Blunt Knives and Trivia

Hilary's Village spreads like a concrete suburb. The welcome rains do not soak the ground to bring sustenance to the flowers, but floods and washes sense and sensitivity away. And Humanity with it.

Several matters have affected Tasmania in the past week. Fires in remote places damaging pristine wilderness that seemingly only has value when it is destroyed. Greenies lock it up and hand it over to the U.N. but fail to invest in its maintenance. 

"The place is on fire.... let's go to the beach"

So when a fire breaks out no-one can get to them because there are no roads. Then they complain and cry 'disaster', even when 99% is left untouched.

Dullards.  Blunt knives in the drawer. And when someone does try to make a road (woodsmen and loggers usually) we get that dull tool 'Dr' Brown (No-one is holier than Brown) complaining when he 'protests' that he gets arrested.  

Yes, this homosexual man who happily supported laws that would arrest people for protesting about the murder of babies in the womb, complains when he himself is arrested for protesting the cutting down of a tree. 

Dullards lack perspective and ethics.

When he was 'in politics' did he propose a fire-fighting aircraft for Tasmania? We do get fires every year.  The greenies let the fires burn trees so they could complain, but they do nothing to value them, least of all invest in them.

It does not stop them forcing their views on others and having them punished though. And force their views they do. One way or another. No-one is allowed to have a different view.

Janet Albrechtsen was in the P & B last night showing us some examples of dull knives in the drawer.

Neo-puritans strive to find offence — anywhere

With January 2016 ticked off the calendar, it’s worth reflecting how the past month has provided a window into the mindset of a burgeoning class of sanctimonious neo-puritans.

A few weeks back, West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle was just about run out of the country after an interview with a female sports presenter where he said: “Hopefully, we can win this game and have a drink after. Don’t blush baby.” Social media went nuts. 

Here is the 'offending' exchange.

The media, talkback, feminists went equally manic that Gayle would dare to flirt on camera. 

The hypocricy of feminists and their media front-bum-sniffers is astounding.

Not that these same people complain when female reporters flirt with male sporty types, mind you. That is fine, it seems. 

A female TV 'reporter' can chat-up a private person on a beach and make highly personal comments about his body, and no-one complains.
She's a woman, you see.
What is fine for her, is A FINE for a man.

So, where is the outrage at this 'interview' below, or is it a tag-team by two women verbally sexually assaulting a man?

No one sees it as anything more than two women having some risque banter with a chap. Which is what it is. Gayle's remark was not even that.  The treatment however was very different.

The cricketer apologised the very next day. But that made no difference to the remonstrating neo-puritans. The batting legend was ¬labelled a sexist and a creep, his club fined him $10,000, Cricket Australia boss James Sutherland said Gayle’s on-camera flirting was “completely out of line and inappropriate”. “It’s very, very public,” Sutherland said.

A few weeks later, NRL player Mitchell Pearce was caught on a smartphone video behaving like a drunken buffoon at a private party. But privacy made no difference to the censorious neo-puritans. Public lapse in judgment? Private indiscretion? The boundaries keep moving. There but for the grace of God go I has become there but for the grace of an iPhone go all of us. 

Pearce clumsily tried to kiss a woman who quickly rebuffed him. So he stopped. The half-back then simulated a dopey, jokey sex act on a dog. He urinated on a couch. Dumb and dumber.

The man was a fool and a crude one at that. But the furore was far worse. 

But in the minds of the neo-puritans, there is no room for boofheads anymore. Pearce is a villain. End of story. And villains must be publicly shamed. 

So there’s endless talk of fines and penalties, contracts cancelled, careers over, rehab and counselling. Pearce has left the country. I am deeply uncomfortable to find myself on roughly the same side of the argument as Peter FitzSimons.

But here’s where the Red Bandanna and I part ways. The progressive set that FitzSimons surely calls home is to blame for the rise of the holier than thou neo-puritanism that has tried to destroy Pearce. 

Australia’s self-appointed moral guardians are having a heyday doing what they do so often: 

dividing the world into victims and villains. 

It is not as though these moral guardians know what the word 'moral' actually means. 

But can it really be that simple? There is something truly disturbing about the refusal by these self-appointed moralisers to make room for a few boofheads, be they drunk or flirtatious.

