Taxpayer and TV rights

The NZ Herald says "The cost to the taxpayer of the bid for Rugby World Cup broadcasting rights will be "considerably" less than the $5 million speculated, Prime Minister John Key says."

So give one good reason why it shouldn't be nil?

This is a very popular event that many will want to watch, it presumably has some commercial viability for a broadcaster, New Zealand has four different free to air nationwide TV network operators that could do so (TVNZ, TV3, Prime and MTS), so for what conceivable reason should taxpayers be forced to pay to buy the rights to a sports event to be broadcast?

Oh, and doesn't this make the claim that National is about less government interference in your life rather vacuous?

Go on, look at your TV listings and find the long list of sports events and other events on free to air television that DIDN'T have you being forced to pay for it.

This whole issue has been a complete debacle, a waste of time and your money. The government should have had no more to do with this than it has had with other sports broadcasting rights over many years.

Yet the majority of you trust this lot to buy your healthcare, your kids' education and a retirement.

Why?

Scab = person who wants job more than you

Idiot Savant is upset that the Royal Mail is hiring additional temporary staff to cover for the unionised labour that is going on strike in coming months. He says it is because of privatisation. He's wrong, the word is never mentioned. He puts modernisation in quotation marks, as if it isn't real. Yet it is - the Royal Mail is a dinosaur of the postal world, using automatic sorting less than its equivalents in France and Germany. NZ Post by contrast is seen as an example of best practice. Idiot Savant would always side with a militant union though, it's a tribal thing.

The left calls such people scabs - a vile term that helps justify doing violence to them and threatening their families, a not unknown tactic in some industrial disputes.

The truth is such people are workers, people who want to do the job the unionised workforce is less interested in doing. Let's be clear here, postal workers do not exactly have jobs involving deep levels of training or skills. It is easily substitutable. The choice is between those who want to work, and those who don't. Why should people who want jobs have any "solidarity" with those who have them but don't want to change to save their employer from ongoing losses of money and business?

Idiot Savant thinks because the temporary workers are being hired with full support of the Labour government it shows how "out of touch" Labour is. He's wrong. In fact it shows how desperate Labour is for Britain not to be brought to its knees at Christmas by a greedy union in the midst of a recession unwilling to let the Royal Mail being seriously restructured from practices that date back to the 1970s.

As the Royal Mail loses business to competitors (no doubt Idiot Savant hates the idea that other people might be employed in competing companies to deliver mail - a sacred duty of the state), this union action cripples it more, threatening more jobs, whilst Billy Hayes, the head of the Communication Workers' Union is on a six figure salary.

Nice to be supporting the proletariat isn't it?

Protect certain ghost worshippers from insult

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent says:

"Muslims, Asians and Black people are human, too – experiencing the pain of gratuitous invective piled on us, day after day, by toffs like Martin Amis and Wilder and racists like the BNP. Words do violence to humans, more sometimes than sticks and stones. They can disable you to the point of insanity"

Of course she's right about racism and the BNP. However, Martin Amis and Wilder have not expressed racist views, as far as I am aware. Race is not something one can choose, and racism is demonstrably irrational and abominable.

However, Amis and Wilder have both condemned Islam. Islam is a choice, or rather it should be (the "crime" of apostasy makes it anything but a choice in some countries), so criticising it should be like criticising Christianity, or Hinduism, or Shintoism or indeed any non-religious based philosophy. Objectivists and supporters of capitalism know this too well, but indeed so do socialists, conservatives or environmentalists. When you decide a particular philosophy is for you, you will inevitably encounter criticism from some, and derision from others. It is part of being in a free society.

Now I don't believe in gratuitously seeking to insult people for the sake of it, but I do believe that people should take direct criticism about their chosen philosophy. If you want to do violence to those who criticise it, it demonstrates your own lack of self control and your own inability to justify your position through persuasion.

However while Alibhai-Brown decries the condemnation of Islam, she also says "Only libertarian fools and fanatics would give set-piece answers" to issues of free speech. Whether she refers to all libertarians as fools or just the ones who are fools is unclear, but it certainly looks offensive to me.

So is she saying if I am an atheist believer in a small state she can call me a fool, but if I believe in a ghost and the words of a long dead prophet who had sex with a preteen child, I should be protected from insult?

No she is a fool. She doesn't understand that free speech means the state getting out of the way, and allowing people to express themselves as they see fit, as long as it does not interfere with the right of others to do the same, or result in infringement of private property rights (including the rights of crime victims and the right to one's reputation).

Indeed, she cannot even accurately describe the events around the Wilders visit saying "I was proud Muslims responded with good sense". Not all, surely?

New Zealand is a backwater

I mean seriously.

This headline says it all.

Nazi murders vs communist murderers

Given the all too appropriate anger at this story, can anyone explain why similar worshipping of a hammer and sickle, or image of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, or Che Guevara, or Castro would not cause any outrage at all?

How many brainless gits do you see every day walking around with pictures of Che Guevara on their chests, or Marx or the like?

Oh and you might get the standard Marxist reply "oh that wasn't really Marxism", because the USSR got it wrong. However, it wasn't just the USSR was it? It was also:

- Mongolia
- China
- Afghanistan
- Cuba
- Albania
- Yugoslavia
- Romania
- Bulgaria
- Czechoslovakia
- Poland
- East Germany
- Vietnam
- Laos
- Cambodia
- North Korea
- Angola
- Benin
- Congo (Brazzaville)
- Ethiopia
- Hungary
- Grenada
- Mozambique
- Somalia
- Yemen
- Burma

Imagine if a school had a communism party? Would the media bother saying this is an outrage to everyone who suffered under such tyranny?

You might think the 60 or so million Mao killed directly or by starvation using insane economic policies, and the 30 million Stalin killed directly or through war or starvation, might give as much reason to be offended.