"One wonders whether the point of the Harmful Digital Communications Act, in the view of some MPs, is to silence critics.”

“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the  Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher jailed.” 

~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin 

“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied. One wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digitical Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”

~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'

Treaty Principles Debate: Have a Listen

I don't recommend many podcast episodes here at NOT PC, but here's one I reckon you should put aside some time for: it's the Working Group's latest podcast, featuring an hour-long debate over his Treaty Proinciples Bill between ACT's David Seymour, and Ngāti Toa's Helmut Modlik.

Hosted by commy bigmouth Martyn Bradbury and libertarian liquidator Damien Grant, it's worth a listen not least because the participants speak with candour, in good faith , and with humour — and (for the most part) are listening to each other. And how many political debates can you say that about today, especially this one!

'Hate-speech' regulation is back again

"Like taxes and death, there are some dependables in life. I would suggest a government’s propensity to censorship and speech regulation is one of them....
    "On Thursday, we saw yet again that even in a liberal, democratic society with longstanding civil liberties, governments are always keen to reach for a bit more than they should.
    "The Department of Internal Affairs’ public consultation document proposes a new law establishing a 'regulator' to oversee the modern content landscape. ...
    "Things won't change too much for major media outlets, but for the first time ever, your tweets, comments on Facebook, and waxing-lyrical on LinkedIn will be subject to oversight by a government watchdog....
    "The content the new regulator is looking to oversee is not child exploitation, terrorist activity or material that encourages self-harm. That is all indisputably already illegal in New Zealand....
    "This is about 'harmful' ideas that make individuals “feel unsafe”. This is about silencing certain perspectives, views or beliefs....
    "Undoubtedly, content online can cause hate and harm. Free speech is the solution to this.... Silencing Kiwis online does not promote social cohesion or build trust [and nor is it within the proper purview of any rights-respecting government.] Kiwis will see this work as nothing more than online hate speech laws, and will resist this overreach also. [Let's hope so!]"

~ Jonathan Ayling, from his op-ed 'Media regulation plan - a censor's greatest dream'

"So a lunatic inside the DIA has decided to launch a consultation round on an insanely bureaucratic ‘Ministry of Truth’ who will impose ‘safety standards’ which just sounds like a means to complain about people saying things you don’t like.
    "If you don’t have these ‘safety standards’, then you will be fined!
    "This is an enormously large Wellington designed Bureaucratic Tank that is going to blitzkrieg everyone the Disinformation Project tells them to ‘audit’.
    "This is way in excess of changing the Hate Speech laws, this is empowering a Sheriff to call together a posse and funding them.
    "The level of over reach is remarkable, it’s Absolutely Positively Wellington!"

~ Martyn Bradbury, from his post 'What lunatic inside DIA decided to launch a ‘Ministry of Truth’ 5 months before an election?'

Climate Corrections

In full-on apocalyptic mode this morning, Martyn Bradbury hyperventilates over melting ice in Greenland. Greenland ice melting should "terrify us," he tells us. The melting is "so extreme" that the ice sheet "lost 11 billion ton of ice -- in just one day"!

Imagine that! 11 billion tons!! In just one day!! In summer!!!

"How does that impact the rest of us?" asks Martyn, and answers: "In a terrifying manner I’m afraid."

Martyn is afraid.

Martyn is very afraid:

We are seeing the last canary die in the coal mine. Catastrophic climate change is here, we have run out of time. Our collective denial has made it impossible to stop climate change, our only hope now is radical adaptation.

But Martyn hasn't done his sums.

George Reisman has. After headlines such as “Greenland is on track to lose most ice on record this year and has already shed 250 billion tons,” Reisman put down his paper and picked up his calculator -- something Martyn should have done before letting loose:

It turns out that this amount of water is equal to slightly more than 60 cubic miles. (http://bit.ly/33tnVhf) The total volume of water in the world’s oceans is approximately 320 million cubic miles. (http://bit.ly/2N2yl1x)
    If we divide the 60 cubic miles of water added by the ice melt in Greenland by the 320 million cubic miles of water already in the oceans, the result is 0.0000001875. This is the relative increase in the volume of water in the oceans.
    The absolute increase is the relative increase times the pre-existing average depth of the oceans, which is approximately 12,100 feet (idem) [or 3,688m).... The results of these multiplications are .0023 feet [or 0.69mm] ... That’s 23 ten-thousandths of a foot, 27 one-thousandths of an inch [or less than one millimetre].
    To put these numbers in proper perspective, recall that a quarter of an inch is 250 one-thousandths of an inch. So what the fake media were trying to frighten us with is a rise in the sea level of little more than a tenth of a quarter of an inch (i.e., .027/.250).

Terrifying! A whole summer's worth of Greenland ice a-melting, as it does every summer, creating a seal-level rise of less than two-thirds of a millimetre. And as Reisman reminds us, "much or most of the 60 cubic miles of melted ice from Greenland will refreeze come Winter."

This is a canary in the coal mine only in the sense that it flushes out those prone too easily to panic.

There is no more need to panic because Greenland ice raises sea level less than the thickness of a cigarette paper than there is to panic about (to pick a place made topical by a costly Prime-Ministerial visit) the seas around Tuvalu. To remind readers:

The reported `plight' of the Tuvaluans is not about sea level rise at all - it's about over-population. With such a high population density, the fresh water table on the atolls is subject to rapid depletion, especially in dry years. In addition, the development which would follow from such a high density will bring the inevitable coastal erosion, a problem which the Tuvalu government falsely blames on climate change and sea level rise. Tide gauge data from all around the South Pacific shows the same pattern as the one at Funafuti - no sea level rise. It is, and always was, a bogus claim, with few in the outside world bothering to check the accuracy of the claim.”

Little has changed since those claims were first made, neither in any acceleration of sea-level rise around Tuvalu, nor the arrival of that flood of "climate refugees" from Tuvalu that Al Gore forecast would have begun arriving here at least a decade ago. (The Tuvaluan population increased by 660 between 2001 and 2006, largely through births. By 2006, there were 1654 Tuvalu-born folk living in NZ; in 2013 just 1848.)

