Literary Ramble VII: Richard Ford & Mike Hosking. + Rugby World Cup in Wowser World.

Some scattered thoughts with the loosest relationship to literary life, (in which I’m still struggling through Richard Ford’s Independence Day - [for the Philistines, that's not the movie with the aliens in it]).

Much of my problem sixteen years ago when giving up smoking (tobacco) was the publicly funded anti-smoking group, ASH. They were big then. I’d go cold turkey for a week until one of their busy-body-bossy ads wanting to clamp down on this, tax that, came on the telly, and then in a blind fury I’d get myself direct to a dairy and buy another carton. They turned smoking into a principle.

Since September last year I have dropped twenty percent of my body weight, making me four fifths of the man I was surprisingly easily despite my love of food and booze (it takes a little discipline, that’s all really) . The rough spots have been every article and news item with an academic wowser wanting to tax the foods and the booze I love; an Arrogance of Altruists who insist I be forced to their monotonous mantra that a long lived low calorie life is better than a happy one. I didn't lose my weight by counting calories, and had to sacrifice little enjoyment of life, but if I had wanted to remain my weighty self that was my business, so bugger off.

This dreadful state-advocacy wowserism slithering its way out of Progressivestan continues to take more words in here. Previously mentioned, as proof we have a progressive literature, I’ve even had the Going West Literary Festival lecturing me about my booze intake (for fucks sake).  

Progressivestan. I first mentioned that term in this post regarding the Progressive campaign to get Mike Hosking fired - not to make a point, to have him fired - over an interview he did (or comment he made – I can’t remember which and don’t care) regarding Ponytailgate:

… 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 Progressivestan [snip] ... 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 a Marxist past into the future.

After posting that a helpful follower on Twitter told me although I have some great ideas, I marginalise too many people.

Really? No, I'm not the one trying to close everything down, so your advice goes unheeded, but thanks.

American/Canadian author Richard Ford, of the Left politick before the Left destroyed any use they had via identity politics, pinned down the (Left)-liberal character well.

Quoting Ford’s character Frank Bascombe in the novel Independence Day:

“In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing.”

Now, go look at some of the vitriolic threads against Mike Hosking on Twitter. The ruling ethos of Progressivestan is an arrogant bitterness which overflows and poisons all it touches, as it attempts to control language, silence thought crimes, segregate the delights of difference, and control our bodies through our diets with its curious wowser’s puritanism that, as H. L. Mencken said, can’t stand seeing somebody – Mike Hosking for example - happy, with his upbeat, can-do, satisfied view on life. In reference to ponytailgate it’s what separates an important feminism born of individualism from the dreadful feminist sharia born of Marxism that would eradicate individualism and with that, free expression.

In that same novel, Independence Day, Richard Ford could have saved the Left (and its prisoners victims) a lot of trouble if they had heeded Frank Bascombe’s wisdom as he …’

‘… peer[ed] up at a control-less TV, bracketed high and out of reach and where Reverend Jackson in an opened-collared brown safari shirt is being interviewed by a panel of white men in business suits, who’re beaming prudish self-confidence at him, as if they found him amusing; though the Reverend is exhibiting his own brand of self-satisfied smugness plus utter disdain, all of it particularly noticeable because the sound’s off. (For a time this winter I considered him ‘my candidate,’ though I finally decided he couldn’t win and would ruin the country if he did, and in either case would eventually tell me everything bad was my fault.)’

Amen.

But then, Richard Ford; I guess he’s just another privileged, middle-aged white man, whose words are not valid because identity is validity in this world where we have cast adrift philosophy, volition, self-responsibility and meaning.

If you wonder why a man of reason like myself comes to the Gulags being built in Progressivestan with such anger, that’s because you can’t be party to the ‘why’ of my deep seated antipathy towards puritanism and humourless wowserism gained from an Exclusive Brethren past. My (immediate) family buried our father just this last March (here’s my eulogy given at his funeral to this gentle-man): during the burial, hiding behind a hedge of the Springston cemetery were two of his Exclusive siblings, or some type of direct relations – I couldn’t care less about them or who they were - who, as with all four of my grandparents, and all aunts and uncles bar one, have not been allowed anything to do with my family since I was four years old, when God (dripping irony here) was good enough to have impregnated my mother with an IHC daughter who the dour, whiskey breath elders took to be the work of the devil – nice buggers aren’t they - so we were happily cast out. And don’t panic, my IHC sister is probably the happiest of our clan.

So you better be worried when I see the same abusive, bullying thou-shalt-not-puritanism in Progressivism and its devotees humourless campaigns to silence and publicly shame every individual who is not them, and is found wanting. They need to be driven back to the joyless prisons they've created of their minds with all the passion and non-violent ferocity we can muster as free wo/men.

Another post in the service of whatevers; thank you.

Sorry, one more thing: if you're thinking of going to the local pub to watch Rugby World Cup games with friends, forget it, this is Wowser-World, there won't be pubs able to meet the new YOU CAN'T DRINK OR ENJOY YOURSELF regulations, and even if you could find one, and you drank moderately, under Iain Wowser-Galloway's halved blood alcohol limit you couldn't drive yourselves home again: that's why rural hospitality is, effectively, dead. Seriously, revolution: we're way past the time for one.


Related Posts:

Of Comedy, Freedom of Speech and Bounded Liberty.

How Many Ways You No Longer Have a Private Life:

Two days ago I said this:

IRD operates above our Privacy Act: it can raid my business premises without warrant; it will never be denied a warrant to raid my home; it can demand my bank statements from the bank and my bank will acquiesce without my knowledge; I have no right to remain silent when an interview is 'requested' by IRD; and as a taxpayer the burden of proof is turned against me - unlike for an accused murderer, burglar, et al, I am not innocent until proven guilty before the tax courts, IRD can simply assess me and I have to prove my innocence, so breaching a fundamental tenet of a free society.

