David Penberthy, and it's time to feel digitally groovy ...

(Above: First Dog explaining how god will punish the unbelievers cheering for the wrong team in Ray Martin's Hair speaks to Danny Nalliah from Catch the Fires Ministries).

First things first.

While the pond pays little or no attention to sport, there are important theological issues arising from recent events.

The pond is instructed that anyone outside the north shore that supports Manly is in fact a traitor who will rot in hell, and a special dispensation has been provided allowing punters -apart from Bronwyn Bishop and Tony Abbott,already with first class tickets to hell - to support New Zealand in their valiant fight against Darth Vader and the Sauron legions of doom (yes, the word is, when in Sydney, Darth and Sauron choose to stay in Mosman).

Treachery, treason? I am further instructed that if Manly loses as a result of inner west loyalists maintaining the rage, remembering their fibro roots when the silvertails take the field, and crossing the Tasman, if only for the day, then they will one day dwell in paradise...

Further, the pond is instructed that Melbourne is likely to endure a severe bushfire season this summer, not because of greenies or burnoff policies, or because Melbourne contains gays and people who love to dance to music (which brought Katrina down on New Orleans), but because it contains wicked Collingwood supporters, and god is a righteous god and she smotes the wicked. All we can do is pray that Collingwood loses, and thus Melbourne might be saved ...

The funny thing is, some Christians take this kind of stuff seriously. Witness the stupidity of Danny Nalliah explaining how the Black Saturday bushfires were a consequence of Victoria decriminalising abortion laws... (here).

Speaking of stupidity, today is Miranda the Devine day, and for outrageous fundamentalist Catholic nonsense, you need never look further than the Devine. She is, all in all, the antiopodes' answer to William Anthony Donohue, but sadly when we went looking for her piece, here's what we copped:

I get that ominous internal error most days when approaching the Devine, and the server agrees.

When we did get through to her Sunday rant, it turned out to be a disappointing standard foaming and frothing about drug-taking and driving, Drug-drivers on the road to perdition.

As always, with even the most uncontroversial issues - who could argue about the stupidity of getting stoned and getting behind the wheel of a car? - the Devine manages to be offensive.

She does so by attempting to downplay the significance (in comparison to drug-taking) of getting pissed and getting behind the wheel, and by yearning for John Howard:

Authorities turning their backs on the Howard era’s successful Tough on Drugs Strategy are sending mixed messages to the public, preferring to treat drugs as a health problem for the user rather than a criminal threat to public safety.

Indeed, authorities so turn their backs that the entire Devine piece is based around the thoughts of NSW Traffic Commander John Hartley, and the work of a bunch of elitist Monash academics.

It is of course possible to juggle and to chew gum at the same time, which is to say to treat drug addiction as a health problem, and on the roads as a criminal threat to public safety, but in the black and white world of the Devine, all rhetoric is like a black cat in a very dark cave ...

Moving right along, there's much fun to be had with David Penberthy, as he scribbles In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream for The Punch:

I received a letter the other day from a reader which was both heartening and deeply depressing. The reader told me that he adored our website, and never wanted to read it again.

Well we can only marvel that someone adored the tipsy Punch - that gin must have really spiked the punch cocktail for them - but do go on:

He said he believed that many of the readers didn’t come to the site to listen to the opinions of others, and often quite clearly didn’t even read the articles; rather, they were simply interested in pushing their own unchanging ideological views and picking fights. He also noted that many of them used language which would never be used in a normal face-to-face conversation and that the entire environment of the website could often become so combative as to be completely repellent.

Do tell. I'm guessing that we're in for another round of hypocritical hand-wringing about anonymity on the full to overflowing intertubes.

We've been there before, like a scratched 78 stuck in the grove.

When it first started, The Punch allegedly encouraged the use of real names by readers, and Penberthy always kept up that farcical fiction, as in How a political luddite got smashed in cyberspace:

We have tried on The Punch to plead with readers to use their real names, often emailing them back ourselves asking them to give a name; most don’t, and would not comment at all if we insisted. Only last Saturday we busted one weirdo who had spent the weekend - probably in Mum’s spare room - sending emails under 14 different names refuting climate change.

There are of course any number of simple and inexpensive solutions, if anonymity is considered an issue. Registration involving real names, rejection of anonymous comments, etc etc. Many sites do it. Some are lax, some are rigorous, and either way it isn't hard.

But The Punch has long relied on trolling and trolls for its bread and butter, dealing in cheap-assed controversy as a way of stirring up the hits, and the comments, and getting the readers whipped into a bat-shit frenzy.

That's why it's comical to read Penberthy's conclusion:

I am trying to talk the bloke around but in a commercially self-defeating way I can sympathise with his sense of fatigue at all the invective, and the treatment of Mirabella is merely the latest example of this modern trend towards abusing people first and asking questions later.

