Montesquieu and Islam: The Peaceful Crusade in Dunedin - Forgive my Discomfort.

I find every form of theocracy dangerous and repugnant, whether it be Christians handing my life over to their angry God; Moslem’s to that contradiction, Allah; or socialists to the butchering machine of the twentieth century, the State. The most evil thing a society can do against itself is hand over its individuals - their liberty of mind and body - to the caprice of an Other: the ills in our welfare state, including the need for John Campbell’s Lunchbox program - which I’ve just donated to - can be traced back to the destruction of self-reliance and self-responsibility, thus natural love, affection, and compassion, within our Gulags of Forced Altruism.

It is on this footing, as a libertarian, I can say that though I respect the right of every individual to believe whatever they like, so long as they don’t breach the non-initiation of force or fraud principle, that does not mean I have to respect what it is they believe in, especially if it is a creed that bases itself on anything other than the liberty and volition of the individual human to pursue their happiness.

And so while I would (figuratively, that is, don’t test it) die for the right of New Zealand’s Moslem population to purchase this former Catholic school in Dunedin, and to set up a school for their young there, don’t expect me to like it, and see it as anything but another step back from the road to freedom that civilised man has as their goal in the only life-time that exists: this one on Earth. A road I saw as my birth right since signposted in 1776, but that has been detoured yet again down the road to serfdom of Orwell's Big Brother State.

I have written before on how the father of modern thought on multiculturalism, Montesquieu, would be appalled at how modern man has misinterpreted his writings:

… Montesquieu; particularly in his 1748 ‘The Spirit of Laws’ – (a line of thought that has been undermined by Left politics, with serious consequences). Namely, while Montesquieu professed a delight in cultural diversity, he always held that while all cultures might be equally valuable, they were not equally good, thus underlying any celebration of cultural diversity, there was (is) a justice that is eternal. He called it the ‘eternal flame’.

From this our Western rule of law must not hold a hand out to Sharia, and I hope this first South Island Islamic school does not become the breath that might ultimately blow out the eternal flame of a humanist, classical liberalism; for while I am willing to delight in the cultural diversity it will bring, the celebration must not draw a curtain across the fact this faith is not ‘equally good’ to a humane morality based on man qua man.

Regarding Islam, I do not respect a faith in which you can work side by side with a man, who for years behaved like a good bloke, indeed, with a grace that could convert an agnostic to the notion of a moderate Islam, but then two weeks after he has disappeared from the workplace, find he’s taken his 16 year old daughter, brought up in New Zealand as a Westerner, to Pakistan and an arranged marriage. I think that is barbaric, his daughter treated at best as a chattel, at worst, cattle. And though I have no respect for the Catholics who will form a major opposition bloc to MP Maryan Street’s Euthanasia Bill should it make it out of the ballot, I have even less respect for the faith that is replacing it in this school in Dunedin. Because for all the talk of it being the religion of peace, you must excuse me, because I’ve yet to come across an atheist (or latter day Catholic) Taliban, so I’ll be throwing my lot in with the atheists. The world won’t know the enlightenment of a peaceful, free society, until we can cast off both schools of superstitious mysticism: as Voltaire wisely said, those that believe in absurdity, will always be capable of atrocity, and in that I include every religion.

Praise be to man. Have a good weekend.

Information Privacy (Australia): We Need a (Peaceful) Western Spring.

The fact that politicians even think this acceptable shows how far the West has fallen. These incompetent Statists seem so determined to turn George Orwell into a prophet, and are beyond contempt as they drive us all down the road to our serfdom in the new Gulags of Forced Altruism.

Australia is proposing sweeping new powers to keep watch over its citizens, including laws to force telecommunications and internet providers to store their subscribers' data for two years.

The data, including communications such as emails, would be available for police and intelligence agencies to check during investigations into criminal and terror networks.

Further proposals include the extension of interception powers to Skype and social networking, and laws requiring suspects to provide passwords, enabling authorities to install tracking software, and simplified access to surveillance warrants.

The proposals have been handed to the federal Parliament's joint committee on security and intelligence as part of its inquiry into reforms for national security legislation.

All this private information in the hands of bungling bureaucrats such as the GCSB and SIS or whatever the equivalent is in Australia. As the Fortresses of Legislation are so keen on spewing out law after law, let’s make another one: to stand for the Australian parliament all candidates must publish the last two years of all the data mentioned in this piece: every bit of it, for public readership. See if they want go ahead with it then.

