“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments."

“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. ...

"And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music?”

~ Ludwig Von Mises from his 1949 magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (chapter 27, section 6, 'Direct Government Interference with Consumption')

The shirt that outlasted the Standards Authority

The lettuce outlasted Liz Truss. And the T-shirt has outlasted the Standards Authority at which it poked the finger.

In a move that sees this blog praise this Government twice in one week -- an unheard of anomaly -- Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith has decided that adults can be adults without needing a nanny to oversee their media and comms. (This week the Broadcasting Standards Authority, next week the Classifications Office?)

The T-shirt was 95bFM's two fingers to the Authority, accompanying a not-so-quiet Public Notice to listeners about the standards to expect on the station.

“At this radio station [said the on-air notice)] we do our utmost to abide by the Broadcasting Standards Authority and their rules and guidelines.

“If you seriously think we’ve crossed the line on air, give us a call on 309 4831 and tell us about it. We’ll be able to help you out and tell you the procedure if you wish to make a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

“Fuck-knuckles, cock and piss, balls. Thank you.”

It did take 25 years. But it did finally get one complaint. 

(PS: get your own piece of history here.)

"My strong preference is to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority..."

"Early this year the Ministry of Culture and Heritage issued a discussion paper on media which included a statement to the effect that as the Broadcasting Act 1989 did not cover internet radio like entities such as The Platform, the Broadcasting Standards Authority’s scope should be extended to them. ...

"Instead of waiting for the government to decide on whether to proceed down this route the Broadcasting Standards Authority decided existing law did give them jurisdiction over The Platform and presumably Reality Check Radio. This is extraordinary.

"One might have thought [Media + Communications] Minister Goldsmith would have said that, as we do not believe it has that authority, it should await a government decision. But no ... he told RNZ’s Media Watch programme: ... 'I’m happy to let that flow through the system and see how it goes.'

"I hope the Minister will regret these words because they won’t be career enhancing. ...

"My strong preference is to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority and allow all media entities to decide whether or not to come under a voluntary entity such as the NZ Media Council ...

"ACT and NZ First have laid out their positions. Is it too much to hope the National Party will end its dismal 80 year record and do the right thing? Or will it be more muddle through?"

~ Barry Saunders from his post 'The BSA power grab: Post 2' [His 'Post 1' is here]

"The Broadcasting Standards Authority is a creature from the past which should not exist in a free and democratic society."

 

"In 1966 there was a watershed event. A National government, under Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, tried to stifle nascent private radio [by barring broadcasting by then pirate-radio Radio Hauraki]. It failed: the government monopoly was broken.

"The present National government can atone for its 1966 sin against freedom by joining its coalition partners to overcome the attempt by the Broadcasting Standards Authority to impose censorship on [Sean Plunket's] The Platform, an online media outlet. ...

"Today, a new type of freedom, the freedom to exchange information online without government censorship, is under challenge from a government agency. ... [T]his could be another watershed moment. National should join with ACT and New Zealand First, to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority. It is a creature from the past which should not exist in a free and democratic society.

"The Broadcasting Standards Authority’s actions have called public attention to the insidious role of the administrative state, the significant power of government agencies to write, interpret, and enforce their own regulations. Creative interpretation is little different to writing the regulations.

"Perhaps the Broadcasting Standards Authority has performed a service by demonstrating not only that it should be abolished, but also why other government agencies with similar powers should either be abolished or have their powers severely curtailed to restore democratic accountability."

~ Gary Judd from his post 'Are we experiencing another watershed event?'

Don't make fun of the despot

 

“The devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs.”

~ Mark Twain from his essay “The American Press”

"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media."

"On my drive in to work [earlier this week], RNZ's Corin Dann challenged the Prime Minister about one part of his meeting with Australian PM Albanese. They had apparently promised to work toward some kind of joint ID and driver license system. [AUDIO, 04:15]...

