A Hangover From Christendom

The Secular State Will Betray Free Speech

More than a few think that all free speech, by virtue of being free, is righteous speech.  Confused protagonists assume that as long as speech is a freedom right, everything uttered must be regarded as good, and never criticised.  Thus, when voices have been raised criticising the Charlie Hebdo portfolio as being extremist, blasphemous, illiberal, immoderate and crude, others have slam dunked the critics by accusing them of being anti-free speech.

Of course there are ethical limits to free speech.  Speech can be good or evil.  Moral or immoral.  The Scriptures unequivocally state that speech can very definitely be evil, and, more often than not, it is so.  Consider one of the Bible’s declarations on the subject:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.  From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.  [James 3:1-10]

Or consider the Larger Catechism‘s exposition of the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbour”

Question 144: What are the duties required in the ninth commandment?

Answer: The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbour, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things: Whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbours; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocence; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requires; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practising of: Whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.

Question 145: What are the sins forbidden in the ninth commandment?

Answer: The sins forbidden in the ninth commandment are, all prejudicing the truth, and the good name of our neighbours, as well as our own, especially in public judicature; giving false evidence, suborning false witnesses, wittingly appearing and pleading for an evil cause, outfacing and overbearing the truth; passing unjust sentence, calling evil good, and good evil; rewarding the wicked according to the work of the righteous, and the righteous according to the work of the wicked; forgery, concealing the truth, undue silence in a just cause, and holding our peace when iniquity calls for either a reproof from ourselves, or complaint to others; speaking the truth unseasonably, or maliciously to a wrong end, or perverting it to a wrong meaning, or in doubtful and equivocal expressions, to the prejudice of truth or justice;speaking untruth, lying, slandering, backbiting, detracting, tale bearing, whispering, scoffing, reviling, rash, harsh, and partial censuring; misconstruing intentions, words, and actions; flattering, vainglorious boasting, thinking or speaking too highly or too meanly of ourselves or others; denying the gifts and graces of God; aggravating smaller faults;hiding, excusing, or extenuating of sins, when called to a free confession;unnecessary discovering of infirmities; raising false rumours, receiving and countenancing evil reports, and stopping our ears against just defence; evil suspicion; envying or grieving at the deserved credit of any, endeavouring or desiring to impair it, rejoicing in their disgrace and infamy; scornful contempt, fond admiration; breach of lawful promises; neglecting such things as are of good report, and practising, or not avoiding ourselves, or not hindering: What we can in others, such things as procure an ill name.

Given that speech can be so evil, why ought anyone for a moment consider that speaking freely should be a human right?  The answer is straightforward.  Not all sins are crimes.  In fact very few of them are.  Essentially the right of free speech asserts that the state has no (or very limited) jurisdiction over the thoughts and words of human beings.   But God, the Judge of all the earth, does.  As always, the Judge of the heavens and the earth has total jurisdiction over mankind, including what men say. 

Consequently, one can both defend Charlie Hebdo’s crude blasphemies against the murderous rage of Islamic warriors, as well as against the rule and power of the French imperium–and, at the same time, consign the content of Charlie Hebdo’s speech and the speakers to divine wrath and judgment to come.  These positions are not contradictory.  They turn upon the greater principle that Christ alone is the judge of the heavens and the earth; all human judgment is a delegation from Him; it is necessarily limited, finite, and incomplete because no creature carries the infinite authority of the Creator. Therefore the Christian is able to tolerate all kinds of evil amongst human beings, without condoning any of it.  Rather, we keep entrusting ourselves to Him who will judge righteously and exhaustively on that great final day. 

The only alternative is propounded by the secular atheist state.  Since there is no acknowledgement of God, there is no higher power than the state to whom justice and judgment can be appealed.  The state alone is the judge of the heavens and the earth.  Judgment upon all kinds of  manifestations of evil can be appealed no further or higher than the state itself.

Consequently, free speech cannot survive in the modern secular atheistic state.  It is a “hangover” from a Christian past.  For secular society and the atheist state, all sins are implicitly crimes.  Speaking hatefully about a person is a sin.  The modern secular state is rapidly turning it into a crime.  This is why all atheistic states trend towards authoritarianism and, eventually, totalitarianism.  It is also why free speech rights are eroding so rapidly throughout the West.  (See the postscript below)

Meanwhile, our defence of free speech rights must remain Christianly based.  Unbelief waxes between two poles.  The one makes all speech sacrosanct and holy–beyond any judgment, moral or otherwise.  The second constantly agitates to employ state power to make all our speech “righteous”.  In a secular atheistic world, the latter will always win, because, not to put the matter too finely, the state carries a big gun.

Christians believe, and insist upon, free speech rights because Christ is the Judge of the heavens and the earth, and man is not.  The present secular state, albeit a divinely appointed servant, is in rebellion against the Lord.  In the longer term, however, these things will not always be so.  In the Christian world–the only real and substantial and abiding world–the secular state cannot and will not survive.  From the Christian perspective, the secular atheistic world is merely a temporary, passing chimera. 

________________

Postscript:
Peter Hitchens writes about the late Mr Harry Hammond, an elderly eccentric living in Bournemouth.

Mr Hammond, a passionate evangelical Christian in his late sixties, liked to preach the Gospel in the open air of Bournemouth, whether anyone was listening to him or not.  In April 2002 he was prosecuted under the Public Order Act of 1986, which makes it an offence to display any writing, sign or other visible representation that is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm and distress thereby.  Mr Hammond’s crime was to display a placard–now destroyed by order of the bench–on which was written: “Stop immorality.  Stop homosexuality.  Stop lesbianism.”

As Mr Hammond hoisted his six-word manifesto in the centre of town on a busy Saturday in October 2001, a small crowd gathered round him, partly hecklers but mostly curious onlookers.  The hecklers were rough with him.  A young woman tried to tug the placard from his hands.  During this tussle, Mr Hammond fell flat on his back and had to be helped to his feet by security guards from a nearby shop.  Soon afterwards, Mr Hammond’s enlightened liberal critics flung clods of earth at him, one striking him on the chest and one on the head.  Another of these campaigners for tolerance crept up behind Mr Hammond and emptied a bottle of water over his bald cranium.

When the police were called, it was Mr Hammond who was arrested.  Mr Hammond’s case may well be the most bizarre arrest in the history of English policing, since the two officers involved disagreed over what to do and did not resolve their disagreement.  A more experienced male constable, Wayne Elliott, thought that Mr Hammond should be protected.  His younger female colleague, Nicola Gandy, thought that he should be taken in.  They argued for 20 minutes before her view prevailed.  At the trial the two officers gave evidence on opposite sides, PC Elliott appearing of the defence, while PC Gandy spoke for the prosecution.  The Crown Prosecutor laid into Mr Hammond as if he were a serious malefactor  He said the offending placard was “insulting to people and people’s intelligence.  It was insulting to gay people and gay people’s friends and he knew that.”  A magistrate ruled that the sign “clearly insulted members of the crowd who had gathered round him.”  She pronounced him guilty and fined him 300 [pounds], plus 300 [pounds] in costs.  She also ordered that his placard be destroyed. . . .

PC Gandy stood by her decision to arrest Mr Hammond. . . . Asked about her motives for taking a strong stance, she explained: “My agenda was to try to maintain the peace.  I was not very impressed with Mr Hammond’s conduct, I don’t think he is a very good representative of the Christian faith.”  It is interesting that police officers now feel able to comment in public on the religious opinions of citizens.

Mr Hammond planned to appeal, but died in the summer of 2002, before his case could be heard.  He would have been disappointed, but not surprised by the failure of his posthumous appeal in early 2004.  [Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003),   pp. 245-247.]

Mr Hammond, formerly of Bournemouth: RIP in the presence of your Saviour and Great King.

Hold Fast to the Traditions and Institutions of Liberty

In Defence of Juries

Why juries?  They appear to be a peculiar anglo-saxon institution, at least in terms of their origin.  Every so often a talking-head stands up to suggest there has to be a “better way”.  The assessment of evidence and the determination of guilt would surely be better served by those trained to evaluate evidence and reason to a sound conclusion.

Juries necessarily reflect the general state of society at large.  That is offered as one of the great benefits of juries: it is a trial of one’s peers.  That is one of their perceived benefits.  Juries are not made up of elites who control just about everything else.  But that also means that if education standards in society generally fall and folk are unable to reason clearly, let alone articulate, juries risk falling into a situation where they are little more than corporate expressions of brute prejudice, self-righteous sanctimony, and general ignorance.  We have served on juries and have “insider” knowledge, so to speak.

Yet, strangely enough, more often than not–by a long, long shot–juries get it right.  Their decisions reflect not just the evidence, but its weight.  Yet, this alone, is not the sole argument for juries.  There is a far, far more important principle at work (which, more often than not, contributes to their effectiveness).  Peter Hitchens puts it this way:

The jury is more noble in theory than in reality.  There is nothing especially elevating in the sight of twelve people crammed into a room trying to decide whether to ruin a fellow human being’s life.  Yet for once, the idea is more important than the practice.  As long as these strange committees continue to exist, governments are less powerful and citizens are more free.  [Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p.180.]

Checking the power of governments and buttressing the freedom of citizens is a worthy, Christian principle.  For that alone, jury trials are a wonderful Anglo-Saxon institution and a definite contributory institution to the emergence and growth of the first Christendom.  Power corrupts and always needs checking and limitations.  Amongst humankind, the state is the highest and therefore the most minatory of all human institutions.  It has the power to kill the body.  Whilst ordained as a minister of God (Romans 13: 4,5) in corrupt times and hands it can wreak (and repeatedly has wrought) destruction and havoc.  Therefore, the institution of the jury is not just a national treasure: it is vital to our collective future.  Hitchens explains how this works:

Two things happen to trails when a jury is present.  First there is the element of doubt about the outcome that is quite beyond the control of the state.  This turns the presumption of innocence from a mere slogan into a real possibility.  Some on the jury may actually be prepared to believe that the police have the wrong man.  Secondly, the prosecution’s huge advantage over the defence is greatly reduces.  The defence is not an interloper among officials but one of the two contestants before a panel that owes nothing to either side. (Ibid.)

The jurors are the gods of guilt; before them the state must (figuratively) bow.  Ergo the godly state will defend the institution of the jury with the fury and tenacity of a she wolf defending her young. If she were to fail, the future of her cubs would become decidedly bleak.

In a criminal court, the powers have been carefully divided–at least in our Christian tradition.  The judge (representing the Crown, and therefore a power of the State) will decide on matters of law.  The jury will decide on matters of evidence, as to guilt or innocence.  The authority of the judge with respect to the law is limited and checked by the institution of the appeal to wider and higher courts.  The authority of the jury is limited and checked by the very high standard of proof required viz a vis the evidence: the matter must be proven “beyond reasonable doubt”. 

The alternative is not just sub-standard, it is positively dangerous. 

Without a jury, the legal process is like any other government action. Strip the process of arrest, trial, conviction, sentence and appeal down to its basic parts and it is quite simple.  A series of state employees, few of them especially brave or intelligent or perceptive, are asked to approve the original decision of another state employee.  The chances are strong they will do so at every stage, and will feel that this is what they are paid to do.  [Hitchens, op cit., p. 181.]

And, we may add, these government functionaries are not just paid to support their employer, but most are career employees.  To oppose, to diverge, to act the contrarian is likely  to become a career limiting move–and that right quickly. The presumption of bias and prejudice on their part is necessarily conclusion to be drawn by anyone who understands the human heart and the fallibleness of mankind and yet insists upon liberty for man as the image-bearer of God Himself.