We are right to be afraid. Not by the way the planet is behaving, but by those who purport to report upon it.

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"We like to tell ourselves that the satanic hysteria that wrongfully convicted Peter Ellis wouldn’t happen today, but with the spread of woke mob social media where accusation is the new evidential threshold, he’d probably be found guilty of everything under the sun if the accusations were made on social media today." Bonus #QotD

"We like to tell ourselves that the satanic hysteria that wrongfully convicted Peter Ellis wouldn’t happen today, but with the spread of woke mob social media where accusation is the new evidential threshold, he’d probably be found guilty of everything under the sun if the accusations were made on social media today."

~ Martyn Bradbury, from a post exploring why the left are crap at winning hearts and minds
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"Ardern is signing an agreement with an EU leader who is currently shooting protesters in the streets of Paris, and none of us really have any clue how it will impact our personal freedoms..." #QotD

"Ardern is signing an agreement with an EU leader who is currently shooting protesters in the streets of Paris, and none of us really have any clue how it will impact our personal freedoms... No one yet has been able to define #HateSpeech. Not even the frauds our government pay to sit around dreaming up this stuff. Ardern said, You'll know it when you see it.' This is bad bad stuff."
        ~ Dane Giraud

"Do you remember the politicians linking arms at the march, the opeds and cartoons after the Charlie Hebdo attack, fervently declaring commitment to freedom of expression and the right to offend? That seems like a long time ago."
        ~ Juliet Moses

"According to @NZMorningReport, @EmmanuelMacron censored media coverage of his and @JacindaArdern's own summit that people worry is about undue censorship. Bad look."
        ~ Matthew Hooton

"Helen Clark’s proposal for more restrictive speech laws is a solution looking for a problem. Last night, she admitted protecting religion from so-called hate speech wouldn't have prevented Christchurch. Why, then, should we further undermine free speech?"
        ~ David Seymour 

"Instead of arguing for our values and being inspirational about defending free speech while enabling agency for those deprived power and platform, the debate from the Woke Left is all about deplatforming whatever is defined as hate speech and in the age of subjective rage, most of the people on the PM's advisory panel have all vocalised pretty ambitious desires to ban a lot of speech as hate speech.
    "I’m guessing by even suggesting there should be some civil rights activists and free speech academics on this panel  [to 'regulate' social media] I’m already being a heteronormative patriarchal cis-male war criminal?
    "That’s how dementedly tribal this debate is getting.

        ~ Martyn Bradbury 

"Facebook [et al] will, of course, continue to be permitted to earn a profit. In exchange, it will get to censor citizens from saying things the government does not like.
    "Does that sound like freedom to you?"
        ~ Michael Hurd

"...an intellectual gulag known as political correctness. When any one tries to speak their mind on questions of race or gender, or if their views differ from those approved, they will be ostracised, this is the beginning of the gulag, the beginning of your loss of freedom"

        ~ Vladimir Bukovsky

"... in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners.
        ~ Ayn Rand

"If you don’t believe in free speech for people who you hate, fear and disagree with, then you don’t believe in free speech."
        ~ Ricky Gervais

The knee jerks, and, after having jerked, what's left?

IN THE WAKE OF the Christchurch atrocity, there are calls to ban outright so-called hate speech, and the pitchforks for it are already out: Already the temporary bans against websites hosting the murderer's video have been extended, and black lists are being drawn up to permanently ban websites, workers, speakers and Twitter feeds for offending against the self-righteous mores of the mob.

Atrocity begins with cheap opportunistic hate speech against minorities [declared the Greens' Golriz Ghahraman at a 'vigil' shortly after the event]. It began with hate speech, allowed to spread here online. History has taught us that hate speech is a slippery slope to atrocity. We now know that New Zealand needs to address this.

This was us, she insists. All of us, not just one Australian with a gun. Hate speech is always a slippery slope to atrocity she proclaims -- erroneously (and narcissistically) offering up as as partial proof of both, in her speech immediately after this atrocity: the barrage of hate she says she herself receives online. The conclusion she draws from the "barrage": that this was not an aberration from overseas.

And address this, she demands: but how? By damning all white people as colonialist oppressors, as her colleague Ms Davidson was at that same vigil? By 'calling out' anyone who expresses reservations about being encouraged to wear a Muslim headdress (a headdresss damned by by many Muslimas themselves as a symbol of feminine oppression)? By decrying anyone as "racist" who adheres to what they call "Islamophobia" (despite the General Secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organisation, declaring it to be"factually incorrect and counter-productive to define Islamophobia as 'rooted in racism'”)?

In any case, the demands are being addressed now, however, by those listening to her calls and those much like them: by the black lists being sent to police, to Twitter, to ISPs and Facebook and to every guardian of real or online communication who can enact a permanent or temporary ban on speech they deem hateful (black lists based almost wholly upon the authors' views of what they themselves just don't like). Addressed by immediate bans on publications and videos. Addressed by the knee-jerk calls to give more power to security services to carry out their own interventions, their own investigations, their own intrusions  -- security services who failed utterly to avert this atrocity despite the millions of dollars and already intrusive power they already possess, and before the just-announced inquiry into their abject failure has even been held. (“When it comes to Simon Bridges calling for enhanced powers for NZ spy agencies," observes security specialist Paul Buchanan, "he is like a guy who says that he needs a telescope because his binoculars don’t work well enough, only to find out that the lens caps are still on the binoculars.”)

And how good a diagnosis is Golriz's anyway? For what, after all, is this thing Ms Ghahrahman calls "hate speech"? "Hate speech" is so amorphous a thing it is crying out for definition.

And maybe that's the real point of the term: precisely that it is so very hard to define.

You see, for a censor, or for any high priest of the public square, that of course is so much the beauty of this anti-concept of "hate speech." Because if you yourself get to define what "hate speech" is, and this "hate speech" thing is being banned, then you yourself get to ban whatever sort of speech (and speakers) you yourself dislike.

It's a beautiful thing, censorship, when you're the one holding the whip.

Or would like to.

