Media Studies: 3rd Degree, TV 3 – The Role of the Free Press In An Emoting Age

Disclaimer: I’m not a journalist, nor any part of the media – I’m a blogger. Bloggers are simply the op-ed on party drugs.

A discussion on Twitter last night demonstrated how total has been the spread of that postmodern virus of emoting about issues, rather than thinking on them. I’ve dealt with this topic before, in relation to the media: on this post, I described how this inability to think critically, was leading me ever more quickly down the road to my serfdom. However that previous post had dealt with how mainstream media had lost itself in its own heart of darkness, beyond the light of reason; in this post, the tables are turned.

Last night’s debate was about a 3^rd Degree piece I’ve not even seen yet – I only watch TV in the weekend, so I MySky the show – but I didn’t need to see it to butt into the debate.

The program had featured an interview with a Kiwi who was imprisoned overseas somewhere for lack of paying a fine. Twitterdom lit up with how ‘irresponsible’ the 3^rd Degree crew were with not stumping up the necessary amount to free him – what? I said that was not the job of the journalist, furthermore, there’s something far more important at stake here, to a free society, namely, the free press.

The role of the free press, in that story, was simply to report this man’s situation to us: it ended at that. The belief systems, etc, of the individuals doing the reporting might well take action after that, or not, but that’s not important to their role as journalists - although from a pragmatic point of view, what ‘do’ people expect? Of course a journalist can’t fix everything they’re reporting; if they had that sort of money, they would be in another career entirely – most journalists have unwittingly taken a vow of poverty.

All the usual topic suspects came out in the debate that are sadly pumped into people’s heads in our universities since Derrida and Foucault did their best to destroy our language and our minds by taking identity to the interior with no way back again - remember these women? It was trotted out there is no such thing as an objective reality to report on; power structures are influencers that can’t be avoided, making reportage merely the un-deconstructed waiting for the pen of vendetta; journalists are vocational, thus, everyone I debated with on Twitter – and this is a frightening thing - thought it was the role of the journalist to fix the evils they report on.

No. There most certainly is an objective reality, any other view is a vicious subjectivist insanity of the type Voltaire admitted atrocity is born, and context provides the facts of that reality, rather than being the obscurant of it. The role of journalism (separate to the journalists) is to report that reality objectively, initially, to us. Let me explain this via the short-cut of the Godwin. I always tend to bring in the Godwin, because nothing defines an issue more clearly than the Godwin example of it: I brought up Syria.

I asked those who thought the role of the 3^rd Degree journalist was to free this man, what they thought the role of the free press was in Syria. I’m quite astounded that everyone stuck to their argument. Journalists were in Syria to ‘do good’, by which they didn’t mean to report objectively what was happening, which is the ultimate in bravery, by the way, and the ultimate good; although never defined the line was – look at my Twitter timeline – the journos were there to do good for the people concerned, and that’s what many had lost their lives for.

Wow. That’s really dangerous territory. Mine was the last tweet, which said:

@harryrickit @mattt_fairhurst @3rddegreetv3 Syria: some actions of FSA as barbaric as Assad's: Reporting is thus b4 moral positioning?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) March 20, 2013

The supporters of ‘journos must do something’ are expecting Syrian journos to take sides? That’s the only underlying interpretation I can give to that. That’s the bottom line for them surely? But that’s not possible, morally, when the Free Syrian Army can match that bastard Assad atrocity for atrocity – they may well have just let off a chemical weapon. Looking at that chemical weapon that may have been used, the only appropriate first report is that such and such side has just used a chemical weapon, ‘this’ is the result of that – no journalist could afford to sit around waiting to see if it was the side they were supporting or not, morally, and therefore whether to censor themselves: now that puts this in context, doesn’t it. I’m saying that the free press is free not just of those coercive states or tyrants who would shut it down; in the first instance, a free press must also be free of the loving, caring, compassionate, brave, committed journalists who often put themselves in danger, or controversy, to bring out into the light of truth, what happened. The first reports out of Syria always are a bomb went off, x number of people were killed: that’s the story the journalists are risking their lives for, there’s nothing more important than that first report, because only on that is all the necessary editorialising afterward possible as it is put in context, or taken out of context and into prejudice of one sort or another.

And this issue is important to this blog, because too many have learned to emote their way through the issues of life, not think about them. The Left politick is founded on that entirely. And that’s why my life is on the road to a new Western serfdom, that has destroyed classical liberalism entirely. We’ve felt ourselves into the prison of other people’s minds.

I love the rough and tumble of Twitter, because debating stuff, often passionately, is how you learn what you believe; your philosophy of life.  But you have to free yourself from that beautiful, sad tyranny of the heart, sometimes.

Marxist Feminism & Chess: Final Musings of a Grand-Slandered-Master.

Why? Why not. This blog is about ideas, and as the woman on the (following) Hand Mirror thread is a unionist and local politician, that is, a wannabe ruler over me, and I want no part of that, the bad ideas underlying Marxist feminism must be brought into light for examination.

