Archive for the ‘Free Speech’ Category
Two must-read articles from Karl du Fresne

Readers will be well aware that my attitude towards the MSM is that that they are, at best, shallow and useless in their reporting and “analysis”, and at worst combine that with massive ideological bias to the Left as well as the occasional bouts of outright partisanship towards, in the case of New Zealand, the Greens, Labour, or the Maori party, depending on how well each of them is doing in supporting a Left wing agenda.
The read I have on the NZ MSM at present is that, as Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury have often pointed out, they’ve sold their souls for capitalist money and the “neo-liberal” status quo established since 1984, in exchange for pushing every other piece of Leftist wank. I think those two gentlemen are nostalgic screamers because, at least in the environmentalist world of combating AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) they may get want they want eventually from their rather despised New Left comrades with a return of state ownership or more likely, a regulatory and tax regime that makes a mockery of the term “private enterprise”. Whether the Leftists in the MSM know where the AGW process will lead or not doesn’t really matter, but I suspect that many “reporters” do and are keen on using it to get back to the supposed Nirvana created by the First Labour Government.
As such it’s important that blogs support eachother, so here are two articles by Karl du Fresne that need as much exposure as possible:
This post deals with the steadily growing catastrophe that is Three Waters and the Health re-structuring.
Carterton District Council, one of the smallest in the country (population 9700), expects to spend $850,000 preparing for Three Waters over the next two years. The council’s chief executive says the plan has imposed an “enormous” programme of work that the council’s not resourced to cope with it. Mayor Greg Laing describes the process as “absolutely appalling”.
The Times-Age quotes the Department of Internal Affairs as saying funding will be provided to cover transition costs, but it’s obvious that councils haven’t seen any of the money and don’t know when they will. In any case, South Wairarapa’s mayor Alex Beijen, who presides over a district with a population of only 11,000 (and one that’s already financially stretched to breaking point), says resourcing will be a big challenge even with extra government money.
I laughed at one of the comments where the guy sent a Letter To The Editor concisely pointing some of the problems and found his points about rents and royalties had been excised. Standard censoring of disinformation; I don’t know why he bothered but others made the point that this why blogs and other social media (to an extent, given their own censorship) are important while the MSM dies.
The healthcare problem has been hidden by C-19 Kabuki Theatre and Three Waters but if anything it’s more frightening:
As Powell points out, “With only 40 working days to go, DHBs have no more information on what will replace them on 1 July than they had on 21 April last year when the health minister announced their abolition.” You can read his damning appraisal here.
This all sounds familiar, the same as other SNAFU’s this government has made in the last few years; ill-defined plans; falling behind schedule; last-second scrambles to do something. I really hope I and my family don’t fall sick in any way for the next couple of years.
2. The Free Speech Union meeting that earned a trigger warning from Salient
This is Karl catching up on Victoria University’s response to his talk On the threats to free speech, that was delivered a while ago at the university, courtesy of the Free Speech Union.
It seems that the students have been triggered by a speech that none of them apparently attended and have used the student newspaper, Salient, to express their outrage; Karl points out that it’s prefaced with a trigger warning advising, in bold type:
This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist, and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.
Frightening.
You can read the sad, pathetic details of the objections to his speech and while I and a lot of other students never took much notice of such things at varsity – where the Left-wing student radicals dominated such talk via the student unions and their varsity newspapers – it’s clear that such people have much greater influence, some might say control, over their varsities than they did forty or even twenty years ago.
For me, one comment showed how far things have gone:
As a Victoria lecturer and a member of FSU (so I would prefer to be anonymous), I am sad to say this is exactly what I expect from our students. Students nowadays are extremely lazy; most of them don’t even bother to attend lectures. Critical thinking and meaningful debates are just not things under their radars. I don’t blame students but the university administration. The university administration is a bunch of failed academics who do not really care about education and research. All they care is their position and would do everything possible to pander students in order to get money from the government. As a lecturer, our constant pressure from the university is how to make students happy and get more of them, not how to train better citizens of the future.
An unexpected result of the 1990’s reforms of university is that there are a lot of people there who should not be, given their lack of brains, and that the incentives for them to go and the incentives of the universities to get bums on seats, are screwed up. Perhaps if student loans were tied directly to the universities so that they’re on the hook for payment recovery, the universities would be pushed harder to teach productive courses and “train better citizens” in real critical thinking.
Really quite atrocious

