Noises Off!

The NZ Left are secretly in love with Robert Muldoon. Vocal proponents of the NZ Left spit tacks against Rogernomics in a way that they don't rally against Muldoon. This is because they are in love with Muldoon's autocratic conservative interventionist style, noting that he only made a few bad gambles. Muldoon's means justify their ends.

Pablo's critique of the NZ Left keeps throwing up core problems involved with this love affair, even as he pines for its return to power. Take the Left blogs, for example. Red Alert, The Daily Blog and The Standard love playing censor to the free thoughts of their commenters. This isn't about weeding out trollers or spammers, but silencing divergent voices.

Pablo wasn't even allowed to comment on Chris Trotter's reply to Pablo's post. He had to republish it on his own site. Giovanni Tiso's comment was also refused permission for publication. Here it is:

"I must vehemently protest you drawing Gramsci into this. Firstly, the sentence you quote means the exact opposite of how you're presenting it. ‘Sono pessimista per l’intelligenza, ottimista per la volontà’ comes from one of the prison letters. As he explains it, it means that he has taken to be utterly pessimistic and bleak in his analysis of any given situation, in order to muster the strongest possible will to change it. And by change Gramsci always meant radical change. He hated reformists. To suggest otherwise is deeply offensive to his memory, seeing as his refusal to compromise and soften his stance is what led directly to his imprisonment and ultimately to his death.

There is very little doubt in my mind – as there could be in anyone who had read his work – that Gramsci would have nothing but contempt for the contemporary New Zealand political class. To suggest otherwise is frankly bizarre."

There, that wasn't so bad now, was it? It wasn't offensive or worthy of censure, surely? How many other valid but improper thoughts have been thrown down the memory tube for the greater good of the collective?

Divergent voices are not welcome with the true NZ Left. They have no need for outside influences. They already know everything. There is no dialogue in their dialectic.

And still they wonder why the voting public won't trust them. The old man always said that the Labour Party are experts of rationalising defeat, because they've had so much practice at it. Some things never change. They just die out.

Nuke Me Slowly

Art by the Great Kev O'Neill

As has been noted elsewhere in popular culture, it is better to be born a rich cripple than a poor one. My lucky draw didn't result so much in prosthetics, and the speech therapy was state funded, but my advantage came from books.

The old man's library was my treasure. There was everything a precocious Deaf kid could want, including many books that have been banned or burned in other parts of the world. Consequently, I have always found censorship more ridiculous than the Easter Bunny.

So it was with some surprise to discover today that Manga is a crime. Farrar is squeamish, so I recommend him not to watch such Manga classics as Urotsukidōji, which is widely available and has more tentacle sex than a tankful of octopuses on octopus Viagra.

First they came for the Hentai. Surely, it's only a matter of time before Internal Affairs will come banging on my door for my stash of Marshall Law comics. Nuke Me Slowly indeed.

Words by the Great Pat Mills

American Morality

H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H.G. Wells described censorship as jealousy with a halo. So, it's a bit of worry that not only is Andy Serkis planning to take the politics out of Animal Farm, Boing Boing happy mutant Mark Frauenfelder wants a neutered TV version of Game of Thrones:

My 9-year-old daughter is an avid World of Warcraft player, and enjoys reading Dungeons and Dragons manuals (We are joining a twice-monthly game that my friend is setting up). So it's no surprise that whenever she hears my wife and I discuss Game of Thrones (which we do a lot), her ears perk up. She wants to know everything about Arya Stark, the young female sword fighter. She begs us to let her watch the show. I wish she could watch it, too, but I don't want her to see the sex and nudity scenes. (I don't really mind her seeing the violent scenes.) 

That, in a nutshell, is the paradox of American Morality.

There's nothing new about the Yanks infantilising works of art. The Christian Fundies have been sterilising movies for wholesome consumption for years.

The US spawns great observers like Mencken, Hemingway or Henry Miller. But if any artist flashes a bit of cunt at the American consciousness, they can't deal with it.

Banned Books in NZ

The How Things Change research is coming along well. After tripping over a dead link over at Steven Price legal blog looking for a list of banned books, the Office of Film and Literature Classification promptly returned my query with a banned book dump (I wish all Government Departments were so prompt).

There are two lists available as spreadsheets.

1215 books banned between 1963 and 1993 under the Indecent Publications Tribunal listed here.
89 books banned from 1993 to Jan 2013 under the Office of Film and Literature Classification here.

