Free Speech vs Drag Queen story time vs violent Samoan Poetry vs Right Wing Hypocrisy
Oh sweet Jesus, what the Christ are we ripping the sacred out of each other over this week?
What new black/white diametrically existential threat to one another culture war are we having now?
Protesting Drag Queens reading stories at a public library and a violent Samoan poem?
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
The motherfucking planet is melting down, the largest land war on the Eurasian continent since World War 2 could go nuclear at any moment, the planet is still reeling from Covid and Sino-American conflict could erupt at any moment alongside the reality of an environmental and cultural Omnicide and we are arguing about Drag story times and angry brown poetry?
I feel like I’ve woken up at a KKK rally wearing a Black Lives Matter hat.
How did shit get this dumb this quick?
What is most fucking despicable is the rank hypocrisy of the Political Right who chant ‘Free Speech’ only when it fucking suits them!
Let me be as clear as I can you raging meatsack clowns.
Drag Story Time:
Police intervene as queer community targeted by protest at Avondale, Auckland, library drag reading
Police have intervened as protesters interrupted a drag performer’s storytime session at Auckland’s Avondale Library.
Auckland Council head of Community delivery, North and West, Darryl Soljan said while the children were not disturbed, and the storyteller was safely escorted from the library, the incident was “distressing” for its team.
“We have chosen to remain closed for the rest of the day.”
The event was part of Pride Fest Out West, and involved dancing, songs, and stories told by a drag performer.
Men wearing drag has been a central feature of theatre since fucking Shakespeare. I’m not accepting any commentary from protestors who can’t appreciate that as a starting point.
Secondly, tolerance for one another in our society is actually essential for a liberal progressive democracy. Equally so is protesting. If these sad fucks want to protest Drag Queens reading stories to kids at the local library, they have that right, but it needs to be outside the library and at a respectful distance, the way we allow anti-abortion lunatics to protest abortion clinics.
Thirdly, I can’t take people claiming Drag Queens are pedophiles who are grooming or molesting children seriously if they aren’t also outside every Church in NZ making the exact same allegations.
Fourthly, let’s acknowledge the Trans Community don’t exactly welcome much aroha. Their hyper militant and woke cancellation fourth wave feminist and non-binary activist allies have made the entire debate radioactive to the point many want nothing to do with the issue altogether.
Fifthly, we want a culture that welcomes and respects diversity because that is important in a Democracy. I would have no problems whatsoever with my daughter watching and participating in a Drag Queen Story time, (in fact I’m pretty sure she has). The toxic moral panic driving protest is usually pretty knuckle dragging in its intellectual thuggery and based mostly on bullshit people have read on Facebook. If you think Drag Queens reading stories to children is sexual, perhaps you need to pause and reflect on that.
Sixthly, yes, yes, yes, There have of course been the few examples where some Drag Queen has turned up with an overtly sexual tone and that was never acceptable right? You can’t point to those few examples and misrepresent the entire value of diversity any more you can point to child molesting Priests representing the entirety of Christianity!
Seventhly, this shouldn’t be a battleground for the anti-Trans community to politicise. I appreciate the toxicity of the trans vs gender critical debate has generated a ‘the frontline is everywhere’ pitched cultural battle mindset, but unless you have an egregious example of a Drag Queen using the moment as an actual sexual fetish, it is cruel to extend the battle lines to public libraries in this manner.
What you want YOUR kids to do and not do is none of my fucking business unless you are abusing them. Likewise, what I as the parent of my daughter allow her to do or not do (within the spirit and letter of the law) is none of your fucking business. Attempting to equate a Drag Queen and the concept of diversity to child abuse is akin to claiming reading will damage your child.
Fuck off with that banjo twanging fuckwittery. We have way bigger fish to fry than stopping people having stories read to them at their local library you goons.
Violent Samoan Poetry:
Poet Tusiata Avia lashes ACT after party calls book The Savage Coloniser ‘racist’ and ‘hate-fuelled’
The author of The Savage Coloniser has hit back at ACT after the party called her work “hate-fuelled” and “racist”.
A stage show, which is receiving taxpayer money via Creative NZ, is now being produced based on the book by Ockham-winning poet Tusiata Avia.
ACT put out a press release criticising the book and stage show on Wednesday, saying the Government is “funding hate” with a show about “murdering James Cook, his descendants and white men like [him] with pig hunting knives”.
“The Government, through Creative New Zealand, which taxpayers fund and whose board Ministers appoint, is supporting works that incite racially motivated violence,” ACT leader David Seymour said in a statement on Wednesday morning.
The party is calling on the Government to withdraw $107,280 in taxpayer money that went towards the show and apologise for “giving so much to racism in the first place”.
