Miranda Devine redux, and once more the determined controversialist strikes again ...

(Above: ah hits and memories, and what better way to start off a look at Miranda the Devine's mock outrage, for having dished it out. Now she somehow thinks it's offensive to get it back. Need we add Lesson in life?)

The shameless never have any shame, and Miranda the Devine is perhaps the most shameless of all.

After all, when she hacked out The problem of a fatherless society, she knew she was trolling for trade, and last score we noted, she'd chalked up 439 comments. Bingo. Up there with the biggies.

Sure it was a mendacious pile of offensive tripe, but that doesn't really matter with the commentariat. If you're an attention seeker, the idea is to get attention ...

It's when you start going back to the same well that the contrivance starts to show, and the whimpering pathetic tragi-comedy that is Jack-Boot Left Gives Dads A Kicking shows the Devine wants another round of abuse.

For a start, no one, whether jack booted or not in the fashionable Prince Willy style, gave dads a kicking. They gave the Devine a well-deserved kicking.

Now for the whimpering:

The reaction to my column last week pointing out the perils of a fatherless society is a case study in how intimidation, vilification, distortion and outright lies are being used in an attempt to silence unfashionable opinions.

Um actually apart from indignant single mothers who felt they'd copped some undeserved abuse from the Devine, the main point was how unseemly it was for her to conflate Penny Wong and gay marriage into a column allegedly about the causes of the London riots.

These are the tactics of a new “politically correct McCarthyism”. In this case gay marriage was the sacred cow that so unhinged people.

Uh huh. Never mind that McCarthyism was the work of the extreme right, and come to think of it, if Miranda the Devine had been around in the fifties, she probably would have shared more than an idea or three and an ideology or two with good old Joe.

Nope, it's the Devine's idea of being tolerant and respectful, in the usual Godwin's Law way of referring to PC jackbooted ratbag Nazi swine.

You see, as always, and as you expect of a clever troll, the Devine seeded caveats and modifiers into her bit of trolling. It's always best to do this, so you can then exclaim in shock and horror,

"no, that's not what I meant, not at all."

The column was respectful of Finance Minister Penny Wong and her female partner, who is expecting a baby, and stated that “love conquers all”, but its assertion that fathers are in general better for children, was beyond the pale for some.

I wrote that Wong and her partner will no doubt be “fine mothers” providing their baby with “a stable, loving upbringing, despite not having a father in the home. Individually, these things work themselves out. Allowances are made, extra effort applied. Love conquers all.”

There, she's ever so nice, so respectful, and if you believe that, please take me to the last shower you came down on to planet earth.

You'd hardly think she'd gone on a feral rant about heterosexual marriage, gays, gay marriage the London riots, fatherless children, Bert and Ernie getting hitched, the burning streets of London as the manifestation of a fatherless society, feral rats causing mayhem and torching buildings, Hobbesian social chaos for the children of the underclasses, and oh yes, that nice Penny Wong and her partner having a child in a fatherless relationship sure to doom it to a life as a London street rioter and feral rat ... without having a little conflation in mind.

Not so, says the Devine, wash out my mouth with soap:

It is hard not to draw the conclusion that some denizens of social media are cerebrally challenged. Were they too lazy to read the original column, or do they lack comprehension skills? Are they so entrenched in their own beliefs they can’t tolerate another point of view? Are they paranoid? Or are they just dishonest?

There is of course another option, one that is slowly dawning on me. The Devine is actually too stupid to understand the writing she has writ, and the implications of the conflated connections she has made.

Either she's dumb, or she just loves to be the well-paid trolling controversialist. Second thoughts scrub that thesis. We'll settle for provocative trolling controversialist. After all, she's been doing it for years ...

The poor hapless Devine is naturally devastated by the mis-understandings and the mis-interpretations, and the awful vilification offered up to her. And naturally she has an extremely sedate, pious, turn the other cheek, exemplary response:

A cursory glance at these rage-flecked responses offers an insight into the illiberal mindset of those who pretend to demand tolerance.

Or rather ram it down our throats. This is not tolerance but jackboot totalitarianism, the tyranny of the minority.

Yes, fuck off you Nazis, you jackbooted thugs - not, you understand, that the Devine is intolerant of you, but rather simply intolerant of your fascist jackbooted intolerance.

Jackie Stricker, the partner of Dr Kerryn Phelps, wrote a letter to this newspaper calling for me to receive “urgent counselling” and saying my columns shouldn’t be published. That’s right. Let’s censor unfashionable mainstream opinions.

There was of course a much more sensible option. Simply not to publish Jackie Stricker's letter, and so spare the indignant Devine the sense of being at one and the same time, both unfashionable and mainstream. After all, we should censor unfashionable minority opinions that happen to think the Devine is a gherkin of the first water.

This is of course in complete contrast to being totally fashionable and in a minority, or perhaps fashionably mainstream.