Especially when you've devised this apparently elegant way -- this anti-concept -- of keeping the whip hidden.

TO REMIND YOU (SINCE we've been talking about this idea of anti-concepts several times in recent years), an "anti-concept" is

an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate ...
    Observe the technique involved . . . . It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick...
    [I]f a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate . . . . Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

This is why "anti-concepts" like "hate speech" and "Islamophobia" are witch-doctored up in the first place -- to dismiss ideas (and those who hold them) without even a hearing in return.

So-called "hate speech" is an anti-concept witch-doctored up to obliterate free speech. The process is working. Observe that "hate speech" itself is so suitably amorphous that even Wikipedia struggles to wrap its head around the concept:

Hate speech [says Wikipedia's authors] is speech that attacks a person or a group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

So we have allegedly three ingredients to hate speech: 

1. speech that attacks; and 
2. the objects of those attacks; and 
3. the attacks are based on "membership" of some group.

The objects of attack are clearly defined. The speech itself: not so much. 

And that itself is really the whole point.

Leave ill-defined in advance what an "attack" looks like -- an "attack" that is wholly and solely verbal -- and there is instantly a chill felt down the collar of anyone who wants to say anything about anyone.

It is doubtful even today that someone could declare that all arguments have been settled and all debate prohibited. It is enough to achieve that aim today, however, simply by declaring that someone or other has or may have been "offended." Or "violated." Or "threatened." Threatened by speech that in itself constitutes on threat. And on that basis of offence alone, every would-be speaker can be silenced, and every debate declared "settled" before it even starts. So it is today after Christchurch:

->Mainstream news sites are announcing a "crackdown" on their online comments sections, and calls to remove so-called "extremist" content.

->Demands are being made for platforms like Facebook and Twitter to "deplatform" people on lists being rabidly drawn up by the woke.

->Commentators as innocuous as Duncan Garner and Sean Plunkett also face calls  to be deplatformed by their media managers. "It's now a public safety issue," declares Golriz.

->Websites are being blocked by ISPs here and in Australia (who, immediately after the atrocity, blocked any website who posted the live video of the murders) but who have since elected to continue those blocks after being asked to by the government.

->And other websites are being blocked, or face blockage, because they just somehow quietly slip onto someone's black list (including this one, gentle readers, which someone elected to place in the category of "hate and racism" on one popular website filter used by companies around the world) and then face up to a future of gentle but gradual suffocation.

->Meanwhile, un-woken workers are being sacked and "panel discussions" are being urgently held around the country about how to do all this grassroots censorship even better: Russell Brown for example leading a panel discussion tomorrow "on how Artificial Intelligence and other technology can help us create safer societies"-- or as Brown himself describes it: "about the place of technical solutions in quelling online hate speech and fake news. Are human moderators enough?" Or (the unwritten implication here) should we immediately implement censorship by robot.

->And of course knee-jerk censorship will already make it almost impossible to determine and understand the views of the only person who actually (presumably) does know why he did it, i.e., the author of the atrocity himself, whose rambling so-called "manifesto" faces disappearance down a near-permanent black hole at the behest of the government.

It has become so insane that Martyn Bradbury (yes, Martyn Bradbury) is looking like a fount of wisdom in summing up some of the (over-)reaction:

Attempting to connect the violence on Friday with right wing opinions, the defence of free speech or concerns about immigration and conflate that with all white people as racist murderers is a sure fire way of eroding the solidarity in sorrow that has bound many.

MUCH OF IT MAY be well-meaning (if not "Davidson and Ghahraman's ... determination to leverage-off the Christchurch Mosque Shootings to unleash an uncompromising anti-racist campaign encompassing the whole of Pakeha New Zealand"), but the chilling effect of the suffocation is real enough. And real even if bans, black lists and blocking don't work out. If I may paraphrase a post by Amy Peikoff on this principle, it occurs to me that this down-home version of Attack Watch is a case study in the application of Ayn Rand’s observation that force stops thinking:

In Chapter 8 of his book, 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,' Leonard Peikoff writes, “[I]f and to the extent that someone’s gun becomes a man’s epistemological court of final appeal, replacing the law of identity [A is A], then the man cannot think.” 

    So, to those who have not joined the chorus conflating all white people with racist murderers, or who still have reservations about Islamists and Islamic culture, or who identify and condemn the seething identity politics of both right and left as being culpable: When you think thus independently and then hear about these sackings, de-platformings and black lists, do you say to yourself, even for a millisecond, that you will now have to be more careful when criticising Golriz or Islamism or the Prime Minister publicly? Never mind that, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably the kind of person who would go ahead and act as you had before anyway. That’s not the point. People decide to resist the institution of government controls all the time, but that does not mean that those controls, if and to the extent that they are imposed, do not stop thinking. 

    Some might argue that this kind of grassroots 'Attack Watch' doesn’t threaten the use of force of any kind, nor the imposition of any penalties, so this is in fact not an example coming under the principle. (The black lists and block lists, for example, are not being drawn up by governments but by networks of private volunteers.) But if you think about it, the only reason that people even care about the existence of these lists, is because they know that, even if there has not yet been a threat of penalties of any kind, such penalties might not be far behind. [Sections 61 and 131 of the ill-named Human Rights Act 1993 for example already threatens you with severe punishment for what it calls "Inciting Racial Disharmony"--and this is even before Ms Ghahraman et al get started on revising it, as they will.] 

    This is why phrases like “enemies list” might occur to you when reading these approving and widespread calls for this grassroots censorship. If you feel the slightest bit intimidated by the creation of these lists, for example, or these "technical solutions"–even if you tell yourself you will not be affected by it, that you will continue on, as before–then you have experienced a small taste of what Ayn Rand meant. [As have, for example, the websites already blocked by ISPs for hosting, wittingly or unwittingly, the live video -- and the ISPs themselves who are "asked" by the government o continue the ban to please the government, even though there is not, at this point, any legislation compelling them to do so.) 

    The initiation of force, or threatening to use force, is evil. This is why even a fairly heavily veiled threat of force by our government is cause for concern.