"The PM's talk had this as all being about mutual recognition of driver licences. Which is obviously a weird justification. We already recognise each other's licences. And if Oz and NZ makes it tough for bars to recognise each other's licenses as ID, that's far more easily solved by just letting bars use the other country's driver's licence. The rest of it isn't needed for that problem. ...

"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media. It looks like this push started well before anyone was talking about that. ... Australia is running trials on ID/age verification setups for social media age gating; it looks like a report is soon due. ...

"[So] - both countries are working toward digital IDs, both countries five years ago agreed that they'd recognise each other's digital IDs, and this seems just to be reaffirming that prior agreement. I'd love there to be more assurance around privacy being important in the design of any of these in NZ. Because there are very bad versions that should not be supported. ...

"When the first a lot of us would have heard about a government digital ID is in context of a trans-Tasman agreement for mutual recognition, in context of Australia wanting to age-gate social media, and nobody particularly trusting that the age-gate system isn't intended to result in the kind of censorship being seen in Australia - not so hot."

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'To what policy problem is this the solution?'

"What is troubling isn’t just the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time."

"The perverse outcomes resulting from adults seeking to protect children range from the mildly idiotic ... to the morally questionable ... Last week our current Prime Minister and the MP for Tukituki (Hastings), Catherine Wedd, added to this list with a proposal to prevent those under 16 from accessing social media.

"This will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are. Leadership is knowing when to say no ...

"Professor Jonathan Haidt has compiled compelling research on the malign impact of social media on young minds. [In actual fact, not at all compelling - Ed] ...

"Thanks to the work of Haidt and others, responsible — and even irresponsible — parents know of this issue and act accordingly. If we were governed by a party that believed in Individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility and limited government, that is where this story would end. ... [Instead] girls being mean to each other on Snapchat requires central government legislation ...

"What is troubling isn’t [just] the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time. ..."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Banning under 16s from social media will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are'

"The framers literally wrote the First Amendment to prevent exactly Musk's kind of government intimidation of the press."

"[I]f you spend years calling yourself a 'free speech absolutist' while decrying 'government censorship,' maybe one of your first moves after taking over the government shouldn’t be demanding prison sentences for journalists who report things you don’t like. ...

"[T]wo tweets, posted just hours apart, ... perfectly encapsulate his free speech hypocrisy — while simultaneously highlighting his near total lack of self-awareness.

"First, responding to some nonsense that isn’t even worth explaining, Musk pointed out that one of the first things Hitler did upon gaining power was to 'apply aggressive censorship.'

"Then, less than six hours later, after CBS’ 60 Minutes posted an interview with a former (Republican) administrator of USAID calling out Elon’s 'utter nonsense' claims about fraud at USAID, Elon declared that people at 60 Minutes 'deserve a long prison sentence' for reporting on things in a manner of which he disapproves. ... 

"[L]et’s be explicit here: this is Elon Musk, a federal government employee with unprecedented power and tremendous influence over the entire federal government at this moment, saying that journalists should be thrown in prison for a long time, because he doesn’t like their reporting. This isn’t just Musk being thin-skinned — it’s a billionaire currently running much of our government, [threatening] state power against the press, just because they called out how his claims about USAID were nonsense.

"It is difficult to think of a more obvious First Amendment violation than that. The framers literally wrote the First Amendment to prevent exactly this kind of government intimidation of the press."

~ Mike Masnick from his article 'Musk Decries Hitler’s Censorship, Right Before Threatening To Jail Critics'

Tech billionaires aren't crawling to Trump because they're powerful, argues Johan Norberg in this guest post. It's because they're weak...

The Flattery Towards Trump Reveals Fear

by Johan Norberg

TECH MOGULS AREN'T FLATTERING TRUMP because they're drunk on power, but because they're afraid. The political arbitrariness that began with Biden risks becoming even worse with Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk were among the guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

At Trump's inauguration, the new president was surrounded by a grinning, applauding Forbes list. Among them were the world’s three richest men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as relatively less wealthy figures like the CEOs of Apple and Google. Sitting in more prominent seats than the incoming cabinet members, it certainly looked like the happy plutocrats had bought themselves a president.

