Marc My Words.
By Marc Alexander MP. United Future NZ.

Freedom

Perhaps the greatest single threat to our freedom is the threat to our freedom of thought. That ideological junta commonly referred to as the Labour Government, has employed every trick in the book to give the New Zealand public a steady diet of sanitised politically correct gruel. But it is a meal bereft of intellectual nutrition. It is hard to imagine another time in our history when honest debate has been a more endangered species. Just how successful this ploy has been is evident in the lack of credible political opposition.

The Government has shoved its dogma down the parched throats of Kiwis - listening to no one but its own credo of political correctness. Denying freedom of choice this Government has insisted on its 'choice' being imposed; for example, enforcing smoking bans on individuals on their private property (such as RSA clubs), yet allowing smoking to law breakers on public property such as prisons. We had hints of a possible 'fat' tax - an idea that assumes individual responsibility and choice to be of no consequence; and now, murmurings of even more nonsense from lobby groups who are floating the insidious idea that beer, wine and spirit bottles should have health warnings! The pretext is to educate the idiots amongst us of the potential risks that pregnant women, people on incompatible medications, and vehicle drivers may face as a consequence of an alcoholic drink. And the current drive towards political correctness is even shrinking our language!

While no one can argue against valid intentions, these self-appointed guardians of our collective good are often in danger of promoting strategies that are two books short of a library. We are in danger of abdicating freedom and self-responsibility. Only those who would choose intellectual slavery could possibly doff their caps to such strategies - and then they might as well tug their forelocks from their missing foreheads.

For example, we now have medical practitioners who - not only being obliged to carry out their Hippocratic endeavours to the best of their ability - must also consider so-called cultural sensitivities! Nurses, teachers, Police are forced to become cultural anthropologists to ensure that no one can possibly be offended - to the detriment of the economic imperatives that are part of their function.

If we are not careful we will leave our children a nation saturated with Government warnings - biscuits with stickers announcing their consumption as deleterious to the good health of those who have a raised cholesterol level; we will strap ourselves into a car where - on the steering wheel - there will be instructions on the minimisation of harm; we will spend every waking moment reading manuals on how we should live our lives rather than actually living them.

And when things go wrong - we will be able to blame everyone and everything else except ourselves; after all, we will have given up responsibility, given up conscious thought and reasoned decision making that, under normal circumstances, inform our lives and minds - we will live but have given up life!

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>