Year End’s Thoughts on Comedy, Free Speech, Raging Against the Left's New Linguistic Puritanism … And Merry Xmas :)

Due to work commitments posting has slowed down, and that will remain the case until April: though there will be new content from time to time. In the meantime, merry Xmas to my readers, thank you for reading, and all the best for the New Year.

As my final post for 2013, given the Left’s new linguistic, deconstructive puritanism too steadily gaining ground, and that tactic of identity politics to gag individuals with their privilege in the hope they'll be too intimidated to speak their minds, I'll shout out against the void a Left politick of enforced conformity would consign dissenting thought to, by re-posting an old post from September, 2012, regarding the importance of comedy, free speech, and most of all, context. There is always context; those who would silence you operate predominantly by dropping it. Despite this post was originally written against Right wing New Zealand blogger Whaleoil, the list of wannabe radshitzy Inquisitors by year end, Right and (albeit mainly) Left - let's just call them nanny statists - is too big to post anymore, although walking proudly at the head of Nanny's Thuggery is self-styled Marxist, Giovanni Tiso. And if I had the time, I'd demonstrate how this humourless linguistic PC puritanism stomps hand in fist with a renewed wowserism that may well be the final nail in the coffin of rural hospitality. I predict that soon enough, we'll be as stupid as the French, destroying our thriving wine industry. Needless to say, many a bottle will be drunk during our festivities in the meantime.

And after you've read the below, to remind yourself of the road to serfdom we're all herded down in the West, read this Herald editorial on IRD overreach (hattip John Drinnan). If nothing else, finally the MSM is linking the nature of our out-of-control surveillance states with protection enforcement of the taxbase: and that's why every Left blogger railing against privacy abuses of the GCSB and NSA is a hypocrite.

Hopefully I'll see you in the New Year.

Of Comedy, @Whaleoil @KimDotcom Freedom of Speech & Bounded Liberty.

Like nothing else, comedy - and for me, stand-up comedy - can light a fire that warms the coldest, darkest nights of the mind – but should there be boundaries placed on it?

Kim Dotcom, of whom I'm no acolyte, because I support IP, tweeted Saturday night to the effect of 'what would his political enemies try next, perhaps besmirching him with a rape claim?’ (I’m assuming, referencing Assange). In truth, it wasn't funny, and I'm not even sure he meant it as a joke: but that's beside the point, being the reaction to that tweet which has overtaken it.

On this Saturday night, all I wanted to do was watch a movie, not lose my play-time, and a good bottle of wine, to defending Kim Dotcom, but as he doesn't follow anyone else on Twitter, other than Obama, and he probably doesn’t know he’s upset anyone until the MSM, or his lawyer, tell him so - I've stopped following people (self-styled celebrities) that do this, for all they must want to do is shout at me: I’m interested in dialogue – and despite, when the PC brigade, of all people led by Whaleoil, instantly fell upon his pate, I originally held out by saying:

Stopped myself making a tweet that would've brought on me unjustified grief owing to how context-less stupid people can be. #BeProudOfMeMum

I was within fourteen minutes, of course, stupidly embroiled in it anyway.

Whaleoil’s tweets were of the following oeuvre:

Not cool making rape jokes Kim...very poor taste...what next gas bill jokes?

Yeah; really funny subject rape, eh Kim. Not! Sometimes it's just better to keep your mouth shut..

Bullshit...there is no parallel and jokes about rape NEVER have context

What next jokes about gas bills and ovens? He is already making Jewish jokes too #toofar

Intuitively - that is, without thinking - he’s right isn’t he? It is bad taste, and perhaps something else … well, for us decent folk. Regardless, I really wanted to stop my mind for a night so I ignored it; ignored it; ignored it: then couldn’t. My following three insomniac tweets in the early hours of Sunday morning give my thinking on this (some clarified now I’m not restricted to Twitter’s 140 characters):

Actually, I'm getting fidgety on this. Would I make a rape joke: no! But ...

Whale says no Jewish jokes (so there goes Seinfeld’s stock in trade); so what of disabled jokes (there goes Ricky Gervais's routine); is there a list someone would like to give of forbidden topics for comedy?

Jimmy Carr says there can be no topic outside comedy, that is the point of it ... Give me a reasoned argument against?

And I mean it: give me an argument against?

Because where do we stop nannying other people’s judgement for them? Regarding jokes about the disabled, I remember a Gervais DVD that starts with him sparring lines with a man in a wheelchair that had me in stitches, and then there’s poor Frankie Boyle who, due to the preciousness surrounding the Paralympics, is, I suspect, guilty only of bad comedic timing, but could lose his job anyway, though he's holding his ground bravely. Who is willing to show me the line at which we stop other’s offending us, or not? Irish jokes in Christchurch are apparently wearing a bit thin, so do we pronounce all who do Irish jokes as bad blokes? Are blond jokes okay, Whaleoil? Baby jokes: I don't think I've seen one of those that doesn't offend me. What about cartoons about God, which I know would deeply, deeply offend all of my family, other than just two of us who somehow fell out of the familial mind and became atheists. And for the record, enjoining my last tweet to his, I've heard Jimmy Carr do a Holocaust joke, deliberately, to test this very point, and his audience laughed, as I did, because it was funny. Didn’t mean he, or I, ever thought the Holocaust wasn’t anything other than pure, inhuman evil: indeed, that was the point of his joke (and much of the point of this blog against statism, for that matter).