They all donated to the inauguration fund and have, in other ways, signalled an approach. Bezos blocked the Washington Post’s official endorsement of Kamala Harris, and Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook became too woke and now needs to be more Texas.

Is the U.S. on its way to becoming a tech oligarchy? Biden’s speechwriters are among those warning of a tech-industrial complex with so much power that they threaten to disable democracy.

As a liberal, I’m conflicted. The only thing worse than a Trump administration run by big corporations is a Trump administration not run by big corporations. Since their position isn’t built on charming inflamed MAGA fans, but on solving technical and business problems in a global economy, they will exert a moderating influence. When Trump wants to imprison opponents, stop global trade, deport all migrants, or invade Greenland, they will try to get him to count to ten (though I no longer dare rule out anything regarding Musk).

Tesla’s 15% stock increase after Trump’s victory shows that someone's proximity to power is disturbingly valuable.

On the other hand, it’s impossible not to feel deep concern when the most powerful state and the largest capital are in the same boat. Tesla’s 15% stock increase after Trump’s victory shows that someone's proximity to power is disturbingly valuable. When I recently interviewed Musk, he said the state should act as a referee but not interfere in the game, which was wise. But it doesn't get better when a player wants to play referee.

Money doesn't buy elections—after all, Harris had more than the eventual victor—but it can buy influence with its recipients. Especially with someone as notoriously "transactional" (we used to say unprincipled) as Donald Trump. Just a year ago, Trump wanted electric car supporters to "rot in hell." Today, he is pro-electric cars, “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

But unsuitability is not the same as oligarchy. In fact, tech companies haven't assumed this role because they're so strong, but because they're so weak.

THIS IS MISSED IF YOU simply follow stock prices, but the big change in recent years is that Big Tech has gone from being everyone’s hero to everyone’s villain. After Trump’s 2016 victory, previously friendly Democrats started seeing social media as sewers of disinformation and demanded strict content control. The Biden administration also launched potentially devastating antitrust proceedings.

And no matter what they do, someone takes a swipe at them. When platforms became cosily progressive and moderated more content (even stories that turned out to be true), the right started seeing them as leftist censorship machines. Republicans like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley demanded regulation and breakups. Trump threatened fines and monopoly laws to crush Amazon and Google. With few watertight principles for such power exercises, there are real risks of political arbitrariness. During the election campaign, Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life.

Tech giants suddenly realised they had lost all political allies.

This is especially dire as they simultaneously face existential risks in key foreign markets. Regulation-happy EU threatens their business models. Many were also shocked last year when Brazil's Supreme Court responded to Musk's refusal to block a series of X accounts by shutting down the entire platform and freezing Starlink’s assets—a completely different company with other stakeholders.

If Big Tech wants a chance in international battles over antitrust, censorship, and taxation, they need the U.S. on their side. Zuckerberg explicitly stated this in his recent repentance speech. The world wants to censor us, and “the only way we can counteract this global trend is with support from the American government.”

This isn't about people who love Trump. Except for Musk, none of the major players supported him before his victory. On the contrary, they’ve long fought against him but lost and are now pleading for mercy—and protection. Musk’s new role made it even more important to be there as a counterbalance to him since he's a tenacious critic who, among other things, has said that Amazon is a monopoly that needs to be broken up. Contrary to the notion of a homogeneous flock of bros, these men are jealous rivals vying for each other’s market shares. And suddenly a new Chinese AI model comes along that threatens all their inflated valuations.

So, the tech moguls aren't flattering Trump because they’re power-drunk, but because they’re scared. Bezos doesn’t humiliate himself with an ingratiating Amazon Prime documentary about Melania Trump because he can do whatever he wants, but because he can't.

The sad spectacle of the past few weeks has many calling for a mightier state to put the plutocrats in their place. On the contrary, I feel an urgent need for a few more independent billionaires who aren’t subject to such political arbitrariness that they constantly anxiously follow political trends.

