Target Practice

Dumb Jon takes the ball and runs with it.

Really, Janet Snell, the proverbial ball in question, is a Godsend to right-wing bloggers. An instruction to fisk her post on Fran Lyon's case can be interpreted in more ways than a Shakespeare play. A million bloggers with a million typewriters (well, PCs with internet access anyway) could fisk away for a million years and still not find every possible permutation!

Incidentally, Ms Snell has now added a comment to her original post which is almost as fiskworthy as the post itself. I won't bother dealing with it now, since the comment doesn't really add anything that we haven't had in the post itself, but I would point out that her attempts to justify her characterisation of the Daily Mail as "vile" contain just as high a level of dogmatic assertion, and just as little evidence-based reasoning, as the original claim itself. Which is quite impressive, in a way.

Update: Well, Janet Snell's post appears to have been pulled. Clicking on the links to it now just brings up a message telling you that "the page cannot be found". Does this mean that Janet Snell is withdrawing her various claims, and accepting that she was wrong?

I doubt it. Rather, I imagine that she, or one of her colleagues, simply didn't like the attention they were getting. When I last saw the post late this afternoon, it had about twenty comments added to it. The only one of those which was not critical of social workers, was that written by Snell herself.

Of course, deleting the post raises further questions. Such as, what does it say about Janet Snell that she writes a post complaining that no one listens to what social workers have to say, and then deletes it because, um, too many people were reading it? I mean, social workers hiding themselves from public scrutiny? Now I really have heard everything!

But readers should not despair. The complete annotated post is still available here. I have also put the Community Care blog, The Child Minder, in my bookmarks, and I can tell you, that Janet Snell's post was really just par for the course over there. There are simply so many posts just crying out for a good fisking. Like this one ("black gang violence is the fault of everyone, except the black gangs themselves"). Or this one ("social workers were the real victims in the Climbie case; I mean, she only died, we get criticised"). Oh yes, I foresee many happy hours ahead, for all concerned.

Update (2): The post is now back up, after having been down for somewhere in the region of five hours. The reason for this volte-face is unclear.