Among the sea of porn (ranging from the hilariously archaic to the disturbingly violent) is also a handful of gardening books and two cookbooks. The IPT banned 18 marijuana-themed books in 30 years:

• How to Grow Marijuana Hydroponically
• How to Grow Marijuana Indoors Under Lights
• The Advanced Growers Guide to Marijuana Cultivation
• The Australian Indoor Marijuana Growers Guide
• Marijuana Growers Handbook Indoor/Greenhouse Edition
• Australian Handbook for Indoor Growing of Marijuana
• The Closet Cultivator
• Marijuana Growers Guide De Luxe Edition
• The Connoisseurs Handbook on Marijuana
• High Time Encyclopaedia of Recreational Drugs
• The Complete Guide to Growing Marijuana - The Culture and Management of Hemp
• Indoor Marijuana Cultivation
• The Primo Plant Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana
• Caretaking the Wild Sinsemilla
• Ancient and Modern Methods of Growing Extraordinary Marijuana
• Cooking with Marijuanga
• Marijuana Growers Guide
• The Cultivators Handbook of Marijuana

In the twenty years since the OFLC has been around, only 89 further books have been banned. Ten of them were about cannabis:

• Indoor Marijuana Horticulture
• Marijuana Botany
• A Guide to Growing Marijuana in Cool Climates
• Cannabis Alchemy
• The Great Books of Cannabis Volume l: Book ll
• Marijuana Grower's Insider's Guide
• The Marijuana Chef Cookbook
• Cannabis Cultivator
• Marijuana New School Indoor Cultivation
• The Big Book Of Buds

The allegedly 'injurious to the public good' The Marijuana Chef Cookbook is on sale at Amazon.com. I'm pretty sure the other titles can be found elsewhere online, as well as hundreds of similar quality publications.

Suffice it to say NZ's antiquated censorship laws are as useless as a dick in a dyke. And don't get me started on the OFLC DVD ratings system, or Spoiler Stickers as I call 'em.

Book seized, DVD still at large

Story here.

Working with children and animals

Two stories from the Middle East Zeitgeist. From the Daily Dish:



And the BBC via Boing Boing:

Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel, media reports say.

Speaking of the naive and the feral, one edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has had the word "nigger" replaced with "slave". That's one editor who needed a thesaurus for Xmas. Slave is not a synonym for Nigger. The Telegraph points out that it isn't the first time Sam Clemens has been whitewashed by nervous revisionists:

In this Twain-targeting censorship, it was not the word “nigger” that was airbrushed from history, but a cigar. In recent years, Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! – a one-man show in which Holbrook dolls himself up to look like Twain and recites his classic texts – has become increasingly difficult to stage, even impossible in some American states. Why? Because Holbrook spends virtually the entire 90 minutes of the play chomping on a cigar, just as Twain did for most of his life, and these days smoking in public is considered even more morally depraved than uttering the N-word.

Take it away Stevie Colby:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Huckleberry Finn Censorship
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

The Nom and the Censors

Jeez, I thought NORML News had it rough, with the Police and Customs attempting to restrict or ban the NZ political quarterly. The Economist has more cutting problems:

China is more proscriptive. Distributors destroy copies or remove articles that contain contentious political content, and maps of Taiwan are usually blacked out...

A trip to the Censor's Office

Ripples and aftershocks continue in the wake of Operation Lime. A district court judge has thrown out the onerous and improvised bail conditions that forced Switched On Gardener stores to ID and record personal details from their customers.

Meantime, the last three issues of NORML News, copies of which were seized in the numerous raids, have been sent to the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour is not happy.

The helpful people at the OFL advise me that a decision normally takes 8 - 10 weeks, and that they will notify me once deliberations are completed. For once, I'm looking forward to July.

Siemens Stains

"Notions like human rights, equality and civil liberties did not come from documents. They came from struggles. Anyone who is aware of the feminist movement in this country can see such a struggle taking place; a struggle that has yet to succeed but that probably will in time. Struggles cannot be fought from the outside; they must occur internally. What struggles will take place within the community of Muslims I would not hazard to say. Nor would I venture an opinion as to whether the Muslims of the twenty-first century will follow the direction of the West in their controversies over political and social norms, or whether they will find unique solutions to unavoidable contradictions. Either way, conflict, diversity and evolutionary change seem inevitable despite the powerful appeal of a traditional core of norms and values."

- from Columbia University's Richard Bulliet, cited in Nader Hashemi's article The Relevance of John Locke to Social Change in the Muslim World, in Iran: between tradition and modernity.