One argument against juries persistently put forward is the limitations of many people that serve on juries.  As noted above, we have experienced it first hand. But this argument proves far too much, to where it actually becomes a telling and convincing argument for the institution of the jury.  Every observation to be made about the limitations and cant of jurors can be multiplied several times over when it comes to politicians, career bureaucrats, and ambitious state-functionaries.  In addition, every argument about the cant and limitations of jurors applies equally well to the democratic system itself.  If jurors cannot be trusted, neither can voters. 

Jurors might well have their weaknesses, but in comparison to the alternatives, they positively shine like beacons upon a dark, sinister sea. 

Relishing A Messy Society

No Mess, No Life

A free society is always a mess.  Because folk don’t like a messy society, they end up wanting to curtail freedoms left, right, and centre.  As Chesterton acerbically put it, when people stop believing in God they end up believing in anything and everything.  One of the things they inevitably come to believe is that society can get rid of all messiness; virtual perfection is attainable.  If we had this authority, that rule, a new extension of government regulations and powers every messy problem we face would be duly solved.

A Christian society, on the other hand, is a mess.  Always.  Why?  For two reasons.  The first arises out of an acceptance of human limitations.  We are finite creatures, with limited understanding and abilities.  The second and worse cause of mess is that we are fallen creatures, in a fallen world, with hearts that are deceitful and desperately wicked.  Yet it is Christian society which maximises freedoms (even while accepting the inevitable messiness.)  In this sense, Christians love the mess, because the alternative is unthinkable.

The Christian accepts both the messiness and the duty to advocate for a free society.  The Christian can do this with sanguine hope and positive joy because we believe in Providence–the faithful governance by God over all things, both visible and invisible.  God devolves His authority to men, and promulgates His law both authorising human rule over the creation, and, at the same time, delimiting the extent of human rule and authority.  Because parents are given special authority and competence to bear and raise children, it does not mean the state, or the church, or the school or any other authority can subvert parents and replace them.  There are boundaries the state and other authorities may not cross–without putting mess on steroids.  This holds true, even when parents make a mess of raising children.  The messiness of some homes does not justify setting up kibbutzim so the state can become the uber-parent.  (If you didn’t like the dysfunctional state of some homes, wait until you see the dysfunction wreaked upon us all when the state becomes the Parent of everyone.) 

These days, because the State is the only authority and power to which secularism can appeal, every mess requires a statist solution.  Is there unemployment?  The government must sort out the mess by welfare payments for those out of work, forcing interest rates lower, and vastly expanding government jobs.  Are there drugs on the streets?  The government must declare a war upon drugs, expanding government powers, surveillance, and punitive punishments.  Are pupils leaving school unable to read or write?  The government must step in to define and control curricula and teaching standards to ensure literacy and numeracy.  And so it goes.  Without end.

At each step, freedom diminishes; external, illegitimate authorities and controls are extended.  And the people love it.  For them, mess and uncertainty are the problem.  The Christian man, however, knows that mess is a necessary and intrinsic part of a free society.  He also knows there is a God-directed way to deal with mess.  Sometimes it requires benign neglect. Some problems ought to be ignored.  Under the loving hand of Providence they will self-correct and diminish.  Sometimes decisive action by local civil society or neighbourhood groups is required.  At other times, it requires interdiction by the Department of Defence.  But the existence of mess, in and of itself, does not provide an argument nor justification for extensions of statist power.

In our secularist atheistic culture messiness becomes the fuel for a white hot nuclear core which relentlessly expands the mandate, role, and grip of the state until the inevitable meltdown. 

Without freedom, there will be no mess.  When there is no longer any messiness, we will all be dead. 

The Sydney Postscript

Dying Day by Day, One Way or the Other

The dust has started to settle in Sydney, after the Islamic hostage drama.  We are now in a position to reflect upon what happened and upon the wider implications.

Here is a summary of events as they unfolded:

• Siege ends after police storm building

• Gunman identified as Haron Monis – a self-styled cleric – accused of being an accessory to the murder of his former wife and once notorious for sending poison letters to the family of deceased Diggers.

• Events sparked by gunman shooting hostage

• Police confirm gunman Haron Monis is dead, along with 34-year-old man and 38-year-old woman

• 17 hostages confirmed, including five who escaped yesterday [NZ Herald]

One columnist said that civilians remained calm and did what they ought to have done.  They refused to become terrified.  The police acted with professionalism throughout.  Less professional and more histrionic were the politicians who made sure the world understood they were shocked, outraged.  Peter Hartcher had this reflection:

Why do political activists turn to terrorism? Australia gave the world a lesson today.   They turn to terrorism to win attention, to cause fear, and to use that fear to produce an overreaction. That overreaction is the measure of their success.

Terrorism is a tool of the weak against the strong. It is designed to turn the enemy’s strength against itself.  One man showed how to get extraordinary attention and inflict serious disruption using only a gun and a Muslim prayer banner.  Successful terrorism is so rare in Australia that the overreaction is perhaps understandable. The police response seemed exactly right. But our political and media systems need to get better at measured reaction.

Two innocents died.  They started their day as they had done thousands of times before.  They had no idea they would die that day. We do not know whether they were ready and prepared to die that day.

The perpetrator was not mad, but evil.  He appears to have acted alone.  But he did what ISIS has been calling Islamic believers in the West to do: engage in individual acts of mayhem and suicidal death. The man’s former lawyer commented:

It’s a damaged goods individual who’s done something outrageous,” his former lawyer, Manny Conditsis, told Australian Broadcasting Corp.  “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” Conditsis said.

The inevitable question became, What ought we to do now?  In some senses, very little, we believe.  Hundreds of people die on our roads every year.  We mitigate the risks by road rules, policing, education, the courts and criminal sentences.  In this fallen world evil things happen.  Calamities occur.  But we adapt.  We mitigate.  We prepare.  We learn.  We respond better next time.

In New Zealand criminal gangs perpetrate crime on an industrial scale.   Some say they run and rule the prisons.  Does this prevent us going out our front doors?  Not at all.  But we citizens participate in the community responsibility to combat such evils.  We are the eyes and ears of the police.  We inform.  We let them know what we see going down.  It is a vital tool in combating such crime.  The evil is restrained.  Its effects are mitigated.

Should the community turn against Islamic people?  Of course not.  Islamic believers are above all human beings, made in God’s image.  They deserve–even command, therefore, our respect, friendship, and support as citizens.  But if any amongst them were to conspire to commit crimes the normal processes to confront crime or other similar threats must apply. That is, society must treat all Islamic people normally, not as a special case.

We live in a world filled with dangers and threats.  Islamic terrorism is just one of them.  It is not to be singled out as qualitatively different from every other mortal threat we face.  We acknowledge that in the struggle to mitigate and resist the threats we will “win some” and “lose some”.

If politicians arose to promise us citizens that they would ensure a crime-free society we would dismiss them as idealistic idiots.  They would lose all credibility.  Similarly, if a politician were to claim the government would deliver a terrorist-free society, we need to dismiss them as flakes.  That means we, as citizens, are accepting the intrinsic and unavoidable risks of living in a fallen world.  That means we are grown ups.

The society which fears Islamic terrorism so much it would demand of its government a cocooned, cotton wool certainty that “it will never happen here” might as well self-immolate, since a government that attempts to deliver on such nonsense, and a citizenry which demands it, will end up killing us all in one way or another.

In the coming month, all over this country, people will be waking up in the morning not realising that this is the day they will die (whether from a road accident, exposure on a mountain face, or shot in a drive-by gang shooting, or a heart attack–or something else.)  None of these folk will have been expecting it to happen.  None of them will have seen it coming.  That’s what it means to live in a fallen, sinful world.  

The man who is ready to die today, if God so wills, is a free man.  It’s the best response possible to the threat of terrorism. 

Constitutional Niceties

An Immoral Miscreant Shames the Nation

They say the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  This truism points not to external so much as internal enemies.  Power corrupts and is addictive.  The apparatus of state always would elide into a tyranny, unless watched, checked, and more-often-than-not thwarted by checks and balances.

Elections are one bastion eternal vigilance can use to impede the drift towards tyranny.  The law and law courts are another.  A healthy and responsible media is another.  Unwritten constitutional conventions are another.  But all of these are weak and likely ineffective without having a more than just “a few good men” to stand upon the walls.  It is not until liberties are lost that people value what they have previously treated with disdain and neglect.

 Several years ago in New Zealand we were treated to the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Phil Goff being caught out lying in the midst of an election campaign.
  Not unusual in a culture which celebrates dissembling as sophisticated and clever.  But Goff’s breach was more sinister.  He had claimed he knew nothing of espionage activity by some foreign agents in the city of Christchurch.  It was pointed out that he had been indeed formally briefed by the head of the Security Intelligence Service of the very same.  He responded by digging deeper, excoriating the SIS head, Warren Tucker, whereupon Dr Tucker responded by releasing part of the briefing notes he had provided to Goff.  The Leader of the Opposition was thereby publicly exposed not just as a liar, but a liar about affairs and matters of state.

The media, largely in the tank for Goff and an anticipated Labour election victory, gave him a free pass and moved on.  Goff subsequently stumbled to electoral defeat.

To observe that the media and the Commentariat hushed over Goff’s duplicity would be an understatement. In fact, Goff proved at that moment he would break every constitutional convention in his lust to hold the country in his thrall.  He had also breached constitutional conventions against attacking state employees in the process, but that was relatively small beer.

Now Dr Tucker has been criticised by an independent report.  He handled the matter wrongly.  He should have sought legal advice.  He breached a legal obligation to remain studiedly neutral towards all politicians and political parties.  If he had sought legal advice at the time, he probably would have done a much better job.

Several wry observations demand our attention.  The first is a positive endorsement of the changes made to the way the Security Intelligence Services operate.  There are now in place mechanisms of internal and external review which did not exist when the Goff scandal unfolded.  In fact, the very reason we are able to learn about the actions of Dr Tucker and his shortcomings is due to the new checks and balances which have been put in place.  This is a sweet smelling bouquet. It establishes that the separation of powers have been strengthened, and the neutrality of the SIS has not only been affirmed, but now much more protected and insisted upon.

The media, of course, are all agog and aghast over Dr Tucker’s shortcomings.  But they fail to observe that the failings occurred four years ago, Dr Tucker no longer runs the SIS, and we are finding out about it because of successful efforts to clean house and make the cleansing institutional, and thus preserved.  That’s good new, but significantly less headline grabbing, so the demands of a good scandal require that one’s attention be directed elsewhere.  

Secondly, the media to this day still wallow in complicit silence over Goff’s dishonesty and his naked lust for power-at-any-price.  Goff is not a nice guy.  In our judgment he is completely unfit to hold any political office in this country ever again.  The media today is engaged in a persistent attempt to find wrongdoing on the part of the Prime Minister and his office in his handling of the SIS.  He is the Big Fish.  If that means Goff’s proven lies ought to be ignored (as yesterday’s never-quite-news) whilst they go for the “Big Story” so be it.

But, here, once again, they are making the news, not reporting it.  We are regaled daily with stories about their intrepid Search For the Smoking Gun, whilst they ignore the real stench of cordite right before their blocked noses.  In so doing, the media are involved and complicit in the very Dirty Politics they themselves hypocritically condemn at every turn.  The fact that Goff still warms a seat in Parliament today is testament to just how politicized the media has become.  He remains there, slurping at the taxpayers’ teat, because the media has given him a “free pass” preferring to deploy him as bait on the hook for bigger fish. 

