Wonderful. It seems as if the New Blog Showcase's newest sponsoring organization, the League of Liberals, is full of people who believe firmly in linkwhoring - using repeated redundant links to scam page-ranking schemes like the voting apparatus at the New Blog Showcase and Truth Laid Bear's Ecosystem. They've spammed this week's showcase in this manner such that a blogger clique with 27 members produced, for a worthless we-hate-Halliburton agitprop site, 41 votes as of yesterday, and 71 this morning. The various right-center cliques have responded in kind, such that the second-place contestant, a decent blog-entry to which I had already linked earlier as my contribution to this week's contest, which had 30 more-or-less unique votes yesterday, now has over two hundred "votes", mostly from hotheads physics geek and Susie. In Susie's defense, she might just be overly enthusiastic. Physics geek outright states that he's trying to blow the contest out of the water by making the results so outrageously fraudulent that Truth Laid Bear will have to adjust the rules.

This here is why I haven't joined any cliques yet. Stupid blog tricks. Clowning around is fine and dandy, people, but linkwhoring is... dishonourable. It's a cheat. Please don't do it.

Update: Pixy Misa of Ambient Irony gets in on the game with a bit of over-the-top quotage. OK, OK, I give. Once you get to this point, it's hard to be all Methodist scold about it. Especially after it degenerates into an exchange of whipped-cream pies.

Update II: Hrm, it looks like The Bear has noticed the whipped-cream-pie fight, and slapped a filter on the proceedings. Good!

Update III: Suzie points out in comments that I gave the League of Liberals too much credit - there's 15 of them, not 27. I stand corrected.