This was a Sunday morning doodle on the iPad. I don’t have time, nor the inclination, to finish it, though the next bit – from ‘etc and so forth’ - was going to be about my anonymous opponent playing with a bag on her head … This post will make more sense in the context of my original post, describing anonymous Tweeter, Queen of Thorns, slanderous attack on me.

* * *

                  

Call me self-obsessed, apparently, but on reflection, playing chess with Marxist feminists felt like sitting opposite an opponent who has a seventeenth piece that I couldn't see: all of a sudden I would find my pieces missing from the board with no seeming explanation for it. After their surprise slander-ambit opening, I thought I might have still played for the draw: if I could only have figured out the pattern, I might’ve by logic allowed for their invisible piece, if it was not, that is, for the further fact that in reality they didn’t actually have an extra piece at all, they just thought they did, and were moving it about according to rules that applied only to some infernal dialectic I wasn’t party to, which ended up allowing them to move to any square they felt like at all.

Although what finally defeated me were the competition rules:

While I was playing against the game clock of reality, they refused to be so constricted, as no woman should have to accept any type of obligation placed on her: time could follow them, or be damned, thanks.

(Wrong, sorry, they wouldn’t say thanks. There’s a law against civility – no seriously, there is. And believe me, they employ it; of the one’s who did interact, it was all prickles and body armour, there was not a civil one amongst them.)

Worse, I couldn’t ever question one of their fictitious piece moves that were constantly taking first my pieces, then my mind, because 'hey, this game wasn’t all about me, you know'. And demanding answers, that’s harassment. 

… etc and so forth.

* * *

That’s all I got to, but a final point, however:

A columnist I find myself more and more in agreement with, than not, is Rosemary Mcleod. As Queen of Thorns would say, I giggled when I read her Press column of Thursday, regarding the departing of Master Chef contestant, Raheel Keer, the previous Sunday:

‘… In a final elimination test the other female contestants turned their backs on her, the way popular kids always do against an outsider at school. When women join forces against you, you’ve had it, and she knew it.’

A non-trivial surprise to me, I have to acknowledge reality and agree about this bullying collectivism over the individual mentality (I should’ve understood it from the outset; they were, after all, playing for team Marx). The ‘gang’, that is what the little toxic corner of New Zealand Marxist feminism that reached out and touched me – I never went looking for them - has felt like: they never once put a spotlight on Queen of Thorns, asked relevant questions about her behaviour, including about her hate site with its wall of scum. New Zealand Marxist feminists appear, admittedly anecdotally, to be only interested in talking amongst themselves, while shutting dissent down with their un-touchable touch-stone, sacred words: obligation (they accept none, as with responsibility – neither an obligation to truth, nor a responsibility to stand by what they write anonymously); trivialisation (huge word); and of course to defend your character from smear is to be self-obsessed. That last is the big shut-down.

What Marxist feminists are saying, if truthful to ‘thine own selves’, in calling me a harasser and self-obsessed for defending my character against a series of falsehoods published anonymously by Queen of Thorns, is that they don’t individually feel like their own characters are worth defending in similar circumstances, because they don’t see such a defence as a value: what does that say about the feminist movement? There was nothing trivial in that exchange, philosophically: the problem for Marxist feminism was it couldn’t see that.

So to my final question as I posted to the Hand Mirror, my last comment to the thread of which I have just noted has been deleted: where does reality fit into feminism? And where are they aiming for on bypassing it? Remembering no acknowledgement of reality, means no acknowledgement of morality. A great woman, one of the thinkers towering over the twentieth century, Ayn Rand, would tell them that, I recommend they read her, because Marx is leading them up the garden path to my serfdom, yet again.

[Um, checking, obsessively, obviously, Thorny’s tweets and posts over the last week – well I did once – I agree with far more of her posts than not: my point is the tactic of her hate site, and unwillingness to retract when wrong, or even interact, undermines everything she writes otherwise. And she doesn’t realise that posting anonymously, for a self-labeled cause, in fact puts her under an obligation taken voluntarily, and with that a responsibility. She continues to welch out of both.]


Update 1:

Social Welfare commentator, and another of my writing heroines, Lindsay Mitchell, has an interesting column up today on this matter of 'privilege'.


Related Posts:

The Obnoxious School of Feminism. 

IRD Mini-Daily-Horror Files the Tooth.

Oh dear, someone’s had too much time on their hands at Christchurch IRD:

In line with the changes made at Inland Revenue regional sites, our service to tax agents will now be managed by the Christchurch Community Compliance team.

While there are no changes to the services that Inland Revenue provide to tax agents, there will be changes to the contact point and contact person.

