Time for a Sunday assignment on the paranoid bilious tabloid mind ...

The pond has long held its suspicions.

And now a meme doing the rounds says it's right to be suspicious, as you too can confirm by checking out Freakishly realistic telemarketing robots are denying they're robots.

No one has yet supplied the pond with convincing proof that the freakishly realistic political robots currently on parade, such as Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, are actually human.

No doubt if you asked them directly, they'd deny that they're robotic robots, and instead assert that they're human robots, but that's pretty much an idle distinction to the pond.

How else to explain the hollow robotic way they say their three word slogans? It seems robotics and programming down under can't handle more involved texts - but if you listen to those telemarketing robots, you'll note the similarities in the peculiar, hollow laugh that sometimes follows a risible thought.

Check out that robotic laugh on YouTube, either the short version here or the longer version here.

The pond merely reports, and you decide, but frankly deep suspicions linger - the only doubt being whether any programmer could devise such a fiendish, hellish, smug, smirking face, to match the inhuman laugh ...

Meanwhile, wouldn't you know it, there's yet another national emergency on hand, though whether it's an actual emergency is hard to say, because every day's a national emergency in Miranda the Devine's paranoid, tabloid beat-up, Chicken Little world, as you can savour in Laissez-faire parents, lasso your kids and teach them right from wrong.

Sigh. Must we?

Lasso them? You mean teach them early bondage themed games so they can enjoy bondage in their adult sex life?

What,  you actually meant teach them to act and sound like a robotic parrot, and parrot Miranda the Devine's bizarre notions of what constitutes right (rabid ratbag right wing Catholic ideology) and wrong (riding bicycles and caring about the environment).

Oh okay, gather around children.

It is wrong:

To be Miranda the Devine:
To write hysterical beat-ups proclaiming the moral end of the universe, while pining for some mythical golden age when things were better;
To use half-baked arguments that push ideological agendas, and call it the truth;
To resort to "experts" who make a name for themselves by adding to the Chicken Little paranoia;
To buy a tabloid newspaper, at any and all times, and especially to expect any cultural, moral, political or philosophical insight of a meaningful kind;
To buy a Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper, which is a particularly harmful and dangerous practise, far worse than masturbation. Wanking can only result in hairs on the palm, or in the case of girls, upper lip hair, but reading a Murdoch tabloid and its crony commentariat can result in permanent brain damage.

It is dangerous, wrong, and can result in self-harm, if you read any column by a member of the right-wing commentariat and fail to follow appropriate procedures, which proved invaluable on cracker night.

Remember they are only for entertainment, and can be explosive, especially if held in the fingers. Always light fuse and stand well clear.

Be warned, whenever the crony commentariat get on to the subject of sex, they will get agitated, prance about like nervous nellies, stutter, have hot flushes, cheeks will go red, and they will do their level best to induce a deep sense of guilt and moral failing in their readers.

Their readers, incidentally, will generally be aged old farts deeply embittered by their failure to enjoy a good fuck, and enlivened by a profound resentment that there might be young people out there, alive with energy, youth and joy.

You will also find, embalmed, a quaint mind set where shibboleths are invoked and the innocent blamed:

Distorted feminism is part of the problem. When "consent" is the only standard that can be applied, and when all responsibility for sexual behaviour is dumped on boys, the double standards are impossibly confusing.

Now what this actually means - please bear with us young people as we decode it - is that the Devine is deeply, impossibly confused, but full of fear and loathing, and especially inclined to distort feminism as she refracts it through the lens of her mindless stupidity.

You can get some idea of what's actually bothering the Devine when you read her final three pars:

The teenage wrangle is a tricky art, and I know even parents of nine who haven't entirely mastered it. But to give in to teenage demands is to mistake why they make them. Often it's to see if parents care enough to stop them. You may detect secret relief amid the fury from teenagers told they can't go to a party or a sleepover. 
"My horrible parents" can be a handy excuse. But parents have to be prepared to wear that "horrible" reputation.

Okay children, we expect a five page assignment on that text by Monday. A full Freudian analysis is permitted, and indeed encouraged, no matter how horrible the result or the insights ... and you're encouraged to imagine the relationship between horrible parents and unfortunate children when the children reach adulthood ...

Those struggling to understand the profound motivating sense of failure and deep bitterness about the way the world has been, is and will be, may find the visual prompt below useful.

It is permitted though not encouraged to mention conspiracies and toxic forces, and it is appropriate to wonder if the Devine would only be happy in a world where sheeple obey her every word.

Gloomy sods might also wonder if there's any way the Devine might be happy, and whether she ever accepts responsibility for the unhappiness, guilt, prejudice and bile she routinely launches into the world like a lemon on steroids:

Meanwhile, more advanced children might care to examine the ability of Andrew "the Bolter" Bolt to spread hate and bile.

Every day provides fresh examples, but for now check out the high dudgeon on view in High Court uses slippery slope argument to defend same sex marriage. Where is Malcolm Turnbull now?

Advanced children can do their assignment on this text:

The High Court this week endorsed the “slippery slope” argument used by opponents of same-sex marriage - and unwisely sneered at by the likes of Malcolm Turnbull. 
In this case the argument is simple: once you insist that two gays should be free to marry each other on the grounds that they are consenting adults then you cannot logically oppose three consenting adults from marrying, either. Agree to same sex marriage and you must agree to polygamy, too. 
It turns out i (sic, or faux modesty?) was wrong only in one detail - one that actually underlines my point. The High Court says we already legally endorse polygamy for many purposes, so we cannot logically oppose same sex marriage. This is indeed the “slippery slope” argument - backed by our Highest Court, albeit with a different agenda in mind.