Perhaps I’ve lost my judgement, of a sudden. Though what I know for certain is I'd rather live in a world where there was freewheeling, albeit risqué, anarchic, comedy, and people weren't scared to write their minds, or out their prejudices, rather than a dour Old Testament world where good taste is shouted down at me from on high, by decree, tweet, or blog, by the self-anointed, whether that be God or Whaleoil, with the concomitant threat always implied in that (by which I mean the tone of Whaleoil’s tweets). Especially when these decrees are judged against the man, or the other Big Guy - see, testing comedic limits again - and might thereby be seen as sanctimonious hypocrisy. And respectful of what Whaleoil has done with his blog, trying as much to play the issue, here, as the man, as is this blog's raison d'être, just a question for you Whale; when you tweeted up this storm of outrage last night - and I know part of your problem is you just don't like Dotcom; got it - but when tweeting, were you wearing your y-fronts or, a term you use often on your own blog, your panty-waisters on this one?

So, returning to my question. I'm prepared to keep a slightly open, if sceptical, mind; at least until it closes in on the truth again. Notwithstanding at this stage my mind warms only to a sodality of comedians, whom I hope never feel forced to 'shut their mouths', as some would have them, rather than the morose, piously preached sanctions of those who would seek to capture me mid-laugh, and tear my tongue out. The fires of freedom must not be extinguished to the darkness, again: no to the humourless, humour Taliban.

Privacy: Customs Officers Have Nothing on the Powers of the Tax Surveillance State. #LeftContradiction

I see statists of every hue, from Left to Right, deservedly up in arms about this appalling piece reported today:

A senior Customs official told colleagues in charge of highly personal information they could earn "brownie points" if they passed secrets to the FBI.

The offer was made by a Customs executive whose job was to oversee one of the organisation's most sensitive units.

[Snip]

The unit prompted privacy fears when it opened as the first outside the United States to actively harvest massive amounts of information from everybody arriving at or leaving New Zealand.

Prime Minister John Key opened it saying: "Anyone who is innocent has nothing to fear."

Just weeks after it opened, Mr Davis wrote to Immigration NZ's intelligence unit, which also holds highly personal information, telling staff there of the FBI's interest in the internet tycoon Kim Dotcom.

In an email released under the Official Information Act, Mr Davis told an Immigration NZ intelligence officer that Customs' Washington liaison was after information about Dotcom.

This was that email:

Continuing:

At the time of the request, no New Zealand agency had formally been engaged under legal assistance laws with the US. Dotcom's status at the time was the same as any other public citizen.

A spokeswoman for Customs refused to comment on the email. She also refused to say if any information was passed to the FBI by Customs.

She also refused to say whether doing so would have been legal - and again refused to comment when asked to clarify the law regarding sharing information with the United States.

Trouble is, as far as the complaining statists are concerned, there’s an elephant in the room, sitting atop every taxpayer, and its equipped with every sort of privacy busting law and the technology to carry out its mandate: it’s called variously IRD, or IRS, HMRC, whatever. It’s the tax surveillance state, built upon a population having no privacy, nor any individual a right to be left alone. This was the only outcome possible from the minute state dictatorians, looking down on us from their fortresses of legislation, decided they could better spend your money than you can, and by bribes to their electorates, and promises no one could keep, usurped for themselves a fraudulent morality to do so.

And it’s the true one world state: no conspiracy theories here. New Zealand has double tax agreements with every major jurisdiction: US, UK, most countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Those double tax agreements have two aspects to them: to determine in any instance which country has the right to tax, but also, as importantly, to implement the legal sanction of information swapping between the taxing authorities.

New Zealand has even signed up, as the world has, to an appalling tax agreement with the US called FATCA under which every New Zealand financial institution must by law pimp the private financial information of every US citizen banking with them to the IRS, on sanction of penalty. Even US citizens whom have never lived, nor are likely to, in the US. This surveillance paid for not by the US, but by the Kiwi bank user.

So for those who damn Customs in this story, as you should, because what’s happened here is disgusting, where is your protest against the taxing authorities and their unparalleled intrusions daily into our lives, our bank accounts, our wallets, and their virtually unfettered swapping of information about ourselves?

It’s the fatal contradiction, and hypocrisy, of those who have chained us to this theocracy of state; especially the Left, whose belief in the theft of redistribution has necessitated the abandonment of our privacy before state officials, and then each other. This Customs brief is merely a side show, bureaucrats such as these, upon the sanction won to run the tax surveillance state, live in a culture where privacy from the state is unknown to them. Why would you be surprised at their casual disregard for an individual's private information? I wasn’t.