* * * * 

Johan Norberg is a Swedish author and historian of ideas, devoted to promoting human progress, economic globalisation and classical liberal ideas.

This post is translated from Blacksmith, where it first appeared.

"Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both left liberal and conservative perspectives."

"Popular opinion views [left] liberalism and conservatism as radically different perspectives about the proper size and scope of government. ... Yet [left] liberal and conservative perspectives are the same in one key respect: both advocate using government to impose particular values.
    "Conservatives want to ban drugs, liberals guns. Conservatives advocate banning abortions, [left] liberals subsidising them. Conservatives support subsidies for home schooling and religious schools, [left[ liberals the same for low-income housing and 'clean' energy. ... Thus the goals of favoured policies differ, but not the belief that government should promote specific views ... —all of which involve government interference with private decisions ...
    "Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives. ... consistently ask[ing] whether government intervention does more harm than good. And it applies this skepticism regardless of the associated 'values.'
    "Thus libertarianism argues against both drug prohibition and gun control; against government protection of unions, but not against unions per se; against government-imposed affirmative action, but not against privately adopted affirmative action; against any government-imposed content moderation of social media, but not against private moderation policies; against all trade and immigration restrictions; against government restrictions on school choice; against government-mandated licenses; and against the government defining marriage.
    "Perhaps libertarians are wrong about the merits of some government interventions. But applying a consistent lens across policies helps understand the inconsistencies of both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives."

~ Jeffrey Miron from his post 'Libertarian Consistency'

RE-POST: Yes, Jenna, it is bribery

Broadcaster Jenna Lynch is aghast that anyone could consider being paid to broadcast government lines could in any way be considered "bribery." Oh, her outrage on behalf of the Team of 55 Million.

She appears innocently unaware there is more than one way to curtail free speech. Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who pay to promote it, like NZ on Air or the Public Interest Journalism Fund, are another.

To make this point, I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 [with just a few ever-so-slight additions]…

This is a post about free speech.

It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.

No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which [newspapers, journalists, broadcasters], artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from [a Public Interest journalism Fund] or Creative New Zealand or Te Mangai Paho or New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.

The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’*: not just the sponsorship of creative souls [and journalists] to toe a government line, which is bad enough, but an even more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a cultural line embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

What's the problem, you might ask? 

 
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling:

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, .

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – and it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [especially so if they can be deemed "racist" or a "boomer" who is desperately behind the times].

This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible and stultifying welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are required to either conform or go under.

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonise--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that.

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

* * * * 

* From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in Rand's book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive. Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

Send a copy to the Free Speech Union.

"A pro-censorship position could now be presented as a matter of national security."

"When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians....
    "In normal circumstances, the pet hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Tragically, however, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19....
    "[P]oliticians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.
    "From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position ... could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. ...
    "What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. ... Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact..."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Disinformation from the Left'

"Jacinda Ardern ... is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world"

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the UN that free speech 

is "a weapon of war," "censorship is necessary" to protect free speech .. and that 

war is peace and freedom is slavery. (Pick any two.)

"Jacinda Ardern may no longer be Prime Minister of New Zealand, but she was back at the United Nations continuing her call for international censorship. Ardern is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world and continues to draw support from political and academic establishments. In her latest attack on free speech, Ardern declared free speech as a virtual weapon of war. She is demanding that the world join her in battling free speech as part of its own war against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” ...
    "In her speech, she notes that we cannot allow free speech to get in the way of fighting things like climate change. She notes that they cannot win the war on climate change if people do not believe them about the underlying problem. The solution is to silence those with opposing views. It is that simple. ...
    "[It is] chilling ... to hear Ardern express her fealty to free speech as she calls on the nations of the world to severely curtail it to prevent people from undermining their policies and priorities. She remains the 'empathetic' face of raw censorship and intolerance. She is now the virtual ambassador-at-large for global speech regulation and criminalisation."