Avia hit back at the criticism saying “ACT do not understand this poem”.
“I would counsel them to read Claire Mabey’s guide on my poem and understand what they are reading, before making uninformed, uneducated claims,” Avia told Newshub.
Excerpt from the poem:
These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna F… YOU UP.
What the fuck is this nonsense over a poem? Why is my sanity tested sweet Lord? Why?
Ok.
So a taxpayer funded poem that expresses the cultural anxiety and anger of being Polynesian in a white settler nation uses violent imagery and the performance art Right have taken snowflake trigger level offence and have complained to the Human Rights Commission?
Oh Fuck right off!
Look, the only two issues with publicly funded art is:
1: Is it any good?
2: We need fuck loads more money in publicly funded art!
Those are the only two parameters, and on the first parameter Tusiata Avia fails miserably.
It’s a tired boring teenage rant poem missing unicorns crying rainbow tears level banality, but she has every fucking right to express herself with such tired anger and Creative NZ have every right to back her freedom of expression!
Yes, artists are exempt from the strict letter of the hate speech laws, the same way we give comedians that leeway, the same way we give many important voices of a liberal progressive democracy! This is the very nuance we demand and yet here we have the performance art Right manufacturing outrage the exact same way the woke do!
It’s a tired poem that uses violent imagery, as a defender of Free Speech I absolutely stand by her right to be a mediocre poet!
Attempting to twist her poem and its taxpayer funded roots into hate speech is a reminder to the Left that we should always defend free speech because the fucking right always attempt to use hate speech laws as a means of strangling off voices they don’t like!
I don’t want you all to waste your energy on hating a taxpayer funded poem when the Taxpayer Funded Opera of those English Tourists is debuting this month!
Right Wing Hypocrisy:
The most appalling part of this entire fiasco over Drag Queen story readers and violent taxpayer funded Samoan poetry is that the very same raging hetero Right wing meatsacks who scream free speech 24/7 suddenly find their limits when it’s Drag Queens and brown people hu?
When they use their voice, suddenly it needs censoring?
The hypocrisy of the NZ Political Right who have all piled into this culture war is galling and stains all the dignity they’ve professed in previously defending free speech.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media.
“Hate speech: you know it when you see it”
If you want to understand where this comes from look at what is happening in the US in Florida under governor Ron DeSantis. This is where ACT is drawing it’s operating manual from and we should be scared shitless.
National are also leaning into this with their attacks on Maori aspiration and anything to do with redressing historic injustice. When those on the left join in with full blown anti-woke hysteria we are heading into a dark place. Naming no names.
The 4 C’s of Conspiracy – Covid – Conflict in Ukraine, – Climate Change – Children’s Story Time
Why not watch the entire rant rather than an excerpt? Begins at 4.35 at below link.
And why does not any so called journalist in NZ write about the origins and history of the theories which now swill around the intellectual pigsties which once, in far off halcyon days were known as universities? The origins of ‘woke’ no less. Again why should we accept the notion of ‘funding’ for the ‘arts’ or indeed ‘degrees’ in art, music, basket weaving etc. The arts tradition was after all a European construction, why are we still bothering with it or pretending that any of it means something. Prior to the European tradition the ‘arts were always an integral part of religious or philosophical and tribal traditions within any society. It was the Catholic faith which gave rise to the European arts tradition and then more particularly to the Renaissance. One thinks of Dante, Shakespeare, da Vinci, Palestrina, Chartres, through to Bach and all the rest. It was killed off stone dead by the end of the second world war when the idea of ‘arts councils’ came in. Never were anything other than political footballs and jobs for silly billies.
The lady snarling away in execrable English is not the victim of an illustrious British mariner, rather like millions of others, the dupe of Marxists who escaped Uncle Joe’s purges in the thirties and settled in Frankfurt. Known as the Frankfurt School they hightailed to the US when Adolf began promoting his National Socialist ideologies. Settling in to US universities they began to promote their own neo- Marxist theories which all these years later are now raging full bore in the West. Let’s have a full history of all this.
https://fb.watch/iXE8BiBSYH/?mibextid=2Rb1fB
However some white kid from a low socioeconomic background writing poetry about driving around looking for brown people to f@&k up is likely to be investigated by the SIS, police and have the military’s SAS kicking down the door.
seymour house has proven himself to be a later day devotee of mccathism.
You just have to read some of the comments on this site, to see how many snow flakes there are on the right are in this country.
Shared my lived experience but was censored.
I don’t disagree with with this take on Drag Queen story hour, there are a handful of egregious sexualised examples, a recent case being the Isle of Mann, but it is not the majority. The curiosity is why Drag Queen story hour is suddenly news through the anglosphere. Is it new or has it been around a long time, like drag in theatre which children have been attending for decades if not centuries.