When will we wake up and take back the free West which has been voted away from us by a tyranny of the majority seeking a free lunch that is only served up along the road to our serfdom?

Related Stories:

IR’s can only be mining social media for thought crimes.

Jacinda Adern’s privacy concerns.

Tax surveillance state: Hans Fallada and the snitch society.

Tax surveillance state: 1984 comes to 2012 – Children nowadays were horrible.

Tax slavery: FATCA and the United Police States of America.

Letter to Editor (Press): Amazon - Again - Columnist Mike O'Donnell.

Mike O’Donnell (9/12) welcomes the Revenue Minister cracking down on multinationals such as Amazon so they pay more tax. Tax is a dead cost to business. If we force more tax on these firms they have to increase the prices they charge for goods and services. O’Donnell is thus advocating for an increased cost of living for Kiwis. That is not a good thing. Why not reverse his thinking? So local retailers can compete, we need to get rid of GST. Then why not slash the size of a state that over 70 years of welfare has grown poverty and dependence, then we could reduce income tax to a level where these multinationals want to bring their profits to New Zealand. Use tax competition to become a wealthy nation.

Chances of this happening? None. Prepare to pay more for life in this theocracy of state, New Zealand.


Related Posts:

Bernard Hickey's Latest Outage, Sorry, Outrage.

Amazon is the Hero, Not the Villain in the Piece.

Labour's David Clark Declares War on the Consumer.

To My Foodie Friend, Nigella.

... No such luxury for Nigella, thanks to law courts that operate with less ethics or seeming guidelines for the care of individual lives than reality television.

I'm fed up with a law court system that allows no privacy for the innocent. It’s my by-line again: civilisation is a movement toward privacy, an Orwellian state the opposite.

I like food.

I like alcoholic beverages.

I like Nigella. She is one of my many food heroes.

And like Nigella, but before I got a career going in this kindy of a country, I liked an occasional toke or a puff. 1986 and 1987, frankly, I barely remember, other than they were great … I think. The point being the fortunate thing for me is that part of my life is private, unless I choose to write on it.

No such luxury for Nigella, thanks to law courts that operate with less ethics or seeming guidelines for the care of individual lives than reality television.

So Nigella likes to alter her consciousness the very odd time also: great. Married to the monster she was, latterly, that would appear a sane approach to her life. Regardless, it's none of our damned business. Why don't we grow up: it's not news.

I've written on this before in relation to the Scott Guy murder trial. The public doesn't need to know all these prurient ruddy details. Nigella is not the accused, why is her life all over the tabloids for the titillation of the small people with no lives? Why has a justice system been turned into a tool for Saatchi to go about the deliberate public humiliation, further abuse, therefore, and destruction of my effervescent foodie mate, his wife? This is only injustice: nothing else. Under Western social(alist) democracy, we are forced to lead lives sacrificed to the selfish entitlement of each other: have no doubt it is in the name of this society the mainstream media are currently cannibalising, and eating alive, Nigella. It's the barbarism of altruism and justice served up in a goldfish bowl for entertainment of the mob. It's dark history lies in taking your kids out to watch the public executions of the guillotine, not understanding you're laughing at the state built gallows of your own life: don't kid yourself there is any noble purpose served by this.

There has to be a better, respectful, private way to go about justice than these public show trials Western jurisprudence is based on. Just as there has to be a civilised, private way to live, without tax officers given carte blanche to trawl legally through our most intimate source documents and details - yeah, that's linked also; you bet ya: read my blog. There is no middle way between a freedom anchored in privacy, and this viciousness of totalitarian mob rule, which is the rule of the sneer and the gaping maw.

So enough. As a single voice of that number whose lives you add value to, Nigella, keep your head high and proud. You've earned that. Thank you for the happiness you've shared with the family in this house. Saatchi, the reporters, the photographers: they're execrable; probably couldn't cook toast, none of them. You’re class.

I'm ignoring the coverage from this point; I won't give my money to any publication dragging my foodie friend to the stocks they would clasp her rudely in for our perverse, uninvited inspection. I look forward only to catching up with Nigella again on New Zealand's Food Channel. Indeed, I can’t wait, because the important value she gifts us, is that joie de vivre exists in her every recipe: this weekend we'll be making for ourselves her Christmas present, a recipe freely given, a generousness unknown to her dropkick ex, and those who would harry and harass her:

All the while I've got this martini in hand raised permanently in salute, affection, and solidarity, at least until the wowsers known as that Arrogance of Altruists in the Fortress of Legislation will no doubt some day make that illegal. And yes, that's linked also, because Nigella's life is the repudiation of wowserism. That's why I like Nigella.

Footnote: for those who’ve argued with me in the past that ‘foodie’ is a class ridden term, oppressive of the masses, look at me, I’m backing away, quietly, quickly, trying not to provoke your particular brand of radshitzism, hoping you’ll go away..