You should never compromise with those who want to use acts of violence to extinguish freedom, reminds Margaret Thatcher, because if you do you then the very things for which you stand are extinguished.

Let us resolve not to extinguish freedom here. Especially not by the jerk of this knee.
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"Sensing their slip to under 5%, the Greens seem to have decided that gerrymandering MMP for their benefit in time for the 2020 Election is preferable to dumping the Middle Class Woke Identity Politics that is making them so alienating and unelectable in the first place..." Bonus #QotD

"Sensing their slip to under 5%, the Greens seem to have decided that gerrymandering MMP for their benefit in time for the 2020 Election is preferable to dumping the Middle Class Woke Identity Politics that is making them so alienating and unelectable in the first place...    "I expect this kind of ruthless corruption of the electoral system from National, ACT and MANA on a good day, but [not] from the Greens ... 

    "Note that it’s not 1%, 2% or 3% ... oh no, it’s 4%, [which just so happens to be] the threshold that would most benefit the Greens while killing off any other proto-political movement." 

          ~ Martyn Bradbury

RELATED:

• Danyl Mclaughlan on "the terrible, terrible optics of a political party that is part of the government, and hovering just above the 5% threshold in the recent round of polls – and which routinely under-performs the polls on election day – attempting to alter the electoral system to its own advantage and consider the 5% threshold itself."

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Time to spit on Castro’s grave [update 2]

 

A minor dictator and tyrant for six decades has died. Opined Garray Kasparov, who lived under several, there is no need to mourn:

Fidel Castro was one of the 20th century's many monsters. We should lament only that he had so long to inflict misery on Cuba and beyond.
    Don't rationalise or apologise for Castro's decades of brutal repression, torture, and murder. He didn't fight for freedom; he destroyed it.

So “why are some dictators remembered so fondly?” wonders Douglas Murray at The Times.

Long before his death it was obvious that Fidel Castro would benefit from the “revolutionary hero” type of obituary more than the “murderous bastard” variety. The BBC and the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, among others, have not disappointed.
    Even now, Castro’s eulogists claim a man who urged the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to issue a pre-emptive nuclear strike against America to have been a man of peace. They claim the torturer of dissidents and sexual minorities to have been the representative of the oppressed. And they claim an unimaginative and logorrheic egomaniac to have been the voice of the voiceless. For decades before his death, Castro enjoyed a disgusting leniency, not to mention sycophancy, outside the nation he immiserated…
     His revolution with the people, for the people turned out to have very little interest in the people. If the justification for overthrowing Batista had been that Batista overthrew democracy, there was no evidence in the decades that followed that Castro had any devotion to the ballot box. And if Batista was brutal and oppressive — and he was — it was a habit Castro showed no desire to kick. Throughout his rule, Castro tortured, murdered and imprisoned his opponents to keep himself in power. Those who still deny these facts — and they are many — should consult the online Cuba Archive as a corrective to their frivolous and sinister revisionism. Like dictators throughout history, Castro was on the side of the people for only as long as all the people were slavishly on his side. And as in North Korea, one of Castro’s staunchest allies, communism was not only the blueprint for the revolution but also an excuse of sorts. It applied an internationalist, intellectual coating to conceal a squalid and deeply parochial crime scene.

Excuses for the crimes continued throughout his reign.

Even now, with his death, we hear the implication that Castro at least “meant well”. This obscene claim can be heard in the assertion by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that Castro was “a champion of social justice”. It can be heard in the BBC describing Castro as “iconic”. And it can be heard in the corporation’s invitations to former KGB agents of influence, such as Richard Gott, to laud their hero on the airwaves..

There were no eulogies from world leaders more flowing than that from Canada’s child-PM Justin Trudeau

— whose Liberal party should have something to say about liberty — [but who] had this to say about Castro’s death: he feels “deep sorrow” upon hearing the news, notes his dad was “very proud to call him a friend,” and offers his “deepest condolences” to the dead dictator’s supporters.

As a former Sunday Times editor points out, Castro' "flaws" include 5,600 Cubans murdered by firing squad; 1,200 in “extrajudicial assassinations”; and tens of thousands jailed, tortured and who died escaping.

The online backlash against the child’s eulogy suggests at least that the embracing of butchers is far from universal, the hashtag #trudeaueulogy quickly trending to post Trudeau-like eulogies to the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, Stalin and Vlad the Impaler:

UPDATE 1: Lawrence Reed reckons the reaction to old busy-whiskers’s death is an important litmus test …:

The moral bankruptcy of the state-worshipping Left has never been more vivid than it is now in what they're saying about Fidel Castro. Good people of sound character and judgment don't praise thugs, thieves, tyrants and murderers but stupid people of lousy character and poor judgment apparently do, especially when they choose to embrace or cover up for an evil ideology.

UPDATE 2: Former Green MP Keith Locke fails the test. Dismissing Fidel Castro as a “brutal dictator” simply shows how out of touch  you are, he says at Martyn Bradbury’s blog. Linking to a good Guardian piece (!), a commenter reckons Keith would do better to remember Castro’s victims.

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Thank you, Matt McCarten

 

As Matt MCarten steps down from the wreckage of yet another political organiser’s position once proclaimed with much hope and many huzzahs, it might be time to ask: Why is this dickhead thought to be some kind of a political genius?

From the way he’s been talked about over the years, you’d think he were the southern hemisphere’s answer to Machiavelli. And being an anti-capitalist political organiser in a country in which that political disposition is imbibed with mother’s milk, you’d think any even half-decent organiser of that persuasion would have acheived great career success.

Yet instead of lasting success his alleged great political smarts and rat cunning have instead overseen the destruction of at least two political parties whose platforms couldn’t be more to the liking of the luvvies (New Labour & The Alliance) and has helped make three others all but unelectable -- Mana, Maori and now the New Zealand Labour Party, which at one time all had aspirations of being in government together, but instead join each other in the toilet at least partly thanks to McCarten’s star turn at their respective organisational helms.

If his colleague Martyn Bradbury is the Wrongly Wrongson of leftist prognostication, then McCarten is is equal in political organisation.

