West’s Tipping Point: Feminist Theocracy Institutes Feminist Sharia - #ProteinWorld #PEN

It doesn't matter what excuse you use to destroy freedom of expression; Allah, Jesus, body shaming, body confidence, et al - the only point of importance is the consequence: freedom of expression is destroyed.

I am sitting behind my keyboard this morning, mouth open, stunned. And, fair to say, distraught – I don’t write that last lightly. My plight started with reading of further authors protesting PEN’s intention to give French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo an American freedom of expression award; that number now reaching two dozen – confirming everything I have written in this piece on how a Progressive literature is the death of a literature that can resist tyranny anymore, and so part only of the western capitulation into another iteration of statist tyrannies.

Then the truly unbelievable: this advertisement is today banned in England by their Advertising Standards Authority (ASA):

Worse is the ASA’s reasoning:

"Although the ad won't appear in the meantime, [banned], we've launched an investigation to establish if it breaks harm and offence rules or is socially irresponsible," the spokesperson added.

"We will now carefully and objectively – [objectively? What the fuck?] - explore the complaints that have prompted concerns around body confidence and promptly publish our findings."

The ad, which stars bikini-clad Australian model Renee Sommerfield, asks whether commuters are "beach body ready" in a promotion for weight loss aids.

It’s as simple as this: a private company has had an advert for their weight loss aids banned because it used the image of a bikini clad women. Restating the above:

“… we’ve launched an investigation to establish if [the picture of a bikini clad woman] breaks harm and offence rules or is socially irresponsible.’

No, this is not from some dreadful Middle Eastern theocracy, but add to this that the firm running the ad, Protein World, is now receiving death threats, and the comparison contained in my title to this piece becomes obvious. It doesn't matter what excuse you use to destroy freedom of expression; Allah, Jesus, body shaming, body confidence, et al - the only point of importance is the consequence: freedom of expression is destroyed. To every mindless moron of Generation Airhead Feminism who joined this campaign, are you even able to make the barest glimmering of how evil that sentence is? And how contradictory?’

Every gain made by older generation feminists, such as [the fuming] Mrs H, since Emily Davison threw herself under a horse, and the bras were burnt – especially this latter - is lost in that single sentence. Utterly lost. Renee Sommerfield, the model in this advert points to it: quite apart from the Sharia closing down of free expression, this is body shaming:

"I think nearly every ad campaign you have ever seen is open to interpretation. But saying the ad is body shaming by body shaming the image is very contradictory," she tells HuffPost UK Lifestyle exclusively. "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Just as Generation Airhead Feminism body shamed Rosetti Scientist Matt Taylor, and demonised his eccentric individualism.

But it’s the wilful destruction of free expression and free speech, born of wilful ignorance, that really hurts. And that it’s the prevailing ethic: I’ve already written last month on New Zealand Marxist Giovanni Tiso’s further campaign against free speech by trying to have TV host Mike Hosking fired for comments he made on #ponytailgate. All roads lead to the Sharia advertisement ban of this morning. If there’s something these draconian bastards don’t agree with, the first instinct of their umbrage taking is to shut it down. And use the fist of state to do so. We have feminist theocracy, and this morning they have instituted feminist sharia on us all. A free life cannot be had without a love for difference: but difference, and individualism, is to be shut down in all its expressions of life and living.

Where does it end? Because all bets are off.

Generation Airhead Marxist feminism has turned itself into the nightmare Orwell wrote of in his novel 1984, ‘the boot stamping on a human face, forever.’

It’s over – the free society: it’s over. Tyranny wins again, as we are herded into the prison of each other’s minds, freedom setting against a pale, grey Western sky, before the blood red sunrise of the new state gulags that are coming.

Honestly, I feel like crying. How the hell did this happen?

Of Market Signals, Toilet Paper and Electronic Bidets. Power & Asset Sales.

Every policy being spoken up by New Zealand’s Left-centric parties make it necessary to repeat the point of this post over and over.

Leaving aside the fact that economics can never be separated from philosophy and politics - that planned economies can only be imposed on planned lives – the evidence of history, and of today, continues to show that centrally planned economies do not work, cannot work, and with a dreadful price exacted: human hardship.

Statists from both the Left and Right, though in every case regarding the Left, too often view the ‘free market’ as some type of cold, impersonal machine that rides cruelly over individuals, thus must be regulated by the caring hand of government. This could not be further from the truth. The market is, indeed, that most intensely personal thing: it’s you and me. It is as simple, but complex, as the expression of all the needs and desires of every individual in a market community searching for resolution, and the means by which those needs and desires are first matched, then priced and allocated as to the resources available. This wondrous social meeting place, based on the voluntary transaction, not the cold dictates of the machine of state, has increased the standard of living of all those communities that have embraced free markets, as well as bringing those communities the concomitant freedom that free markets exist on: there is no free market without freedom, and no freedom without a free market. It therefore follows, put the oafish fist of the central planner into that complex, living market place, that is, into the lives, hopes, and desires of individuals, at this crucial micro level, and despite it can take one hell of a shellacking, ultimately a market, and with it liberty, plus the community, will be destroyed.