Thirdly, there is plenty for the media to be legitimately focused upon.  Yes, there does appear there has been a blurring of the hard lines between politics and government in the Prime Minister’s office.  That also breaches a constitutional convention.  It would seem that Key has been far too casual over such important separations.  The real focus should be upon necessary changes to policy, procedures, and operational conventions there need be in the office of the Prime Minister.  Granted that things have got much better with respect to the governance of the SIS, but what about other government departments?

Moreover, Key’s drive to grant more powers to the SIS so as to “combat” ISIS terrorism is ill-advised, hasty, and altogether bearing hallmarks of unjustified panic.  The fact that some of our citizens may wish and plan to go overseas to Syria to lay down their lives in “holy” martyrdom does not constitute a clear and present danger to the rest of us.  Not if their passports are cancelled should they turn up in Syria.

Key’s drive for urgency seems to arise out of a half-baked scheme that we have some kind of duty to cancel the passports of those who are intending to go and join ISIS before they leave the country, which is folly indeed.  That is the real issue which should be debated long and hard, for its possible ramifications would be dangerous indeed. 

There is a shameful postscript to this story.  The report on Dr Tucker was pre-released to the handful of interested parties under strict legal embargo.  But it was leaked to the media more than twenty-four hours before its public release.  The leaker?  Why, Phil Goff, of course, who has admitted the breach, and has proven repeatedly that illegalities will  never be allowed to get in the way of political ambition nor his lust for power.  His role in this breach is now going to be investigated.  He is an immoral miscreant.  

Letter From Australia (About Trotskyite Sydney University)

Orwell Would Weep at the Demonisation of Professor Barry Spurr 

Miranda Devine

The Sunday Telegraph
November 16, 2014

I MUST assume Eden Caceda is an inspired satirical creation by Sydney University students outraged at the brutalisation of poetry professor Barry Spurr. 
 
After all, the anagram of the name is “A Decadence”. That’s one way of looking at the descent into Orwellian thought-control at the nation’s finest university, which has suspended Spurr indefinitely and banned him from campus for using “offensive” language in private emails, which he said had been hacked and sent to a left-wing website.

“Eden Caceda”, an office-bearer with the university’s “Autonomous Collective Against Racism”, ho, ho, led the campaign last week against Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s “racist” Mexican-themed staff Christmas party.  The dress code was “Mexican Fiesta — bring your own sombreros and ponchos”.  But “Caceda” was deeply ­offended by the “culturally ­insensitive” invitation.  “My family has a poncho and it is really important to us, and these people are treating it like a costume,” he said.

Spence, who made the decision to render Professor Spurr a non-person, now finds himself hoist with his own petard.  He has been forced to send an email to staff, cancelling the Mexican dress code: “I have today asked the event organisers to amend our plans so the party has no particular theme.”

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Cowardly capitulation to political correctness only ends when the barbarians are pouring molten silver down your throat. But Spence deserves everything to come, because his treatment of Spurr is a shameful disgrace.  It dishonours everything that a great university is supposed to be. Rather than exalting reason and truth, it is prosecuting Crimethink — banishing people for having private thoughts.

Spurr wrote some of his private thoughts in jocular emails to a friend in which he refers to “Mussies”, “chinky-poos” and “whores” and describes the university’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, as an “appalling minx”.  New Matilda has published some of the stolen emails, while the university conducts a top-secret and extremely slow “investigation” into whether they constitute evidence of closet racism, sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia etc.

Spurr said the comments were not serious, but part of a “whimsical linguistic game” in which he and a friend tried to outdo each other with extreme language. Any literate person would understand this boundary transgression. Yet one of the few people to speak up for Spurr lives in London.  “How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously?” wrote comedian Barry Humphries, asking if Australia has “gone slightly mad”.

You might have thought that students would rise up in fury and condemn the disgusting treatment of a good man.

Professor Barry Spurr.

But, alas, the only student protests have been by the campus Trotskyists, Socialist Alternative, who shrieked through megaphones outside Fisher ­Library that Spurr was “racist filth” and a “vile bigot” and gathered signatures to have him sacked.

In the days after Spurr was driven out, his fellow ­professors read aloud the ­administration’s ritual denunciation of him before every class, urging students who may have experienced discrimination to come forward.

Spurr is Australia’s only poetry professor. He is the world’s pre-eminent T.S. Eliot scholar. His CV, which has not yet been erased from the university’s website, shows a man of extraordinary literary and academic accomplishment. Students come from across the world just to be in his classes.  Most are dismayed by his banishment, but are so ­oppressed by the McCarthyist atmosphere on campus that they daren’t speak out.

Michael Davis is one brave exception. In a brilliant article in next month’s Quadrant, the 20-year-old blasts the university for “caving to the efforts of 100 caustic teenagers who insult and abuse a 60-something year-old who’s given the better part of his life to that same institution. There would be no University of Sydney without men like Barry Spurr, and there would be no Australia without the Western Civilization he defends.”

Of course, the reason Spurr was marked for destruction was because he helped in the Abbott government’s review of the national curriculum, recommending greater emphasis on the Western literary canon.  Along with review co-author Kevin Donnelly and four other subject experts deemed “conservative”, he has been monstered by the authoritarian Left who control education.

He agreed to help fix the curriculum because he believes English studies are in crisis. He believes democracy is under threat when its people are “inarticulate in their use of language and sub-literate in their linguistic discernment”.

Spurr has devoted his life to eradicating the sort of slovenly, deceitful, politically correct language that “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”, as Orwell put it.

Now he is its victim.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

America in C Major

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

October 20, 2014

I do understand there has been some debate over whether America was once a Christian nation. But whether it was or no — and I believe it was — there should be no debate among Christians over whether it was a normal one. Defenders and revolutionaries alike insist that those norms be defended, or smashed, as it suits them, but everybody agrees that the norms were actually there. Twenty years ago, same sex mirage was unthinkable. Now you are an enemy of all mankind if you call the mirage for what it is — a shimmer in the air over the desert sands — instead of what everyone is demanding you call it, which is something that rhymes with carriage. But it also rhymes with disparage, which brings me to my theme.

Rejected New Yorker Cover

. . . . But whatever the mix was in helping to establish what used to be normal, I want to insist cannot be reattained apart from a reformation and revival, the kind which impels us to call on the name of Jesus Christ. Not only do I believe this must happen, or we are all lost, but I also believe that we will not be lost. This will happen. It is happening now.

In the meantime we have to deal with the secularist overreach. The fact that they must overreach is to be expected because their entire worldview is based on an inability to say no to their lusts — and this libido dominandi is no different on this score than the other kind of lust.

So, for the present, now that we are no longer in the grip of H8, water is commanded to flow uphill, by order of the Supreme Court, and triangles must have four corners, by order of Congress. On top of that, the president has recently signed an executive order determining that ham and cheese sandwiches may no longer contain ham, or cheese for that matter, and that anyone who, from the date of the issuance of this executive order, makes a ham and cheese sandwich with any ham or cheese in it will be fined five thousand dollars, and remanded to sensitivity training, where trained bureaucrats will pull out his toenails as a way to teach him not to be so hurtful.

In other words, ordinary norms of the sort that would get you yawned at in the Eisenhower years are now officially transgressive. This is why I am thought to be such a bad boy. I continue to maintain that the sky is an azure blue, and that grass is emerald green in the springtime, and so it has happened that reading this blog is something of a guilty pleasure among establishment conservatives. They are not in a real position to say that the sky is blue — bad career move — but they do enjoy watching someone else be naughty.

The most outrageous thing someone can do in our Bosch exhibit version of Night at the Museum is part his hair on the left side, comb it carefully, and smile for the camera — with a cute little blonde wife by his side, and four well-scrubbed and well-loved children, also with their hair combed properly. If those children have also had their noses wiped, this is a clear indication that we need to work even harder to teach our people that hate is not a family value, and that the patriarchy could clearly use a little more smashing.

It is now avant garde jazz played with the fists, but America used to play its songs in C Major. And for those of you who think this is some sort of racist dog whistle for referring to the good old days when it was “all white keys,” we might as well get to that issue now.

A wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, The Hitching Post, run by a man and wife team, each of them an ordained minister, has been informed that they could face jail time or fines if they refuse — as they intend to refuse — to perform same sex mirages. Now let’s leave out of this the fact that they are standing for biblical values when she is ordained to the ministry contrary to biblical teaching. That kind of inconsistency was simply placed in this story by an all-loving God to help us keep laughing as we keep our eye on the central point.

Now the argument is that they will be forced by the state to perform same sex mirages in their role as businessmen, and not in their role as ministers. Because this is an “open to the public” thing, like a restaurant, they must serve whoever walks through the door. Simple pimple, right? Well, not exactly. In the first place, I see no reason why they should be forced to perform same sex mirages any more than our local La Casa Lopez should be forced to serve up Chinese, however much an urgent patron wants him some almond chicken. Their defense would run along the lines of “we’re a Mexican restaurant. We don’t serve Chinese food. We don’t know how to make Chinese food.”

So this is where appeal will be made to the great advances accomplished by the Civil Rights movement back in the sixties. Back in the day, whites could refuse to serve blacks in their restaurants, and it wasn’t that long ago. It was that way in the town where I grew up, and who wants to return to those days? The claim is made that “you opponents of same sex mirage want to return us to those days.” This particular point is the central slippery trick in this whole mess.

Before proceeding further, I do want to say that we should be far better masters of the distinction between sins and crimes before we go about trying to outlaw sins. Because we tried to eliminate the sin of racial prejudice in public spaces without grasping that essential distinction, we have ended up by mandating the commission of sin in public spaces. Essaying to stamp out one sin we have made another sin, one that is far worse, mandatory. Let me go over that again. We have outlawed one sin, and the cost of doing it is that we have made another sin compulsory. People who do that shouldn’t be in charge of things.

Run this out. Suppose The Hitching Post was owned by a couple that had sincere religious convictions against miscegenation. This would mean that they would want the right to refuse to perform a ceremony between a black man and a white woman. Now I take it as a given that such a refusal on their part would be sinful. But should it be illegal?

And even if it should be illegal, how does it follow that if the state can make someone quit being sinful that this somehow authorizes the state to make people start being sinful?

So this is the point where our pretended moral arbiters try to retreat into moral relativism — they say that we use terms like “sin” and we quote Bible verses and all, but not everyone has the same understanding of morality. Who is to say what sins are? Who is to tell us the difference between right and wrong? This is a pluralistic society, and we should know that we cannot impose our own moral codes on others who do not share them. Don’t you know anything, rube? Well, okay, but if we can’t impose a particular morality on people who don’t share that morality, then why did you impose your morality on the bigoted restaurant owner? This is not a difficult question to understand, and I am willing to wait for an answer. By what standard are you making your moral decisions, and why should they be obligatory for others who do not share your devotion to those standards?

The anti-miscegenists had a really tenuous case from the Bible. They wanted to maintain set racial boundaries because, said they, God had appointed the boundaries of our habitation (Acts 17:26). That is some thin soup cultural application, right there. And to the extent that the Scriptures speaks of interracial marriage directly, it was on the occasion of Moses having married an Ethiopian woman (Num. 12:1). The only person in that story who was really white was Miriam, who, when she objected to the marriage, was struck with leprosy. The Lord checked her privilege. In short, the opponents of miscegenation had a cluster of petty bigotries covered over with the thin veneer of one Bible verse that did not say what they claimed it did.

Sodomy, on the other hand, is spoken of throughout the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and always in a way that condemns the practice as vile, the necessary end result of a refusal to honor God as God. God destroyed cities with fire from Heaven over this evil (Gen. 19:24), He says using a man as though he were a woman is an abomination (Lev. 18:22), He excludes unrepentant practitioners from salvation over it (1 Cor. 6:9), and He says that those who live like this receive in their own bodies the due penalty of their sin (Rom. 1:27).

