Warning: The language used in this post is very likely to offend absolutely everyone.
From Greg Craven at Loon Pond Central today:
The older you get, the more you realise life is completely unpredictable. Who could have anticipated Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, Pauline Hanson resurgent and Bill Shorten — almost — popular?
And who could have imagined that in 2016, Australia would be falling out of love with freedom of speech? A profound affection that goes back centuries is rapidly turning into a dangerous indifference, even contempt.
This is something that goes way beyond particular debates about things like section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Freedom of speech is less a specific right than the building block that grounds most of Western liberty.
Without it, there is no freedom of opinion. There is no right to a political view. There is no freedom of religion. Rights to assemble or protest are meaningless if you must remain muzzled while exercising them.
This understanding has been the bedrock of the post-Enlightenment Western approach to liberty of speech. No matter how repulsive you and your views may be, you can say — though not do — as you like.
And a few days ago from Rowan Dean:
TREASURER Scott Morrison seems ignorant of the fact that freedom and capitalism go hand in hand; two sides of the same coin.
One reinforces the other. They are the twin pillars of our prosperity, our history and our extraordinarily bountiful lifestyle. Our forefathers died in battle so our personal freedoms, guaranteed by Parliament, could continue to allow us to enrich our way of life.
We’ve become used to fatuous comments from this Treasurer. Recently, he appears to have taken lessons from the Master himself in the art of political waffle. But his comment last week, refusing to countenance amending or repealing Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, hit a new low, even for him, of patronising smugness.
Let’s get a few things clear. It’s self-evident that I’m no wowser. At this blog we canvass stuff openly where others fear to tread daily. But I just can’t come at this free speech puritanism. There are always limits on what is decent and what constitutes assault on another and present law does not impinge terribly on anything so far I can see. Nobody is stopping anybody from declaring someone else a “nigger”, “boong”, “wog”, “frog” “spik”, “spak”, “nip”. “panhead”, “slaphead”, “crout” or, for that matter, “faggot”, “poof”, “pillow-biter”, “shirt-lifter”, “Hershey Hwy Biker” but if you do so you may just have to take responsibility for it rather than swaggering away like you’re king ‘o the world (or getting pre-selected by the Coalition).
Might I remind our abusive crusaders that they still have at their disposal an excellent and very lengthy list of terms of abuse that make no reference to race or sexuality such as “fuckwit”, “cunt”, “wanker”, “dickhead”, “prick”, “cock-sucker”, “arse-licker”, “shit-for-brains”, turd” so on and so forth.
It reaches new levels of absurdity when one realises that these loon pond “fuckwits” are the same “turds” that are busy trying to kill off same sex marriage. That is, it’s more than fine to be called a “faggot” but you can’t be one, oh no, no “fucken” way! The loon pond wouldn’t know freedom if it ran them down in a truck.
As for this ‘death of capitalism’ meme, give it a rest, from my book, The Great Crash of 2008:
An economist with the International Monetary Fund, Fred Hirsch, introduced a subtle treatment of these issues into modern economic literature in the 1970s. In Social Limits to Growth, Hirsch argued that the modern market economy is successful only to the extent that it stands on the shoulders of a pre-capitalist ideology. He was concerned that the growth and maturation of the market economy undermined the moral and ideological foundations upon which it depended. The market economy depends on respect for rules that cannot be enforced by law alone. It depends on the owners of business being permitted to maximise their own wealth and incomes in certain defined ways, and on others in society foregoing the opportunity to take advantage of their own positions to do likewise. Hirsch presented a pessimistic prognosis for capitalism and the market economy that resonated through the Great Crash of 2008. ‘As the foundations weaken’, he concluded, ‘the structure rises ever higher’.
Capitalism does not hang on the freedom to abuse your fellow man. It is the exact opposite: it hangs on an embedded morality that you do not do so – that is, Christian values basically – otherwise you end up with class division and capital destruction, with a pack of rich “wankers” doing everything in their power to prevent others taking their money instead of the competition we need to deliver capitalism’s promise to society, like now.
These loon pond “dickheads” are the very epitome of Hirsch’s vision. They couldn’t run a business to save their lives. That’s why they’re nearly all sucking at the public teat in the Parliament. When they get out they’ll take soft sinecures at the rent-seeker interests that they now defend, not start out on an entrepreneurial journey of their own.
The loon pond is all bark and no bite, all fart and no arse, all stink and no shit. It’s a pack of intellectual ants busy hoeing a row of hate for political gain.
It should just shut the “fuck” up.
