SnowflakeGeneration

Honesty is a difficult scrap of ground on which to make your political stand.

Naturally apathetic, Australia’s political culture has been one of tolerance driven overwhelmingly by laziness. This is not necessarily a criticism. What better defence against tyranny than a landmass incapable of being whipped into an idealogical frenzy? After all, you can’t start a revolution if there’s no one to drag out the guillotine or storm the doors of parliament. Good luck tearing down flags when half your rabble is fishing beer out of an esky or negotiating overtime rates.

Every now and then one group or another gives rebellion a ‘right ol’ go’ but Australia’s stamina for political radicals has trouble outlasting the opening refrain of the campaign. Unlike our patriotic friend across the pond, it’s not controversy that kills off dictatorial hopefuls in this land – it’s tedium.

Indeed, Australians would much prefer their politicians subscribe to the Victorian approach to children – be rarely seen and never heard. So long as they perform their basic task when in government most people couldn’t give a toss what sort of waggery they got up to. I have a theory that scandal only undoes a minister because the public object to endless coverage of their existence. In short, they annoy themselves out of office. Nothing exemplifies this point quite like ex-PM (still self-appointed lord and saviour) Malcolm Turnbull banning sexual relations between staff in his party to band-aid then Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s uninteresting affair. To be frank, there’s not going to be a lot left for the public servants to do if they’re not shagging each other in the stationery cupboard.

Joking… but it is true that we have and do let our elected officials get away with all manner of mischief.

Democracy is a chore and most decent people expect the bare minimum of those that get paid by the public purse. The standard M.O. as far as I can determine is, ‘don’t bugger it up’ more eloquently phrased, ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ which is why voters are beginning to lose patience with the endless re-re-re-restructuring of mindless enterprises instead of embarking on much needed infrastructure works.

Before going on, I will admit this:

Australia has a very strange political quirk. You would (sensibly) imagine that to truly motivate a voting base against an incumbent party – to create an honest political movement in his country – you’d have to put in a dire performance. Oppositions are not voted in while governing parties are almost always voted out. Labor in particular has a rather theatrical record of being smacked on the arse by the slamming door of general elections after forgetting to carry a few ‘ones’ on the national balance sheet.

However…

The voting public also have a Russian Roulette approach to politics. If things are going really well with the nation and they’ve spun the barrel three or four times on a good party – we paradoxically load the pistol with a terrible set of ideas and give it a tug on election day. And so the great Australian dilemma of well-performing parties meeting their untimely demise becomes standard practice. Locals know this as, ‘Liberals fixing things and Labor routinely screwing them up.’

What is my point? The mechanisms that drive Australian politics are bizarre but predictable. We are creatures of habit uncomfortable with tectonic change who occasionally set fire to the sprawling forests of logic.

2019’s Federal election will be a war between disaffected Conservatives tired of the tide forever receding into Labor’s lap, the Millennial generation fresh out of university keen to try out a bit of Socialism like voluntarily strapping themselves to a Breaking Wheel, and the terrified minority who remain confused about the barren political landscape offering them very little tangible hope.

Who plans to walk away as Prime Minister? That all depends on which leader self-combusts first. To date, this election has been a comedy of errors with Bill Shorten floating sinister ideas like mandating your body be used for spare parts and a resurrection of the deeply hated ‘death taxes’ to compliment his pickpocketing of franking credits while Scott Morrison’s flanks squabble over how green to make their energy policy, ignoring screeches of dismay from their base.

The blue ribbon is unravelling while the red sword swings within a hair of its own neck.

If minor parties are Australia’s protest, it’s going to be one hell of a year. With both major parties dragging their feet through disastrous news polls, all eyes are on the solitary voices shouting out through the thrall of bickering politicians. In this compliment I do not include breakaway independents who have hastily re-branded. Any ex-Liberal who hides under the shadow of a Getup! campaign is not worthy of the title. To paraphrase the Princess Bride, ‘independent – you keep using that word, I don’t think you know what it means…’

None of this soul searching is remarkable.

The curious thing about the 2019 election is the sudden vigour for dogmatic apocalypse mongering. There have always been crazies wandering the streets, hands raised to the heavens declaring the end to be nigh. They are a statistical certainty and usually dismissed as delusional. How strange then it is to watch the state of Australian politics descend into a sea of poorly spelled placards proclaiming the planet’s demise as the linchpin for both Federal and State elections. How aptly timed is the student’s ‘Strike4Climate’ in this thinly disguised attempt by activists to use our children as political interference. Teachers are paid by our taxes to educate our children, not turn them into mindless tools of the State.