If the Scriptures had prohibited interracial marriage with the same kind of clarity, that particular battle would still be going on. The opponents of interracial marriage only climbed down because they were defending a sinful position and they knew it. They had no real scriptural case, and they knew it.

But it is completely different now. Back then the anti-miscegenists had a bad conscience; the bad conscience now is with the soft-on-sodomy crowd. Those Christians who are climbing down today, in the midst of this current battle, are the ones whose eyes are shifting back and forth, right along with their exegetical core values. The anti-miscegenist Christians were shamed into abandoning a stupid scriptural argument. The evolving Christians, who are not afraid of what the Holy Spirit in our generation calls “lots of cool, new stuff,” are the ones who are being shamed into a stupid scriptural argument. And call me old-fashioned, but I still maintain there is a critical difference between climbing out of stupid and climbing into it.

So let us distinguish our current crop Vichy Christians from the fight-on-the-beaches, fight-in-the-fields-and-streets, fight-on-the-landing-ground Christians. The worst thing about pragmatic accommodations is that they don’t work, and the best thing about principled lost-cause stands is that they do.

The Bible speaks on this subject with such clarity that the only way this current homo-overreach can conclude is by trying to take our Bibles away. As long as we have our Bibles, their contentions will be unable to get the clown face paint off. But we live in an era that has difficulty in understanding when an argument is ad absurdum, and so I apologize for bringing it up. No need to take our Bibles. Really.

Letter From the UK (About Bert and Ernie)

Bert and Ernie gay marriage cake leaves Christian bakery facing court threat

Christian bakery facing legal action from equality quango for refusing to make cake with Sesame Street characters saying ‘support gay marriage’ 

The Daily Telegraph

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor 

July 07, 2014

A Christian-run bakery is facing legal action from a Government agency for refusing to produce a cake carrying a picture of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie and the slogan “support gay marriage”.

Ashers Baking Co, based in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, cancelled an order for a novelty cake with a picture of the puppets arm in arm printed onto the icing saying that it went against the directors’ religious beliefs.

They believe that producing the cake with the slogan and the logo of QueerSpace, a gay rights group the would-be customer supports, would amount to endorsing the campaign for the introduction of gay marriage in the province, and go against their religious convictions.

But the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has now written to the firm claiming that it is breaking the law. A letter signed by the legal office orders the firm to “remedy your illegal discrimination” within seven days or be taken to court by the commission.  It claimed that refusing to print the cake amounted to discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation against the man who placed the order.

It establishes a dangerous precedent about the power of the state over an individual, or business to force them to go against their deeply held beliefs.

The Christian institute, which is supporting the bakery, says it is not discriminatory for managers to refuse to endorse a political campaign.  Gay marriage is not legal in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK in which it is not on the statute book.

Colin Hart, chief executive of the Christian Institute, said: “This is a sign of things to come exactly as we predicted.  “The Government repeatedly failed to listen to members of the public, lawyers, constitutional experts even its own MPs when they called for safeguards to protect those who back traditional marriage, especially those who work in the public sector.

“Now this nonsense, more usually associated with the public sector, is being applied to the private sector. This means millions of ordinary people who do not agree with gay marriage, face intimidation and the real threat of legal action from the forces of political correctness if they, out of conscience, decline to provide good or services to campaign groups they do not agree with or support.

“It establishes a dangerous precedent about the power of the state over an individual, or business to force them to go against their deeply held beliefs.”  The customer was unable to comment.

 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

And Free Chocolate Milk for All . . .

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 3, 2014

The uproar on the left over the Hobby Lobby decision has an explanation. That explanation is that we have allowed our understanding of what is meant by rights and liberties to become badly degraded. In fact, to simplify, the common understanding of rights has gotten into a condition of extreme labefactation. So to speak.

The left tends to think of political rights in terms of stuff — the right to affordable housing, the right to health care, the right to contraception, and so on. Conservatives tend to think of political rights in terms of non-interference — the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to worship God freely, and so forth.

Now rights always imply corresponding obligations. If I have a right to life, others have an obligation not to shoot me. If I have a right to keep and bear arms, others have a responsibility not to take those arms away from me. If I have a right to peaceably assemble, then others have the obligation not to disrupt my peaceful assembly, and so on.

In a similar — yet strikingly different — way, if I have a right to free chocolate milk, then somebody has an obligation to provide it for me.
If I have a right to free health care, then someone has an obligation to provide free health care. If I have a right to free contraception, then someone must buy it for me.

Actually, the First Lady called. She wants to change it to free soy milk for all.

This different conception of rights is why the right and left reacted in completely different ways to the Hobby Lobby decision. The left paraded placards that said they wanted their boss to stay out of their bedroom. But they sure wanted their boss’s wallet in the bedroom. If they have a right to free contraception, then their boss has an obligation to follow them into the bedroom with that free contraception. They cannot demand this, and then object to his presence there.

But they do object. They object because they are depending upon the “give me stuff” conception of rights, while still trying to utilize the old rhetorical power of the “leave me alone” conception of rights. But this is trying to have it both ways — and we have gotten way past the point where you can have it both ways.

Keeping the boss out of your bedroom is similar to keeping the government out of it. The government out of the bedroom, aye. This, from people who want the government to dictate how far apart the sheetrock screws in the bedroom wall have to be, how flame resistant the mattress is, how big the window is for an escaping adulterer’s ease of egress, or perhaps because of fire, and whether or not one can buy an incandescent light bulb for the lamps in that bedroom.

Because the government does not generate stuff, but can only take it, if the government becomes the guarantor of rights in the sense that the left demands, then it must become a predatory state. If the government respects rights in the sense that conservatives want, the government does so by not doing things. The government can leave you alone and remain small. In fact, being small helps. The government can stay out of your business, and operate within biblical boundaries for government.

But if every citizen has a right to be given something, and if the government is the guarantor of rights, it doesn’t matter how small the object to be given is, the government that gives it must be huge. If every citizen has a right to be given one toothpick annually, this is a trivial thing individually, but the government that ensured such a thing would have to be enormous.

And this brings us back to the central difference between the left and regular folks. The left loves coercion. They love making things mandatory. They love the sense of power it gives them, and this is why they insist on government of the fussbudgets, by the fussbudgets, for the beleaguered.

 

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy, Part II

Will the Secular Clerisy Triumph?

In Part I of “The Rise of the Secular Clerisy”, published here, Joel Kotkin argued that an elite has arisen to  coalesce around a series of propositions and ideas which are now being enforced with regularity.  To espouse a contrary opinion is to enunciate heresy.  The enforcement sanctions used by this new elite have gone beyond mere public opprobrium to sending the guilty to Coventry, and to sacking offenders from their jobs.  Not that their employment had anything to do with the hateful opinions being expressed.  It’s just that what they believe is increasingly seen as an anathema. Witness the case of the CEO of Mozilla forced to resign because he happened to give a small donation several years ago to a political campaign opposing homosexual “marriage”.   It is getting very close to the ancient punishment of exile. 

In the second part, Klotkin analyses the seat of the power of this new clerisy.  Whilst he is analysing the battlefield as it exists in the United States, we are confident the same patterns and nodes of power are to be found in almost all countries in the West.  The first bulwark of influence and power is found in the nation’s bureaucracies, both federal and state. 

America’s Nomenklatura

The Clerisy has thrived during these hard times. Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some twenty million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.

The upper bureaucracy have been among the greatest beneficiaries—along with Wall Street and the green crony capitalists —of the Obama Administration’s economic policy. The number of workers, particularly at the federal level, continued to rise even at the height of the great recession. Between late 2007 and mid-2009, the number of U.S. federal workers earning at least $150,000 more than doubled. The ranks of federal nomenklatura—combined with a host of related private contractors —- have swelled so much that Washington DC by 2012 replaced New York as the wealthiest region in the country .

The upper bureaucracy has evolved into a privileged and cosseted caste. In California, state workers are allowed such special privileges as having their Department of Motor Vehicle records kept confidential; a sensible precaution for those, like police, who deal with criminals but now expanded to cover a vast array of public servants, including social workers. Naturally, as beneficiaries of an expanded government, public sector unions have been among the strongest backers of regulatory growth and ever increased social services. Their political power has also been on the rise; since 1989, public sector unions accounted for two of the top three top ten donors to political candidates.

More important still is the bureaucracy’s ability to control society through unelected agencies, something that grew even during Republican administrations, but has achieved unprecedented scale under President Obama. Increasingly, agencies such as the EPA and HUD, seek to shape community development patterns—for example on land use policies —- that traditionally fell under local control. With their power, the agencies have harassed unfriendly conservative organizations, as seen by the IRS, and monitored the populace’s private conversations, seen in the case of the NSA. But to some prominent members of the Clerisy, these power grabs haven’t gone far enough.

Leading figures of the Clerisy, like former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman, argue that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations. The popular will, according to the Clerisy and its allies, lacks the scientific judgment and societal wisdom to be trusted with power.

Here the naked ugliness of elitism is displayed.  Ordinary people are deemed stupid (unless they think like the clerisy).  They cannot be trusted with government.  The opinions they hold are not just ignorant, they are flat out dangerous to the survival of the planet, at the broadest level, and to civilised society, such as our own country.  The clerisy alone is sufficiently educated, clever and able to protect the interests of all other people–or at least, the interests other people ought to have.   If you think the clerisy treats you with condescension herein lies the reason.  They know you better than you know yourself.  They believe themselves to perceive your interests far better than you do–which is to say that at root you are profoundly ignorant of yourself and what is best for you.

The Real College of Cardinals.

Like the upper bureaucracy, academia has also expanded rapidly in recent decades. In 1958 universities and colleges employed under 370,000 people; by 2014 that number had expanded to roughly 1.7 million. With universities now serving roughly twenty million full and part time students, academics have never exercise more influence over young Americans.

Ironically, despite its patina of egalitarian beliefs, the academic world now epitomizes the new hierarchical class order as much as any major institution. The roughly 1.4 million instructors in the University system, have experienced what one writer calls “the great stratification” between roughly 500,000 largely older tenured “alpha” Professors and a vast “beta” of low-paid teaching assistants, contingent faculty and those working in extension programs.

At the same time, the bureaucracy of the University, like that of the government, has exploded, even more at elite (and tax-favored) private schools than among public ones. Whereas there were about 250,000 administrators and professional staff members in 1975, about half the number of professors, by 2005 there were over 750,000, easily outnumbering tenure-tracked professors. As the University has gained in power, those in control have taken on ever more the trappings of an aristocracy whose primary mission is self-preservation—not unlike the Medieval European clergy.

The Academy sees itself not just as the protector, preserver, and transmitter of our historical culture along with its values, to present and future generations.  It has gone way beyond that.  It now sees its role as redeemer and saviour–ushering in the new world of redeemed men and women.  

The Creative Elite

The final element of the Clerisy’s triumvirate is the culture-based industries and their upper middle classes participants. Arnold Toynbee identified the “creative genius” as the historic leader and savior of society—an apt description of the self image held by many of the new tech and media elites.

Today, this “creative” element has grown ever more pervasive. Artists, writers, fashion designers and actors have achieved enormous status in our society; and a handful has become very wealthy. More important still has been the rise of media oligarchs, some tied to the tech establishment, who now rank among the wealthiest Americans. Indeed of the world’s 25 richest people, a majority come from either the information sector, the fashion industry or media. These new media elites, combined with the tech oligarchy, could well emerge as the dominant economic force of the 21st Century, surpassing fortunes made in energy, manufacturing, or housing.

