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.