Band - And Banned

What ? John Band's packed up ?

Me no understand. John seems upset that his commenters have 'lied, cheated, twisted and bullied'. 'You've won' he says. But I assumed that the whole point of his blog was to wind people up into a 'robust debate'. Which he did with a great deal of style and humour, if a bit too much bad language for my taste.

A typical post might be headed "If you believe X then you are a ***** who should have his **** toasted over a slow fire". And then he complains about the comments !

I've obviously got John wrong all these years. It seems the toilet-mouthed iconoclast I thought I knew was but the outer carapace of a sensitive soul, longing for love, acceptance and community but besieged by a commenting army of loons, right-wingers and dsquared.

As Thomas Hardy rightly said of Tess, "continual dropping will wear away a Stone - ay, more - a Diamond." This day there's a gaping hole in the Blogring of Britain, where a precious if somewhat tarnished jewel once shone.







John recommends commenters to jump ship to, among others, Matt Turner, who banned me from commenting a year or two back. Matt doesn't seem too chuffed by the recommendation.

I'v also been banned from Thinking Anglicans, a fine site, but run by people who, like so many on the liberal left, believe in diversity of everything - except opinion.

However I can be truly Christian in my response. It is as good a site for CoE news as any in the world, and I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who wants to know what's going on in the church. The slow suicide of Anglicanism is displayed and described in minutest detail, and even those who want to preserve the Chuch, like the saintly Peter Akinola of Nigeria, are allowed to present their arguments in their own words. Only in the comments boxes do you get a the full effect of "we believe in tolerance, love, and the acceptance of difference - and anyone who doesn't think like us is a hate-filled bigot who should be cast into the outer darkness."