The media itself is increasingly populated by the children of prominent politicians and by those who come from the ranks of the plutocracy. These include the offspring of the Reagans, GOP stand-bearer John McCain, various Kennedys, and Nancy Pelosi. In Hollywood, meanwhile, some of the new powerful producers come from the ranks of the ultra-rich, including heirs to the Pritzker fortune and the daughter of Oracle Founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s ten richest men.

The celebrity culture is the creative elite on public display.  The outpouring of adulation, the self-congratulation, the narcissistic preoccupation with oneself, daaarhling, is not just obnoxious, it is contemptible.  By-and-large these folk are tinpot wannabes.  The genuine artists among the media  are far too weighty and serious about their craft to want to have anything to do with celebritism.  

The Clerical Consensus

Today’s Clerisy attempts to distill today’s distinctly secular “truths”—on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment—and decide what is acceptable and that which is not. Those who dissent from the accepted point of view can expect their work to be simply ignored, or in some cases vilified. In the Clerical bastion of San Francisco, an actress with heretical views, in this case supporting a Tea Party candidate, who was pilloried, and lost work for her offense.

The pattern of intolerance has been particularly notable in the area of climate change, where serious debate would seem prudent not only on the root causes and effects, but also what may present the best solutions. Climate scientists who diverge from the warming party line, even in a matter of degree, are routinely excoriated by the Clerisy as “deniers” of “settled” science even in the face of 15 years of relatively stable temperatures. The media also participates in this defense of orthodoxy. The Los Angeles Timesas well as the website Reddit have chosen to exclude contributions from skeptics.

The stifling orthodoxy from the technocrats and media elite is benign compared to the inquisitional behavior can be seen in institutions of higher education. It is nothing short of tragic, notes civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, that a 2010 survey of 24,000 college students found that barely a third thought it “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.”

Such attitudes seem natural in an environment where, according to various studies, liberals outnumber conservatives by between eight and fourteen to one. Whether this reflects natural preferences among the well-educated or is partially due to institutional discrimination remains arguable. But consider that 96 percent of all Presidential donations from the nation’s Ivy League schools went to Barack Obama, something more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy. Nor is there any sign that this trend is slowing. Between 2007 and 2010, a University of California study revealed that “far left” and liberal views grew from 55 percent to almost 63 percent of full-time faculty while the conservative segment dropped from roughly 16 % to less than 12%. If the academic left simply waits long enough, it could look forward to a conservative-free faculty on many campuses.

A similar, if less uniform, clerical consensus suffuses the media culture, led by the television networks and the leading newspapers. In fact nearly half of all Americans consider the media too liberal, more than three times as many who see it as too conservative. Overall, reports Pew, the percentage who feel news is tilted to one side has grown dramatically from 53 percent in 1985 to 77 percent in 2011.

To be sure, there remain important exceptions to this rule, notably Fox News and talk radio, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Yet the right’s hold on the major media is demonstrably weak, and likely to decline further once Murdoch himself is no longer on the scene. A detailed ++UCLA study found that of the twenty leading news outlets in the country, eighteen were left of center.

Despite the journalistic embrace of the idea of diversity, a recent Indiana University Study notes that journalists themselves have become increasingly homogeneous.  Journalists are far more likely to be college educated than they were in 1970, and less likely to be a racial minority than just a decade ago. But the biggest change has been an ideological one; barely seven percent in 2013 were Republican, compared to nearly a quarter in 1971.

Even Arnold Brisbane, the former ombundsman of the The New York Times, has noted the group-think that now overshadows objectivity, long cherished by that most important of America media outlets.  Brisbane observed that, “so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism—for lack of a better term—that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”

These positions are all reflected in almost lock-step media support for President Obama. Over sixteen prominent journalists joined the Obama administration, which was something of a record; in 2012 employees at the major networks sent President Obama almost eight times as much in contributions as they did his Republican opponent.

This consensus of views prevails as well in the electronic media. As the liberal author Jonathan Chait suggests, the media increasingly reflects not just commercial values, but “a vast left-wing conspirary.” He adds: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television (I’m not) to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.”

What of the future?  What are the prospects for this new clerisy?

Will the Clerisy rule after Obama?

The fact that Republicans continue to maintain considerable power in both Washington and the states suggests that the Clerisy’s power is not yet determinative. And indeed after President Obama leaves office, the Clerisy’s reach may be temporarily diminished, but its ability to set the social and political agenda will likely persist and even grow given their influence to shape perceptions, particularly among the young.

The current atmosphere of ideological unanimity—in academia, the arts and much of the government bureaucracy—set the stage for the outrages of this commencement season, making painfully palpable the growing authoritarian spirit in so many of our leading institutions. They often see themselves as a liberating force in our society, but in their dislike of conflicting ideas and open debate, today’s  Clerisy increasingly resembles the closed-minded dogmatists of the Medieval church.

This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy

Misanthropic Distrust of Humanity

We have posted several pieces in recent months on the rise of ideological authoritarianism in the West, particularly in the Europe, Canada, the UK, and the United States.  Further in this vein we are going to reproduce an article written by Joel Kotkin, entitled “Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent” that not only calls attention to this phenomenon in the United States, but identifies the nodes of its influence and power.  

We believe Christians, along with all citizens should be not just aware of these developments, but conscious of the implications for civil freedom, liberty, and the threats to the right of dissent.  One of the reasons Christians need to be aware is that common to all the nodes of influence of the new ideological authoritarianism is a disdain, if not outright hatred of the Christian faith, and a despising of Christians and the Church. 

Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent

by Joel Kotkin 

06/07/2014 

New Geography

 

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

 The “official” pieties are not defined in a creed or other formal statement.  They reflect a world-view which coheres around doctrines such as economic egalitarianism, distributive economic rights, a strong emphasis upon identity politics–both racial, class, and gender–a misanthropic distrust of the human race, along with a deeply held inchoate (as opposed to, reasoned) commitment to the omni-competent regulatory despotic state to create a society consistent with the shared world-view.  

Increasingly, those who dissent publicly and even privately are subjected to discrimination with teeth–so much so that people are now being hounded out of positions and occupations because they do not hold the received view. 

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive. 

The emerging mien of the “politically correct” brigade is that it would stand upon the bridge, shouting “You shall not pass”, thereby preventing any heretics or naysayers to enter any academic hall, place of work, or government position, or society in general, lest the heretics do great harm to others by offending them.

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.

The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.

The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Of course, every society needs a clerical class, to instruct the young and maintain cultural standards. But in the past, at least in modern America, they tended to be a tolerance for fairly disparate views. Today’s Clerisy, by contrast, is increasingly homogeneous in its beliefs- despite pockets of conservative power such as the Heritage Foundation and most notably the media empire controlled by the Murdoch family.

Like all destructive ideologies, it relies not upon reason nor persuasion of the will, but upon the exercise of  social, political, and legal powers, such as ostracism, sending to Coventry, exile, ridicule, mockery, and ad hominem attacks–very much like classical racism. 

The modern Clerisy’s homogeneity springs from their social conditioning. Educated along similar ideological lines at major universities, they tend to be geographically concentrated in wealthy, “progressive” places, where few dissent from the prevailing worldview. As such they breathe, as analyst Walter Russell Mead suggests, “within a cocoon.” Inside their urban cocoons they operate from a thoroughly internalized set of progressive tropes on such issues as the environment, urbanism, gender and race. In practical terms, such as in their support of President Obama and the Democratic Party, they are both broadly allied with centers of power and influence, much as the clergy was in Medieval and early modern times.

When a people come to hold verities which they view as impeccable, but are unable to argue for them in any winning way apart from blackmail, threat, and force, we are confronted with invincible ignorance.  
 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Gaylag Archipelago

Blog and Mablog 
Douglas Wilson

So a marginal football player got drafted into the NFL, kissed his boyfriend smack on the lips, and then another football player tweeted something that expressed the sentiment ick gross, and so the second player was hustled into sensitivity training. Got that?

As the revolution is established, there will be no heckling. Kirsten Powers got it right. I have as much of an expectation of broad-minded tolerance from the left these days as I do of somebody hoisting up a John 3:16 sign at a North Korean missile parade. These people are coercion junkies.

How will they stop the heckling? Vee haff vays. Notice that I did that obliquely because I didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law — the first person in a debate to invoke Nazi parallels loses. This is because it is a well known principle of political science that political coercion and tyranny was only possible in the 1940s. All claims about oppressive coercion in our day are therefore bogus by definition, and one begins to suspect that the person who won’t stop expressing his views when the establishment wishes for him to express theirs is cruising for a sensitivity seminar. I also brought up Godwin’s Law because Nazi analogies are not the only negative examples that we should take into account.

Look. If you use language in ways they disapprove of, they will show the world what thorough-going malice looks like. That is why I make a point of doing it. They will send you off to the Gaylag Archipelago — there’s an example of what I do — where they will upbraid you for your intolerance until you come to realize that love is the answer. Love is all you need. Love is the best. Love is what Big Br . . . love is a good thing. Who could be against love except for the haters?

Anybody who says they believe in free speech, but who insists that Christians start groveling lest we “hurt” the perpetually hurt is someone who is himself a central part of the problem. The church is full of effeminate cowards who want us to truckle before the machinery of our passive aggressive police state. Beneath the visor of the leader of the SWAT team hauling me off, I saw a slow tear trickling down. I guess my language was hurtful. I see that now.

Second, they like to marginalize anybody who observes the obvious and comments on it, and they do this by claiming that some Christians can’t get over their loss of privilege, and are just a bunch of whiners. Now I have many faults, deep and grievous, but I think that whining is not one of them. Try another one.

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.
You know what we need around here? We need a liberty czar.

How many commencement speakers have been uninvited this graduation season? Tolerant liberals are going the way of the dodo, and they really might well be the one genuine victim of climate change. But speaking of commencement speeches, let me share with you the paragraph that got my speaking gig at Oberlin nixed. They had the prudence to ask for a manuscript beforehand, and I was foolish enough to send it to them.

“. . . and now, moving on to your women’s study department, an exercise in what I call petticoat feminism. They have instructed a generation of young women on the art of demanding to be treated like the men are, and then to burst into tears if somebody does, and to contact an attorney shortly afterward so that they can have the security of some fatherly legal protection. This is a mass of . . .”

Third, never forget that discrimination is inescapable. Why are people going along with this ludicrous claim that same sex mirage is marriage? Well, it is because Americans have been taught to hate “discrimination,” as though discrimination is a thing out there all by itself. Discrimination is not a stand alone characteristic. I would discriminate against people who take away liberty; they discriminate against people who exercise it. But everybody discriminates.

But Americans dislike unnecessary coercion, and they have been persuaded that traditional Christians like myself are “coercing” homosexuals by denying them the delights of nuptial bliss. Well, yes, but only in the same sense that I am coercing them by denying them the delights of the hawk’s ability to soar above the clouds, the marlin’s ability to swim the coral reef without scuba gear, and the gazelle’s ability to dash across the savannah. I am coercing them by observing (mildly enough, I thought) that they don’t have a body equipped for such delights, and they don’t have it because God didn’t give it to them. You can’t be born retroactively something else, and as it all came down, you weren’t born a hawk, marlin, gazelle or girl. But you know, things are tough all over.

The one bright spot in this whole rolling debacle is that this kind of big E on the eye chart punditry just encourages them further in their torquemadian tolerance crusade, and this means they start manifesting what actual coercion looks like.

Keep it up, boys, keep it up. I want as many people as possible to see your political theory in action.

