Check out this article on our freedoms and the dangers to them at the moment. Kurt Mahlburg writes:-
As I have elsewhere argued, vaccine passports are an ethical disaster. They pose an unprecedented threat to personal liberty; they replace informed consent with coercion; they assume no reasonable grounds for declining vaccination; they create medical apartheid; and they open the door to untold medical control.
To all the Australians reading this: think about the future you want to leave for coming generations. Think what our nation’s social fabric will look like in a few decades if speech continues to be silenced and the State takes mastery over your bodily integrity.
Speak up while you can and remind others of the liberties we once prized, bled and died for. Because forgotten freedoms fade fast.
Grinding poverty can certainly come about through natural disasters – famines and so on – but the thing we really need to be on guard against is organized and coercive poverty, by which I mean socialism. Socialism is the drive to control the free choices of other people, especially in the future, in order to prevent them from doing things that seem stupid to the self-appointed organizers, but which will lead to staggering wealth, or so the organizers say, three generations from now.
For a long time I have struggled to have any real faith in the media. There does seem to be extensive bias in many areas. People are often dismissed with inaccurate labels such as climate change denier, bigot, and far-right extremist and their ideas are ignored. Stuff’s policy of not allowing comments denying anthropogenic climate change is probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of narrative shaping.
Recently there has been a brouhaha over more than half a dozen police officers searching the house of Dieuwe de Boer, a conservative Christian blogger, while his wife and 3 small children looked on. Why? All for a now prohibited magazine fitted to a .22RL lever-action rifle. Dieuwe had written a submission against the Firearms Amendment Act in 2019 which featured a photograph of this weapon. It had not been handed into police, although he no longer has the weapon. Now let’s put aside for a moment the ridiculous overreaction of the police and the potential abuse of political power to silence dissent. What I want to consider is the reaction of the mainstream media. RNZ, Stuff, One News and The NZ Herald all had articles labelling this young family man as a ‘far-right activist’.
This is a serious label. What connotations does ‘far-right’ have? The label carries connotations of fascism and racism. It’s a serious charge. But it seems to be thrown around with increasing abandon. Would you call a Christian conservative family man with 3 young children, interests in mountain biking, target shooting, playing strategy games, classical music and programming a ‘far-right activist’? He runs a commentary site called Right Minds NZ, which describes itself in the following way:
Our editors, writers, and contributors range from traditional conservatives, to populist Tories, to right-wing libertarians, and anything in-between.
Right Minds NZ is a broad church right-wing movement for New Zealand conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, capitalists, and nationalists: people who share our Christian values, believe in personal responsibility, and want to see government play a lesser role in our lives.
So far-right activist? Far-right of whom? Stalin? It seems likely that too many journalists have little understanding of people with differing political opinions. This is not a healthy state of affairs.
Come on mainstream media. Attaching derogatory labels to people to reduce sympathy or belittle them and their opinions as not worthy of consideration should be beneath you. Give us the facts and a little less spin please.
