Twitter’s not the smartest platform to frequent if you’re prone to high blood pressure, but I’m trusting my kicking the bottle (I’m now 6 months sober) means, at the very least, I’m exposing myself to no more danger than what my $12.99 a day habit had become. Our young comedians constantly boasting about how inoffensive their sets are is sure to get a rise, but this is a generation who think you can base an entire act around wearing a ‘onesie’. The costume choice would matter a whole lot less to me if the youngster opened with something like…
“Early today I masturbated with a couch cushion. I guess that makes me more of a dog person”
In the comedy club of my mind for now…
Another source of constant frustration is the all but ubiquitous opposition to ‘free speech’ coming from so-called progressives. Responding to Auckland Mayor Phil Goff’s decision to disallow far-Right culture warriors Lauren Southern and Stephan Molyneux from using Auckland council venues we got a lot of cheerleading for Phil, who was clearly on holiday when pro-Hezbollah protesters spewed their bile in Aotea Square a few weeks earlier.
A motif of many of the tweets was that free speech advocates must support, or at the very least see some merit, in the ideas of Southern and Molyneux. This is cynical stuff (cynicism, Dane? On Twitter??) and a wild misrepresentation of what the free speech advocate is in fact defending, which is not ideas. As a free speech supporter, I would’ve preferred the couple had been able to come in and given their talk, but the notion that I, a Jew, active in my community, would support anything that sniffs of white nationalism is clearly ludicrous. As a free speech advocate what I’m defending and defending alone is the ‘right for individuals to express their opinions’, opinions I may very well despise, and even consider personally detrimental to me. Yet still the petulant innuendo persists, because, well, it’s mud that could stick and branding an opponent with a searing ‘F’ for fascist is much easier than making a sound and thoughtful argument against a concept that has been central to the actualization of minority rights in the West.
Another popular position even expressed by an MP (Golriz Gharahman) during a recent talk she gave on ‘online-hate’ sponsored by InternetNZ (a talk in which she labelled her being called ‘Sweetheart’ during an online debate as ‘low-level hate’. Sweetheart, p-lease!) is that free speech ends at the point your speech has offended someone. FREE SPEECH EXISTS PRECEISELY TO DEFEND OFFENSIVE SPEECH. I mean, think about it for a minute… Why the Hell would ‘harmonious speech’ need protecting? And by this act of defending offensive speech, the concept is ENCOURAGING OFFENSIVE SPEECH; it’s actively seeking to draw out of shadows the most controversial opinions, the most audacious and unsettling presuppositions and it doesn’t give a damn whether they’re right or wrong. It just wants them heard, discussed and either spat or shat out, or absorbed into the bloodstream of society.
This was KEY to challenging the power of organized religion in Western societies. Which really does makes the (so-called) progressive opposition to free speech completely baffling, seeing that the church was the seat of the true (not the imagined) patriarchy, which couldn’t finally withstand the advances free expression afforded the West.
There was also the commentary that Southern and Molyneux’s event would likely lead to violence against minority groups. I’m not talking about claims of direct incitement; the twitter twits seemed to suggest the general tone of such an event would be enough (the constant lack of specificity in the anti-free speech mob is super concerning and not only from the twitter twats; our own Human Rights Commission, currently seeking the power to restrict our speech, is equally as vague). If this was in fact the case, wouldn’t the easily accessed YouTube, where Southern, Molyneux and far more reactionary voices are archived, have already lead to this spike in violence? In truth, despite this being the greatest era for mass communication, we’ve seen NO such DRAMATIC SPIKE. If thousands of hours of online content where the couple’s same views are repeated ad-nauseum hasn’t opened the gates of Hell, why would a single two-hour live event provide the tipping point?
A man I frequently disagree with (but I’m happy now I never blocked) Martyn Bradbury said it best when he said, “Of course far Right polemicists have the right to speak in NZ… but nothing is solved by banning this toxicity – if the Left can’t argue the far Right and win, we’ve lost, not them”.
I would agree and would add that the far-Right, as with any movement driven by a culture of victimhood, only has its narratives affirmed when it’s suppressed. But I’ve discovered the control Left aren’t interested in long term strategies to deal with threats like the far Right; I don’t believe they’re interested in politics at all. This is about emotion and the short, sharp thrill they feel when they know they’ve taken something from someone. The control-Left thread symbolic, ultimately empty victories onto a trophy-necklace the way Ed Gein did the teeth of his victims, oblivious that their narcissistic, white saviour act has a far greater risk of creating resentment against the groups they seek to protect by privileging them, than it does of creating harmony. And that dangerous ideas never go away.
They grow in the dark.
