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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Sunday, April 26, 2015

Oh Yes You Are Attacking Free Speech Giovanni Tiso: And Here’s Why. #Ponytailgate








Pursuant to my tweet, I like John Campbell’s show, Campbell Live, arguing for it to stay against Mediaworks short term Generation Airhead Reality-TVism. I like John’s TV and social media persona – he’s a great bloke. And I support his show, even though often disagreeing with its Left-centric premises: for example, regarding the lunchbox in schools crusade - and I donated because yes, you can’t see kids suffer through the irresponsibility of their parents - there should have been journalists investigating the causes of why so many parents were sending their children to school with no food, alongside the lunchbox campaign. Because there’s no excuse for sending your child to school with no food: food *is* cheap, and if you can’t afford to feed a child, on this seeming scale indicated that has the taxpayer up for feeding all these school children, nationwide, forever, then what has happened to prudent family planning? If our media isn’t brave enough to investigate causes – and Maori TV is guilty also - then the problem won’t be fixed, given the clamour that fills the vacuum left by lack of investigative reporting is always to throw taxpayer money at whatever the perceived ill is, and grow an already bloated state, which is the problem from the get-go: that is, welfare dependency.

But sooth to say, the latter is immaterial: good on John Campbell; please, Mediaworks, start thinking long term and giving your audience intelligent content like this. That said, I like the other show also, Seven Sharp, and believe if more Kiwi’s had Mike Hosking’s can-do confident attitude, and positive outlook, and that of the show’s lead, on her return, Toni Street, we’d have an extra percent of GDP. Regarding the former, there’s an awful lot more that can be taken from Hosking than can be shoved back in his face.

Though for this post all that is beside the point, as is Hosking’s opinion on Ponytailgate (or mine, for that matter.) This post is about that self-styled demigod who presides in the Progressivestan of social media, Twitter, and his yet further campaign to ban, boycott and close down free speech. Self-proclaimed Marxist, Giovanni Tiso – (who keeps a great blog most of the time, gird your loins and check it out). Needless to say, according to Giovanni he is not attacking free speech, indeed, it is I who am contradicting myself:





But that is not the truth: Giovanni is gunning for free speech all right. Here’s why.

I first expressed my disquiet with Givonni’s successful earlier campaign against Willie Jackson and John Tamihere’s Radiolive show: both men lost their broadcasting jobs from that (with Jackson making a comeback some months later, but JT assigned to a media oblivion Giovanni will be well pleased with). I began that post with a quotation from Kundera’s wonderful The Unbearable Lightness of Being:


When she told her French friends about [why she would not attend a street protest against the communists], they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.


Relating this to Giovanni’s campaign in that instance as follows:


I have this inbuilt freedom loving radar that responds to individualism, and recoils from mob group think.

Nothing surrounding the silencing of these two men breaches Libertarian philosophy in any way. Blogger Giovanni Tiso started a campaign of putting pressure on their show’s advertisers, and those advertisers submitted to it, pulling their paid time. There was no government coercion involved: every action has been voluntary … that’s the correct way to bring about change. Good on Tiso.

My trouble is, as Lindsay Mitchell aptly put it:

But it's still a disturbing example of the repercussions of thinking the 'wrong stuff' out loud.

Yes. That. On the surface, everything is right here. … And yet … and yet, in my mind there ‘lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.’ But I know I will never be able to make the radshitzy clique understand. Nor even the centre anymore.


Because Giovanni’s current campaign to ban and boycott Mike Hosking follows the same line, reality is clearly exposed. He has again concentrated his attention on the sponsors, namely Rabobank, and tweeted the form and content of his complaint followed by exhorting his neophytes to copy and paste so he can have a parade of people marching by with raised fists and pasting identical letters in unison. [Hope the below publishes okay, because of course Giovanni (banned, boycotted and) blocked me long ago: I don’t pass the muster of Tisospeak.]


https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/467916542194089984/-CmYc2fe_normal.jpeg
Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso)
Here's the link to my complaint. I know you don't need to take cues from me, but just for the record. docs.google.com/document/d/1fn

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/467916542194089984/-CmYc2fe_normal.jpeg
Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso)
And this is my letter to @RabobankNZ. Again, for the record. docs.google.com/document/d/11U<


Finger to nose, *wink*, for the record; yes, of course.

Here’s the thing.

Writing a complaint to the respondent or station concerned: fine. You’re exercising free speech. But as with the Jackson/JT campaign, when you go the next step to publicly organising a boycott and harassment of the sponsors, you have only the one intention in a market economy: to shut down totally what you see as offensive. To expunge it. Giovanni has a single intention above all else: get Mike Hosking off the air, as he did with Willie Jackson and JT. To ban, to boycott, to shut down what is offensive to you, is to attack free speech directly all right. You bet it is.

For all the many journalists residing in Progressivestan backing Giovanni on this one – not John Campbell, at least that I’m aware of, note – be warned. If you ever sin against Tisospeak, you’ll be in the ban and boycott cross-hairs also. He’s so sure he’s right, you will be wrong, then wronged. (And of all people who should understand that, you, Philip Matthews, Fairfax journalist, albeit blinded by being a raving Progressive, should pay it more thought.)

Indeed #Ponytailgate itself has now got little to do with a waitress and our Prime Minister: it’s been weaponised by the Left for a direct attack on the press freedom which is fundamental to a free country:







Do I think journalists always get it right, including according to my own moral code (of man qua man)?

Hell no.

But I’d rather a bit of discomfort, hurt feelings or anger from time to time, than a regulated media, thanks, or forced to live in a Progressivestan haughtily presided over by tyrant Tiso policing all matters un-Tiso. The geography of Progressivetan is a grey and indolent wasteland, populated at each town centre with a public stock in which rebellious thought is captured and put on display for public learnings … for the common good (of course). There is but one colour in this lifeless land, red, the rivers of blood flowing from our Marxist past into the future.

So careful what you wish for when with raised fists you’re copying and pasting to Rabobank.

… Wait a minute, as patronising as Giovanni’s assumption was you were too stupid to pen your own complaint, you suckered for it? And @secondzeit you retweeted The One’s injunction to increase reach into the subjugated subjects? Dear oh dear. For 500 days thou shalt all tweet to the peoples with #MindlessMinionMoron.

Oh, a final note:






Um, yes. Yes, I think that’s about it.

Off I go, fun times, I’m on holiday; wine to be drunk and martinis don’t make themselves ...


Update 1:

Welcome to Progressivestan: tourist warning - watch out for muggers:












Update 2: Fire Mike Hosking But Firing Scott McIntyre is a Free Speech Issue? Huh.

Scott McIntyre has been fired from his sports presenting job at SBS due to inappropriate tweets he made regarding our ANZACs.

I see on Twitter that the Progressives, led by John Pilger, are (rightly) treating this as a free speech issue. I don’t agree with what McIntyre was trying to do with these tweets, but don’t think he should be fired.

However, if you just signed up to Giovanni’s campaign to have Mike Hosking fired, because that is the campaign, I hope you’re not at the same time campaigning against SBS for firing McIntyre. (And if you are then you’re playing the #MindlessMinionMoron team game: you’re not wedded to ideas and the just society at all, are you.)





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