I have been fascinated by the challenges modernity poses to the various Muslim nations for some time. The House of Saud has genuflected mightily to preserve its illusion of Wahhabi puritanism whilst introducing TVs and mobile phones into their homes. In Iran, similar tensions prevail. As the Wall Street Journal has uncovered, the clerics and the corporates have a special agreement on modernity:

[I]n confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

Siemens, Siemens, where have I heard that name used in association with violent dictators before... Ah, that's right; in Cracked's Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us:

Siemens was the major player in the Nazification of Germany. The company, run by Werner's son, Carl, and then his grandson, Hermann, struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression and had to earn some dough fast. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, it was the signal for the Siemens executives to start building factories, and nowhere was the real estate better than near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Hundreds of thousands of slave workers were employed to build all sorts of goodies for the German military to use on both the western and the eastern fronts. Though they weren't the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, they were certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany's rail infrastructure, communications, power generation ... the list goes on. If the Reichstag was the brain behind the war, Siemens was definitely the right hand that stroked Hitler to ecstatic glory.

And y'know how I said last week that what happens in Iran, happens everywhere? Back to the WSJ:

Countries with repressive governments aren't the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." A White House official wouldn't comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.

Last time I buy a Nokia, that's for sure.

Stihl Life with Peckerwood

What sort of crazy messed up world is it, when hundreds of thousands of NZers can't get one damned prohibition bar lifted, but any po-faced sad sack can get some humour pulled off the media? Seriously, what is offensive about this chainsaw ad?



It's about as funny as the very similar Stella Artois ad not so long ago, reaching a Heh on the laughometer from me. But since the advertisers weren't aiming at me, being neither a chainsaw nor lager enthusiast, that's OK.

At no time did I get the urge to write to the Powers That Be and insist that the offending thing should be removed right now. No, not tomorrow, now. Nor do I expect anyone to get paid for listening to such nonsense. That's what blogs, or at a push talkback, are for. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened with the Crunchie ad, featuring 10 out of 9 dyslexics who like Crunchie Bars.

Therefore, by the powers invested in me by the start of the Wellington International Comedy Festival (proudly sponsored by Crunchie makers Cadbury not Peckerwood from Taihape), I declare open season on uptight fuck-knuckles. Grow some levity.



If there's one show I can scrounge the entry fee for, it'll be Radar's ode to the school of hard knocks, Te Radar's Eating the Dog at Bats. The first show started ten minutes ago. Runs til Saturday.

You ain't heard nothing yet

Trent Reznor is not happy with Apple. The company banned his iPhone app because of the faint possibility of a swear word being heard once. TRez sez:

“You can buy ‘The Downward Fucking Spiral’ on iTunes,” he continued, “but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it … Hey Apple, I just got some spam about fucking hot Asian teens through your e-mail program. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone! Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.”

Oz Censor site hacked

Wired's Threat level blog is reporting that hackers have left a "chilling and humorous" message on the Australian Government's Censorship Board's Website:



At this time, their website is still down.

TVNZ is lactose intolerant

Earlier today, I was having a chortle at British expense reading about this new CD featuring old songs that the BBC has banned. Not included is Split Enz's Six Months in a Leaky Boat, which was banned during the Falklands War. Thank Dagg we live in liberal old NZ. OK, the old control freaks at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation were something else, but times have changed:

As a junior employee in the record purchasing section at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in Wellington, my first job was to gouge a nail across the tracks of the B-side of the Ray Charles single "Hit the road. Jack". Censorship and concepts of "safe" records were an over­ riding pre-occupation of the establishment back then, although it has to be said the "The Danger Zone", the B side was less threatening than "Hit the road, Jack".

Or rather, times haven't changed, they have twisted. Steven at Spare Room points out that TVNZ have banned a music video by soul band Hot Grits. No sex, violence, nudity or dry humping. Just a bunch of kids drinking milk:



On the subject of child censorship, it may be a good time to highlight that almost half of UK kids are banned from climbing trees as parents think it is too dangerous:

Play England, which says it promotes free play opportunities, insists that parents "constantly wrapping children in cotton wool" can harm the children's development. The poll found showed 51% of children aged 7-12 were not allowed to climb a tree without adult supervision, with 49% stopped from climbing trees altogether because it was considered too dangerous

...It found children's experiences of adventure are confined to designated areas such as playgrounds (56%), their homes (48%) or theme parks (44%).

Little wonder the little buggers are bored. There are calls over in Blighty for parents to please neglect their kids, leaving them to make their own fun.

The day they banned the penguin

This just in from the land of freedom, etc:

"The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from
publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including
Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format
on their respective dates at Salon.com."

So, what was the fuss about? Sex? Violence? Swearing?

Hat Tip /.

That's what I call gay

So Telecom's filtering software doesn't like the word "gay". It also has a problem with "heterosexual". While I suppose gay could be rephrased as same sex (as in Dear Same Sex Hamilton,...) and heterosexual becomes straight, but what other words does the Telecom email cleanser object to? Here's a few guesses:

honky
unbundled
nigger
refund
golliwog
competition
wanker
Freeth
nazi
Commerce Commission

Any more for any more?