The world gets sillier with each passing day.
The ridiculous creature you’ve just watched is now the head of a new part of the US Department of Homeland Security, the Disinformation Governance Board.
What a coincidence that this announcement comes just days after Elon Musk buying Twitter and the Liberal world setting its hair on fire as a result.
The Department of Homeland Security is setting up a new board designed to counter misinformation related to homeland security, with a focus specifically on Russia and irregular migration. The board will be called the “Disinformation Governance Board,” and will be headed by executive director Nina Jankowicz.
And there it is right out of the gate, “irregular migration”. So we won’t be able to say “open borders” any longer? Or “illegal aliens”, (even though that’s the legal term) without the ban hammer coming down, or worse.
I’m going to call it the Ministry of Truth from here on because that’s entirely appropriate.

Ms Jankowicz herself writes:
Now that I’ve got it: a HUGE focus of our work, and indeed, one of the key reasons the Board was established, is to maintain the Dept’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties.
That sounds like exactly the opposite of what this board is designed for. It’s purpose will be to stamp out information that the Biden administration doesn’t like, censor any thoughts that run counter to the MSM narrative of the day, and “fact-check” points of view deemed “inappropriate.”
The thing is that she herself is a peddler of disinformation as, for example, the 2020 claim that Hunter Biden’s business records were a Russian plant. In fact she was still pushing this as of March 2021.

Amazing how all those “natsec experts” were completely wrong, although that’s being generous as I think they just flat-out lied: they’ll probably gets jobs working for her at the Ministry of Truth. Hmmm… DGB… that acronym rings a bell.
It was the claim that it was Russian Disinformation that was the actual disinformation — partisan Democrat Deep State disinformation. As the new Disinformation Czarina, she should, of course, be eager to apologise for her previous disinformation. What are the odds?
I see some back-peddling going on with the Biden Administration now claiming that work on this started on Trump’s watch in 2020. Oh really? When during 2020 did this “work” begin? What exactly was that “work,” of which the current bureau is a merely a “continuation”? Did Trump ever hear about it? Did the Trump administration ever appoint an Executive Director of a Ministry of Truth?
Actually it’s fun to imagine the Liberal world’s reaction if Trump had done this. It would have made the Musk meltdown look like nothing.
But then something like this was always on the cards with the DHS. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks twenty years ago I figured that President GW Bush would tear down the CIA, FBI and other “intelligence” agencies that had so clearly failed and then re-build them into something fit for purpose. But instead, as a typical Moderate, Centrist Right Winger – the sort who loves Big Government almost as much as the Left does – he simply created yet another giant bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security and draped it over the top of the existing failures, supposedly to tie them together better.

Claims from the Right and Left that making the National Security state even bigger posed future dangers to the freedom of Americans was ignored in the heat of 9/11 emotions. The Right – admittedly mainly Libertarians – saw it as just another example of how bigger government creates bigger problems in the future, mainly because it further empowers those who love state power for its own sake in controlling individuals. The Left had traditionally felt uneasy about the NatSec state – until recently it seems, now that there’s a chance it can be weaponised against Right Wing enemies.
As silly as Ms Jankowicz appears, this is deadly serious. That joking meme of GW is no joke when you read official shit from the DHS like their March 2021 report, ‘Internal Review of Domestic Violent Extremism.’:
A March 2021 unclassified threat assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Department of Justice, and DHS, noted that domestic violent extremists “who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.”
The assessment pointed to newer “sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence” that “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”
This is what DHS is now all about, exactly as its critics predicted two decades ago, and this new Board is simply another drawing back of the covers to reveal the machinery underneath. What’s next?
It’s probably easier going after “domestic violent extremists” than after the people that were originally supposed to be the focus of DHS: people like Nidal Hassan, Omar Mateen, Fahreed Skyhook and his concubine and at least a dozen or so other attackers as well as plots that were only foiled by sheer dumb luck rather than by the DHS/FBI.
It’s appropriate to leave you with this interesting article: Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis? The short answer is no!
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
Meh – I couldn’t leave it on such a grim note, so here’s the original silliness, featuring what is generally agreed to be one of the worst fake accents on film, courtesy of American actor Dick Van Dyke as a Cockney chimney sweep.
Let the meltdown begin! (UPDATE)
Ooooooo…….. Mummy, mummy…the pain. The pain…