A Really Thorough Hanging

Sinister and Stasi-like

Free speech is being attacked everywhere in the West.  The saddest specatcle of all is the crowds packed around the tumbrills cheering and applauding as fresh decapitations roll in.  Unbelief is becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more militant.  It is now blasphemous to speak certain words, or utter certain sentiments. 

Let’s recap why free speech is a Christian construct–required by the faith.  Firstly, God alone is judge of the human mind and its ruminations.  He alone is judge of the tongue.  He has not given that authority over to man.  He alone “takes every thought captive” to His Son, the designated and appointed Messiah.  (II Corinthians 10:5-6)  He alone understands, and can weigh the thoughts and intentions of the human heart.  (Psalm 139:1-6)

Secondly, when man arrogates the power and authority to control what people think or say he is necessarily claiming authority over all knowledge, truth, and thought.  This inevitably means the approval of some beliefs and thoughts, and proscription of others.  The forcible imposition of an ideology or religion is the inevitable outcome.  “Official Man”, whoever that might be, becomes self-elevated to the status of a deity.

Thirdly, if human beings are to believe something in truth, they must believe according to the liberty of their conscience.  Their intellect, emotions, and will must all give assent.  To force someone to believe is not just an oxymoron, it destroys the essence of what it means to be in God’s image.  It makes that man a slave.  It reduces that man to a chattle or a mere animal.  Consequently, it reverses the created order, “animalises” man, and attempts to dethrone God, Who alone is Lord of the conscience.

God alone is Lord of the conscience and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men . . . and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also. (Westminster Confession of Faith, 20:60

Fourthly, in a sinful world, where the Spirit of God has not yet taken every thought captive to Christ, to recognise liberty of conscience necessarily means that many thoughts and words and opinions that are not merely wrong, but evil, will be conceived, considered, and expressed–for the heart of man is deceiful above all things, and desperately wicked.  In a fallen world, awaiting full redemption, evil thoughts and evil words are a necessary trial and tribulation; they are a necessary and inevitable adjunct of freedom of conscience. 

Remove Christian faith from the culture, and there is no absolute foundation for human freedom, let alone the rights of free speech.  At best there is the tyranny of the fifty-one percent.  Therefore, secular humanism, being true to itself, cannot help but extend its putrid hand to punish thought and speech which it deems odious or evil.  In such a dystopian world, the only tolerable freedom is to be utterly conformed to the authoritarian state.  In true Orwellian Newspeak, “freedom” means complete conformity.

The latest example of free speech disappearing, to be replaced with authoritarian controls over what one thinks and does is the case of BBC Top Gear host, Jeremy Clarkson.

Jeremy Clarkson, The ‘N-word’ and the Creeping Tyranny of Political Correctness

by James Delingpole

Breitbart London

5 May 2014 

On the day the Jeremy Clarkson “N” word story broke, I was sitting with friends of the same age in their kitchen, trying to remember when it was that the children’s choosing rhyme “Eeny meeny minie mo” (or however you spell it: there are myriad variants) transmuted into its politically correct, N-word free modern version.

First, I seem to recall, the offending word was changed to “tigger”. Then – so that even the memory of the unfortunate rhyme was expunged – it became “tiger.” Today, most children who recite the poem probably aren’t even aware of its sinister, “racist” past. But for my generation – which is pretty much Clarkson’s generation: anyone born before, say, 1970 – it was so unexceptionable as to pass without comment, even were you to be overheard using it in front of your left-wing teacher in your kindergarten classroom.

This is something our politically correct culture has contrived to forget about the past: deliberately, I think, because the totalitarian left is the enemy of history and tradition and would like to declare every year Year Zero.

I can tell you now because I remember it well that when we used that rhyme as children and we came to the “N” word, there wasn’t a racist thought in our heads. It was just another word in a ritual incantation, not unlike, say “trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Sure it might have had a meaning once but you never thought about it or analysed it. Did we know the “N” word had offensive connotations? Well of course we did but the way we used it in the rhyme wasn’t one of those occasions.

There’s a world of difference between chanting such a word in a children’s rhyme and directing it, with deliberate venom, in the street at a black person. Everyone knows this. Most people with any sense, anyway. It ought to be so obvious as scarcely to need restating. . . .

Now suppose . . .  there had been someone with a tape recorder present. And suppose they had tried to present this in a left-wing newspaper like the Guardian or the Mirror as shocking evidence of a hated, right-leaning commentator’s evident racist tendencies: the irreverence in his voice; the fact that there were children present during the discussion; the evident nostalgia for a past where the language police weren’t out to get you for every vaguely distasteful phrase you may have used…

Even as a recently as decade ago, I would suggest, such a thing would have been unthinkable. As unthinkable as the possibility that a team from the Sunday Mirror would have been able to get hold of some outtakes from an old recording of Top Gear, in which maybe or maybe not the presenter recites the Eeny Meeny Miny Mo rhyme cheekily using the now verboten word from his childhood, and turn it into a story so scandalous that it threatened the ruination of the presenter’s career.

Why would it have been unthinkable? Because even after a decade of Tony Blair people still had a sense of perspective. It would have been perfectly well understood that Jeremy Clarkson is an outspoken, cheeky, politically incorrect presenter who likes to push things to the edge; that the harmfulness of the “N-word” is dependent on context; that using it does not automatically make you a ‘racist’ (whatever that word means); that anyway, the offending incident wasn’t even broadcast, so what business is it of the Sunday Mirror to be intruding on a private moment; that all these bien-pensants now calling for Clarkson’s head – among them the noisome Piers Morgan – are doing so less out of affronted righteousness than simple resentment and jealousy at Clarkson’s salary and popularity. . . .

There is nothing healthy or fair about this attack on Clarkson. In fact it is downright sinister and Stasi-like. The fact that hardly anyone is coming forward to say this – with such notable, brave exceptions as Michael Gove –  is more worrying still. If freedom of speech is now impermissible even in private, then we are well on the way towards tyranny.

Sinister.  Stasi-like.  The final full-flowering of secular humanism has commenced.  It will be the last gasp before it, too, integrates into the void, along with every other “ism” which has infected our benighted, fallen race.  The Lord not infrequently gives a culture or civilisation just enough rope to facilitate a really thorough hanging.  All of us are going to have to choose sides.  All of us are going to have to respond to Joshua’s insistent demand: “Choose you this day whom you will serve . . . ”

Hypocritical Plutocracy

The Buying and Selling of Free Speech

Free speech is usually more of an idea than a civic reality.  H. L. Mencken, writing in the 1920’s observed that the Bolsheviks showed the way for the West–which has clung on to the ideal of free speech far longer than most.

The Russian Bolsheviki . . . . once they were in the saddle, they decreed the abolition of the old imperial censorship and announced that speech would be free henceforth–but only so long as it kept within the bounds of the Bolshevist revelation!  In other words, any citizen was free to think and speak whatever he pleased–but only so long as it did not violate certain fundamental ideas.  [H. L. Mencken, “The Genealogy of Etiquette”, Prejudices: Volume I, edited by Marion Rogers (New York: The Literary Classics of America, Inc. 2010), p. 99.]

Nowadays we are moving much more into a Bolshevik world where some speech is not deemed equal at all, insofar as it violates some cherished ideas.  Mencken goes on in his essay to argue that the Bolsheviki notion has been precisely the “sort of freedom that has prevailed in the United States since the first days.”

We have recently been treated to the debacle over the Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling who has privately expressed sentiments which fall outside of “Bolshevist” revelation.  Sterling provides an excellent touchstone for Mencken’s thesis that free speech is a chimera in the West.
  He represents a classic case study because he said things which were abhorrent to most.  His free speech rights evaporated more quickly than ether on a hot stove–yet the abstract civic ideal of free speech argues that it can exist only if abhorrent sentiments and thought remain free and protected from suppression.  His case demonstrates that the US (and the West, by extension) has become progressively more and more Bolshevistic.

Sterling has been attacked and done real, substantial, and actual damage because of what he said–and not even in public, mind.  What he said was actually a private conversation, recorded without his knowledge  (therefore, illegal), and made public by someone else.

There is something rotten here.  Ben Shapiro gives us his take:

In November 2009, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling settled a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Sterling had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks and families without children in his rental properties. The lawsuit contained testimony that Sterling had suggested Hispanics were poor tenants because they “smoke, drink, and just hang around the building,” and that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.” The settlement cost him and his insurers $2.73 million.

The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing. That same year, the NAACP gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.  

What!  How on earth could the NAACP have done that?   Something other than principles had to have been involved.

In 2005, Sterling signed a check for more than $5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that he had attempted to prevent non-Koreans from renting in his facilities in Koreatown.  The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing.

This week, Sterling’s 31-year-old girlfriend, V. Stiviano, released a tape of the 80-year-old racist being an 80-year-old racist. Sterling apparently told Stiviano he didn’t want her posting pictures of black men on her Instagram account and didn’t want her bringing black men to Clippers games.

The entire media establishment suddenly went insane.

Colin Cowherd of ESPN idiotically called for the league to void all of Sterling’s contracts with his players and agents — a violation of basic contract law.

Magic Johnson declared that the NBA should force Sterling to sell his team — a violation of basic contract law.

President Barack Obama, determined never to let an opportunity pass to label America racist, took to the microphones to declare Sterling’s racism a symptom of America’s “legacy of race and slavery and segregation.”

This is, at the very least, hypocrisy.

• Last year, Sterling signed coach Doc Rivers, who is black, to a contract worth $7 million per year.
• Chris Paul, who is black, is slated to make nearly $19 million this season. 
• Blake Griffin, who is black, is slated to make $16 million. 
• DeAndre Jordan will make $11 million. 

 The coach, these players and their agents surely knew about Sterling’s legacy. So did Cowherd, Johnson and Obama. They all said nothing. 

Ah, money.  How sweet the sound.   These guys knew all along that Sterling was racist and practised (not just talked) discrimination in his business activities.  Yet they did nada.  They said nada.  Such commitment to free speech.  Such dedication to the Bill of Rights.  We wish. 

But the big problem here isn’t hypocrisy. The big problem is that the market is turning on Sterling not over action, but over words. Sterling’s a pig, and that’s been no secret for decades. But what triggered America’s response? Sterling’s thoughts. American society now considers expression of thought to be significantly more important than action. Sterling got away with actual discrimination for years. But now he is caught on tape telling his gold-digging girlfriend he doesn’t like blacks, and that’s when the firestorm erupts?

Mencken argued that the Bolsheviks were committed to free speech, as long as it did remained conformed to “basic ideas” as defined and developed by the State Apparatchik.  This appears to be precisely the kind of freedom of speech operating in the United States today.  Mencken argued that from the beginning the US notion of free speech and Bolsheviki real-politick were kissing cousins.  The Sterling case proves him right again, after all these one hundred years.

But there is development. A peculiarly American twist has emerged.  The evolution of the Mencken thesis lies here: now discrimination is acceptable as long as  there’s money in it for all, which means that free speech can be bought and paid for.  But, when there’s more money to be made by crushing and excising the “free-speaker”, the guillotine will fall quicker than a Jedi light-sabre. 

Human rights and freedoms are commodities to be traded.  Good profits can be made.  Sterling proved it for years, and the NAACP cheered.  But now, the piranhas scent blood.  Anyone care to bid for the LA Clippers?  Oh, Magic Johnson has called for the forced sale of the Clippers, and has reportedly made an offer.  How noble.  How principled.  Hypocrisy, thou art a rare jewel.  Freedoms and principles can be ignored for thirty pieces of silver in the United States.  Bribery and simony, thou art glorious.

