Day 5 and a candyass Shanahan enters the room ...

There's nothing like a dose of Xian paranoia over Easter and who better to supply it than a Shanahan, banging the same drum she's been banging for years ...

Paranoia, the persecution complex, the martyrdom, the suffering and the indignation, it's all there ...

Thanks be unto the reptiles of Oz for multiple choices this day ...

Naturally the pond went with the genuine, authentic down under paranoia, as opposed to the ramblings of a genuinely Marxist 'won't someone think of the Xians' British interloper ... though the suffering and the persecution was much the same ...

Note well the beginning wondrous logic, whereby progressives are conflated with the persecution in the middle east, in Africa and parts of Asia, China and North Korea, no doubt because wicked progressives hold all the cards and the power in such heathen places.

Then it's on to another familiar chant, this one about the liberal secular media. 

How to the reptiles of Oz stand for this defamation, not to mention commercial television and radio? Now we know Chairman Rupert dominates the fading print media, and commercial television and radio far exceeds the ABC in terms of collective reach ...

It seems the Chairman plays host to a damned infestation of liberal secular media, as opposed to British blow-ins whining about how a university club should gain access to union privileges while banning some of the poor suckers who pay for the privileges ...

You know, the same rule should apply to the tax break that all religions get in Australia. If you want to discriminate, do it on your own dime and your own time ...

As for those "some political and social elites", thank the long absent lord we're not dealing with women who might actually want to control their bodies, gays who might want to get along without being consigned to hell on earth and then eternity hereafter, and other matters where fundamentalist Xians and fundamentalist Daesh sound very much the same ...

Shanahan is simply too dumb - one hesitates to blame all Xianity for the condition - to realise that a religion that consigns vast swathes of the population to hell is going to get a few people agitated ...

And then there's the contribution to science ...

But the surest thing to get some people going is an elitist, put in an elite position - yes, not just one but two Shanahans on the same rag - rabbiting on about social and political elites and libertarian milieus and liberal secular media.

Your average common or garden punter must resort to a blog or a letter to the editor, while the reptiles routinely host the elite Shanahans so they might rage on about the 'leets ...

Another soupçon of a serve if you please Jeeves, but not too much because the pond is already overflowing with rich, ripe, fruity paranoia ...

Well no, actually, fuck willy nilly religious freedom for fundamentalist Islamics, and while we're at it, fuck religious freedom for fundamentalist Catholics and fundamentalist angry Sydney Anglicans ...

Show a little civility and respect and decency. 

The old days when you could go around burning witches and gays are gone - though there's still a mountain of work to be done undoing the support of Wahhabism that was front and centre of the Bush love-in with Saudi Arabia ...

And while there are still some places, such as the deep south, where Xians can go around binding the rights of women and gays with bigotry and prejudice, while consigning dissenters to an eternity of hellfire, it's got nothing to do with being progressive.

It's about having a respect for humanity and Christ's actual message - often obscured by the hatefest of fear, loathing, paranoia, hatred and hostility that emanates from fundamentalist bigots preaching about right and wrong, and mankind's (as opposed to humankind's) place in the cosmos.

It is often not appreciated in our Western tradition that modern notions of political liberty had their origins largely in the struggles for religious liberty?

Oh FFS, go tell that to Galileo ... what alternative universe of the Index Lbrorum Prohibitorum did that spring from?

But it put the pond in the mood for a confrontational New Yorker cartoon ...