First the pond gets dental policies sorted with pliers, then it's on to a Farrelly Blair spat ...

(Above: dentistry, Dad and Joe style, with Dave watching).

It's the pond's boast that one of its favourite uncles always removed his teeth with a pair of pliers.

The notion that they were a rusty pair of pliers was an exaggeration, it was simply that the procedure saved the time, trouble and expense of attending a dentist.

The pond's uncle is in esteemed sociopathic company. On page 99 of Zhisui Li's scurrilous tale The Private Life of Chairman Mao, it's recorded:

Mao never brushed his teeth. Like many peasants from southern China, he simply used tea to rinse out his mouth when he woke, eating the leaves after drinking the water. He had resisted all attempts to get him to see a dentist.

This excellent regime finally produced a result:

As the years went by, the problems with his teeth continued and so did his aversion to dentists. His teeth became blackened and began falling out. By the early 1970s, all his upper back teeth were gone. Fortunately, his lips usually covered the remaining few teeth even when he talked and smiled, so the absence of so many and the color of the few that remained were not often noticed.

It almost goes without saying that untended, discoloured, deformed teeth are the first sign of a lumpenproletariat, working class - dare we say peasant - lifestyle.

This is most noticeable in the United States.

There's simply no point in getting out of bed and attempting to become a Hollywood film star without a gleaming set of capped, highly whitened choppers, which can bring an exceptional Stanislavskian intensity to portraits of people suffering in concentration camps and the like. You know the drill - mud spattered face, and a dazzling set of choppers.

What's the point of having class distinctions, if the do gooders are always out and about trying to get a decent minimal standard of health care to poor people?

The pond notes that jolly Joe Hockey has a great set of choppers, no doubt earned while selling used cars and used Liberal party policies, but we simply can't afford to help poor people. Think of the cost of maintaining a yacht in Sydney harbour!

But the current dental fuss, and all the neigh sayers, set the pond to thinking about the way a caring Liberal party, run by a compassionate Catholic, could resolve the conflicting tendencies, catering to the capped gleaming rich while pretending to give a toss about the poor.

It's simple really. Provide a piece of string and a door knob (afix to any flat surface) for free at every post office in Australia, along with a decent pair of pliers. Problem solved.

Some do gooders have also suggested discounting the price of tea, so that the peasants can tend their teeth while imbibing a caffeine hit, but really the pond couldn't countenance interfering with market forces.

Not to worry, there's your dental policy, done and dusted. Now you can see why the pond is consulted on all the major policy issues let loose in the land ...

Cynics might detect a little irony on the day that a story breaks about pollies and perks (Rein reigns supreme in Qantas upgrade spree - forced video at end of link), but that only says all you need to know about pollies, perks and failed Qantas business strategies. By golly did the board pick the wrong CEO or what.

Meanwhile, after the exhaustion induced devising a new dental policy, the pond went in search of light relief, and there's nothing like an intertubes war to provide said relief.

Poor hapless Elizabeth Farrelly is in the thick of it, as she explains in Anonymity powers the cudgels in hatesphere.

The sweet, confused and miffed thing posted a few snaps of a removalist (and truck - we're not quite sure what was featured, because it seems the original post has now disappeared) who had dared to block a bicycle path.

As he stalked off I took a couple of pics of his unmarked truck and posted them on my blog.

The funny thing? Farrelly then goes on to complain about the response:

I was called a pompous prat, a rude and viscious (sic) idiot, an incredibly stupid woman, a small sad person, a pompous git, an old commie bat, an absolute wanker, a poor little suffering Doctor princess pet, a moron, an imbecile, a pestiferous little idiot, a selfish fool, an arrogant conceited woman, an old tart, an old fart, a dolt, lord of the bicycle paths, a wowser, pathetic, despicable, weak, dishonest and a complete f---wit.

Shocking. You could spend a lifetime siccing the spelling on the tubes.

Naturally Farrelly gets agitated, critiquing cyberspace and the rise of secrecy and the digital hatesphere and the way the intertubes provides both secrecy mask and cudgel.

There's a new strain of hate out there - misogynist, anti-education and clearly frightened of change; the Julia Gillard bullet-hole T-shirt; the threat to kill Nicola Roxon; the Nazi slogans with which radio host John-Michael Howson abused Christine Assange.

Yes, it's only since the internet's rise that we've seen Nazi slogans.

Oh and the leflaneur.mobi blogger who deemed it okay to put up an image of a worker going about his business as a form of payback (it's a favourite sport of workers to block the pond's rear lane access to the water lilies).

Now leflaneur.mobi was acting within rights. You can't control your image if it's snapped in a public space (unless it happens to be in the precinct of the Opera House and the goons come out in force to stop you filming).

But isn't it a bit rich to be complaining about the anonymous hatesphere, having launched a bit of hating of an anonymous trucker into said sphere? The polite thing to do would have been to ask for the insolent chappie's name and inform he would be featured on the tubes.

I understand the truckie didn't like being outed. But it's that old privacy thing: if you wouldn't want it known, don't do it. If it was OK for him to do it, it was okay for me to say so.

Uh huh. So there's a nice double standard, with Farrelly cast in the role of a truth teller:

If you pillory truth tellers, you chase decency from public life, skewing politics and ending meaningful debate in a way that helps no one, least of all those on the bottom.

Oh please, conducting a minor skirmish with a trucker isn't meaningful truth telling. It was payback that went wrong.