~ Jonathan Turley from his post 'Harvard’s Jacinda Ardern Calls on the United Nations to Crack Down on Free Speech as a Weapon of War'

RELATED:

"The organised Left—once a bastion for free speech, equality, and social justice—has become drunk on the heady wine of identitarianism, losing its way in the maze of its own making. The politics of identity have eclipsed the quest for universal values, and in doing so, mutated into a grotesque facsimile of the very far-right extremism it purports to fight. The great irony lies here: In their incessant mission to highlight the pervasive evils they claim to battle, they have themselves become the embodiment of these forces." 

~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'The real devils among us' [emphasis in the original]

I'm not sure it's so covert

Simon O'Neill with Waltraud Meier on stage at Milan's
La Scala, pretty much the pinnacle of the opera world

From Stuff on Thursday morning:

One of New Zealand’s most celebrated opera singers, Simon O’Neill​ has ... accus[ed] the Government of “a racist agenda” against European arts and institutions ... [saying there is a] “concerted effort, between Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori covertly pushing the agenda of the eradication of great art.”... He suggested the increased support for Te Matatini, the national kapa haka organisation, had come at the expense of the likes of the NZSO and NZ Opera ....

"This is what Mātauranga Māori looks like in real life [he said]: The deletion of Western science and culture and the replacement with some sort of post-stone age fake construct ...

"[They] have absolutely no interest in supporting our cultural cause – the works of Beethoven, Bach, Puccini... [these artists] are, literally, completely foreign to their dangerous racist agenda....

"It would be a shame if ‘to rob Peter to pay Paul’ turns out to be the New Zealand Government arts policy."

From Stuff on Thursday afternoon:

[Carmel] Sepuloni said it was “disappointing” to hear O’Neill’s comments, as she had been a fan of his music.... Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi called for O’Neill to apologise, labelling his views “race baiting and racist”....
On Thursday, he issued a written apology to Sepuloni and Waititi... New Zealand Opera ... Chairperson Annabel Holland issued a statement saying she did not share his views.

 Do you?

Should he have apologised ?

"If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

 

"The politicisation of science, the honing of the activists tools for cancellation of people they don’t like, and the involvement of government in collusion with big tech and media to control 'disinformation' ... may [well] alienate and attack so many people that their supporters become a minority....
    "It is indeed ironic [however] that those who claim to be squashing existential threats to democracy, have themselves caused a climate of growing acceptance of intimidation and threats, political violence and serious violations of ... law. If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

~ David Young from his post 'How the Disinformation Industrial Complex is destroying trust in science' [hat tip Watts Up With That]

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

Don't feed the grifters

 

In a world in which people make money from "clicks," there will always be grifters who are happy to be live clickbait. 

On Saturday, down in Queen St, we had Profit Brian Tamaki and his mob of followers bravely telling passersby not to allow poofters, paedophiles and "child groomers" to be out in public (by which, I think, they mean transgender folk). But his chief message was: "Click on Me!"

Up the hill in Albert Park, we had a mob full of "tolerance" and "love" summoned by trans activist Shaheed Lal, there to fight Nazis, howl down the main event, and to get people to "Click on Me!"

And the Main Event there at Albert Park -- or at least the woman who had come halfway across the planet to be "The Main Event" -- was a woman who calls herself The Posie Parker (it's a pun, you see), who has made her living in recent years ("Click on Me!" "Click on Me!") by telling people who like to hear it that penises shouldn't be in women's spaces.

Yes, that really is what she came here to say, as she tried to tell Kim Hill last week. (And as you'll hear, she didn't make a very good job if it.) But she didn't get to say it at all, not at least in Albert Park or Wellington, where she was due to say it next, because the mostly peaceful mob summoned by Shaheed Lal (who makes his living, it seems, by advising govt ministers on "rainbow issues" and writing columns about those issues for the Herald) fought off the twenty or so old people who had hobbled there to hear her. Fought them off bravely with their fistfuls of love. (Shaheed's mob had come there to "fight Nazis" they said -- "so ready to fight Nazis"! -- but of jackboots and German helmets there were none. Just a few old folk who never got to hear their speaker.)

