Is Campbell Live Racist? ... That Al Nisbet Cartoon.

Update 1 follows after post ... the answer. No, of course Campbell Live is not racist, albeit, I don't know that is the final point to take from the debate over the cartoon.

Re the comments, and a couple of emails, of course I believe in unfettered free speech: I never took this as a free speech issue, no one has been asking for a law change to ban cartoons! The issue here was is this cartoon racist. For me the further issue is the breakfast in schools program that is growing dependence and the welfare/surveillance state.

As a classical liberal, I can talk about racism because I can’t, by definition, be racist (or sexist, etc) ;) I deal with people on the level of the individual, thus not as stereotypes, or insentient representatives of a group - as, for example, this Marxist feminist ironically deals in.

So, I simply want to pose some questions. There is currently a furor happening over Al Nisbet’s cartoon on the breakfast in school’s scheme being racist:

Okay, but then have a look at this clip on Campbell Live last night regarding the breakfast in schools scheme: have a very close look at every single child in it. I might be wrong, but I don’t see a single pakeha child: only Maori and Islander. And even if there is a pakeha I've missed, they are a minute minority.

So my questions. Is the Campbell Live clip racist by only connecting non-pakeha children with this issue via dint of the children shown in their clip? If it's not, then what makes this cartoon racist? Note the sentiment of the cartoon might well be offensive, but the accusation is Nisbet is racist because he has only shown Maori in the cartoon.

Surely before we put good old stick John Campbell before the squash player, given the strength of the hate earned by Al Nisbet, we need to understand the contradiction here.

Regarding the breakfast in schools scheme, itself, given it sheets not one iota of responsibility onto the parents - regardless of their race - in the form of identifying those sending their children to school with no breakfast, and asking them why this is, (because in that lies the only actual fix); then this scheme is, of course, another travesty of welfare growing an already huge state by creating yet more dependency. We're not just feeding those children who are being sent to school with no breakfast, we're feeding every child in New Zealand attending a primary school: who can't see where that leads?

Then think of the further logic behind this scheme: these parents can’t, apparently, provide breakfast for their children. Okay, so why isn’t the taxpayer also providing their lunch, and packing them with tea to take home? Surely we should just be feeding these children, period? And what about clothing them? Indeed, if parents are this hopeless, then shouldn't we do away with families, and just have the state raise our children in total?

This is exactly the same issue as to the (unintended) consequences of renovating and building bigger state houses, as I have written on earlier.

Freedom and the free society. No point looking here: it’s gone, lost to rampant statism. Because what pays for all this is tax; and the tax system is Orwell’s vision of the surveillance state, my entire blog is proof of this.

To the parents, and I couldn't care less your race; if you can’t afford to feed children, then please, don’t have them. Childbirth is not mandatory.


Update 1.

That'll teach me. The answer to the first part is below: and I simply needed to rearrange the words in my first paragraph to find it. A wise man, or in this case, woman, might even conclude a bit of ... let's say a lapse, rather than rank stupidity on my behalf.

Cheers Gina.

@mokai77 @jcelaw Thank you. A valid argument, finally, that I can understand. We are all individuals, not defined by a group. 1/2
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 30, 2013

I was going to take this post down, but that would be somehow cowardly, plus across 160 posts, I'm allowed to err this once :)  And related, the way this debate was framed in the MSM, and via too many journos on Twitter, I wonder how many did in fact get it, because until Gina, I was only getting single word denunciations of my proposition, that is, no explanation? Plus the issue also stupidly devolved into another 'get Devoy' agenda on Twitter, which is counter productive as it takes the mind from the issue that matters - why, in New Zealand, 2013, is any child being sent to school hungry. Per my blog above, the second part, my answer is different to what the Left imputes (erroneously).

And anyway, that said, my post was also deliberately written to throw a second rotten egg into the debate on racism and this cartoon, but in a manner than could not put the yoke back on me, because it is deeply uncomfortable - that issue's still there, regardless of the above explanation, in those two questions, and the content of the Campbell Live Clip: but for once, I'm not going there - and no one else can, there is no data. Political commentator, Bryce Edwards, points to this again in his summation of this post on his political round-up: see update two following.

For the record, yes, this cartoon is racist. And we'll put this down to the clumsiest post I've written.


Update 2:

Marvellous: my clumsiest post to date, and I finally make Bryce Edwards Political Roundup :) The lot of a blogger.

 Libertarian blogger Mark Hubbard argues that 'the sentiment of the cartoon might well be offensive, but the accusation is Nisbet is racist because he has only shown Maori in the cartoon', and this is unwarranted because clearly many of those using food in schools are indeed non-Pakeha, as evidence by a TV clip - see: Is Campbell Live Racist? ... That Al Nisbet Cartoon.

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