip, I thought. Apparently not.

He uses language himself that he deletes from his own blog and he baits people with whom he isn’t actually engaged; his first interventions, remember, were humorless contributions to what had been an enjoyable series of ideological send-ups. Famous for having the sense of humour of Rosa Klebb with menstrual cramps, he essentially did what he always does: hung around pretending to be an expert on something he’s not trained in and knows nothing about.

He has always ridiculed Blair for Andrea Harris’s deletion regime. Within the liberal parameters of an open thread, this Andrea Harris in a lab-coat arrived as a troll and got hammered for being a censorious and hypocritical twat.

“Mean-spirited”, my arse.

“So what‚Äôs changed?”

I now like to associate with the bad children. Some of them anyway.

So what’s changed?

To think I almost missed this one. Go J F Beck!

And about time Joe and Beck started up their new blog http://www.TimTheKittenKiller.com?

In the blogosphere it is harder to quarantine yourself from guilt by association.

So, does someone want to tell me how the public service works? Is this Director General/Premiers Dept stuff a cosmetic bureacratic change and Sandra N says, or not? What are the practical results?