Uh huh. Clearly Penberthy doesn't read the fetid level of commentary surrounding the online presences of such unique News Limited luminaries as Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman, or Tim Blair or Andrew Bolt ...

It's like stepping into a cesspit of fear and loathing most days, and yet there's little apparent by way of moderation.

Is that because even the most outrageous anonymous comments can't match the cesspit of outraged fear and loathing delivered on a daily basis by the commentariat themselves?

Penberthy claims that The Punch team tosses away thirty per cent of the comments it receives, but you'd never know it. Other sites concerned with civility note that a user's comment has been removed/banned for not conforming to site policies. Moderators issue warnings, ban IP addresses, crunch trolls and flame wars, and otherwise strive to maintain a atmosphere if not of politeness, then of limits and boundaries via active, visible moderation ...

The truth of The Punch is that it wants the hits and it doesn't want to alienate:

... those of us who publish opinion sites are naturally inclined towards publishing as many comments as we can – it’s not our preference to censor, and we often end up in a situation where we’ll err not on the side of caution but recklessness and let things through which are right on the boundary of decency, or slightly over it.

Uh huh. And then to the excuses, including:

... so much online communication – indeed almost all of it – is anonymous. People are more inclined towards invective and name-calling if they sign off as “Chook” of Parramatta than Ian Harris of Parramatta.

But actually anonymity doesn't have anything to do with it, because anonymity is no protection against defamation, and there is no reason for a blog to go soft on "Chook" of Parramatta, or for that matter "loon" of Camperdown. And yes Virginia, with a simple program, they have your IP address ...

The truth is The Punch wants its readers to box on, delivering whatever gibberish and punch-drunk commentary they can muster, often led by a first out of the box ratbag by the name of Erick who clearly has no personal life. If he isn't on welfare, with too much time on his hands, then clearly he's making a living as a professional troller ...

It's like rugby league, explaining how non-violent it is, then showing a cavalcade of big hits. Or car races, showing how they care about the skills of the driver, before delivering a montage of amazing crashes. Take a look at the banner:

Best conversation? Yeah, and if you don't like it, cop this in the mush cobber. Lordy they'll even run a 9/11 birther for the hits (unless you can explain how it's to do with an alternative fourth dimensional reality).

Which brings us to another professional troller.

Sophie Mirabella is the perfect example of a politician as commentator dishing it out for free on The Punch, and The Punch perfectly happy to publish her more rabid pieces because (a) they allow some Labor politicians to do the same, so there's the old balance thing taken care of, and (b) because you can always rely on good old Sophe to stir the pot and deliver a shit-storm.

But wait it gets even funnier, as Penberthy first admits that the recent legal matters involving Mirabella are of public interest, but then somehow shouldn't be a matter of public interest or commentary:

Having said that, the repellent feature of its publication is that it has unleashed a wave of vile abuse towards Mirabella, purely because she is an outspoken right-winger. To their credit there have been some on the other side of politics who have sprung to her defence and argued that it is a legal matter which should not invite public discussion. They have been outnumbered by those who relish the fact that Mirabella is copping it. Funnily enough a lot of these people would be the first to say that any criticisms of the conduct of Julia Gillard are the result of media bias, misogyny, or everyone’s favourite, a News Limited conspiracy. Yet when it comes to Mirabella no level of abuse is off limits.

Actually the comments on the long ago conduct of Julia Gillard's personal life were the result of media bias, misogyny, and blatant bias by a number of News Limited journalists acting together in curious consort (we'll leave the conspiracy theories to the 9/11 birthers given a platform by the Punch).

That none of them could be as scurrilous as an ABC sitcom is another matter (but then The Drum is these days as low rent as a News Limited blog, so it's hard to be surprised at anything turning up on clap happy Mark Scott's ABC).

Mirabella is a sledger of the first water, and it's not surprising that having given it out for so long, she should cop some of it back. The pond, having no interest in her personal life, was surprised to learn that she'd had an affair with a much older man, though it did cast a whole new light on the righteousness of such scribbles for the Punch as Our kids are getting adult content instead of fairytales.

Well the funny thing is that all this has led Penberthy to think about the matter of regulation of bloggers by the Australian Press Council.

Australian Press Council chairman Professor Julian Disney wants the discussion to extend to the standard of reader comments online, saying that many online publishers are prepared to publish comments which are “abusive, incoherent and off topic”.

Yep, it seems that poor old Penbo is incapable of self-regulation, can't recognise an abusive, incoherent off topic comment if it smacks him in the noggin, and needs the help of Julian Disney to achieve some kind of regulatory nirvana because he doesn't know how to actively moderate his very own blog.

The kneejerk reaction to Disney’s call from free speech purists would be to shun any suggestion of tighter controls, to argue that a thousand flowers be allowed to bloom, and that in the rough and tumble of online publishing both the bloggers and readers be allowed to fight it out amongst themselves.