I've often wondered as the Iron Curtains of the Eastern Bloc fell where all the Stasi and KGB guys and girls would have found employment: I'm starting to get an inkling. If I was going to make anything compulsory, I'd put the movie The Lives of Others on every high school curriculum.

Civilisation is the movement toward privacy, a police state the opposite.


Update:

Nice piece on the Australian proposals, and Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, by Myles Peterson. The final paragraphs sum up well:

Why any politician thought a policy of logging everything its citizens do online and mandating the permanent "retention" of such data is a bit mind boggling. Australia’s first telephone appeared in 1876, but did not see common usage for another half a century. Not once was it suggested that every phone call should be bugged just in case someone committed a crime facilitated by telephony.

That the Attorney-General of Australia would think it is at all reasonable to record the online activity of every citizen of Australia speaks volumes. Roxon has flip-flopped on the policy since announced, but the mere act of suggesting it should be abhorrent to a liberal democracy.

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Hillary Clinton: Woman-Child – The West as a Kindergarten.

There are few more immoral than statist theocrats. When will these politicians wake up to the fact that, as with children when they see something they want, but which doesn’t belong to them, they can’t just reach out and take it. And they certainly can’t do so without consequences, including, or especially, when it's someone's wealth they're helping themselves to. Why is doing something that a loving parent would reprimand their children for, in order their children grow up responsible, productive adults, become okay when politicians practice it on a national scale, and preach it from the pulpits of the Fortresses of Legislation?

Look at this Woman-Child: she can’t even tell the difference anymore between voluntarism and force, between a noble philanthropy and an immoral theft. To this politician, her name is Hillary Clinton, tax is now philanthropy, just like war is peace, freedom is slavery, liberty is bounded: yet another politician using George Orwell’s nightmare world as her political manual. And hey, it’s the presidential election in the US, so might as well throw in persecuting the rich again, there’s votes in it for the Democrats:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a strongly-worded message to the rich at the Clinton Global Initiative Monday –- help grow your countries. 

The former first lady addressed an audience of leaders in … philanthropy … [she] urged struggling countries to tax equitably and to lean on the wealthy.

"One of the issues I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country,"

If you advocate a contradiction, then you better re-examine your premises. And in relation to your first paragraph, Hillary, you don’t grow a country by stealing the wealth from those who actually know how to use it to better the living standards of all of us, via the voluntary transaction, and putting it in the hands of bureaucrats. History has taught us that. (Whisper: ‘And let’s just ignore the quaint notion that wealth is owned by those who earn it. Remember what your ‘land of the free’ was built on? It wasn’t this speech of yours; it was property rights and freedom from people like you back in the homeland).

I despair. As I've said before, no wonder modern youth slouches down the street aimlessly, violently, and drunk, its bum hanging out of its pants: look at how its being brought up.

Privacy: Kim Dotcom and New Zealand's GCSB

So as part of the ‘fiasco of officials’ that has been the Dotcom raid and its aftermath, we now find that New Zealand’s central intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, has mucked up its part in the raid also, in what must be a perfect fail mark for the State now, with every government department involved having overridden its powers; itself an admittance of the semi-police state we live under. But for me, there is something all the reportage on this is so far missing. As stated in the NBR piece:

GCSB had acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.

I thought we had separation of powers for a reason. I don’t know what the limitations on the GCSB are, but I just assumed their jurisdiction only concerned matters of national security, such as foreign terror risk, a function which I’m quite comfortable with. But do I take from this that police can routinely use the frightening privacy busting powers of GCSB to augment their own powers, once exceeded, to prosecute routine 'domestic' criminal cases: copyright, theft, drugs, etc? And what other departments can do this also? IRD already have more powers of snooping, search and seizure than the police, so I assume they’re linked in to GCSB as well?

I support IP, and so if Dotcom is found to have breached same, then that is a legitimate matter for state sanction, but damn I’m fed up with government departments that already have police state powers - when viewed against the civilised classical liberal society - casually ignoring even those few boundaries they have, and thumbing their nose at process in a way you or I as individuals would be crucified over. And it's easy to fall into the assumption that it's only Dotcom's notoriety, in this instance, that has brought to light what is routine behaviour occurring here, and the inferences that has for whether we have the rule of law, or not, in New Zealand.

[Listening to a snippet on National Radio, that news broadcast ran that the problem was they were spying on New Zealand nationals and they aren't allowed to do that. If Wiki is to be believed, that would seem to be in line with their governing purpose ... but, the question remains: are they spying on other New Zealand nationals? What linkages do other government departments have with them?]