Statism and Privacy: IE, You Have None. And Bossy Teenagers.

I got through the first two articles in Granny Herald this morning, and have had to stop. I've set out my thoughts on privacy on this post:

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. [Snip]. 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. [Snip] 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.

Now let’s ignore privacy busting behemoth, IRD, and how they can, and do, turn the lives of innocents over, daily, with no hope for the audited of redress against the utter, complete devastation of their privacy and dignity; the audited whose only crime is to run businesses that better the lives of all of us. Let’s, instead, turn the torch of freedom on another Orwellian department of the type the state is so good at growing: immigration.

Staff at Immigration New Zealand are being accused of using a confidential client database "like a dating site", and of looking at information on wealthy applicants. [Snip] A former immigration staff member, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said staff sometimes logged in to look at information on wealthy and interesting clients "just for fun".

Yeah, just for fun. It’s only their privacy; their lives. What would bureaucrats care about those. Mind you, that, fun, leads me onto the second Herald piece: is this foul mouthed teenage solo mum, who doesn’t seem to like paying her way, or mind a bit of vandalism, and whose life choices to date would seem, at times, a bit inchoate, the same one that just recently has been telling the adults on some Pacific island or other how to live their lives with an arrogance that would take your breath away faster than the emissions emanating from a bull’s backside?

Oscar nominated actress Keisha Castle-Hughes yesterday settled an acrimonious rental dispute by phone after she left a Tenancy Tribunal hearing upset.
The 22-year-old leased Roger McCracken's $1.4 million Mt Eden home with her friend Michael Graves for a year before moving out in November. Mr McCracken asked the tribunal for more than $5000, claiming damage to carpet throughout the house, fixtures and storage costs.
Early in the hearing adjudicator Amanda Elliott called for a 10 minute break after Castle-Hughes yelled "I go through f***ing hell", when told the matter would be reported.

There’s that lovely song, ‘It’s a Wonderful World’. The bloke with the divine deep voice. Anyway, he was wrong in the Police State circa early twenty first century. We are all forced to live our lives, again, as with the tribes of an older barbaric time, in the public bear-pit, with even teenagers, minds either barely formed, or deformed by alcohol, and their bums hanging out of their pants, having inculcated the ludicrous, but brutal, ethic that they have the right to determine the rights in lives of total strangers.

I must shelve 1984 for a  while, and pick up ‘Lord of the Flies’ again.