 -The term ‘Agent Account Manager’ has been replaced by ‘Account Manager, Community Compliance Officer’

 -You could be assigned a new Account Manager for your face to face visits and performance monitoring

-Instead of contacting your Account Manager directly, please now use the email address below for all enquiries that can’t go via normal channels (eg requesting AMBR reports) as well as any exceptional issues [snip email address]

Our Community Compliance team are experienced Inland Revenue staff who will be mentored …

Well, if they’re ‘experienced staff’, why the mentoring? Anyway, reply sent back to the new contact address:

Dear Community Compliance Officers

Please note I wish to lodge my objection at changes to my agent/account manager relationship announced by your email of 13/3/2013. I don't want to be dealing with a 'Community Compliance Officer'; after my laughter at the community bit (don’t take offence, but you’re IRD), and the "eye roll" at the Compliance Officer bit (yep, the big stick, IRD right back again), I know this is going to be a bad idea. I’m a grown-up, for twenty two years I've basically achieved 100% filing, year on year, so I don't need a compliance officer regarding my client filings, just a ‘colleague’ to smooth out the odd problem that comes along. Indeed, there's some sort of weird PR meltdown between the oxymoron of the fluffiness denoted by the community bit, then the coercive overkill of the compliance bit – good cop and bad cop within the same officer: it just doesn't work on paper, as it won't work in actuality. Perhaps as a taste of what’s to come, I note the email (13 March) announcing what are major changes in how agents/accountants interact with IRD, didn’t even have a subject line - I almost ditched it as spam until I noted the sender. And the timing of these changes are appalling, almost as if you were going for maximum inconvenience for all of us.

I can sum up my position as follows:

I am no longer to work through a single account manager, I am to send issues to a faceless email address, and I'll be contacted back, if I'm lucky, by a Community Compliance Officer: I suspect this simply means inconvenience and run around. A one on one relationship with an individual is what gets stuff done, always, especially when working with bureaucracies. I have a great relationship with my current account manager, who puts up with me, and who has always smoothed out and solved those administrative niggles that arise from time to time, including through the earthquakes. I want to carry on dealing with an individual, not a nameless, faceless email address. That never works. I can guarantee your changes are going to add to bottlenecks, not resolutions.

I'd write much more on this, but my time is needed to complete my years work by Easter; on average I’ve been putting in twelve hour days since January 28. There is one single client that I may possibly not make due to unforeseen circumstances – information required from an earthquake affected trustee (Perpetual): my account manager would normally have resolved that with an additional time extension by a quick phone call at no more waste of my time than a few minutes, but I'm now wondering by going through the new Community Compliance Officer how many hours I'll be repeating myself to how many people you've stuffed the chain of communication up with. Please leave us able to talk to individuals who know our practices and histories, which in itself cuts a lot of repeated 'explanatories' having to be attached to every correspondence. Please leave us with our account managers and the existing agent/IRD system. That is, nothing was broken, there was nothing needing to be fixed. And please, please ditch the group-think and the silly names department :)

Thank you.

Mark Hubbard

Today’s Mini-IRD Horror File

Just two things which seem beyond me today:

First, the below is a reply to a simple query on why a client, with extension of time, was showing as having terminal tax not payable until 7 April coming, as ‘owing immediately’ on their assessment with penalties for ‘late payment’. You’ll just have to take my word that the below answer through online correspondence doesn’t actually answer the question at all, indeed, missed it entirely – you’ll have to take my word for it, because you figure it out otherwise.

Thank you for your email regarding terminal tax.
The reason the penalties have been charged is that the provisional assessment is usually based on the residual income tax (RIT)for 2011 but as the 2011 return was not filed before the first provisional tax instalment was due it is based on the 2010 year. The provisional assessment for 2012 was $5025.00. Then as the RIT was under the $2500 for 2010 they are not liable for the first two prov tax instalments for 2012, therefore when the 2012 Income tax return is filed the RIT is lower than than the provisional tax assessment therefore the provisional tax assessment is the same as the RIT for 2012. The only provisional tax instalment was due on the 28 June 2012 $3591.64. Your client had only paid $2562 therefore was short by $1029.64 and this is the reason penalties have been charged.

My second is an on-going horror with a company client who due to a mix up between paying provisional tax on the ratio option and the traditional safe harbour uplift option ended up overpaying their 2011 provisional tax by $80,000. One would think as the company at all relevant times has had enough imputation credits in its account – there must be enough credits to match all refunds - it would be a simple matter of getting the overpayment refunded.

Don’t be silly.

After filing the company’s 2011 income tax return we assumed the overpayment would be refunded as, then, a terminal tax refund. It was not.

I rang IRD to ask them to release the credit showing in the 2011 year, but it was unfortunately by this time into the 2012 year, so they said I had to file an interim Imputation Return, which I did. I then asked – stupid me, I should have kept checking up on it – the client to advise me if the amount wasn’t refunded by the end of that relevant month. They didn’t check in with me, but it was not. We were then into the 2013 tax year, so when they brought me their records we decided to get their 2012 year tax return filed, with its imputation schedule as that should then release the $80,000 credit in the 2011 year. I filed that return two weeks ago, we’ve just got the assessment back, all figures correct, however the overpayment is still being held to credit of 2011 year, not refunded. I’ve just rung IRD to ask could they please now release the $80,000 to be told although I had filed the company 2012’s income tax return, it could take up to ten weeks to process the included imputation return – PARDON, this is all on electronic efile – which may well take us beyond the end of March and into the 2014 year, at which time I’ll have to file an interim imputation schedule.

Mr Dunne. … Mr Dunne, Mr Dunne, Mr Dunne, what have you done?