CRIKEY, THE RULES ARE DIFFERENT

PP boy Tobias Ziegler on the nastiness of Andrew Bolt, which flows on to his commenters:

[Bolt's] approach to commentary shows contempt for reasonable debate – and comments deriding the character, personality and even the appearance of people and groups who disagree with conservative positions are published but not denounced as being below the preferred level of debate. Contrary to claims of valuing open debate and disagreement, the publication of respectful disagreement at his site can be patchy – as we and our commenters have documented on this site and its predecessors. The topics and line of debate in his posts commonly focus on defining outgroups – “What is it with the Left and …”, Aboriginal enough or not Aboriginal enough?, Muslims and the problems they bring into this country, etc.

Here's an example of a "reasonable" conversation starter from Pure Poison's infamous and now gone contributor Ant Rogenous:

Clearly, The Hand that Signed the Paper’s author has no sense of humour. Which makes her views on what constitutes a humorous blog all the more laughable. Dale is disappointed that Crikey has employed a bunch of bloggers from GrodsCorp — a site she calls “very, very unfunny” and whose contributors she describes as “bullying nitwits” and “among the nastier bunches floating around the Oz interwebs”.

Yet who do we find in Dale’s blogroll? None other than bullying nitwit Tim Blair who, in collusion with some of the “Oz interwebs’” most deranged bottom-feeders (including Andrew Bolt), has spent years trying to intimidate Jeremy Sear, prying into his private life, trying to damage his career, poking fun at his divorce and so on.

Jeremy is by no means the only person Blair, his winged monkeys and the blogosphere’s biggest creeps have targeted; and, needless to say, GrodsCorp has never involved itself in anything this disgraceful — but that’s beside the point.

The point, of course, is that gnashing one’s teeth about “nastiness” and “bullying” on the same page as a Tim Blair link is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

As far as bottom-feeders go, little-known blogger J.F. Beck was the most unctuous to weigh in to yesterday’s Pure Poison attack. Beck’s blog has for years been little more than an exercise in ingratiating himself to Tim Blair with creepy personal pot-shots Jeremy Sear and ham-fisted attacks on Antony Loewenstein. Not surprisingly for someone of Blair’s ego, it seems to have worked — the two exchange links (and cuddly emails) with almost the same loving frequency as Blair and Bolt.

I won’t bother posting a link to Beck’s site because it (like the man himself, who all those years ago stalked Jeremy until he’d uncovered his identity) truly is a steaming pile of shit. But if you really must have a look at it, you can find a link in Legal Eagle’s blogroll at (gasp!) anti-bullying-humour-authority Helen Dale’s site.

Last, and most certainly least, a pathetic bankrupt you probably don’t care about had a crack too. But the less said about him, the better.

Any disapproval from Scott Bridges? Nope:

Great post, Ant.

Gee, that sounds like an endorsement. Yet here's Bridges today:

While I agree with Bolt that publication of a comment at a blog does not necessarily indicate endorsement by the blogger, I’m a little surprised that a senior journalist and blogging veteran (a few years in the blogosphere makes you a veteran) is shocked by the realisation that bloggers tend to be associated with the comment threads they spawn. Surely he can’t be that naïve. Bolt’s critics have long pointed out the kind of rubbish that is regularly published in his comment threads and Bolt has long failed to do anything about it, so the sudden hand-wringing and soul-searching comes across as a bit disingenuous, as does the attempt to blame only “students”, “leftists trying to cause michief” and “nutters”.

This is hilarious coming from a blogging veteran who took his blog offline so he could sanitize it by removing the more embarrassing posts and deleting all of the comments. The whole PP crew lives in a parallel reality.

Update: The Rogenous post above is pretty old; they don't do that "play the man" stuff anymore, right? Wrong:

Like his loony namesake in the US, it seems that Beck is willing to lie, distort facts, quote out of context, and throw science out the window in order to score some cheap points against environmentalists. He’s a persistent nit-picker of this blog (his own blog’s raison d’etre seems to be to monitor the typos of Pure Poison, Loewenstein and a couple of others) but his own attempt at producing a substantive argument fell into 17 shades of fail.

How am I going to be a better blogger if I'm not shown where I'm wrong? El Barbudo tries to be helpful:

THR and Tobias, let’s not forget that noted scientician Tim Blair linked approvingly to Beck’s debunked piece – and, later, Beck’s shrill attempt to “deal with DDT denialists”. His lies, as noted by THR and Tim Lambert, are of course ignored.

THR and Lambert, now there are two reliable sources. Some critical analysis from Ziegler:

Thanks for that link, El Barbudo – and I see Blair offers the level of detailed and critical analysis of the content he links to that we’ve come to expect.

It doesn’t seem to have picked up much interest from his commenters, though – “WB” has accounted for one-fifth of the comments so far, and nearly half of the comments that are there seem to have nothing to do with the topic.

More from El Barbudo:

Tobias, this is precisely why people of J.F. Beck and Tim Blair’s ilk prefer sniping and infantile smart-arsery to advancing their own arguments: whenever they attempt the latter, they get their fragile chins handed to them.

And so Tobias Ziegler manages his site in a way that encourages arguments based on stereotypes, divisiveness and personal attacks to thrive. Naughty, naughty PP boy. Anybody got a wooden spoon I can borrow?