Apparently I'm Back Blogging ... Getting to grips with Blogspot - The Impudence of Literary Censors

 

 Over the last15 years I've blogged twice. My last post to my first blog Life Behind the IRon Drape was over December 2015. I put up this second blog with the single post at the start of New Zealand's first Covid lockdown to explain why my wife and I decided not to take Pfizer's Covid (so-called) vaccine: a decision I've never regretted, indeed, I think possibly on the data coming out, one of the best decisions I've made in my adult life, despite the decision became the blessed final end point of my professional life.

By now I'm moving on from Covid, although never to forget because it was where a raw authoritarianism  took away all individual rights in the blink of an eye from an Orwellian single pulpit of Truth, and the vast majority said, yep, that's fine. Which of course it wasn't, it was a disgrace.

But that's not for this post. This is just to say I stopped my first blog because I'd said everything I wanted to and was boring myself with repetition, but in this post-Covid world I find I want my own venue again, because there is so much wrong, from my road in the Marlborough Sounds which is buggered in two storms 19 and 7 months ago, which is unlikely to make it through this winter but is not being fixed, to New Zealand's tax system which has seen under this Labour government some of the worst legislation enacted across my professional career. Although my first big post will be to point out how our Foreign Investment Fund Regime, legislated by the Minister Cullen in the former Labour government, is about to see a huge - if you consider every Kiwisaver account - theft of investor money to the state on an unethical windfall gain that is astounding in its brazenness.

This post, however, is to say, I'm back :) I may only blog once a month, or once every six months, but I won't close this blog down. For a litany of reasons I can't access my old blog, so that remains up as a tombstone to a long gone past, while Life Behind the IRon Drape II goes into the future, or what there is left of it. And on that point, no better place to start than with where I think we're at as a society. My below comment from a post by Dr. Melissa Derby on the shameful re-writing of Roald Dahl by his publisher, his goddamned publisher (!) who has hired sensitivity readers, so help me God, on the great new Bassett, Brash and Hide blog:

 

I long ago realised we live in the ruins of a once great, in fact, the greatest, of all civilisations that was based on classical liberalism and free markets. A civilisation that took thousands of years of individuals fighting for their rights to volition against the tyrannies of monarchs, feudal overlords and popes. A civilisation founded on a Renaissance and an Enlightenment. But a civilisation now where the lights are going out. This vandalism of Dahl's work is all part of the return to a soft authoritarian barbarism, that no doubt ends badly, most likely violently, although that's probably after I've departed.

Specifically on this: the arrogance of just breaking into a dead writer's work and vandalising it by changing all the words is breath-taking, and especially because these meddlers don't have any understanding of that and how unethical and monstrous they are.

Soon, if not already, we will have a literature that is grey, lifeless, and simply represents the insecurities of these self-styled censors. And that is not a literature at all. It has gone the way of our activist hence ruined fourth estate. (That is connected, because our fourth estate would now be on the side of the 'sensitivity readers' these publishing houses are employing - actually, having written that, the literature is gone isn't it; it's gone with the woke publishers as we lost our fourth estate to the woke editors). I despise every single strike against our humanity these miscreants force on us.

... Rambling, sorry: this sacking of literature belongs to China's Cultural Revolution, not the free world, but that's where we're at.