Children who fail to note that this means that in due course they will be forced, in due course, to marry a dog, cat or some other creature will be marked down.

It is important in all slippery slope arguments to carry the argument to a logical extreme, and what better way than for children to realise that they will be entered into a forced marriage with the family cat at the age of 12, requiring a sizeable dowry and a no-divorce clause, and they will then be required to act out furry porn on the internet for ever after, and it will all be the fault of gay marriage proponents.

Talk about toxic forces at work!

Never mind children, with a bit of luck some of you might even grow up in a household free of the distorting effects of the tabloid mindset, and its corrupting, corroding, damaging ways.

Nameless experts conjured up by the pond have estimated that reading the Devine or the Bolter for a week is roughly equivalent, in terms of brain damage, to smoking a packet of cigarettes a week for a year, or drinking too much for a year, or visiting porn sites on a weekly basis for a decade.

Urge your parents to refuse to allow this sort of toxic material into the house. Set your safe filter to preclude the Bolter.

Instead, why not urge your parents to buy The New Yorker. Why, in last week's edition, you could have read James Wood writing a moving meditation on life, in Why? - sadly it's inside the paywall, but you can get a whiff of why Why? is such a healthy corrective to the Devine, with this:

When I was a child, the “Why?” question was acute, and had a religious inflection. I grew up in an intellectual household that was also a religious one, and with the burgeoning apprehension that intellectual and religious curiosity might not be natural allies. My father was a zoologist who taught at the University of Durham, my mother a schoolteacher at a local girls’ school. Both parents were engaged Christians; my mother came from a Scottish family with Presbyterian and evangelical roots. The Scriptures saturated everything. My father called my relationship with my first girlfriend “unedifying” (though in order to deliver this baleful Kierkegaardian news he had to ambush me in the car, so that he could avoid catching my eye). I was discouraged from using the secular term “good luck,” and encouraged to substitute the more providential “blessing.” One was blessed to do well in school exams, blessed to have musical talent, blessed to have nice friends, and, alas, bles

sed to go to church. My untidy bedroom, my mother said, was an example of “poor stewardship.” Dirty laundry was un-Christian.

When I asked where God came from, my mother showed me her wedding ring and suggested that, like it, God had no beginning or end. (But I knew that someone had made the ring.) When I asked about famines and earthquakes, my father pointed out that human beings were often politically responsible for the former and, in the case of the latter, were often to blame for continuing to live in notoriously unstable areas. But what about cancer, mental and physical handicap, awful accident, the freakish viral attack that felled my friend's brother at the age of forty-four? I was told that God's ways are incomprehensible, and that a Job-like humility before the incomprehensible must be cultivated. But Job was a complainer more than a saint or a stoic, and I fear that my childish questioning got permanently jammed in the position of metaphysical complaint ...

... inquiry was welcomed up to a certain point, but discouraged as soon as it became rebellious. Job could not become Captain Ahab. This illiberality, coupled with my sense that official knowledge was somehow secretive, enigmatic, veiled - that we don't know why things are, but that somewhere someone does, and is withholding the golden clue - encouraged in me, countervailing habits of secrecy and enigma. I would reply to their esoterica with my esoterica, their official lies with my amateur lies. They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen and that there was no afterlife. As they kept the actuality of their afterlife a kind of prized secret, I, too, would keep my revelation that there was no afterlife a prized secret. I became a formidable liar, the best I knew, accomplished and chronic. Lying went all the way down: you started by withholding the big truth, your atheism, and ended by withholding small truths - that you swore among friends, or listened to Led Zeppelin, or had more than one drink, or still had the unedifying girlfriend ...

And so on. And as a bonus, you could read Douglas Starr explaining in The Interview how to produce false confessions, essential for the Star Chamber world in which the Devine and the Bolter live, and want others to live (sadly, it too, is inside the paywall).

By the end of it, you might even be in the happy position of being able to laugh at the angry Sydney Anglicans, and to smile when you read this sort of Jensenist prose, given the megalomaniacal header How You Spend My Christmas.

Everybody, except the scrooge, agrees it is a time to celebrate - there’s just no agreement about what we are celebrating. So everybody wishes everybody ‘happy Christmas’, but in true post-modern fashion it means different things to different people. Recently there has even developed the fashion of articles and advertisements on “How I Celebrate ‘My’ Christmas” as they seek to impose their beliefs that everybody’s Christmas is different! Increasingly, in the world of individualism, our community leaders have lost the sense of celebrating something together. Yet, when the opportunity arises, the population turns out in great numbers to sing again of the birth of our Lord.

Fancy sheeple imagining that they might dare to have an Xmas different to an angry Sydney Anglican Xmas!

Never mind the angries. You can dare to be different, and it needn't be a fashion, and you needn't turn into a blathering, shouting evangelical, bothering god and anyone else who stumbles across their path.

Oh sure you'll hear a lot of robot voices telling you to become a loyal robot, and you might have to carry the differences within you, camouflaged and sheltered, but still you can nurture the differences, and treasure them...

Why you might even end up a professor at Harvard ... and write intelligent pieces about literature and why novels can provide most useful insights into the worlds of differences and different people, and where's the harm in that?

(Below: and you even get cartoons, and there are more cartoons from that issue here. One for the Devine and one for the Bolter)