By Darryl Mason
Miranda Devine, September 3, 2009 :
"A surfeit of self-love is almost a prerequisite for success now, and the proliferation of egomaniac sites, from Twitter and MySpace to Facebook and YouTube, make the peer pressure to be grandiose and irrationally self-confident almost irresistible."On Sunday, Miranda Devine, columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, 2003 recipient of the federal government's Centenary Medal and former board member of the Catholic Weekly, engaged with 20 year old university student Justin Barbour on Twitter. Barbour didn't like one of Devine's recent columns about gay marriage :
Miranda Devine, "born in the early 60s", replied :
Devine responded to the 20 year old student's demands for an apology for publicly associating him with the raping of mostly harmless rodents, with this message :
No doubt she will get a column or six out of the Twitter frenzy and journos-on-journos column inches that followed, and no doubt it will be all to her great delight.
In at least one of the columns she will write, she will portray herself as a hapless victim of online hate speech.
As for Devine's previous views on homosexuality, she wrote this in August 2002 (excerpts) :
Gays kiss on prime-time TV shows without protest. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has become so mainstream that it's unfashionable. Society's attitude is basically that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is nobody else's business.
...modern society....is already benignly tolerant of homosexuality. There is no longer any stigma attached to homosexuality, no discrimination, not even a raised eyebrow.
But that is not enough, it seems. Activists will not rest until homosexuality is treated as just another sexual preference in life's infinite smorgasbord, just as desirable as heterosexuality, if not more so. Failure to go along with the equivalence argument will result in heavy penalty...
The US Library of Congress is now archiving every public post that appears on Twitter.
From now until the day the sun explodes, there will be a permanent digital archive at the Library of tens of thousands of Twitter messages filed under the subject Miranda Devine and #RogeringGerbils.
At its peak last night, the number of Twitter messages posted under #RogeringGerbils soaked up an astounding 1 in every 100 tweets.
The Herald Sun decided to go with the headline : You've Been Rogering Gerbils.
How could they not?
Here's a piece I wrote for ABC's Unleashed back on April 16, warning all of the permanency of everything posted on Twitter. Miranda Devine tried to delete her comments, but it didn't work.
Nothing disappears.
Roger The Gerbil : Bulwark Of A Civilisation In Devine Decline
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