"We won!" said the mob, in a self-described "victory for free speech," when The Posie Parker scuttled off with a headful of tomato sauce, heading for the nearest international airport.

But at the same time, The Posie Parker herself was tweeting her supporters, telling them the fight is clearly bigger than they all thought, for which she will need more cash -- and lots of it.

And meanwhile, down in Queen St, Brian Tamaki was sending around the collection plate to pay for his next Harley.

There are grifters everywhere, on every loud and voluble side. Making a living by making themselves live clickbait.

This is all very exciting to the protagonists, I'm sure and to the newscasters who need them, because it fills up their news broadcasts and column inches with colourful but undemanding fare. Because it's issues played out simply for live clickbait. Activism theatre. "Activists" observing an issue out there, and discovering how to make clickbait out of it. 

There's a certain genius to this kind of activism. To make an important stand and to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them? No, not at all: in order to attract more followers. And more clicks.

So instead of discussing the issues, on Saturday we saw lots of people shouting and throwing fists, but nobody listening. Lots of heat, but no light. 'Cos mostly what they were all shouting anyway, effectively, was not much more than just: "Click on Me!"

Cancel Culture meets Clickbait Culture. Everyone's a Winner!

These people all need each other. They are part of a mutually reliant ecosystem. Without each of them shouting out their bumpersticker slogans, none of them would be making any kind of living at all. But without any of them, we might be able to have a decent chat about the issues they all say they stand for (or against).

RELATED:

Bryce Edwards: The Ugly stoking of a culture war in election year
Saturday’s clash of cultures is a sign of where politics is heading in New Zealand – towards a fully-fledged culture war. This is something normally more associated with American politics – but also increasingly in places like the UK.
    There was an element of pantomime on both sides over the last week. Posie Parker thrives on controversy. She might be complaining now about her treatment in New Zealand, but by holding her rally in a public place like Albert Park she was provoking opposition and stoking tensions, hoping to become something of a martyr.
    She won. She made global news, fuelling publicity in the UK and US markets where she carries out her main fundraising....
    Likewise, those opposing Parker were rather opportunistic in arguing that she is a fascist and that her beliefs were such a danger to the public that she had to be banned from the country.
    They must have known they were giving the previously-unknown visitor huge amounts of free publicity and therefore helping get her views out to a wider audience. As broadcaster Heather du Plessis-Allan argued yesterday, “Parker’s opponents made sure that she was in the news most of the week”, and “They helped her spread her message. They played right into her hands.”
    The Greens represent one side of the polarised divide. MP Golriz Ghahraman tweeted on her way to the rally: “So ready to fight Nazis”. Co-leader and Government Minister Marama Davidson put out a video to say that she was “so proud” of the protesters. And obviously wearing her hat of Minister for Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence she used the event to declare that only “white cis men” commit violence. Such messages will go down very well amongst the party’s support base, which is increasingly sensitive to the need to make progress on gender issues. [>>READ MORE]

 

"It’s time to ask why New Zealand needs the Broadcasting Standards Authority. Just another Big Government censor to tell journalists what they can say."

    "Izzy Cook is the 16 year old version of Greta Thunberg in New Zealand. She unravelled spectacularly as a political leader and a climate star during a radio interview last September....
    "But now some government Watchdog in New Zealand has declared it was an unfair joke and the broadcaster was reprimanded and has apologised. Apparently the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) thinks radio interviewers must not deter 'passionate young people' from making fantasy declarations and issuing vaporous wish lists live to air...
    "It’s time to ask why New Zealand needs the BSA? Just another Big Government censor to tell journalists what they can say and interfere with what New Zealanders are allowed to hear ....
    "New Zealanders who see biased, offensive, unbalanced and inaccurate reporting can complain to the BSA. New Zealanders who think the BSA is a parasitic Orwellian threat to free speech and decent radio can complain to the Minister of Broadcasting and Media — Willie Jackson."