So thank you, Matt McCarten. You have given NZ’s capitalists much to be grateful for.

Any chance you could now go work your magic on the Greens?

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Postmodern politics: It’s all about the narrative

 

Commentators have called it the single most important story of the Obama years.” It is the story of the thoroughgoing ignorance of the Obama regime bolstered by the all-but complete incompetence of the American media.—on whose ignorance and stupididy the Obama White House relied.

Across the US, wherever people gather to talk national security, the hot topic for days now has been the New York Times Magazine’s big interview with Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign policy guru-cum-salesman. Especially inside the Beltway, Mr. Rhodes’ pointed comments about his work—particularly his admissions about manipulation of the media to sell Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran—have caused a stir that’s unlikely to die down soon.

What Rhodes admitted is essentially what every clear-eyed critic of the Iran deal has been saying al along: that it does nothing to tie that regimes’s hands in acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration knew this, but didnt care..

But the greater revelation even that that, which on its own should be the story of the Obama years, is

1. to the White House, the domestic politics of having a deal was of far greater importance than anything the deal said; and
2. they could rely upon an incompetent press gallery to sell the deal to the American public.

These last two points were made simply as frank admissions, as if they should be thoroughly uncontroversial. It’s not just that the press gallery is chockful of left-wing zombies --- although they are --

Mr. Rhodes made it plain that the reporters he deals with every day—that’s the essence of his job—are idiots.
    “They literally know nothing,” he explained. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” It’s difficult to deny the truth of that statement, and any journalist who’s being honest won’t try. With the decline of foreign bureaus, a distressing number of those reporting on national security and foreign affairs are pretty much as Mr. Rhodes described them.

And it’s not just the press gallery. Rhodes himself, Obama;s senior foreign-policy advisor, has no apparent quilfications for the job either – a failed novelist, a lecturer in creative writing, and precisely zero background in international relations.

As one commentator decribes it, this is idiots led by idiots.

But it really should be no surprise that a 'creative writer' is essentially in charge of advice to a seniot department of state, because today policy it's not about reality, it's all about crafting “the narrative.'

If you control the narrative, you don't just control what gets reported. You control what people see and hear.

This is the era of postmodern in political policy: not how it is, but how it appears. So why wouldn’t policymakers be taking advice from a writer of fiction?

This bullshit is all-pervasive.

The fuss about John Campbell leaving TV3 was totally predicated along these lines.It wasn’t because he rated his fine diction that Martyn Bradbury et al were all so incensed at his departure. It as because he saw him as an ideological brother. The line about him being NZ’s finest boradcaster? That was just “narrative,” spun for

John Key’s failed tax cut promises? Don’t worry, just control “the narrative” about taking off “the sharp edges of the recession” and then dangle them again next election.

Central bankers and their economists implicated in global financial meltdown? No worries, just write a narraitve about how it was the markets that failed, not their models.

British voters eventually threw up their hands at the lashings of spin that Tony Blairs ultimately-failed administration brought into office. But all he was doing was applying postmodernism to politics: that it’s not about controlling reality, it’s all about controlling appearances.

It is what the astute Ayn Rand used to call The Primancy of Consciousness in Action.

The Obama team knew this all from day one. They were the boy heroes of “crafting the narrative.” What else are “ Hope and Change” if not a triumph of story over reality.

Asked in his early days as president

'What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?'
[Obama] answers: 'What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people' about where we are as a nation and should be."

As an incredulous Peggy Noonan commented at the time:

"Tell a story to the American people? That's your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?!" [Emphasis her’s]

After Ben Rhodes’s revelations about the reality behind the ‘narrative’ woven by fiction writers around the Iran deal, we now know that is quite literally true.

.

“Shopping for groceries becomes an increasingly dangerous activity.”

Young folk who’ve never seen socialism up close, and Martyn Bradbury, should be keeping their eyes on Venezuela – the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, a once-prosperous country that has and is being turned to ruin by socialism.

Latest news from the hell-hole: “shopping for groceries becomes an increasingly dangerous activity.”

It’s the law of the jungle in Venezuela, as shopping for groceries becomes an increasingly dangerous activity. As the shortage crisis worsens, more and more angry mobs are raiding the nation’s supermarkets, looting whatever basic goods they can find…
    High inflation and the drastic decline in the value of the bolívar on the black market has hit wages hard. Venezuelans currently earn the lowest incomes on the continent, with a minimum wage of US$10.87 per month, based on the unofficial exchange rate.
    Marco Antonio Ponce, general coordinator for the OVCS, tells the PanAm Post that the rise in protests and vandalism stems from a widespread dissatisfaction with the government among the public. “Desperation is increasing, since people can’t purchase food, medicine, or personal-hygiene products,” he says…
    The number of total protests, however, has dropped compared to the same period last year, when 6,369 anti-government rallies took place, leaving 43 dead, hundreds wounded, and dozens of political prisoners detained.

Both tyranny and poverty are endemic to the socialist commonwealth – poverty, because socialism fails to produce; tyranny, because the poverty must be equalised by force.

Read more: Looting Sweeps Venezuela as Hunger Takes Over.

Surprise: I agree with Martyn Bradbury

How often is it possible to agree with a Martyn Bradbury post?

For me, it’s never happened before. Then astonishingly, over the weekend, I went from zero to two in as many minutes.

First when he attacked the outrage of private prisons – “If you voted National or ACT at the last election, you voted for this [“fight club”] atrocity at Serco.” And so you did. You voted for the ultimate in cronyism: the actual privatisation of force, with all the temptation to corruption and abuse that goes with it. The moral argument against private prisons is that the concept puts the gun in the service of the dollar. The practical argument is that it puts profits at the whim of bureaucratic management. The necessary outcome of both is what we now see in your headlines.

My second agreement with Bradbury was his defence of someone we both loathe, “but no one, not even Rodney Hide deserves to be treated like this…” Rodney’s story of state harassment suggests the surveillance state is already taking its powers so much for granted it doesn’t bother them who they bully, and for what.