Naturally the Devine is also upset by the likes of that rage-flecked John Birmingham, and the rage-flecked Brian Greig, but she finds consolation in the words of David Cameron, and the Daily Express, and British think tank Civitas, and then doubles down on the bet.

In the middle of the furore came an email from a friend who grew up in public housing in western Sydney and has spent much of his career trying to right the problems he saw there: “Anyone who thinks a cadre of fatherless children is good for society has never set foot in a public housing estate.”

And indeed the statistical data that the Devine has prepared on the thousand or so fatherless children already charged with rioting is impressive.

Oops. Printer's error. Insert here the sound of crickets.

To use the Devine's own phrase, the ultimate straw man, it wasn't her off the cuff rabbiting on about the fatherless society, or that ultimate straw man the good father that saved all, that got many people going.

The reason many people took objection to her column was the specious, irrelevant, offensive conflation of the London riots with Penny Wong, a couple of lesbians having a kid, and gay marriage in general, and her trashing of single mothers, without anything meaningful by way of data or research to back up her idle prejudiced, biased speculations.

But then the Devine is utterly shameless, and shifts ground like a chimera so she can come to a trumpeting final par:

Pointing out that fathers are important is not homophobic.

No, but linking Penny Wong and gay marriage to the fatherless society that allegedly - in the Devine's mind - caused the London riot, is quintessentially homophobic, especially as the evidence suggests that the rioters in the streets were largely the product of heterosexual relationships, and any blather about the slow motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of the UK in the past few generations should have been tagged to heterosexuals.

Consistency and coherence wouldn't have made that analysis correct, but it least it would have ameliorated the Devine's silliness. Sadly, in her determination to pin the riots on the fatherless society, the Devine has forgotten that the major cause, as determined by the consensus of the commentariat is ... drum roll please ... the welfare state.

And then comes another mea culpa:

Nor is it an indictment on individual single mothers, many of whom do a heroic job.

Yep, the Devine really pissed off a number of indignant single mothers, doing their best in difficult circumstances, and suddenly finding their form of family as the root cause of the London riots.

But to pretend that a fatherless society is not a disaster doesn’t delete the truth.

Nor does pretending that somehow linking Wong and gay marriage and the London riots isn't an offensive, insulting kind of conflation designed to generate heat and hits and comments but absolutely nothing by way of light of insight.

My partner always says "How can you read that dreadful woman?" but I have to say a Devine column provides the same kind of fascinated horror as a traffic accident or perhaps an hour long Air Traffic Investigation show. And that's why she keeps on getting published.

It's like contemplating a train wreck, what with the hostility, the barely repressed rage, the anger, fear and loathing. And she calls herself a Christian. Oh wait, she actually calls herself a Catholic. Now things, and all that patriarchy worship, are getting a little clearer ...

Okay, you say, but I'm not really interested in train wrecks or the pornography of stupidity or the rantings of a Catholic conservative, I'd like an intelligent insight into English social history and rioting.

Well you have to endure the insufferable, interrupting, talking over and through his guests, anecdotally self-indulgent Phillip Adams, but why not have a listen to the genial Donald Thomas take a tour through British criminality, putting the recent riots into a historical context in the process (History of rioting in Britain).

It's only twenty four minutes of your life, whereas reading the Devine might make you feel that you've just lost twenty four years ...

Oh this provides a chance to throw in a splendid meme has been doing the rounds lately:

Your boy has just got his HSC, and yet he has no cultural interests. He despises classical music, never reads a serious book, and seldom uses a word beyond the range of a six-year old child. And he has no manners….this generation of teenagers is inferior in almost every respect to the generation of, say, the 1930s. (William F. Broderick, “The Ugly Teenager”, The Age, 7/2/1976)

Yep, that'd be the generation that marched off to war in 1939, humming along to Herbert von Karajan conducting Beethoven, perhaps with a copy of Goethe under the arm.

So it goes.

It's a funny old world, and lordy you only have to read the cataclysmic catastrophic jackboot-foaming and frothing Devine to realise it ...

(Below: the twittering Devine, dribbling drivel in the tweet wars.

Miranda of course does actual debate, which doesn't involve name-calling, because how can calling out the vile vilifications, and distortions, and outright lies of the politically correct McCarthyites, full of performance rage from the entrenched, intolerant, cerebrally challenged, paranoid, dishonest, lacking in comprehension skills, jackbooted, abusive thugs on the left be interpreted as name-calling?

Seeing as how these illiberal rage-flecked leftist ratbags ram their jackbooted totalitarian thuggery down the throat of the innocent Devine (not one speck of carbon on her pure soul) and the unfashionable mainstream (and just what is wrong with ugg boots?).

Stop your intemperate thuggish foot-stomping ways at once so we can have a respectful, calm, loving debate about how truly fucked you are, you totalitarian, censoring, McCarthyite left wingers, and join Joe McCarthy in loathing commie lefties...

Oh yes, the word surely is dribbling drivel, or is that a drivel of dribble?)