~ Jo Nova, from her post 'Hiding behind teenage girls again — so they can’t be ridiculed for saying silly things'

 

'Ban this sick filth' ?

"One thing that comes with the territory of being a libertarian is a lifetime of explaining that one can very much not wish to say 'Ban this sick filth,' while still thinking the thing concerned is sick filth."

~ Natalie Solent, from her post 'So who signed off the Tots ‘n’ Bondage Bears ad, Balenciaga?'

Much Ado About Something: "The welfare state of the intellect"

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a long-dead Elizabethan playwright hits the headlines here at home. Creative New Zealand's decision to defund (or not to defund) a high-school Shakespeare competition spiralled into a debate into what Creative New Zealand should be funding and promoting. Competition supporter Terry Sheat argued a public enquiry must be held into what and how Creative New Zealand goes about its funding choices:

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute.
    In the case of Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, funding was terminated primarily if not solely because Shakespeare is, to quote CNZ’s assessment, “located within a canon of imperialism” and not “relevant to a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond.” Vincent O’Sullivan dismissed this as nonsense in his letter published last week in the Otago Daily Times, describing it as “a breathtaking absurdity from a government body whose brief is to promote excellence in the arts.” An editorial in Stuff said that “the CNZ assessment has exposed the obvious problems that come with interpreting art through the narrow lens of national identity and politics.”

And then before you knew it, everyone was debating Creative New Zealand's funding criteria, how it should best promote "Aotearoan art," and whether or not Shakespeare was an "imperialist."[1]

Which rather starts where the argument should end. To me, it’s not an argument about how Creative New Zealand's bureaucrats should choose whom to fund in order to promote the latest fashionable ideals; it's whether these bureaucrats should have the power (and the money) to do that at all! The problem is not how Creative New Zealand goes about handing out money, in other words: it’s that Creative New Zealand hands out any money at all.

And here the issue here isn’t primarily the amounts that the establishment elects to pays out; it’s the effect of what that money buys: which (like its more quotidian companion, the Public Interest Journalism Fund) is intellectual conformity.

You may not realise it (and the dullards at the myopic Free Speech Union almost certainly won't), but this is a free-speech issue -- but not in the way you probably think.

WERE YOU AWARE THAT there is more than one way to curtail free speech? Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who promote it, like Creative New Zealand. are another.

I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 to make this point…

This is a post about free speech.  
It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.  
    No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from Creative New Zealand and Te Mangai Paho and New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.  
    The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’²: not the sponsorship of creative souls to toe a government line, but a more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a culturalline embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

    What's the problem, you might ask?  
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections, and I hope you lot feel disgusted enough about that to do something about it. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling: 

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

That's right. Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, . 

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [and no better target for that than the phoney shibboleth they call 'neo-liberalism'].  
    This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are all but required to either conform or go under. 

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonize--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that. 

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

NOW, IT SOUNDS LIKE good news that the Shakespeare funding has been reinstated, for which everyone and his leather codpiece are praising the Prime Minister's intervention

And I applaud the establishment luvvies and others who came out in defence of one of my favourite playwrights. Good for them.

I'm also happy that for a week or so we've been discussing his work. 

But why should you or I other folk be forced to pay, for the most part, for theatre (or art) you don't like. Especially when this process of bureaucratically-selected funding -- bureaucrats choosing what to fund based on what best fits the government's fashionable cultural concerns -- constitutes the self-same censorship of encouragement New Zealand is presently enjoying with the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

By my own literary and theatrical standards, it looks like the restatement this week was a small win. From the larger standpoint however, the amounts involved are but a tiny pimple one the huge arse of the government-promoted cultural establishment.

If we understand how that whole arts and literary establishment has become so comfortably established, we might feel more uneasy not just about the way this sausage is sliced - but that it's there to be sliced at all.

* * * * * 

1. You would have thought one look at Henry V would answer that one.
2. Cresswell (1996), reposted with the generous permission of Dave Perkins.
3. From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive.
Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

[Pics from The Spinoff]