Miranda the Devine joins forces with Mary Whitehouse, and as Mary always explained, it was the intertubes wot did it ...

And the pond wondered where the mentality of hacking, eavesdropping, spying, overhearing, listening in, and otherwise prying into the affairs of private citizens - the sine qua non of sensible Murdoch thinking - might lead.

Now we have the answer, thanks to Miranda the Devine:

In the end, parents are duty-bound to sign up to Facebook and become cyber snoops. If you have to decide between your child's privacy or mental health, there's no contest.

Yep, everybody's got to turn into cyber snoops, it's the only way forward to mental health. The whole world becomes Julian Assange, or perhaps a hacker for a Murdoch rag, or a parent of a child who believes intrusion is the best way to achieve wholesomeness.

Oh oh oh that CIA rag, it's so elegant, so intelligent ... no contest, we're only being voyeurs of your filthy disgusting mind, sweet child, because it's ever so good and wholesome for you, and if you don't believe me, why we have ways of making you talk.

The Devine rolls out all the big guns in Toll on teens lost in sexual Cyberia:

"Your children are in a new land called Cyberia where what looks like a bank can be a robber, what looks like a friend can be a predator," he (Michael Carr-Gregg) says.

Yes, and where paranoia, fear and loathing is the only way to live your life, with your contorted anxious eyes casting dubious looks over your shoulder before the digital sword strikes you between the shoulder blades. Doomed, I tells ya, you're all doomed.

"You can't stand there waving goodbye as they sail off. You have to learn the language and mores. Monitoring and restricting the time kids spend socialising online is vital. It's one of the most important public health issues facing us."

Yes, punish and stalk and monitor and restrict and harass and bully, that's the way to build a solid relationship. Onwards and downwards parents of the world.

Actually I would have thought that one of the most pressing public health issues facing the world is the behaviour of psychologists and psychiatrists, as detailed in Marcia Angell's The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? for The New York Review of Books (it's outside the paywall). And after you've finished digesting that piece, why not have a go at her companion piece The Illusions of Psychiatry, also outside the paywall.

If that doesn't make you think twice about the doing of drugs prescribed by licensed dealers in drug peddling, I don't know what will.

Naturally, being inclined to Catholic conservative prudery, the Devine also manages to drag in Tankard Reist, and of course it's all the fault of pornography (we look forward to Reist's eventual explanation of the two world wars as being due to an upsurge in pornography in Nazi Germany as a result of the loose behaviour in the Weimar Republic. No I didn't say it'd be a sensible link, but any link will do in a storm):

Tankard Reist, who has spent a torrid year researching pornography websites for her upcoming book, Big Porn Inc, says the violent sexual language and imagery found on teenager's websites are influenced by the porn industry.

"It's shaping boys' sexuality," she says. "They are wanting anal sex and group sex, they are slapping breasts because these are the scripts they learn from porn."

She says the advent of sexting - girls texting nude images of themselves to boys - is also driven by the porn culture. "Girls get the message early they have to expose themselves sexually. They are being culturally groomed to act out these sexual representations of themselves," she says.

Sexual misogyny is rife.

Naturally there must be censorship and Senator Conroy must be supported all the way.

Well I guess on a dull day when the only news doing the rounds is a carbon tax which is going to undermine western civilisation as we know it, a tour of the lost teens of Cyberia, with heavy brooding and panting about sex, and bad language and a toxic hyper-sexualised culture is about the best kind of fear-mongering available for a conservative Catholic commentator.

The funniest thing is that in another part of the Sunday Terror, there's David Penberthy rabbiting on about Wowsers the real cancer in society.

Yep, take it from Penbo, Miranda the Devine is the real cancer in society.

Of course Penbo's getting agitated about people agitated about people getting on the piss, and having a slurp of the turps, and getting blotto, but blow me down when he gets around to talking about full-blown maternalistic wowserism, we look forward to the strips he's going to tear off the Devine.

Meanwhile, as Bazza once said, Australia is the Brisbane of the world, and Miranda the Devine is surely the Brisbane of the Sunday Terror (apologies Brisbane, we keed, we keed).

Oh okay, we only ran this piece to draw your attention to the two fine, if alarming pieces by Marcia Angell, which might re-think advice to get youngsters on medication as a way of solving their mental problems, while the commentariat keeps up an unhelpful hysterical babbling in the background about how all the young folk are about to be rooned, are being rooned, or will shortly be completely rooned.

The thought of thinking about Miranda the Devine and Tankard Reist and Senator Conroy for more than two seconds is too much for any possum to bear ...

(Below: Miranda the Devine leads the hymn-singing while an insolent Penbo loiters at the pub door).