Economist Donald Boudreaux explains the reason for failure behind central planning well:

… I deny that behavioral economics strengthens the case for government regulation.  Indeed, I believe that it weakens that case.  Because the regulators have the same psychological foibles as the regulatees – yet face far less direct feedback on their decisions than do those whom they regulate – turning more decision-making power over to government increases the frequency of human error and amplifies its ill-effects.  Markets keep those errors less numerous and their effects more confined.

Human beings are not laboratory rats to be controlled and conditioned by some elite of their number who, somehow and without explanation, manage to become higher-order creatures simply by working for government and professing deep concern for the welfare of their lab animals.

(Note again from this quotation the impossibility of separating economics from philosophy.) 

Regarding the topical issue of privatisation versus nationalisation and central planning of the power industry in New Zealand, how much more evidence of this do the Cunliffe’s, Shearer’s, Norman’s et al need?

A quick real-world refresher for them:

For an historical example, click through to this link to see the centrally planned poverty and food queues behind that first Iron Curtain before it went down: Poverty, prostitutes, and the long, slow death of the Soviet Union: haunting pictures show desperate struggle to survive in last days of the USSR.

And if still not convinced, to the present day, look at centrally planned Venezuela, where their politicians can’t even organise enough toilet paper:

Venezuelans are used to going without staples like milk, coffee and butter, thanks to the country’s frequent food shortages. But now they’re dealing with a much more urgent crisis: a lack of toilet paper.

Stores have run out, and each new delivery sees a rush on supermarkets. The demand is so great the government has now been forced to order 50 million rolls to appease desperate shoppers. One woman standing in line at a Caracas supermarket that received a fresh delivery told the Associated Press that she had been scouring the capital city’s shops for two weeks. “Even at my age, I’ve never seen this,” another, 70-year-old shopper told Sky News.

Economists blame Venezuela’s shortages partly on price controls, initiated by the late President Hugo Chavez, to make goods affordable to the poorest people in society (in a government store, a kilogram of pasta costs $0.30, writes the BBC). But that has also led to country-wide shortages of staple items, and Venezuela’s “scarcity index” is currently at 21% – meaning that out of 100 basic products, 21 aren’t available in stores, notes the BBC. “State-controlled prices—prices that are set below market-clearing price—always result in shortages,” said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press. “The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union.”

Say what you like, but as much as our Left politicians hate free markets - and thus an individual's freedom from the arrogant theocracy of themselves - in the market economy, with the feedback loop of market signals, you’ll always have toilet paper. The Left need to take off their ideological blinkers that keep them in this ignorance of emoting about issues rather than thinking on them.

For Labour and the Greens, who have promised if winning the 2014 election to force us all ever quicker into that sewage pit called socialism, starting with renationalising power, and placing it under central planning, please learn the lesson. And if you’re wondering on the link to toilet paper, specifically, well for purposes of hygiene the Hubbard household has wholly converted to electronic bidets – think of warm toilet seats at 4.00am on a wintry morning – and so sadly to employ a dreadful, because its grossness offends me, but necessary metaphor, centrally planned power can only eventually mean brown-outs.

Coming to this blog on Tuesday: State Housing – You’ve Just Got to Be Kidding … in which I introduce to the debate on state housing, the notion of the cork.

Spot What Is Missing in Christchurch Rebuild – And People’s Heads.

Front page of today’s Press:

‘Landowners in proposed central Christchurch retail precincts have been warned to speed up negotiations or face compulsory acquisition …’

Roger Sutton – CERA

What’s missing? Answer: Freedom; based, as freedom is, on property rights. Not a skerrick left. I'm assuming the reference to 'landowners' is purely ironic, for what sort of 'negotiations' are possible with a state that can and will compulsorily take your property anyway. And how did it come to farcical this? Easy to see; from Twitter:

@markhubbard33 It's not your wealth that's being redistributed but that of the community.
— Draco T Bastard (@DracoTBastard) March 22, 2013

To which I can best end with my reply:

@dracotbastard You rotten slime. Crawl back under your rock, Mr Stalin. In the free West, there won't be a worse post than you just did.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) March 22, 2013

Communist, Fascist, we’re some shade of either or both, whatever, no free society to be found in New Zealand; not anymore, it just daily stuns me how far we’re moved away from it down our road to serfdom.


Update 1:

Note how @dracotbastard, who has above just recommended the complete nationalisation of all private property in New Zealand, is yet another anonymous poster, like this hypocrite and her hate site, and yet another member of the Left whom, when the bright white light of Freedom is momentarily shone into the void of their darkness, has blocked me on Twitter. There's quite a list now.

