If
you belong to either or both of those two groups - the Left and the Arts Community - how does it feel to be lumped
into such arbitrary groups, identities, and told what and how you think based on that, as I
have done in my heading?
My
next post, after this one, timed for Parliament's next sitting on February 10, in
which I seek to eviscerate ACT’s David Seymour, the Prime Minister and the
Leader of the Opposition, will be easy; this, however, because I have a great
deal of respect for the participants, is not. So, without abating any of my
respect for the participants, and their talents, yet noting, gloriously, free
speech is all about the spirited (because passionate about my life) retort:
Keep covering this in my blog, but let it be tweeted: those who assume I am heartless, without compassion 4 those in dire circumstances 1/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015
@MarkHubbard33 That I do not like arts & literature, culture, as much as the most cloistered humanities academic, that I have no care 2/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015
@MarkHubbard33 for the future of a child, who assume I'm greedy, who assume I must be wrecking the environment, not conserving it; those 3/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015
@MarkHubbard33 who assume all these things about me *because* I'm not Left wing. Such people are trite. Are stupid to being vapid. Worse 4/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015
@MarkHubbard33 Such people are tedious. End transmission.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) January 31, 2015
These
tweets come from a debate happening in New Zealand currently which is angering
me greatly. Such a facile position as intimated in my tweets, taken by too many
of the Left, and by our Arts community almost wholly, is not ‘intellectualising’:
its lazy, sloppy, emoting, not thinking at all, as I have explained in my post The
Mind/Heart Dichotomy – Feeling Our Way To The Police State.
This
Left DumbThink that throwing the tax take at any social problem solves it, not
subsidises it, is not compassionate, it’s a societal disaster. Read the second
half of my piece on
Maori self-determination – which classical liberalism has to advocate –
regarding the hellish results of unthinking welfare beyond the barest of safety
nets; in fact, let me help you by quoting:
The [Native Affairs – Maori TV] story on housing was framed by
interviewing five – from memory – individuals who were living it dire
conditions. The opening interview was a teenage mother who had been living in a
car with her baby; the woman – sorry, girl – had herself been brought up by her
solo dad living on a benefit. The father of the girl’s baby was neither seen
nor mentioned: that is, he’d scarpered from both his fatherly, and
financial responsibilities.
Stop. In those last two sentences how many bad life choices, across
three generations, are evident? The summation of those bad choices is called a
cycle. And then it got worse. Apart from a single respondent who was a male
living in his car, the remaining three respondents were all teenage girls, all
with babies, the final one had not long given birth to her second –
conceived while living in a car, as was the first, presumably – all living in
appalling circumstances, not a teenage father in sight, and no extended family
for support. For those I am annoying right now, if you read that and can guess
the multitude of problems I have with these girls and their missing,
irresponsible sperm donors – they ain’t fathers – then even as huffing and
puffing with your indignation, you were thinking the exact same thing as I was.
Which brings me to my beef with the reporting of this piece. The
circumstances of these teenage girls with their fatherless babies is
disgraceful and my first reaction is to emote, just as the Left do: give them
money, house them, do something! And yes, something must be done. But surely it
is also compassionate to understand the cycle evident here of why too
many people are making not just these irresponsible, but insane life decisions,
and on how our welfare state incentivises this. What chance have these babies
got of breaking the cycle of their parent? From memory, pursuant to some of the
last statistics I read on Lindsay Mitchell’s blog, we
are up to one in four babies now born into a family dependent on a benefit.
Perhaps the Native Affairs selection was unrepresentative, but four out of
five, really? We will never understand this cycle until we face it and ask the
hard questions which the Native Affairs reporting did not ask: namely, why did
you girls decide to get pregnant when you were in no position financially nor
emotionally to raise children; on getting pregnant, why did you decide to first
take your babies through to term, and then on doing so, keep them?
Hard arse isn’t it. But we have to be hard to break this cycle. As to
the first question which should have been raised to each of the girls - where
are the fathers - Liberty Scott speaks well to this point:
In an age where contraception is cheap and universally available,
without shame, to anyone of breeding age, where it is possible to trace fathers
of children through DNA testing to prove their responsibility, child poverty
should be exceedingly rare.
