Miranda Devine, and off with the Samaritans, the splitters and the culturally condescending Christian pixies ...

(Above: it's almost the weekend. Time to drag out that frock, get down and have fun).

Pay for a display of News Ltd woeful ignorance, knee jerk exceptionalism, ethnocentric righteousness and remarkable silliness when you can still get it for free?

There's the problem of The Australian paywall, right there in a nutshell ...

Take Miranda the Devine - please someone, anyone take her, she's still going for free - only yesterday scribbling furiously in Better angels fall to brutal reality.

It just goes to show how dangerous the intertubes can be, as it seems the Devine is perfect proof that watching the occasional video the web can warp the plasticity of the brain (or so Susan Greenfield and the Devine used to assure us).

After watching the videos doing the rounds - the death of a child in China and the death of Gaddafi - the Devine comes to a set of stunningly confused set of cross cultural judgements on all manner of societies:

There’s no point expressing revulsion at the callous Chinese passers-by or the barbaric Libyan rebels and believing ourselves incapable of the same behaviour.

Yep indeedy, unless we can overlook a couple of world wars, the nuking of cities, the fire bombing of cities, the futile war in Vietnam, the contrived, calculated crusade in Iraq, the ongoing destruction of Afghanistan ...

We could go on and on, but back to the Devine for the important part of the message:

It is not that we in Australia and the West are intrinsically morally superior to the Chinese who walked past little Yue Yue, or the Libyans who delighted in killing an evil dictator.

It is that the Judeo-Christian basis of our society, with its tradition of the Good Samaritan, “Do unto others”, “Turn the other cheek,” and so on, for 2000 years has tempered and modulated the worst human tendencies.

Yep, the Judaic-Christian basis for society is responsible for the turn the other cheek tendency which saw the Devine demand that greenies be hung from the nearest lamp post.

But stay, what is this idle chatter about the Good Samaritan?

Even for non-believers, it has fostered social norms which honour the actions of a Good Samaritan like Xianmei, and create a society that reinforces qualities such as kindness and compassion.

Uh huh. Well never mind that the Devine clearly doesn't have the first clue about the meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, other than the one she learned in primary school, nor the second clue about the tensions between the Samaritan brand of Judaism and mainstream Judaism, and the way that Jesus's parable - solely reported in Luke - makes use of tensions between the splitters and the splittees.

Rather than being a testament to the philosophy of "do unto others" the ongoing feuds between the Samaritans and mainstream Jews is a template for unrelenting warfare, a model carried out with exemplary good manners by Christian societies in the west these past few thousand years, and in the time of empires and colonies exported to all the far-flung reaches of the world ...

Both Jewish and Samaritan religious leaders taught that it was wrong to have any contact with the opposite group, and neither was to enter each other's territories or even to speak to one another. During the New Testament period, although the tensions went unrecognized by Roman authorities, Josephus reports numerous violent confrontations between Jews and Samaritans throughout the first half of the first century. (wiki)

Yep, there's a bloody good model for the start of the first world war. Of course Christians with short memories like to blame the Japanese, Hitler (a nominal Xian) and Stalin for the second world war, and never mind how the pope fellow travelled with Mussolini and the Catholic and Lutheran churches fell into line in Germany as the persecution of Jews began in earnest.

But there's no get out of jail clause of any kind for the start of the first world war, with the imperial ambitions and colonial outrages of the Christian European powers serving as the springboard, and with Russian Orthodox Russia ready to jump into the fray and help get things rolling ...

Still, what's the value of the deaths of thousands of children up against the ideological muck-raking value of a couple of deaths seen in videos on the web?

You have to have an astonishingly myopic view of history to parrot the sort of nonsense that the Devine parrots, and an even more jaundiced view of China, which is one of the few civilisations to keep itself running continuously as a unit since the three kingdoms were forced together ...