Uh huh. That wouldn't bear any resemblance to the precious petal knee jerk reaction of Andrew Bolt imagining that he's as big as Glenn Beck, and thought of giving up the ghost and going away to have a big long sulk (if only, if only), as put on display in How Gillard tried to kill a story ... along with a whine about the right to trawl dirt in the glorious name of News Ltd.

We're still waiting for Bolt's spin on the Mirabella matter. Perhaps it could run like this:

You may even think it’s mean to suggest Sophie Mirabella showed poor judgment in working for and having a relationship with a lawyer who turned out to have a difficult family ... And on all these points, you may be right.

Idle nonsense about pots and kettles and Bolt aside, it's back to Penberthy:

Speaking as the publisher of such an opinion site, my personal view is that Disney’s call is both welcome and important, as the debate about the lack of civility in modern conversation is being fuelled more than anything by our interactions online.

Uh huh. Well then it's time to go biblical, and trot out Luke:

Then he said, “You will undoubtedly quote me this proverb: ‘Physician, heal yourself’—meaning, ‘Do miracles here in your hometown like those you did in Capernaum.

Yep, what need of Disney, if Penbo can do a Christ-like cleansing of Capernaum, and The Punch and other News Limited sites ...

But you see, even then, he simply can't resist provoking and trolling:

This is no longer a fringe issue for those groovy people who converse solely in the digital space.

At that point, what digital nerd could resist the desire to call him a twit, a galah given to meaningless abuse, under the cloak of reviving 'groovy' and pretending it has some kind of 'cool' Maynard G. Krebs contemporary relevance?

Never mind. Just when you thought it was all the fault of anonymous people and groovy nerds, and trend setters, it turns out it's all the fault of young people led astray by social media:

There is now a whole generation of people out there who have either lost or never acquired the newspaper habit and who access most of their news via Twitter and Facebook, and who would much prefer a heated argument about politics on an opinion site than the orthodox reporting of politics via a conventional news site.

Uh huh. But here's the problem. News Limited long ago abandoned the orthodox reporting of politics on a conventional news site, and you only have to read the tone of the crusading ratbaggery that litters The Australian, The Daily Terror and the HUN to realise that you're not on a conventional news site, you're in the middle of a heated argument about politics on an opinion site, where news and opinion are regularly conflated, and on the front page at that (and you don't have to read Robert Manne on The Australian on climate science to reach that conclusion within a nanosecond).

So does the tone on the intertubes, antipodes department, come from blogs that score hundreds of hits a day, or from News Ltd branded blogs that boast of millions of hits and thousands of comments and very few limits on polemical ratbaggery?

Time to polish up that Luke quote again, and suggest Penberthy first heal The Punch site?

Perhaps he could then get to work on the rest of News Limited, so that the routine abuse of Julia Gillard, inner western elites, groovy people, latte sippers, chardonnay swallowers, the educated elite, greenies needing to be hung from lamp posts, and all the other examples of the modern 'is your News Limited' trend of abusing people first and asking questions later can be shoved back into the drawer full of cliches, stereotypes and random stupidities where they belong.

No doubt it's the kindly thing for Penbo to stand up for a contributor, even one as rank, in your face and disagreeable as Mirabella, but is it right for him to provoke so provocatively?

And can't they ever get their stories straight at The Punch?

Why only the other day, there was Tory Shepherd drinking the kool aid and standing by the team in The News world is not as Limited as you think:

Social media and the world wide web mean that if a journalist gets a quote, or a statistic, or a job title, or even a single word wrong, someone picks it up. If people tire of listening to News Ltd journalists (God knows I’m sick of the sound of my own voice right now), they can get their news from anywhere they want. Thanks to Twitter, politicians can speak directly to people, without fear of bias distorting their words.

Think newspapers are invading people’s privacy? Put ‘em down and tune in to A Current Affair, or Today Tonight, reloaded on their website! Think newspapers are too right wing? The Green Left Weekly is now online! Too left wing? Tune in to a Ray Hadley or Alan Jones podcast!

Oh dear. That leaves only two alternatives.

An anonymous comment on the Penberthy piece, ranting about the incoherent contradictions to be found on News Ltd sites, even if it means boosting the comments and hits so they can place a few more advertisements, and reach their 'smell of an oily rag' budget, and lordy perhaps even pay their contributors in something other than sunshine, and the ego and vanity and special pleading benefits of exposure.

Or take another swig of that gin-soaked punch on a lazy Sunday.

Your choice. The pond, as always, is fair and balanced, and merely reports, and you decide ...

(Below: oh heck, enough with all the contradictions to be discovered observing the output of "Is your News Limited, or did you start reading all the other stuff on freely available on the full to overflowing intertubes". It's Sunday, pass the punch, we're feeling groovy).