What the reporter of this piece never did, nor have I seen it done on
similar reports run by current affairs on the networks – remember mum of eight,
ninth on the way with her Sky decoder – was
give us the backstories, with the shame of that being all long term solutions
come from those backstories, not the patch up after-the-event welfare solutions
that the Left guilt society with from their smug arrogance – arrogance because
they believe themselves to have a monopoly on compassion (with my tax money). My challenge to Native Affairs on stories
such as this is to go under the level we were given here and investigate
causes, not just make causes out of the welfare patch-ups that set lives lost on
the next cycle of dependency. And same to the networks, thinking of Bryan
Bruce’s appalling documentaries before the 2011 elections, and Nigel Latta’s
fluff pieces showing currently - his opening piece on inequality was one-sided
nonsense …
To
the debate at hand, proper, referring to the children in that Native Affairs piece, as well as what
chance do those children have of breaking the cycle of their parent(no ‘s’), what
chance have any of them got of their parent imparting to them a love of books? As
if my love of books came from tax dollars, not my (poor and in today’s terms
large) family which nurtured it.
If
you want to understand how selfish, hence, vicious, progressive societies set
up around iterations of the common good
are, that notion of the common good, moreover, which is fatally written into that
other founding document of our nation,
the school curriculum, read my 1984
Comes To 2012 – Children Nowadays Were Horrible, which is my most read
post, over 21,000 views, and merely changes the narrative point of view to
recite the Truth and the sleight of hand that has been mindwashed into our
children – that’s you.
If
you want to understand how progressivism is gutting a vibrant literature that
held the historical and, once - not any more - the future hope of resistance against unbridled
authority, rather than worship at the premise of it, a post, furthermore, rejected outright
by two literary ‘journals’ it was sent to because - I know in one instance,
suspect in the other - it seeks to turn outward from our modernist literature
of interiors – from Proust via the Bloomsbury group – to a literature placed
in our politics (note the ironies in the current context), then read my Disquisition
on Our Contemporary Literature: Standing Upright Here, noting at the
end of that piece my thoughts on how the concept of a ‘book’ and the book market
is changing, via technology born of capitalism, to open books up to groups who’ve
never had such opportunity before, as well as to authors who’ve had no mass
market outlet up until now.
Yes,
that piece is over 18,000 words (and in truth is as much a critique of our contemporary literature as a disquisition, with a further piece on aesthetics coming at some future date); as is the race relations piece approaching a similar word count. Diddums, no
apologies.
And
unrelated, related – because those of us versed in Systems thinking understand
everything connects – while on matters cultural, if you want to understand how
Marxist (identity bound) feminism is the final Maoist Cultural Revolution seeking
to destroy those few oases of legislative freedom left in the West, and to
borrow from George Orwell’s 1984, by rejoicing in the ‘destruction of words’,
read my Retrieving
CERA Boss Roger Sutton’s Corpse from the Cross Of Shesus. The West as the
bastion of free individuals living in free villages: it’s long gone, as soon
will be the central tenets of same, the burden of proof on the state, not the defendant,
and the right to remain silent; more coming on that and the parlous state of
our judiciary in future posts. And never forget the ethic that once informed our western societies, making them the countries those living in tyrannies wanted to escape to.
Argue
any or all of these points above intelligently with me, but don’t just launch
ill-thought-out op-eds tarring individuals who don’t think as you do with the same
damned brush. And don’t think because you’re of the Left Politick you have any
type of moral or emotional transcendence over me. Of all groups in society, I once thought artists would/should be the least likely to view the world in straight lines, without sophistication: I was wrong, perhaps this, also, is a product of the progressive capture of our literature, which starts in our primary schools. Regardless, serve me up like this, then unfortunately I will end up
ignoring you (and I love ya really, while being at pains to point out this piece is
very widely scoped in actuality.)
Postscript:
The term 'Neoliberal', in my opinion, describes nothing actual, or useful, as regards New Zealand, or Western, politics. For example, our current National led Government is unfortunately socially conservative, but is also unfortunately not capitalist, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of it. I am a laissaz faire, minacharist capitalist, but a social liberal, more socially liberal, indeed, than any sitting Labour Party MP and probably most in the Green Party, that is, a classical liberal, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of yours truly. Invariably those throwing that term, Neoliberal, around, do so in pieces that are invariably, as stated, unsophisticated, ill-thought out, catch-bags of stereotypical prejudice which have nothing to teach to me.
Postscript:
The term 'Neoliberal', in my opinion, describes nothing actual, or useful, as regards New Zealand, or Western, politics. For example, our current National led Government is unfortunately socially conservative, but is also unfortunately not capitalist, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of it. I am a laissaz faire, minacharist capitalist, but a social liberal, more socially liberal, indeed, than any sitting Labour Party MP and probably most in the Green Party, that is, a classical liberal, so neoliberal has no meaning in the context of yours truly. Invariably those throwing that term, Neoliberal, around, do so in pieces that are invariably, as stated, unsophisticated, ill-thought out, catch-bags of stereotypical prejudice which have nothing to teach to me.