So why did the payback go wrong? It turns out that the reason has bugger all to do with anonymity, it has to do with that gadfly Tim Blair. After blogging about the trucker, Farrelly was assaulted by the hive mind, by way of emails and comments:

...blogging became a kind of experiment. I knew failure was on the cards. Humiliation even. But I did not expect to feel endangered myself.
Now I am hourly reminded that experimental knowledge is sometimes so dark and loathsome we'd sooner be without.
And it's not all anonymous. Of the mob pursuing me, some used government or university or work email addresses. Some - including their apparent puppetmaster Tim Blair - gave names.
I don't read the Tele. I'd never heard of Blair. Turns out he blog-blags me so often it looks like attention-seeking, calling me ''crazylady'', ''grandmaw'', ''bossypants'' and ''idiot doctor'', imputing motives I've never had to incite his hate-filled acolytes.

She'd never heard of Blair? But it's a rite of passage for any blogger to endure an assault from Blair and his mentally deficient drones.

It's how Blair makes his living, making his parrots wheel and squawk as they fly through the digital ether to do his bidding. It's an even higher mark, a greater honour, if you've copped an assault from the Bolter's assorted pack of first grade idiots and tossers.

The point here is that while the actual grenade-tossers might be anonymous, the motivating tossers are well known and housed within News Limited. It's exceedingly rich of Farrelly to talk about the blogosphere and the hatesphere when in reality she's talking about the Newslimitedsphere, and its routine business of spreading the fear and loathing and the UD in FUD.

Yes, it's not Anonymous, it's News Limited, the very same News Limited that once featured John Hartigan railing at the way journalism, not the limited intellectual value of blogs, is the future of the web.

It's News Limited readers, clustered around Blair and Bolt and Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman and Miranda the Devine and The Punch and such like, who are encouraged in their behaviour by a publicly listed company.

It's Blair and Bolt in particular who revel in their dittohead following and who regularly unleash the hounds, as they indulge in a very public, completely un-anonymous cyber bullying.

What to do if you happen to be assaulted by these bullies and their acolytes on line? Well the last thing you should do is quail and quiver and show weakness, as Farrelly did. First the quailing:

Some of Blair's blogs use more of my words than his. I'm considering sending a bill.
And so he blogged on, relentlessly. Thursday, Saturday, Monday; clearly enjoying the rabble. He might not be responsible for his nut-job devotees, but he carefully fed them their ideas and terminology. Describing me as an "idiot Doctor of Urbanism who thinks 'traffic' means her in a freaking bike lane" he told them repeatedly that I wanted the truckie fired, hated ''working men'' and thought myself too good to "get off her stupid bike''.

Uh huh. But the first thing to do, to be polite, is to offer a link to Blair's ranting, so that readers - if they desire to step into the cesspit - can do it with a click and head off to Path of Most Resistance.

It turns out that it's just a typical set of Blair jibes:

He helpfully posted links to my blog and CV, even requoting some of the comments from my site, where I was derided as a communist, a Green, a hypocrite and a tory; as rich, powerful, supercilious, menopausal, adolescent, a Green ''self-annointed [sic] member of the ruling class'' and cause of everything wrong with both the inner city and the Fairfax share price.
It was a lynch mob; bike-hating, city-hating, education-hating. Wound up by Blair, they rode a tide of anger, envy and sexism.

At which point, you almost begin to think Blair might have a point about preciousness:

It wasn't just criticism. A personal blog is personal. The comments come to your email. These people were in my living room, spraying hot pus. Suddenly I saw how teenagers can kill themselves over cyber-bullying.

Oh for god's sake, just send the email to the spam bucket and don't read any of it. And delete comments on the blog you don't like, rather than yank the whole blog. And if anyone complains about having their comment yanked, tell them to fuck off, you want some fucking politeness and some fucking decent language deployed on your corner of the intertubes.

Tim Blair is a dickhead and a stirrer, that's a well-known fact, with the depth and intelligence of your average gadfly, fancifully imagining that he makes a contribution to climate science.

At the same time, it's completely fanciful to lather this little online bruising up into an indictment of everything:

There are two issues here; the infection of politics by unmodified emotion, and the poisonous strand of class-based secrecy that sanctions the wrongdoing but not the telling of it.

Alternatively, don't take an easy shot at someone doing a job, and that way you might avoid being on the receiving end of a set of easy shots. And don't resort to gobbledegook in the quest for self-justification ...

What happened on the street should have stayed on the street ...

Meanwhile, Farrelly should be aware that Blair has constructed a law to describe him and his stupid flock:

... the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force revolving around one giant useless blog flung together by one spiteful spleening blogger (oh we made a bit of it up but you can read the real law at the Urban dictionary here).

This sort of warfare is grist to Blair's pathetic mill (see Tim Blair human rottweiler or light weight lap puppy of Big Media?)

The lap puppy loves to play ... ask him nicely and he'll explain all you need to know about Arctic sea ice ...

(Below: and so to the good news. Just as in secret Andrew "the Bolter" Bolt is an Italian opera loving, quality red wine sipper and Europhile, it turns out that Tim Blair is a chardonnay slurper and swiller. Image found here under the header Tim Blair's dirty little secret is out. A chardonnay swiller! Oh crawl away and die of shame. What next? The Arctic sea ice is in a record melt, and can't be used as ice blocks to chill the chardonnay?)