To be sure, no one should celebrate stupidity. Pearce behaved badly. He has to account for that. But the obsession to label every misdemeanour or error of judgment as a sure sign of bad character points to a deeper malaise infecting our society. This false dichotomy of victims and villains is creating a sterile, puritanical world where even minor mistakes of judgment are pathologised as serious moral misdeeds.

Witness the weird explosion of academic literature and campus chatter about so-called micro-assaults, micro-aggressions, micro-insults, micro-invalidations and so on and so forth. So you’ve picked up a copy of Hustler magazine and looked at a naked woman? That makes you a perpetrator of “micro-insults” — and a villain. 

Prefer to be colourblind to race so you don’t define people by their colour? That makes you a perpetrator of micro-invalidations — and a villain. 

You’d think that the very mention of “micro” points to how trifling this all is. 

Not in the eyes of the neo-naggers, who can find wrongdoing anywhere they look.

And it’s not hard to trace how we ended up in this realm of the utterly ridiculous. The misguided taxonomy between villains and victims was given a fillip once feelings entered the realm of human rights laws. Once an offending word here or an insulting word there attracted the heavy hand of the law, victimhood became a booming business. And given that victimhood works as a political philosophy only if there are villains, it’s not surprising then that Western modernity is stretching at the seams with newfangled classes of victims and villains.

You’re a Catholic archbishop from Tasmania who produces a pamphlet that defends the traditional definition of marriage that has not only existed for millennia but remains the law of the land? Most would think this is a complete non-story within a healthy democracy where freedom of speech and religion are basic rights. 

What is it with ugly men transforming into ugly (wo)men?

Wrong. Under the hectoring neo-puritanism, the law allows anyone offended by that pamphlet to claim victimhood status and, hey presto, the archbishop and his church are cast as villains by a human rights bureaucracy only too willing to play along. 

We seem to have reached the point where every transgression from the norm now demands either a victim or villain label. There’s no room for plain difference or straight stupidity any more. And the victim/villain dichotomy has reached into absurd places when Gayle and Pearce were cast as villains even where there were no victims.

Neither Gayle nor Pearce broke any law. The police were not called. There was no harm done, as John Stuart Mill would have concluded.

The 19th century English philosopher best explained the no harm principle when he said “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Mill was addressing the importance of individual liberty in the face of state control. These days, the preachy neo-puritans imagine they are the state, imposing their judgments, wrecking reputations and careers because they have identified a villain even where there is no victim. No harm no longer matters to the neo-puritans. The principles that helped drive liberty have been upended.

Last week, the honchos who hand out Australia Day awards tried to further cement the victims and villains narrative into our national psyche when they picked David Morrison as Australian of the Year.

Morrison, a military man, is not regarded as an extraordinary soldier. So why did he get the gong? 

He gave one famous speech about victims of discrimination (a speech written by his then speechwriter, Cate McGregor, who transitioned from a man to a woman a few years ago).

Again. A 'failed' man who pretends to be a woman, insulting real women along the way, and he/she/whatever gets to write speeches for generals?  She could be Mayor of Hilary's Village. 

You might have thought that upon receiving the award, Morrison would defend this great nation, maybe explaining the importance of being committed to Western values such as individual liberty and so on. 

Wrong again. Morrison’s Australia Day speech was replete with dark talk of victims and villains.

Not surprisingly, those who have fallen for this false dichotomy have bequeathed hero status on Morrison.

The Tavern is for Heroes. Morrison just does not make the cut. His knife is blunt. 

Those of us who see through the victim and villain baloney see a man of mediocre achievement given an award he didn’t deserve. And his paean to progressive causes is a reminder of how far we have fallen as a proud nation.

The lionisation of Morrison and the concomitant destruction of Pearce suggest it’s high time we did more to keep in check the rapacious colonisation of our communities by the neo-puritans. After all, the freedom to be a boofhead is the other side of the liberty coin.

Janet stopped well short of providing us with a long list of fatuous people and fatuous accusations regarding trivia. And far worse. 

We all needed a drink after that. I gave her a rather fine one for her efforts.

I keep my sword sharp.

Meanwhile there are little things not at all trivial. The buiding blocks. The Love and learning that makes little girls fine young women. (Boys too, of course)

Here are three little things, finely built up to cheer us.

Pax