It's as if Confucianism and all the other great philosophies of a non-Christian kind that surged through the country - Buddhism anyone - counts for naught in the blinkered Devine world. If you want to have a go at China, have a go over Tibet, rather than use the death of a single child as a symbol for everything ...

Because otherwise, the next thing you know, people could be using the death of a single child in Australia to stand for the hedonistic barbarian aspects to the country, no thanks to the preachers and the do gooders (whether driving kids into a lake to drown them, or abusing them in any other number of refined ways, especially those altar boys so beloved of Catholic clerics)

So where are we heading?

Perhaps what scares us most is that the death of little Yue Yue and the barbaric end of Gaddafi give us a glimpse of a post-Christian world.

Yes, and perhaps the torture at Abu Ghraib gives us a vision of an ongoing Christian world.

The one thing you can say about the likes of the Devine is that they don't get out and about enough, preferring to cultivate a triumphalism about their own culture, a triumphalism recently echoed by Tony Abbott in his views about Malaysia, and heralding a man likely to set back Australia's position in the region by a good century or so ...

Perhaps he can get us back to the good old days of the Confrontation in 1963-66, yet another reminder that when it comes to a regional do, Australia is always ready to turn up and slap a few cheeks, and has been playing the cheek-slapping game since the days of the Boer War.

Never mind. Let's just tweak the Devine a little:

Perhaps what scares us most reading the Devine and her insular, insolent, ethnocentric, culturally superior and condescending musings, is that it give us a glimpse of how far we are from post-Christian world where mutual tolerance and respect and understanding are the dominant forces doing the rounds of the commentariat.

Okay, okay, you mutter, sure you've led with the Devine, but surely the supply of loons is dropping?

Well as a reader noted, so long as we have the likes of frock-loving (not that there's anything wrong with loving a frock) Cardinal Pell rabbiting on about climate change like a complete and utter goose in London, there'll always be riches in abundance. Once again Pell becomes an embarrassment to the church, as noted by hapless Catholics in Cardinal Pell tries to sow doubt on climate change.

Yep, with the Devine blathering on about Christ, and Pell scaremongering on climate change "as an individual", even if that only became clear after questioning, the pond will never want for loons.

But what about those daily polls always reported in News Ltd that foreshadow and predict the imminent decline and downfall of the Federal Government by close of business today? Aren't they locked away in the paywall and the ritual weekly scaremongering lost forever?

Not to worry. There's Mark Kenny punching on at the punch-drunk Punch with Labor points behind but finally kicking with the wind, but before you read yet another tedious bout of entrail examining and tea leaf reading, why not read Polls and pretenders at The Drum, the thoughts of a fellow sufferer ranting at emotional exhaustion by polling. Oh the horror, oh the humanity ...

Yes, these days the pond marches to a different drum, just in time to discover the previously mentioned drummer Tim Dunlop has now discovered rocket science, in Without balance that paywall will not stand:

... here's a prediction: The Australian's paywall will fail unless they change their editorial stance. When you are passing yourself off as a serious newspaper, you can't continue to insult half your potential (already small) audience and expect them to pay you. So until they offer more balanced news coverage, and leaven their ranks of rightwing commentators with some credible people from the left (and no, I don't mean disgruntled, failed and bitter former Labor politicians) they will struggle.

And only a few days before, he was urging the world to sign up to fair and balanced journalism behind The Australian paywall. Talk about a fickle, fair weather friend.

Well the pond would settle for fair and balanced rather than tired commentariat members ranting at each other across the ideological divide, but thanks for the outline of the bleeding obvious Mr. Dunlop ...

Dearie me, so many loons, so little time, but thankfully so long as we're blessed by Cardinal Pell and Miranda the Devine dropping in on the pond every so often like Daffy Duck dropping in on Porky Pig, all's well in the world ...

(Below: why does Daffy Duck and News Ltd inhabit the same brain space in the pond? Who knows, but you can see the episode in question, Cracked Quack, at Youtube, at least until the rights holders notice. And as a bonus, it takes less time and offers more pleasure than reading Miranda the Devine).