I don’t usually cover “breaking news” because that’s not what blogs are for, but this news is just too delicious to ignore.
Twitter sells out to Elon Musk – Twitter Press Release.
Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

I’ll stay away from the beach today because of the risk of a tsunami of Leftist tears.
Meanwhile, from one of the alternative sites to Youtube (Alphabet’s favourite Stasi source), Rumble, is a little piece of video you’ll laugh your tits off at – if you’re a right-winger
Live look at Elon Muck firing people at Twitter.
The questions about what will actually change will now come to the fore, starting with whether the Babylon Bee will get their account re-activated? Still, it would seem they’ve got a handle on this…
Leftists Worried Elon Musk Will Turn Twitter Into A Place
Where Terrible People Post Bad Opinions
And Fight With Each Other All The Time
The irony is that this all started because of the Babylon Bee’s now famous headline, which got them banned from Twitter.

And of course the possibility of the return of He Who Shall Not Be Named.
This is also relevant.
The great Iowahawk is having fun…
Resume update: Conversation Safety & Quality Associate, Twitter Inc., 2018-2022. Created bold initiative that resulted in a net $10 billion gain in shareholder value

Stamping on a human face forever

As we slowly crawl toward freedom and away from the mandates and restrictions surrounding General Tso’s Sickness pandemic, it’s worth knowing that there will always be a part of the population that loved all this and are feeling bereft.
You see it with people still wearing masks outdoors and while driving cars alone, or who still hold their phones to scan in before entering shops.
It turns out that not everybody likes freedom, and based on my everyday observations the percentage is too high for comfort in (supposedly) freedom-loving democracy.
So the following cartoon seems appropriate.

I’d forgotten about this survey from the USA.

THE WAR – MY STAND

I look at the news, I look at the pictures. Putin’s war on the Ukraine rivals that which Hitler unleashed on Russia, minus perhaps the executions which may well come later as ordinary Ukrainian people continue to resist the Russian occupation of their land.
Be that as it may I have decided that in order to show my solidarity with the Ukrainian peoples in their fight against Russian aggression I will not in future allow Putin apologists to post the Kremlin’s talking points in response to anything I post on my blog in relation to the war.
So, don’t waste your time. Expect to be edited out. Slava Ukraini.
Contagion

The Canadian virus continues to spread, now to Australia where a massive convoy has descended upon the Federal capital of Canberra.
“A huge crowd is building in Canberra as the anti-mandate Convoy To Canberra protest gains momentum in the nation’s capital. Last night traffic was brought to a standstill as cars, caravans, trucks and buses flooded into the city from all states. The crowd today met at Commonwealth Park before starting the march to Parliament House where a range of speakers will address the crowd.”
I wonder how long it will take before the Australian government and their MSM stenographers begin to repeat the words of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and NZ PM Jacinda Ardern about “fringe minorities“, “fascists”, “racists“, “xenophobes”, “anti-vax nutters”, etc, etc.
Amazing how consistent that narrative has been across the English-speaking countries in response to these protests.
Dance like you’re scum (updated)

Homophobic. Transphobic. Racists. Traitors.
Filled with hate. Violent. Symbols of division and intolerance. Desecrators of statues.
Did I say racists? Disgusting.
All of those words have been used by the Canadian toy boy Prime Minister to describe the thousands of truckers currently ensconced at the Canadian capital of Ottawa.
You can see them here in this video smuggled out of Truckistan.
Looks like they’re having an effect too, despite being “fringe”:
A majority of Canadians now say it is time to end COVID restrictions, according to an Angus Reid poll, a sharp increase from when the same question was asked in early January.
Meantime, here’s two photos taken on the NorthWestern Motorway in Auckland on Sunday as the local effort went along. I think that’s the St Lukes-MOT overpass.

Last thought re Canada…

UPDATE:
I no sooner post this than news arrives that Ottawa has declared a state of emergency and the police are taking their fuel/gas supplies used for heating and that anyone bringing in “supplies” of such, or food, will be arrested. A type of siege warfare then! Video shows that the cops are fully SWATted up as they grab the supplies – as you need to be when dealing with terrorists.
Heh. Well you shouldn’t have chosen Canada then. Hell, if you took the Ottawa Police and dumped them into East Germany in the 1970’s they’d have fitted in perfectly as the Stasi, but then Justin would have made an excellent leader of that nation, and would have been swooned over by Western Leftists as the youthful, cool face of communism.