It is reasonably easy to hoodwink the very young. Indoctrination starts in school because students lack the worldly experience required to spot a used car salesman flogging a wreck. Surrounded by half-wit rhetoric, paid hysteria and manipulated ‘science’ our educational institutions fail to leave our children with the one protection they need against dogma – the ability to question…

For a zealous group of self-made messiahs, the Climate Alarmists have made an interesting oversight. You see, there is a massive expiration date branded onto their pseudo religion and instead of the usual, vague Hellfire that can be trotted out over the aeons, these geniuses have learned nothing and given themselves a meagre 12 years.

A decade comes around soon enough. So soon, in fact that I do not have to win this debate today because there is a tsunami of reality creeping forward towards us – like the silent wave racing across the ocean after a seismic event.

Herein lies the warning: when your apocalypse deadline comes and goes and starts to fade – another committee of ‘experts’ will attempt to push out the bar for 5 – 10 – or even 12 years as they have done repeatedly through the last century.

But… Eventually… Those children that you indoctrinated are going to wake up, dare I say they’ll get woke and realise that ‘Climate Change’ is simply another one of their childhood myths. Like its predecessors Global Warming and Global Cooling, it’ll lay on the floor in bits at their feet with a price tag amassing interest that they now have to pay. Having destroyed their faith in reason and undermined the scientific establishment, those children now adults will turn and look you lot of charlatans in the eye and ask:

“Did you do it on purpose? Did you do it for profit? Or did you do it for power…?”

Labor, Greens, Getup! Independents and misguided Liberals who tried to drag this out for political gain – good luck spinning another doomsday fantasy. As the old fable goes, the village never comes to the defence of those who cry wolf.

-ellymelly

I’m sorry – I don’t remember signing a ‘Global Compact’ at birth to be obliging, mild-mannered, conforming and polite toward all of my fellow citizens in every situation until the end of time. That might have been the expectation on the average woman in the 18th century but as far as mandating a culture of manners we’ve taken a colossal stumble backwards as a civilisation.

Worse, this stringently enforced philosophy of ‘avoidance’ toward offending or (heaven forbid) ‘triggering’ other carbon-based lifeforms is not born out of a desire to create a utopian metropolis… Far from it.

Let us not waste time tip-toeing around our social media censors with elaborate euphemisms. We all know what’s going on and so we shall call this movement out for what it is – censorship. Boring, run of the mill, dictatorial coercion of speech.

It is entirely fanciful to expect humans to be courteous to each other on an unwavering basis. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be societal encouragement toward good manners in the hope of a functional peace but this is an absolute world away from the criminalising of everyday rhetoric.

Put it this way, humans are badly behaved. We squabble and scratch – are petty, moody – we lie and invent ever more creative ways of insulting each other. Speech is our first evolutionary response to conflict and our last resort before despair. Expressing frustration, fear, concern, humour, criticism and outrage is an excellent tool to avoid physical conflict. Do feelings get sacrificed in the crossfire of debate? Absolutely but it is better than actual people being rounded up and thrown onto the nearest pyre.

Words are powerful. There’s a very good reason that aspiring dictators stock up on duct tape. The lone voice of a free person can capture a nation and topple tyranny. Some Western countries had the foresight to enshrine this gift of our birth into law – others, like our great country of Australia, carelessly assumed that freedom was of such great value that no entity would ever attempt to erode it. How naive. How foolish…

You see speech is the enemy of bad ideas.

Bad ideas fear debate because their armour is comprised of fallacy which can be unpicked under scrutiny. Discussion claws at weak fabric – nails dragging until something catches and the whole carefully built fantasy unravels like a $2 sweater picked out of a discount store. Without clothes, emperors stumble about until they’re knocked from their perches usually to a good deal of cheering.

Good ideas, in contrast, are robust. They get stronger from their forging in the fire. The weight of history tells us that they shuffle up to the top, surviving even the most brutal of opposition. Consensus is just a statistic that can be overturned with time if a good idea has merit. Indeed, Western Civilisation’s crowning jewel – the Enlightenment – would not have happened if not for our adherence to the Darwinian culture of offence.

Let us not forget that it was offensive to suggest that women should vote. Triggering to the establishment that slavery was morally abhorrent. Upsetting to admit that we were apes all along. Had these conversations not taken place what possible progress could we have expected? Advances in society do not magically appear – they are thrashed out at full volume to wails and cheers alike.