You won’t hear me say this often, and maybe never again, but you should probably read both of Martyn Bradbury’s weekend posts:

• Dear National Party voters of NZ – so how’s that private prison experiment working out for you? – DAILY BLOG
• And then they came for Rodney Hide? – DAILY BLOG

RELATED POSTS:

• The aristocracy of prison management – NOT PC, 2009
• No to private prisons – NOT PC, 2010

Friday Morning Ramble…

Left-wing loon and failed/failing/failingest political pundit Martin/Martyn Bradbury still hasn’t got over the election trouncing.
2014 – Year of the angry white knuckle – Martyn/Martin Bradbury, DAILY BLOG

Mind you, some National supporters are still thankful for the support of Martyn/Martin’s little helpers.
Mana planning to stand in 2017 – David Farrar, KIWIBLOG

“Whenever a small country gets mentioned specifically in an international report, that report there gets noticed… A new OECD working paper claims that income inequality hurts economic growth, and particularly hurt New Zealand growth… The set of results is then a little surprising….”
OECD on inequality – Eric Crampton, OFFSETTING BEHAVIOUR   [BONUS: Eric guests at the usually dreary Interest-Co.NZ with a decidedly un-dreary Top Ten.)

“All in all, the OECD has gone into the dragon’s den by backing the accumulation of human capital as its mechanism to link inequality with lower growth. No matter how you spin it, this linking of lower economic growth to greater inequality through financial constraints on the accumulation of human capital by the lower middle class was a bold hypothesis.” Interesting use of the world “bold.”
Charles Murray and the OECD’s Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth – IQ, signalling, over-education and plain bad career advice – Jim Rose, UTOPIA – YOU ARE STANDING IN IT

Mind you, it’s not like the OECD has a clue.
The Only Thing More Bullish For The Economy Than Lower Oil Prices Is ... Higher Oil Prices - OECD

And ours.
Blame America's Housing Woes on Zoning Laws – ARCHITECTURE LAB

“The whole question of when the State should be able to step in to stop people going overseas to act on their moral principles - in particular, by fighting for them - is a quite fraught one.”
Kurdish bombs over Kobane – Andrew Geddis, PUNDIT

“90% of rental houses failed the warrant, yet the Dom Post wants it made compulsory. That’s a great way to make rental housing far more scarce and expensive.”
Dom Post calls for 90% of rental houses to be banned – David Farrar, KIWIBOG

Waterview Connection September and October Time-lapse…

“Distinguish between the non-problem of inequality and any legitimate issues… Make them justify their proposed solutions… Reject the premise that successful people don’t count.”
How to Disarm the Inequality Alarmists – Don Watkins, VOICES FOR REASON

“In this case, underneath our current weak protection of property rights is an ethical belief that persons don’t have a right to what they’ve earned or inherited. Sentiments such as ‘you didn’t build that,’ and ‘it takes a village,’ hold much cultural sway. This is a significant philosophical change from the 19th century, when people had strong convictions that they deserved what they earned.”
The Surging Tide of Resentment – Marsha Enright, THE SAVVY STREET

And people say scientists sit in ivory towers…  “"Heels don't subordinate women - they empower them in romance," said Kaufmann.”
Study proves high heels do have power over men – ASSOCIATED PRESS

“This rather inconspicuous speech, on an anniversary occasion in the ancient Moravian town of Olomouc, contains perhaps the most comprehensive outline of the ‘Havel Doctrine’ of humanitarian intervention. It is striking in its simplicity. It emphasizes the shared responsibility of people to stand up to evil wherever and whenever it is being committed, and the unacceptable nature of appeasement, inaction, or indifference in the face of evil. It is cognate to the maxim attributed to Edmund Burke, ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’”
In Search of Allies: Vaclav Havel and the Expansion of NATO – Michael Zantovsky, WORLD AFFAIRS

“It probably makes you more productive.”
Does Working from Home Work? – APARTMENT THERAPY

“In the great fiscal scheme of things, October 22, 1981 seems like only yesterday. That’s the day the US public debt crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time. It had taken the nation 74,984 days to get there (205 years) … ; and the last trillion was added in hardly 365 days.
How US Govt Debt Went From $1 Trillion To $18 Trillion in 33 Years David Stockman, ECONOMIC POLICY JOURNAL

We never cease to be amazed what can make it through peer review and several levels of editing …”
Overly honest references: “Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?” – RETRACTION WATCH

“According to [warmism], getting rid of fossil fuels is a free lunch. The wise will roll their eyes at [warmism’s] wishful thinking.  But no one exposes its sheer absurdity better than Alex Epstein in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.  You cannot have modern civilisation without abundant energy.  And despite decades of government favouritism, alternative fuels have yet to deliver.  As global wealth has skyrocketed, energy use has risen 80%, thanks almost entirely to increased production of fossil fuels… Haven't alternative fuels played a big role, too?  No.”
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels: We Owe Civilization to Fossil Fuels – Bryan Caplan, ECON LOG

“We're marking the fifth anniversary of Climategate here at SteynOnline, in part because the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial of the century is in some ways a bit of unfinished business arising from [Climategate].”
The Emperor's New Carbon Credits – Mark Steyn, STEYN ONLINE

“As it says next to my picture, I defend laissez-faire capitalism. ‘Anti-government’ is the term Leftists use to smear this position. And, amazingly, some calling themselves ‘libertarians’ are indeed anti-government across the board; they argue for what they call ‘anarcho-capitalism.’  ‘Free competition works so well for everything else,’ these anarchists say, ‘why not for governmental services, too?’  But that argument comes from an anti-capitalist premise….”
Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government – Harry Binswanger, FORBES

“Here’s an excerpt: “You may notice that there is something striking about the way we define this ‘illness’ — that is, by its symptoms, rather than its cause. If we were to define a heart attack by the chest pain, then the appropriate cure would be painkillers, rather than repair of the heart. Other examples are easy to find…”
ADHD: the Party’s Over – DR HURD.COM