Some years ago I wrote how the Revenues around the world routinely snoop on social media for thought crimes - if you look at the footnoted update, you'll see IRD read that post.

Yesterday I wrote on how your bank is now required to snoop on you under Judith Collins’ Anti-Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism Act:

RIP the economy (and any privacy you ever had). This National government is generating more red tape than the previous Labour one did. To capture a minor subset of transactions, every single commercial and private transaction, be it financial (where your bank has to report you to police if irregularities are found), or property, are being delayed, and weighed done by cost on cost on cost on penalty of the snitch society. God I want out.

Over the weekend Rodney Hide wrote a chilling piece on the investigation on him by the Official Assignee, covertly targeting his friends and family:

The interesting thing for me is how upsetting it has proved to be. I have nothing to hide. I am well used to being in the public spotlight. It was once part of my life to have others talk about me in less than flattering terms.

I would have thought it no big deal to have a state agency do similar.

But I have found it extremely disturbing to have friends and colleagues compelled to appear under threat of arrest and answer questions about me and my family put to them by a private investigator under contract to the Government.

Oh, and to have those friends and colleagues warned not to tell me what they were asked.

 It's extremely invasive and sinister. It's what we expect of totalitarian regimes, not free and democratic societies such as ours.

So of course today we find the police have taken their pointless war on drugs to your Facebook page:

The monitoring has been exposed by members of a blackmarket Facebook group, who complained of receiving letters out of the blue from police, warning them they were being watched.

One unidentified user received a letter from the Canterbury Organised Crime Squad, dated July 15, warned that their membership of a group suspected to be aiding illegal drug deals had been noticed.

There are no parts of our lives not being surveiled and intruded upon. From a letter to the editor of today’s Press, penned by no other than Sir David Hay:

ECan employees who screen for smoke from wood burners invade our domestic lives and put people who try to heat their homes affordably at risk of a $750 fine. The invitation for neighbours to inform on neighbours reeks of a totalitarian state.

But hey, the sacrifice of our private lives is justified: we’re catching the tax evaders, we’re catching the money launderers, we're catching the polluters to ensure they don't heat themselves, and we’re catching the druggies.

No.

For freedom lovers, the price has been too high. Those who’ve read George Orwell’s 1984 will remember the proles thought everything largely fine in the prison cells of their minds, it was only those who had foot-tripped over the State who figured out the nature of the entrapment, and the total loss of liberty that defined them. Which explains why the below photo is not from that novel, it’s from a street in England, courtesy HMRC – though I think I know what they’re using as their manual:

Next time you’re updating your Facebook, you be careful out there. Don’t go thinking you’re living in a free country. That, and we all live in the snitch society now. Forget the threat of external terrorism, we have an internal surveillance state which is far beyond the bounds of what a free, western society should have settled for without (at least) civil rebellion.

Bloody Companies Office Bureaucratic Bullshit. Is this the Monstrous Money Laundering Act Again?

RIP the economy (and any privacy you ever had). This National government is generating far more red tape than the previous Labour one ever did. To capture a minor subset of transactions, every single commercial (and private) transaction, financial (where your bank is looking to report you to police if irregularities are found), property, et al, are being delayed, and weighed done by cost on cost on cost on penalty of the snitch society. God I want out.

I’m trying to get out of all independent trusteeships at the moment, because with wanting to live in the (gloriously isolated) Mahau Sound for six months, the physical requirements of witnessing, et al,  involved on, for example, property transactions, with our Kafka-esqe money laundering legislation are too convoluted and physically onerous. (Due to these same dopey laws, a friend has spent three hours recently trying to open a child’s bank account. And I remember reading someone on Twitter trying to do that and giving up.)

How much money is Judith Collins’ monstrous Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism Act costing our economy? I’m starting to think it’ll be catching up to tax compliance.

Anyway, so today I go to file the first of this month’s annual company (client) returns to be told on filing all returns from this point I have to have directors birth dates (okay) and place of birth (what the fuck!). Does any office reading this blog hold client place of birth? Because the caution screens have said I won't be able to file returns without this information I've not been through to see if place of birth is simply country, or province and country; but the point remains unchanged. Plus the error screen says place of birth, not country of birth.

[Update: after completing my annual return, it's province/town and country. There's a lot of purple language in this office this afternoon.

Ultimately, here was my problem: changes to the Companies Act ... and so it goes, on and on.]

So:

Un-fucking-believable @CompaniesOffice I now have to file place and date of birth for directors of all returns I file annually? Whose idea?

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 20, 2015

@CompaniesOffice Date of birth I largely keep on file, but place of birth means I now have to email every single company director I file 4

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 20, 2015

@CompaniesOffice ... which is a mammoth and bullshit task. Needless to say I'll be late on some returns. Is this ruddy money laundering ...

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 20, 2015

@CompaniesOffice ... nonsense again @JudithCollinsMP @amyadamsMP

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 20, 2015

@CompaniesOffice @JudithCollinsMP @amyadamsMP In fact I've got to file my own company return this month: I don't know where I was ruddy born

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 20, 2015

Seriously, RIP the economy (and any privacy you ever had). This National government is generating far more red tape than the previous Labour one ever did. To capture a minor subset of transactions, every single commercial (and private) transaction, financial (where your bank is looking to report you to police if irregularities are found), property, et al, are being delayed, and weighed done by cost on cost on cost on penalty of the snitch society. God I want out.