Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Scott Guy Trial and Privacy: A Society on Trial


A society that puts the private affairs, and pain, of the Guy/Macdonald families on the six o’clock news every night for our prurient interest is a barbaric one. The mother’s evidence and grief two days ago recounting the death of her son should not have been public spectacle, nor should Anna Macdonald’s hellish position of giving evidence regarding her (weeping) husband, in the case of her brother’s murder, both men of whom she loved. None of this is any of our business. It’s justice meets reality TV with its sick lineage back to the gladiator pits of Rome. It’s the barbaric life and justice of the tribe lived in public. For the opening news item tonight, why doesn’t TVNZ just put Jerry Springer on in the place of Simon Dellow: that’ll be good for ratings.

A major theme that readers will soon pick up in this blog is that civilisation is a movement toward privacy, the police state the reverse: that if you have no privacy, then you have no liberty. And how we treat privacy in this instance, with cameras rolling in the courts, makes a mockery of innocent until proven guilty: if Ewen Macdonald is innocent, it’s too late already to save his reputation and future prospects, because there was always this second trial by the public who are not in court and don’t get all the facts. We’ve already heard from Lindy Chamberlain this week, what such bush justice is like. In respect of privacy issues I find the political Left and Right both equally repugnant.

To carry out their program of theft, sorry, redistribution, the Left from the get-go had to destroy the privacy of every individual: for IRD to be able to take my earnings and my property, my privacy before state officials first had to be disposed of; it was a given from the time the first Left dictatorian decided it was better that they, not I, should decide what was to be done with my money, just like in every police state from history. Albeit, let me put on record, the majority of IRD staffers I deal with daily are ‘good’ people, I have no complaint whatsoever on a personal/personable level; but this blog is about the principles involved. And don’t give me the Privacy Commission as a safeguard: a society only needs a Privacy Commission after it has first destroyed my privacy – it’s simply an admission of the crime already committed by the state, and the Commission is state run, so that’s no safeguard.

Although, as in the case of this trial, the (conservative) Right are worse, for they don’t even have the excuse of expediency (to my money): theirs appears to me to be simply the emoting of the vigilante delivering bush justice from the mob. It’s my major point of difference to the naming and shaming Whaleoil, wanting to deliver, I take it from his daily proverb, his Old Testament eye for an eye revenge. His advocacy of the ‘outing’ by naming, pre-verdict, as I believe is the position with NBR (?), shows that innocence or not doesn’t seem to play a part in their reasoning. And the argument that technology today makes privacy of the accused, but un-tried, impossible, is not an argument, it’s a cop out, because privacy is a moral issue, as is my freedom.

I believe there should be no cameras in court. I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police, all defendants before criminal trial should have name suppression unless, or until, proven guilty. That’s the civil and civilised society. Yes, we must have reporters in the court, as a check on corruption and to ensure the law is delivered without bias, but that need only be an embargoed print media, with proceedings  reported either only after a guilty verdict, or by withholding names in the case of innocence.

And as an aside, turning this issue back onto the themes of this blog, consider that as an alleged murderer, Ewen Macdonald still has more rights than a law abiding taxpayer before the IRD. The Crown must prove Macdonald murdered Scott Guy, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, as it should be. If this were a tax case, it is reversed; the Crown would simply have sent him a statement saying guilty, with no reasons necessarily attached, and it would be up to him to prove his innocence. What sort of society does that to its law abiding citizens? (Answer: read my blog byline).

I hope through this blog I am starting to make my limited readership understand the nature of the brute-perfumed society we’ve voted in: it is the life forcibly lived in public; a police state, by most definitions, this scant regard for privacy being a major one of them. Take those damned cameras out of that court, and have the decency of a civil society for the Guys’ and Macdonalds’; their lives are hard enough, and angst nothing to do with us.


UPDATE:

Mind you, as bad as our privacy issues are, look at what they're doing in Britain

UPDATE II - 8th July, 2012:

Just for the record, following the privacy issues voiced in my above post, I note that the MSM have today hit a new low, by reporting messages left by Scott Guy's widow on his graveside. That's sheer tabloid. Shame on Granny Herald.

11 comments:

  1. I think the tweets and the updates coming thru the Manawatu Standard are fantastic, I watch TVNZ news last night and I felt that TVNZ had reported it as Ewen was guilty it seemed bias. I agree TV Cameras do not need to be in the courtroom showing us the family pain, we want the important evidence highlights, I felt they the motive has been overplayed, I hope they have more than how did Ewen know he had been shot before it was known, this type of information could easily have been over heard by police, neighbours saying they heard shots this morning, and a bit of friction in the family doesn’t make you want to shoot someone, Ewen worked on the farm since he was 16 so he had a bit of idea on how the family functioned and it seemed like the father made it clear Scott wasn’t going to get the farm, there seems to be a lot of unanswered questions still I just hope the police have some better evidence that what is currently being presented. I think it’s not a privacy issue but it is the way NZ reporters now present the facts with added drama and their own personal opinions!

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  2. No, we don't 'need the important evidence highlights': it's none of our business. This is a matter for the court and the jury: all the participants have a right to their privacy in the interim.

    It's the civilised society versus the life of the barbarian tribe.

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  3. The only benefit of this reporting is it shows uo how thin and (I hesitate to use the word useless) is. Vehicle in the vicinity when Scott shot not found, armed robber in the vicinity with a P freak as an alibi, rough looking man no-one can find, 3 other cars not identified, shooter wore dive boots. Police say MacDonald killed and buried puppies the next day? Really, no-one noticed? Or was he supposed to have done it that morning as well?

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  4. I couldn't care less: that case, and families grief, is none of our business. Read my post and get the point I'm making.

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  5. But we all own each other Mark!

    Not only do we now all carry some 'responsibility' for this tragedy, we'd like to see it serialised.

    In fact, we are almost all equal now.

    They have nearly won.

    It is beyond trivialisation of greatness, it is persecution of it.

    We have no lives of our own above our aspirations of conformity.

    So what else is there to talk about?

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  6. Yes, as Linz Perigo calls it, Generation Airhead.

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  7. Mark, check out this post at the Hand Mirror.

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  8. Yes. I'd put up a post there, but the last time I did that, and I was being nice, I got all this weird male hating stuff back about how they didn't have to give me time, space, oxygen ... Once bitten ...

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  9. "I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police..."

    What do you mean? Can you give an example?

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  10. Stephen: if pushed it's hard to come up with an example, I was more leaving the door open. One instance would be though, say terrorism: or more precisely, take the London bombings - if the police had caught one of the four bombers, and had enough intelligence to know there were other bombers, and a real threat to public safety, then it would be appropriate to give the name, etc, of the suspect caught if it would help find his co-conspirators.

    But it would only be in rare instances like that: mostly, I think name suppression in all criminal cases would be appropriate.

    ... I spluttered over the Government part of your profile :) but you have a couple of interesting looking blogs. I'll get back when I have time an have a look.

    Thanks for reading my blog :)

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  11. You may regret looking at my blog once you see some of my more left-leaning posts. (Although I can honestly say I was a PC-gone-mad, Tax and Spend Liberal even when I was in my previous job in the private sector.)

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