The re-issue of the classic book answers the question so often-asked, and so rarely answered.  “How could it happen? How could ordinary people, seemingly decent Germans, turn into goose-stepping, Sieg-Heil-ing robots, eager to obey any orders, even to administer the ‘final solution’–the Holocaust? Leonard Peikoff’s answer to ‘How could it have happened?’ is: ‘The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.”
Makes the rise of the Nazis finally intelligible – THE CAUSE OF HITLER’S GERMANY

“The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favours to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.
    “So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Time For A Muslim Reformation. – REASON VS. FAITH

Objectivist podcasts on the philosophy of religion? That will excite some of you…
Resuming My Podcasts on Philosophy of Religion – Diana Hsieh, NOODLE FOOD

“Heather Wilhelm explains why she left feminism … I think the article is a fine snapshot of what this movement means for women in practice. Here's an example…”
Philosophical Rohypnol – GUS VAN HORN

“Mockingjay - Part One is an uncomfortable movie. I suspect this is why it has not been greeted with the praise that was heaped on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. But I’m glad this first part of Mockingjay isn’t comfortable. It’s not supposed to be.”
Mockingjay: Are You Uncomfortable? – THE FREEMAN

How to maximise small rooms.
Small Space Solutions: IKEA's Idea-Packed Videos – APARTMENT THERAPY

“Humanity's quest for knowledge has taken us back in time to the early stages of the universe — well before the first grains of dust clumped together to form our home planet, Earth. To accomplish this, we use powerful instruments high above Earth's atmosphere to collect particles of light that are more than 13 billion years old.”
These 3 Images Changed Our Understanding Of The Universe Forever – TROVE

What’s wrong with the visuals in the Tintin movie is what Rembrandt got so right!
Fatal Flaw: Showing the Light Source: A Lesson to Learn from Spielberg's Tintin – Michael Newberry, OBSERVATIONS IN VISUAL ART

An atheist Christmas carol….

Duke Ellington’s Best Album—One of the Best in Jazz—Is Also One of His Least-Known …

“… If there were nothing on this album but Mood Indigo, if there was nothing in the Ellington canon but this [extended concert-version] arrangement of Mood Indigo, it—and he—would deserve a special spot in the annals of 20^th-century music. But then the album’s new song, The Tattooed Bride, which Ellington and Strayhorn wrote shortly before the session (and which afterward entered their vast repertoire of classics), delves deep into greatness….”

It took hundreds of years for British pub culture to develop. And only a few years of nannying government to destroy.
The real reasons for the tragic demise of the British pub industry- Allister Heath, TELEGRAPH

“Epic @Roger_Kerrison comment after NBR's Yeastie Boys story is a mini manifesto for NZ craft beer scene.”
Yeastie Boys will seek $500K crowdfunded equity through PledgeMe – NBR

How could you not like an Auckland brewer’s Beers of Auckland Advent Calendar 2014…

Oh, and …

[Hat tips Christopher Chinchilla, Kaila Geary Halling]

Thanks for reading,
Have a great weekend,
PC

Election wrap

Every bullfrog and their leg rope has had their take on the election. So why not me?

Unusually, “None of the Above” didn’t win this election:

Pic by Nick Young

As my colleague Richard McGrath suggests, parliament should leave 28 places at the trough empty to reflect this voter disgust.

This was not because of low turnout that “None of the Above” polled so poorly.  (This was one of New Zealand's lowest turnouts ever.) It was because National did unusually well.  The first MMP election in which a party scored enough votes to rule on its own, and – virtually unheard of – a party lifting its vote for a third term in government.

It helped that its opposition was virtually unelectable. But National still had to beat the usual winner, None of the Above. And it did. Just.

Perhaps #DirtyPolitics helped? That what the electorate saw was not the muck but that it was directed National’s way, with Hager conflated as DotCon, and voters simply wanting to get behind “our guy.”

That might be a touch simplistic.

But perhaps there is a positive sign here.

“The Moment of Truth”: Too many agendas

“A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role
as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy;  in very few
contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only
when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary
for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and
GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.”
- Yaron Brook, YARON BROOK'S POV — NSA MONITORING: SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

IT HAD BEEN BILLED by Kim DotCon as “The Moment of Truth” – "a political bomb" – THE moment when he would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Key knew about DotCon before the raid on his house, and by implication that Key had conspired to get him into the country so as to get him into American hands.

It wasn’t that moment. The shred of evidence DotCon floated earlier yesterday had already been shot down as fraudulent, and nothing more on that score made any appearance at all.

It was billed by Laila Harre as being “framed” by Hager’s #DirtyPolitics, hyped by DotCon’s lawyer as being “Watergate on emails.”

It wasn’t that either (and really never was).

And it was promoted by the likes of Martin/Martyn Bradbury as something that would make your head blow off.

It may well have done that for him (but how would the rest of us ever know the difference.)

There was a wrestle of agendas going on among an ill-sorted collection of folk: a copyright thief keen to make it about him; a political party leader and activists running an election rally; a public launch of the fat German’s “communications suite”; the fat German’s lawyer launching anti-corporate barbs and trying to turn it into an anti-TPPA rally…

Take away the puffery of these poseurs, and the rambling irrelevance of Julian Assange, and in the end what you had was a story presented by Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden that needs sober consideration -- but will hardly get them given the context in which they were put, and the company in which these two global figures allowed themselves to appear.

And there was still a glaring absence of smoking guns.

Snowden claimed NZ’s GCSB as part of Five Eyes has been ramping up towards a system of mass state surveillance which, if true, is worrying. But what was his evidence?

He said the American National Security Agency (NSA) has a base in Auckland “and in the north of the country.” Sounds ominous, but Paul Buchanan suggested this morning the Auckland connection is probably no more than an NSA agent at the American Consulate in Auckland, who may have the services of a satellite dish. The facility up north one assumes is the Warkworth satellite station, which he suggests by implication is subject to monitoring. This deserves further investigation.

Snowden claimed that when working for the NSA in Hawaii he routinely handled metadata from NZ’s GCSB, and could easily drill down into the metadata to investigate content. But he had no specifics, no documentary evidence, just a discussion (on which he had expanded in his Intercept article earlier yesterday) about a checkbox on the XKEYSCORE system used to compile and analyse data.