Like it or not, freedom is offensive. It’s contentious, insulting, abrasive, confronting, difficult and terrifying. If you wish to be told what to think and feel, try living under a totalitarian regime. You may not agree with the party line but at least everyone’s running a unity ticket. Indeed, uniformity of thought is a hallmark of oppression and runs in complete contrast to our natural behaviour.

To the best of our ability as caretakers of the next generation, children are coddled from harm. That includes protecting them from truths, speech and ideas that they may not be intellectually ready for. Somehow the West has managed to raise a new generation of adults who believe this intellectual infancy should extend into adulthood – that consideration of their personal feelings ought to be imposed upon every other member of society. Sorry Millennials, that’s not how the real world works.

I find it surprising that a generation in love with Netflix’s violent content could paradoxically fear the Reaper of Contrary. It is as though they crave the depraved world of human truth but, in the sudden stark sunlight of their university campuses, thrust poorly spelled signs in the face of conversation – or lock their fellow students inside a debate and threaten to burn the building down whilst carrying a garrote… Don’t offend us or we’ll kill you. Make of this hot and heavy irony what you will.

To understand what has gone wrong with freedom of speech in the West it is important to recognise that there are two distinct groups at play.

The first group is the rabble – the children of the helicopter parents who were raised by surviving Marxists and indoctrinated at the teat of soft Socialism masquerading as world peace. I am young enough to have caught its beginnings on my way through school, being forced to repeat the endless mantra that we are all one people with one philosophy and countries are fictitious entities created to oppress us. A rosy sell to a preschooler who never hears the counter argument.

These children are told that they are the most important entity in the entire world – that their personal needs and well-being outweigh everything else on the planet. These demi-gods stumble into the once rousing halls of University and face the uncomfortable reality that they’re part of the pack. A standard issue homosapien who has to prove their value in the world, like everyone else who has ever lived. This is a shock but instead of growing up, they gravitate toward our second group – a group that has worked out how to prey on the underdeveloped emotional responses of our snowflakes.

Group number two are the leaders. Their involvement in the censorship ring is not incidental but imperative to their goal. If words are powerful then controlling them is a cheat way of manufacturing control of a political narrative. There is a very good reason that every good dictator – be they theocratic, communist, monarchistic or freelance – employ it. Intimidating a population into silence or acquiescence can then be used as a mandate for usurping real political positions. Without a counter argument and with criticism silenced, the new ruling class can pretend to govern – even through abject tyranny – for a period of time. Certainly this disgraceful system lasts long enough for the group to make a lot of money.

Group two exploit group one. Very smart, politically aspirational leaders bribe and coach the young into enforcing censorship. Believing themselves to be Social Justice Warriors instead of Stormtroopers, they enthusiastically sacrifice the freedoms purchased for them by the blood of their grandparents.

It is not entirely their fault that their philosophical history has been kept from them – or even that empathy toward opposing viewpoints is a blasphemy. Remember, they were raised by a carefully planned machine of indoctrination – a cult, if you will, of political ideology. This is the revenge porn of the scorned Communists. A subversive way to avenge their decimation at the end of the last century.

We should have been keeping a closer eye on our children.

Now we are faced with a generation who place no value on freedom. Who are perfectly happy to shackle the chains of tyranny not only around your neck but also their own. Hurt feelings and opposing viewpoints are capital offences despite the obvious reality that there is not a single thing that can be uttered without causing offence to someone in the world.

Not only are their demands impossible to adhere to, they are disastrous to embrace and must be rejected wholesale. No half measures – no polite concessions. Remember, nothing good ever came from ceding ground to a Socialist.

So here is my message to the fragile generation of would-be censors trawling the backwaters of twitter for martyrs and thatch:

Freedom is your birthright. You are one of the few to be born into a democracy with more scope for success and safety than any one at any point in history. You have the absolute right to express your thoughts be they ludicrous, dishonest or fabulous. As an individual, you can speak without fear of retaliation by your government. Yes, you can disagree, argue and, if you possess a strong constitution, take your ideas to the baying crowd and defend them.

You do not have the right to a life free from offence. There is no expectation of pleasantries. Your feelings are not sacrosanct and your fellow humans owe you nothing. The rule of law is there to protect your life, liberty and property – not the entrails of your mind.

If you want your ideas to have worth you must earn it for them.

Coercion is not politeness. Censorship is a temper tantrum from a child without an argument. I can assure you, snowflakes, if you bring out the duct tape it’ll be your arse that ends up strapped to the chair. You are group two’s useful idiots and as soon as you’ve handed over the reins of power, you’ll have none of your own left to save yourself.

For further reading see – the entirety of human history.

-by ellymelly