Home Schooling, Christchurch Rebuild, and that Tyrant's Call - The Common Good

Stupid me, I just assumed it as axiomatic home-schooling your children would be a right in every Western country. It still is in New Zealand, thankfully, indeed, I have a sister who has home-schooled her two well-adjusted boys through all the age groups to polytechnic; and one of those boys would have definitely fallen through the cracks of a state school system which could not have provided him the time he required, which his mother could.

But of course I was wrong on my initial assumption: it’s not axiomatic at all. This is a topic at the centre of this blug. I was gobsmacked to read the below story via Fairfax this morning.

 A German family who say they were persecuted for home-schooling their children have failed in a last-ditch bid to stay in New Zealand. 

The Schoeneich family's second attempt to gain refugee status, this time on humanitarian grounds, has failed and they now face deportation. 

Home schooling is illegal in Germany and the family claims they would face fines, loss of custody and possible imprisonment if they returned

(Snip)

After fighting with education officials in Germany - including receiving more than $6000 in fines - the family came to New Zealand in 2008 on temporary visas.

If you are not free to educate your own children, then what freedoms do you really have? What type of society do we have when the state takes over the parenting to this extent? Although the principle here is deeper, and attaches as ever into the huge tentacles of the Western surveillance state. Noting first that I’m an atheist (humanist), on principle I am in full agreement with the Schoeneichs’ reasons for wanting to home school:

The parents, Andrea and Gerno, decide to home-school their children on religious grounds, believing the German state education was socialist and conflicted with their strong Christian beliefs.

(Snip)

Home Schooling New Zealand principal Todd Roughton said he felt for the Schoeneichs, who should be able to control their children's education. "They are being denied by the state." 

Home Schooling New Zealand provides support for parents teaching about 750 New Zealand children at home a Christian "world view". 

Roughton said state schools - in New Zealand and Europe - imposed a world view that was morally abhorrent for many Christian families. "If we were obliged to put our kids in a state school, we would leave the country too." 

Why would countries criminalise home-schooling? Because the Western surveillance state now demands it is the alpha and omega in the lives of every individual; the state will bend the minds of the young to its state-centric view of the slave state, regardless of what parents think, regardless when parents know better for their own children: the individual is being exterminated by the state, again, and ‘this time’ the state has largely won. Classical liberalism as the founding ethic of a free West, is not only lost, it is commonly reviled from the front of the classroom. I only need to copy the pertinent part of my by-line above:

When was the last time you heard even a lone voice from the Fortress of Legislation in Wellingrad use either of the words liberty or freedom? I haven't heard those words for at least twenty years. If this is the free West, doesn't that strike you as odd? The West was built on a classical liberalism that has been subverted and defeated by Antonio Gramsci standing at the head of our classrooms, and he won because he caught the hearts of the children, and was able to make the first imprint before they were capable of critical thinking. That was why Comrade Antonio, founder of the Italian Communist Party, said the free West would not be beaten by the gun, but slowly stamping the minds of the impressionable young. The enemies of the free society didn't need AK 47's, just 'enough' progressive teachers in a state school system to preach the Big Brother State in everything.

And how did the state win? It was so successful this time because it appealed to a human’s better nature: the common good, a doublespeak ethic it imprints onto the minds of the young. Emoting over thinking, again. I’ve had another demonstration just yesterday of the muddled thinking coming from our state schooled minds that ludicrously derides individualism as selfishness now, and preaches the state in all things to pursue the common good, by sacrificing the individual’s pursuit of happiness to it:

Tweeter (regarding the current situation with the Christchurch earthquake rebuild):

"“Remember that this is for the greater good of the city.” No comfort to those of us being screwed by the Government"

My initial reply:

Hey, you're turning libertarian :) Every tyranny in history justified itself on common good. Only individuals have rights.

Tweeter’s reply:

ha! If I believed it were for the common good, then I might have more time for it

The Tweeter seems completely oblivious to the contradiction between their first post and the last. I asked her to define ‘the common good’ for me, but received no reply. For the record, as I said in my tweet, the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. Rights cannot attach to a collective, when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the true Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the force of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (and especially from the abuse of state). But now I’m talking about a free and peaceful world so far from the one we have, it’s depressing, so I wish my readers a Merry Christmas, thank you for reading, and though I oft times wonder why I do this, I hope you catch my blug again in the New Year (albeit, posts will be spartan through to the end of March).

Footnote:

There is also a secondary issue of immigration in this story: the libertarian view on that is as long as the Schoeneichs’ sign up to not using the welfare state, and they do not seek to force their views, etc, on others, then they are welcome to stay in New Zealand, as is anybody on this basis.