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My entry for media headline of the year:
RELATIONSHIP BREAKDOWN AT POTTERS’ ASSOCIATION OVER DILDO WORKSHOP
Dare we (ahem) delve further?
Let’s.
Published a fortnight ago on the Stuff website it details an acrimonious dispute at the Wellington Potter’s Association over plans for a visiting Mexican ‘artist’ to hold ‘dildo-making workshops’.
After the workshops were opposed by some members, the president, a Ms Nicole Gaston resigned in a huff calling it ‘a huge injustice’ (one wonders what she calls war, poverty or racism). Ms Gaston went on to extol the virtues of the ceramic sex toy, calling them ‘fun, beautiful, safe and suitable for all bodies.’ After a look at the Association membership (on their Facebook page) I can see how this last quality would be to their advantage. Ms Gaston was particularly frustrated by some of her fellow potters and their description of the workshops as ‘inappropriate’, insisting irrelevantly that ‘the world is changing’ and that the workshops would be ‘empowering for gender minorities’.
And what ‘gender minorities’ would Ms Gaston be thinking of? I’m guessing the ones that would find an eight-inch clay phallus useful.
And so we get to the nub of the issue (so to speak).
The way, in 2020, if everything isn’t about race, it’s about sex.
Last Tuesday saw the publishing of the Royal Commission of inquiry into the Christchurch Massacre and the government’s response. Even less relevantly than our Wellington potter, the Prime Minster took the opportunity to talk up extending hate speech provisions to cover the ‘LGBTQI’ community.
Just why a terrorist outrage perpetrated on a Muslim community in Christchurch should be used to argue for protecting the sexually diverse among us from nasty comments is something only a progressive (or their psychiatrist) can explain.
The recommendations concerning ‘hate speech’ made by the commission (that Ardern has promised to enact) have already been ably explored by other Insight writers. To sum up: they’re against them. Stephen Berry called them “the most direct threat to individual freedom in New Zealand this century.” While I agree, for me what is most concerning is the calamitous effect they will have on something even more vital than ‘individual freedom’: the ability to tell a joke.
Watching a modern stand-up comedian (particularly one of our ‘Kiwi comics’) is like witnessing a one-legged man trying to put on a pair of trousers. There’s something missing that soon has them falling flat on their face. That missing element is risk. Having the guts to risk breaking one of the many new taboos around identity that the Left has seen fit to foist on us all over the last ten years.
The contemporary left is as puritan when it comes to sex and gender as a Witchfinder general.
The Royal commission’s recommendations would make it a crime to ‘stir up hatred’ against racial or religious groups by ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ language. With the P.M’s intervention this would be expanded to include gays, transsexuals and those who egomaniacally insist that they have nothing to do with sex at all. And I don’t mean nuns. Threatening language would presumably cover intimations of physical violence but what is ‘abusive’ or ‘insulting’ is ominously vague. Perhaps deliberately vague. Allowing these new puritans enough scope for ensuring jokes are not made that offend their sensitivities around sex and gender.
This is not mere alarmism, on the part of conservatives like myself; the U.K experience is damning. Last year under their hate speech legislation, a man, Harry Miller, was ‘investigated’ for sharing a rude limerick about trans-people on Twitter, the police having marched into his workplace to question him. Among the most egregious of a plentiful supply of other examples is that of a woman, Kate Scottow, who was actually arrested in front of her children for ‘abuse’ after she called a trans woman ‘he’ on social media.
It is an oft-repeated observation that political propagandists and extremists of all stripes lack a sense of humour. As reported in ‘Hitler’s Table Talk’ Hugh Trevor-Roper’s day by day account of Nazi high command meetings, Adolf Hitler only ever made one (rather lame) joke. By contrast, Churchill regularly had his cabinet colleagues in stitches.
The fanatical lack the necessary sense of irony to find anything really funny. The Left can advocate late term abortions, condoms in primary schools and hormone treatment for ‘trans kids’ while also wanting someone jailed for using the wrong gender pronoun because they have no sense of the absurd.
Rowan Atkinson does. He’s made a career out of it. That is why back in 2009 he opposed an attempt by the then Labour government to outlaw ‘homophobic’ speech. When addressing the House of Lords on the matter he predicted this legislation and measures like it would create ‘a culture of censoriousness’.
Quite the prophet, Mr Bean.
Humour is sometimes the only weapon the masses have to prick their pompous overlords. It won’t be the elite who will be winding up in prison under hate speech laws. It will be the pissed- up apprentice mechanic who mocks the ‘poofters in parliament’. Or the lowly office grunt who unwisely tells a transphobic joke at the office party within the hearing of their prissy supervisor.
Such humour is too ‘real world’ for idealists. Jokers, from Rabelais to Rodney Rude have focussed the human mind on the dirty and unjust reality of life. They are often cruel, mean-spirited, and yes ‘abusive’ and ‘insulting’. That’s what makes them funny.
And dangerous to the people who wish to police our views on matters sexual or social.
As the French writer La Bruyere said ‘Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.’
Promises of hate speech laws are further proof (if it be needed) that Ardern and crew are not among the latter.
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