What remains of free speech?  It has become a harlot to be bickered over and bartered for by the mercantile apparatchik. 

Letter From America (About Mozilla’s War)

Mozilla’s Culture War Is a Bad Model for Business

Russell Moore
Penny Nance
April 8, 2014

Time Magazine 

The decision to remove Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich is not good for anyone on any side of the culture war

Last week’s forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich should have sent a shudder through gatherings all over the country. This shudder was felt, it’s true, in gatherings of evangelical churches, Roman Catholic parishes, Orthodox Jewish synagogues. But this shudder should also have gone through corporate boardrooms, because it signals a dangerous trend of forced political uniformity, rather than tolerance, in corporate America. That’s not good for anyone, on any side of the culture war.

At issue, of course, is Brendan Eich’s 2008 donation of $1,000 to a campaign in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure to retain the definition of marriage in that state to the union of one man and one woman. Eich was hounded out of his job by activists who didn’t simply disagree with Eich’s view but who wouldn’t tolerate any dissenting view in the company at all. The goal, it seems, wasn’t dignity or justice, but enforced equality of thought.

As social conservatives, we, of course, were shocked by this development. Columnist Rod Dreher spoke of it as Portlandia’s form of Sharia Law. But those on the traditional marriage side of the cultural divide weren’t alone.
Some pro-same-sex marriage thinkers, such as Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, also dissented from this sort of Inquisition. “The whole episode disgusts me,” Sullivan wrote. “If this is the gay rights movement today—hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else, then count me out.”

Make no mistake, we support the rights of corporations to live up to their corporate values, even when we disagree with those values. We don’t want the government interfering with Mozilla’s right to make this decision. But we think the decision was a poor one, one that seeks to wield a nuclear option of silencing all dissent through endless campaigns of forced silence. We believe it’s important for all of us to ask, how did Mozilla get to this point? And is this really where we want to go?

Mozilla executive chair Mitchell Baker wrote, in explaining the board’s decision, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right.” Baker uses “people” here in an abstract and almost universalizing way. Who are these “people”? It’s obviously not LGBT people in general because many of them, like Sullivan and Rauch, don’t agree with these tactics.

And “people” here cannot refer to the overwhelming consensus of the American population because every poll indicates that, whatever cultural changes have happened, the population is still divided on the question of whether the definition of marriage should be revised to include same-sex couples.

The “people,” it appears, who sparked this controversy, are critics on Twitter and a dating site, OKCupid, which recommended its users find another browser than Mozilla’s Firefox. And Mozilla has received more backlash for removing Eich than for hiring him. The company tracks positive and negative comments, and the negative reaction to this is unprecedented.

We’ve seen this before in recent days, in the kerfuffle over A&E’s suspension of Duck Dynasty reality show star Phil Robertson for quoting a Bible passage about sexual morality. The backlash to the suspension was so overwhelming that A&E rescinded it within days.

So how does this happen? How does a company get to the point where its first reaction to an unpopular opinion is to punish diversity of thought? We think it happens because the company becomes so culturally isolated that they no longer know that there, in fact, is diversity of thought on a given issue. The Twitter and Facebook outrage against Eich can seem to be the uniform “voice of the people,” rather than one more debate in an ongoing controversy.

As evangelical Christians, we’ve heard, all our lives, our churches and ministries warn against a “Christian bubble,” where we can be around fellow believers all the time to the point that we lose touch with what our unbelieving neighbors think, to the point that we lose any point of connection with them. That’s easy to do, and not just in church circles.

There can be a “boardroom bubble,” where belonging to a particular cultural group can give the blindness of thinking that “everyone” believes the way that you do. This can happen in Hollywood studios or in New York media empires or in Washington DC think tanks—and it can also happen in Silicon Valley tech companies.

Have American boardrooms become so insulated in their secularity, that they cannot even imagine why, for instance, Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Latter-day Saints might hold sincere differences from the accepted wisdom of the corporate cocktail parties about what marriage is? If so, these companies will be out of touch with a significant segment of the population. But, more importantly, these companies can find themselves, as Mozilla did, turning their corporate mission into a scorched-earth culture war battlefield that will be good neither for business nor for civil society.

The answer, we believe, is to break out of the bubble. Don’t silence disagreement, but see more conversation, not less, as a means of engagement. The Bible tells us that “in the multitude of counselors,” there is wisdom (Prov. 11:14). We would think that successful business leaders—even those who wouldn’t know how to find that passage in the Bible—would know that intuitively. But that multitude of counselors means engagement, not silencing. And it means real diversity, not just whatever makes sense to the diversity officer. If companies were to seek this sort of engagement, we might see fewer embarrassing episodes like Mozilla’s in the years to come.

Dr. Russell Moore is President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Penny Nance is CEO and President of Concerned Women for America.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Too Thick to Deal With

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2014  

by Douglas Wilson

Looking over the comments below Gaywalkers, Gaytards, and the Gaystapo, I can see that it is time for a refresher course in why we talk here the way we do. To write the same thing for me is not grievous, and for you it is safe (Phil. 3:1). But, alongside the refresher course, a hearty well-done for those of you who clearly do get it.

First, we must recognize the utter lack of proportion that this kind of thing represents. The strategy of pc-correctness is calculated to silence any form of effective opposition to their despotic agenda, and it does this by inverting the proportions. So what we see is an ever-expanding circle of taking offense at trifles, coupled with an ever-increasing pile of “acceptable” outrages. It is demanded that we never use any language that might, under some circumstances, considered in the right light, hurt a fly, while at the same time insisting that the savage butchering of millions of children be considered a women’s health issue. We have a professional class of feminist offendees agonizing over “micro-aggressions” against women, for example, while simultaneously demanding their right to continue unabated their macro-aggressions against the unborn.

We demand groveling apologies from the fellows who fail to strain out a gnat, and give Medals of Freedom to those public-spirited figures who managed to choke down the camel.
We are a generation that, in the words of Dabney, are simultaneously sentimental and inhumane. The only way we react with moral outrage anymore is if someone insults our bizarre and disjointed sentimentalist taboos.

But this is not mindless behavior on their part; it is a play they are running. They are running it very successfully. They arbitrarily make more and more things offensive to say, and then well-meaning Christians who want to “maintain a good witness” volunteer to police the boundaries of their new prohibitions. Orwellian double-speak abounds, with Christians who really should know better serving as the double-speak cops. They do this, thinking it our duty for the sake of the witness, when our real duty is to put our foot through the side of every double-painted lie.

Second, when I coined (or so I thought) the word gaytard, I was courteous enough to explain what I thought I meant by it, and that meaning did not include mocking the mentally handicapped. For all anybody knew, I could have been riffing off of leotard. But no, I wasn’t — I actually was combining gay and retarded, and I was describing those people who are being blockheads — whether homosexual or straight — with regard to the sexual propaganda they are being served up. Now while it is offensive to God to taunt a retarded person for being retarded, it is not offensive to tag someone who ought not to be acting that way.

For example, Paul does this very thing to the Galatians. “O foolish Galatians . . .” he says. The word for foolish is anoetos — without reason, without sanity or sobriety, stupid. Is Paul walking through a psych ward, making fun of people? Not if you know how to read.

Third, on top of all this, one commenter noted that the word had an entry in the Urban Dictionary, and so I went and took a look see. And in that august place, the meaning given was not the same as mine. There it referred to someone who was simultaneously gay and retarded — obviously scurrilous and offensive, and unnecessarily so. While there, learning one of the names that you street-wise secularists taunt mentally-handicapped homosexuals with, I was helpfully offered the opportunity to “buy ‘gaytard’ mugs and shirts.”

So if you would like, all you people who are distressed at my word choices might want to head off to the complaints department of the Urban Dictionary and protest their calloused disregard of civilized discourse, and their merchandizing off the actual misfortunes of actual gaytards. Good luck. I’ll wait here for you. While you are there, you might discover that their gaytard entry is one of their milder offenses.

And last, one observer thought that I was interfering with his ability to spread the message of God’s love, and that is why he wanted me dead. You really can’t make this stuff up. At least he didn’t want me dead because our church sometimes sings imprecatory psalms. That would have made the irony too thick to deal with.

Mouldy Tyrannies, Free Spirits

Freedom For Us, Controls for Everyone Else

There are two ways in which a secular society can be organized.  It can be built upon maximising a form of human freedom, or it can enforce one view as absolutely right, imposing it upon all.  The former champions liberty of opinion and freedom of thought, word and deed.  The latter champions order, structure, and the one right way.  The former reflects libertarianism.  The latter reflects an authoritarian dictatorship either by One or the Party.

Unbelief will always pull either one way or the other.  But over time, libertarianism will crumble and tyranny will win out.  Why?  Libertarianism has no authoritative standard by which the limits of liberty can be nailed down. It has no authoritative standard to define what the human being is who is to be free.  Humans in the womb, senile humans, comatise humans don’t necessarily qualify.  Sexual perversions performed by sexual perverts do.  Man-boy-“love” must enjoy the protections of liberty.  Libertarianism produces the ruthless discarding of humans from their own race. Libertarianism inflicts a deadly tyranny upon those judged to be “outsiders”.

At the same time, libertarianism must foster and allow and even indirectly encourage views which champion authoritarianism, its opposite. Libertarianism is a vacuum which the natural order eventually abhors. Consequently, all secular societies gradually morph into tyrannies of one kind or the other.

Here is an example of  what we speak.
  In the United States there have been a couple of recent examples of free speech being punished by those professing to be offended.  The first is the case of the Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich  forced to resign because he contributed to an organisation opposing homosexual “marriage”.  The second was the withdrawal of an honorary degree being awarded by Brandeis University to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  The latter’s offence: her sustained public criticism of Islam’s tyranny over women.

The liberal Commentariat considered both matters and punished both Eich and Ali, effectively ruling that their speech, opinions, and ideas were to be suppressed, and that they were to endure repression.

Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, pointed out what we Christians have known all along.  The Left does not believe in liberty–not for its opponents.  The Left’s view of liberty is that it wants freedom for itself, but control and repression for everyone else.

Earlier this year, a column by a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y. L. Korn briefly achieved escape velocity from the Ivy League bubble, thanks to its daring view of how universities should approach academic freedom.  Korn proposed that such freedom was dated and destructive, and that a doctrine of “academic justice” should prevail instead. No more, she wrote, should Harvard permit its faculty to engage in “research promoting or justifying oppression” or produce work tainted by “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” Instead, academic culture should conform to left-wing ideas of the good, beautiful and true, and decline as a matter of principle “to put up with research that counters our goals.”

Korn’s view of freedom is progressively taking control–which, as we suggest above, is inevitable in the halls and confabulations of Unbelief.  Whilst libertarianism is actually a vacuum, which Unbelief will abhor and strive to fill with a version of command and control.  Douthat goes on:

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

He concludes that he can live with progressivism.  It’s their lying that is toxic–lying about freedom, holding up freedom’s mask, whilst underneath ardently working and militating to suppress all who disagree with them.

Now all this might sound a bit over the top to the ears of all ostriches embedded in grainy stuff.  But Douthat’s point is proved beyond reasonable doubt by the comments of readers, rated most popular, at the end of his piece.

We provide just three samples of the evidence that Douthat is right:

Example 1: Rima Regas 

“This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, …”

You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Douthat. Once Eich’s donation of $1,000 to Prop 8 became known to both the employees under him aware and of it and its implications as to his likely bias as a boss and the board above him, it was absolutely appropriate for both to make their feelings known and for the board to make an ethical decision as to where to stand. This is self-correction at its finest. Ethics won. Possible bias at every step of Mr. Eich’s management of the organization he headed was thwarted. . . .