That solitary checkbox, the Five Eyes Defeat … is what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty.

Snowden has always appeared genuine, and unlike others at this event appears to understand the importance and basis of “our most sacred rights” – not a gift from government, he said last night, but part of our nature as human beings.

When these things are collected, by any arm of government, without an individualised, particularised suspicion of wrongdoing, on the individual level, that is a violation ... of human rights -- that are not given to us by government,but are inherent to our nature.

He’s right, you know. But unless I missed it somewhere, he’s offered no direct evidence for his claims about mass surveillance in NZ than his testimony last night, his earlier documents about XKEYSCORE, and the reluctance of PMs, leaders of opposition, and former and present heads of GCSB to discuss XKEYSCORE.

He took a swing at the Prime Minister for his public claim that “there is not and there never has been any mass surveillance.” This is false, says Snowden, and only defended now by a Prime Minister “throwing classified documents in the air like Julian Assange.”

Clearly, Snowden sees himself as more careful with classified documents than Julian Assange, and the PM, but he still brought nothing more to back his claims but his cogent discussion and believable demeanour.

If there was a smoking gun last night, it was brought by Glenn Greenwald. While John Key was throwing classified documents in the air defending the non-commissioning of something called CORTEX, Greenwald was documenting a programme called SPEARGUN.

According to Greenwald, [and I’m relying for this summary on Keith Ng’s report] this project involved the "covert installation of 'cable access' equipment" on the Southern Cross cable (i.e. Tapping into New Zealand's traffic with the rest of the world). The existence of this capability cannot be denied.
    In response to the Southern Cross cable's operators saying that such a thing was impossible, Snowden (who videoconferenced into the event) asked (I'm paraphrasing): What makes the Southern Cross cable so special that it cannot be accessed undetected by the NSA, when everyone else around the world can be?
    The new documents show that the GCSB had a cable access project underway, followed by another document that Phase 1 was "achieved". More crucially, he has a message showing:

        (TS//SI//NF) New Zealand: GCSB's cable access program SPEARGUN Phase 1; awaiting new GCSB
    Act expected July 2013; first metadata probe mid 2013.

This shows that they had to wait for the GCSB Act to be passed before SPEARGUN could be used. i.e. The new GCSB Act - the one that supposedly wouldn't expand GCSB powers - expanded GCSB powers to allow them operate a metadata probe on the this cable which they'd tapped.

If there was a case to answer that was presented last night, then that was it.

THE BIGGER PICTURE TO all this is realising that the time-honoured protections against state intrusion into our lives has been breaking down philosophically, legally and politically, just at a  time when new technology makes the possibilities of this intrusion so much more widespread.

“We want to bring down Five Eyes,” said the fat German trying to get a chant going. Well, no “we” don’t. In a world with many threats, intelligence gathering is essential.

The reason we have state security is to protect our most sacred liberties – to protect them against the slings and arrows of war and outrageous criminality. That’s government’s job. But to protect our liberties against those agencies themselves, especially as the power of surveillance and analysis increases, we need more than just checkboxes. 

It is not a matter of left or right. Yes, the centre-right here are defending the GCSB’s alleged excesses and the left are running the argument against the abuse of power, but reverse political power and the positions would be reversed. The left are always against the abuse of power until they have it themselves. And remember too that this process started here under Helen Clark’s Labour, and has been carried out in US under the Democrats’s Obama.

The issue is not party political. It is protection against the state.

In “the old days” the need to obtain a search warrant was your protection against every state agency except the IRD. But we are now in a new age.

In this new age when searches of your data so much more easy than rummaging through your rubbish bins (as easy as tapping a cable, it seems), and analysis of data is as easy as writing a good data mining algorithm (still not that easy, to be fair) what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty seems to be only the scruples of security agents themselves – and in New Zealand, so the claim goes, those scruples are being sacrificed for the excitement of being part of a world intelligence network in which New Zealand can be a player just as long as it supplies the (meta)data that keeps it in the big tent.

It is really a time for a new consideration of the checks and balances that tie up the agencies who act purportedly in our defence – and those who think it’s all okay now because a nice man is overseeing date collection might like to contemplate how they might feel if it were all overseen by the former PM, or her successor.

But that sober and serious job needs better “framing” than it did with all the agendas on display last night.

PS: I’ll be updating this post over the day as new info and analysis comes to light.

RELATED POSTS (TODAY):

• NZ Prime Minister isn't Telling the Truth About Mass Surveillance – Ed Snowden, THE INTERCEPT
• New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It – Glenn Greenwald, THE INTERCEPT
• The Questions for New Zealand on Mass Surveillance – Ryan Gallagher, THE INTERCEPT
• The Moment of Truth #1 – Tim Watkin, PUNDIT
• "Project SPEARGUN underway" - Keith Ng, ON POINT
• But what is truth – if you follow me? – DIM POST
• The smoking SPEARGUN – DIM POST
• Finny on Five Eyes – Charles Finny, KIWIBLOG
• Vision and dumbassery – Russell Brown, HARD NEWS
• It’s time to get angry – David Farrar, KIWIBLOG
• 'Moment of truth' - do believe the hype – Andrea Vance, STUFF
• Guardian Live Coverage

RELATED POSTS (PAST):

• Edward Snowden: hero or villain? Philosopher Leonard Peikoff in top form in two podcasts:
• “Q: Is it moral for a person to expose secret government programs which violate citizens’ individual rights, even if this may harm strategies which the government states are essential to national security? In other words, what is your estimate of the NSA now?”Download & Listen
• A follow-up to Dr. Peikoff’s previous podcast: An interview with Amy Peikoff on the NSA programs. Download & Listen
• #Snowden: One Year On
• Don’t shoot the messenger
• Phone-hacking by media so 2006
• #EdwardSnowden: Traitor?
• #EdSnowden reveals spooks have already cracked and hacked your software
• #SurveillanceState: Privacy for me, but not for thee, say National ministers
• #SurveillanceState: “But he’s such a *nice* man…”

TWITTER, AS IT HAPPENED (oldest to newest)…