Where you are wrong, again, Mr. Douthat, is that diversity doesn’t – shouldn’t – include its opposite. In a world where we strive for the forces of good to win over evil, evil gets canceled out and not invited to have a permanent place at the table.  That is the point you always miss consciously and subconsciously.

[Note the self-deception of the correspondent endorsing the same evil which she is also arguing against. There must be tolerance and diversity, but not for things “we” disagree with.  The appeal she makes is to her own self-referenced absolute standard (ironically calling her opinions good versus her opponents  evil) to which all others must be made to conform.  And when conformity is enforced, it is euphemistically described as “self-correction”.  Ed.]

Example 2: DR

You’ve gotta hand it to conservatives for coming up with yet another way to dress up bigotry. Now they call it “diversity of thought.”

Example 3: Stephen

No Ross, being fired for for financing hate is not a violation of free speech, nor is it hypocritical for those who advocate diversity to fire them. When people say they want a diversity of ideas it’s implicit that the ideas pass even minor scrutiny. This means nearly all ‘conservative’ ideas don’t pass muster, like global warming denial, creationism, or the belief that homosexuality is going to infect and pervert children (the idea Eich’s money went towards expressing).  

Douthat is right.  Tolerance is afforded only to those with whom the secular left agree.  The secular right cannot survive because it needs to ensure the left have oxygen, and lebensraum.  In a secular society, power, in the end, always comes out of the barrel of a gun: it does not reside in liberty of conscience and freedom of opinions.  The Left will always win, and its tyranny will carry the day.  The void into which evil integrates is tyranny.  Favoured opinions will be accorded freedom and liberty.  All others will be suppressed violently.

In the meantime, we Christians continue as merry warriors, resisting evil wherever we find it–amongst the Libertarians or the Left.  Our hope, both for ourselves and the whole world, lies not in Ayn Rand, nor in Kim Jong Un, but in God and His Son. They will not fail, for none can stay their hand.  The long arc of human history will eventually co-incide with the longer arc of redemptive history.  Therefore, nor shall we fail.  The future belongs to us, in Christ Jesus.    

  

The Assyrian Has Come Down . . .

. . . Like a Wolf on the Fold

There are few slave states left on the earth at the present time.  North Korea most certainly is one such state–one of the worst in recent history. 

If ever the world needed an an object lesson in how limited government, the rule of law, and private property rights can lead to rising standards of living one needs only to compare the trajectories of North and South Korea after the cease-fire in 1953.  People of the same ethnicity, history and cultural background were divided by an artificial border.  The only substantial difference since that time has been  in political, economic and legal systems.  South Korea is today an economic powerhouse, with rapidly rising living standards, and its people both industrious and vivacious.  North Korea is grindingly poor, with a starving population, and a government maintained only by means of fear and enslavement. 

Below is a summary of the UN indictment of the North Korean regime.  It charges the regime with “crimes against humanity” which means very little, except that when the regime finally collapses, as it inevitably will, North Koreans and others will be warranted sending their present tormentors to international courts for judgment. 

United Nations says North Korea should face ICC trial for crimes against humanity 

news.com.au

NORTH Korea’s leaders should be brought before an international court for a litany of crimes against humanity that include exterminating its population, the United Nations says.

A hard-hitting report on the nuclear-armed totalitarian state also strongly criticised its denial of basic freedoms of thought, expression and religion, and its abduction of citizens of neighbouring South Korea and Japan.

“Systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials,’’ said the report by the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea set up in March 2013 by the UN Human Rights Council.  “In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. These are not mere excesses of the state; they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded,’’ the report said.  “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’’

Commission chair Michael Kirby said the world could no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for a failure to act.  “At the end of the Second World War, so many people said: If only we had known … Now the international community does know,’’ he said.  “There will be no excusing of failure of action because we didn’t know.’’ . . .

Kirby wrote to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — the third ruler of the communist dynasty founded by his grandfather in 1948 — to give him a last chance to put his country’s response.  In a January 20 letter, Kirby told Kim he could face justice personally for the crimes committed by the system he runs.  “Any official of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who commits, orders, solicits or aids and abets crimes against humanity incurs criminal responsibility by international law and must be held accountable under that law,’’ Kirby wrote.

The report said options included the UN Security Council referring the country to the International Criminal Court or setting up an ad hoc tribunal. . . .

North Korea’s crimes against humanity entail “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,’’ the report said. It condemned a system of throwing generations of the same family into prison camps under guilt-by-association rules, given testimony from former guards, inmates and neighbours. . . .

North Koreans’ daily lives were marked by constant “surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment to preclude the expression of any dissent,’’ the report said.  It estimated 200,000 people from other countries had been abducted by North Korea or disappeared after going there willingly.  Most were South Koreans stuck after the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, and ethnic Koreans who arrived from Japan after 1959.  But hundreds of South Koreans, Japanese and nationals of countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Lebanon, Romania and France have also been pressganged as language teachers or even spouses.

North Korean defectors have also been kidnapped from countries including China, it said.  “These international enforced disappearances are unique in their intensity, scale and nature,’’ the report said.

Soup Nazis

Ubiquitous Food Police

One of the most famous episodes in Seinfeld is the Soup Nazi. It has probably been watched more than any other.  (In case you have missed it, there is a YouTube highlights version below.) 

As life once again imitates art, years later we find ourselves beset by food Nazis of all kinds, telling us what to eat and, more importantly, what not to eat.  But the matter does not stop at nagging and hectoring.  It is ironic that Seinfeld, which was such an acute insightful commentary upon New York City and New Yorkers, has ended up parodying-in-advance the actual charge by Nanny Mayor Bloomberg to rule and regulate what New Yorkers can and cannot eat.  Bloomberg became the actual incarnation of the Soup Nazi, aspiring to control every part of the human anatomy–for our own good, naturally.  And so it has come to pass that Food Police are now everywhere–yearning and lusting for the reins of power–passing rules, regulating, and controlling, all to protect us from ourselves. Bovine New Yorkers love it.  The rest of us?  Not so much.

We read and hear this sort of thing almost daily:

Imposing a 20 per cent tax on Coke and other fizzy soft drinks could save 67 lives a year by reducing ill-health, a New Zealand study has found.  A high sugar intake is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. [NZ Herald]

Then comes the fine print:

The study by Auckland and Otago University researchers said the tax would avert or postpone between 60 and 73 deaths a year from cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes – or about 0.2 per cent of deaths from all causes.  Based on economic survey data showing the effect of varying food prices on household buying, they calculated the tax would reduce daily energy consumption by 0.2 per cent.

Oh, so the proposed tax–designed as an implicit penalty for designated evil doing–would only avert or postpone about 0.2 percent of deaths in this country.  Not prevent.  Not grant the gift of eternal life.  Only delay the inevitable–and then only 0.2 percent of deaths in any year. And the ultimate insult to this injury to common sense?  We, the taxpayers, are funding this kind of inanity.  They are taking our money to facilitate their swaddling us into a state of perpetual infancy. 

It is a fundamental principle of civil liberty that everyone has a freedom right to go either to hell in their own way, regardless of how horrific hell may be.  There is no statute of limitations on folly and stupidity.  Folk have a freedom right to be foolish and stupid.  If they don’t, the concept of freedom has no meaning.  We do not object to disclosure when it comes to food and drink–in fact, honesty and integrity and good faith are compelling reasons for its employment.  We do not object to health warnings–provided they are honest, accurate, truthful and not alarmist.  We all have to die of something at the end of the day. 

What we absolutely object to is the Soup Nazi attitude whereby elites and self-appointed authorities  rule, regulate, and attempt to ration what one shall have, when, how, and in what quantities, all for our own good.  Such despotism is an anathema to a human being born free. 

The Soup Nazi is comedy.  The real Food Nazi’s are not so funny.  But, probably the best defence we have is to mock and ridicule them.  If you want to get into training for the grand liberation, watch this episode of Seinfeld a few times.  It is positively, nefariously seditious.

Bye, Bye Facebook

The Big Bad Ban is Coming

The ban is coming back.  It is a long favoured tool of centralist authoritarian governments; it was well favoured by the previous Labour regime.  The most recent Labour leader, Helen Clark tried to ban incandescent light bulbs, long showers, and human kindness.  The present aspiring Labour regime is promising to bring out the big ban all over again.  But bans associated with global warming are so passe.  Now the ban is going to go after the really big fish.  Labour is talking about banning the internet.

Normally one associates such draconian controls with totalitarian countries, such as China, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia.  Labour wants New Zealand to join these esteemed ranks.  This, from 3News:

The Labour Party has put forward a possible solution to force multi-national corporations to pay more tax – ban them from the internet.  It says the Government should first talk with companies like Facebook, but if that doesn’t work it is important to have a backup, something Labour is describing as a credible threat. Facebook is the world’s largest social network by far, but pays little tax here in New Zealand.  “The Government should always have in its back pocket the ability to ban websites,” says Labour revenue spokesman David Clark.

Let’s unpack this a bit.  Labour is claiming that banning websites should be a stock-in-trade power of government.  It should keep such power in its back pocket all the time.  Then, let’s consider Facebook (since it is named).  Millions of kiwis have Facebook accounts.  Since Facebook is an international conglomeration, what is really being proposed is that kiwis will have their Facebook accounts blocked by the government, not that Facebook will be banned from the internet.   New Zealanders will be banned from using Facebook. 

That would not be an attack upon Facebook; it would be an attack upon the liberties of New Zealand citizens. 

Secondly, Labour’s revenue spokesman, David Clark has a justification for such drastic totalitarian controls and abuse of power: he says paedophile sites are banned regularly:

“Paedophile websites are banned the world around,” says Mr Clark.

So, companies engaged in lawful business are guilty of crimes equivalent to paedophilia.  What subterranean world do these people inhabit, one wonders.  But no paying enough tax–that’s a crime is it not.  Well, if the government says so–but it has to say so subject to law. There are tax laws in New Zealand last time we checked.  There are also international tax treaties where nations agree how income earned across borders shall be treated and taxed. 

So either Facebook is subjected to such treaties, or it is not.  If not, then it can be legally prosecuted by any number of governments in countries where it operates.  If it is subject to such international tax agreements and it is still not paying “enough” then ordinarily countries will sit down and attempt to renegotiate the respective tax treaties.  That’s the lawful way things are done. 

Why the big brouhaha over Faceboo?.  Well financial guru, David Clark says that Facebook “made” $790,000 in New Zealand in 2012.  But, after expenses it made a loss.  So it only paid $28,000 in tax.  And the problem is . . . ?  Can our dear Mr Clark be confusing revenue and gross income with profit.  Is he really suggesting that New Zealand companies should be made to pay tax even when they are losing money and making no profits?  That’s what he is implying.  For if the principle be just with respect to Facebook, it must be equally just for the corner dairy.

Naturally, Labour’s political opponents wound up their mockery meters at this startling disemboguement from Labour’s revenue spokesman, who by any measure must be a few sandwiches short of a picnic:

But Finance Minister Bill English says “frankly, that sounds nuts”.

“Fine print, he’s going to close down Facebook,” says Prime Minister John Key. “That’ll be interesting.”

Indeed. 

Of course this silly notion will be swatted away by lunchtime.  But it reveals a familiar mindset in Labour–the same mindset that led them to want to ban sugar, fatty foods, tobacco, light bulbs and bad breath.  Americans call it Bloombergism.  We call it Clarkism.  If Labour is elected it will soon show that it has plans–for all of us–and its most favoured tool will be “the ban”.