For clarity, there is nothing inherently woke about drag, although like much else in culture it can be hijacked for woke causes. Resist the knee-jerk reaction to the superficial without looking at substance.
Also Drag Queens and crossdressers are not trans and shouldn’t be conflated.
Like the woke trying to cancel artists, this right wing cancellation risks a Streisand effect. The most offensive thing about public funding for Tusiata Avia’s poetry is that there is probably a far more talented artist who isn’t getting funded and doing minimum wage gig-work to get by.
“Also Drag Queens and crossdressers are not trans and shouldn’t be conflated.”
You don’t have a problem with trans people, do you?
@Sophora Lol I won’t dwell on my personal life but be no I don’t 😀 I was attempting disambiguation.
However i DO have a problem with much of what passes for contemporary trans activism, which has largely become a vehicle for Queer Theory ideologues. They are often counterproductive to even simple goals like long term Trans respect and acceptance while using LGBT people as rhetorical human shields oh and can be ridiculously homophobic.
Wokism (the various schools seeing society as a series of oppressor/oppressed cultural conflict theories) is a cuckoo in the progressive nest.
I must be naive to this ideological activism (if I understand you correctly). Can you give examples?
One of the issues with drag performances by non-trans people, is that it is similar to doing “black face” or “yellow face”, creating a false imagine of what a trans-woman looks like & can harm real trans-women.
That’s partly why Drag and Trans needs to be disambiguated and why Trans people need to be disambiguated from Trans activism. Drag are not trans woman nor are they trying to imitate them.
Trans and drag often get on very well. Simple example, if a trans woman want to learn about makeup or walking in heels, men who do drag are ideal mentors, working with the same physical characteristics.
There are also many forms of drag from family theatre to risque adult stage shows. The issue is when ideologues try to smuggle in their own agendas.
The whole issue gets pretty complicated when everyone needs to be put in specific identity boxes. It would be nice if people could just be themselves, dress as they like, live their lives in the way they would like (provided they don’t harm others), and just feel safe to do so.
“poem that expresses the cultural anxiety and anger of being Polynesian in a white settler nation” But she is a settler immigrant herself whose waka arrived here some hundred years after the first european wakas. Does she have the right to come here and dis a Paramount Captain Notable Navigator and World Explorer James Cook! Really, Cook as a stand-in for white people, should be fucked up by brown people in SUV’s? This is the underlying fear that sees cops and the justice system incarcerate brown people without hesitation. Is it incitement to violence or ‘just a poem’?
“And finally – they closed the library after the event. Really? Distressing for the Team – really? What are they 5 years olds manning the library?”
Maybe because it felt like an invasion? I’d be shaken by it too, & I have a damn thick skin.
Oh I’d forgotten about the unruly tourists show! Wish I could see it. Hope it’s hilarious anyway
These days
we’re driving round
in Campervans
looking for ya
or kiwis like you
us Gypo kids, gunna Fuk you up.
Poetry.
If a white man wrote the same words about killing Maori he’d already be in Jail
Time will tell if it is good poetry. What ever good poetry is.
We should support free speech even if some abuse this right.
I grew up in a system that restricted frerdom of speech. My Dad ides to call restrictions stupid, becsuse it is much better to know ehst the enemy (ultranationalists) think…how right he was.
The funniest and most bizarre in the whole “poemgate” story is that it inspired a politician to day the truth. Hilarious. A first on the history of humanity.
What gets me is so many who prominently rabbit on about freedom and personal choice seem to spend a lot of energy on trying to control the freedom and choice of others.
IIRR Rawiri Paratene is Marama Davidson’s father. Marama is still I think the Green’s poster girl and very concerned about proper speech and culture. Her father was censured for reading out at a school or library some work that referred to bloody battles I think; Maori were involved victims/perpetrators/actors?
There is a need to know about such stuff but within limits. Trouble is on TV and internet where limits is a bad word; there is more dangerous mind-bending stuff than I’ve had hot dinners. What about cancelling the ruddy internet or limiting it to two hours a day for business purposes? Take the pictures off so we have to read using the thinking part of the brain and not just the goggling! Can’t be done it’s here to stay – going to suck out our humanity and leave us as dried corpuscles. Robots are okay will be the call, people are too emotional and boy do the moneyed know how to stoke that fire.
Christ!. Some of youse fellas would be rilly rilly pissed off if TDB closed down comments entirely.
There is this expectation that those that run TDB must immediately drop everything to moderate your words of wisdom, then publish. As in NOW!
Gotta be a conspiracy eh?
If you think you’re being censored, start your own fucking blog and let’s hear your words of wisdom and wonderment. I’d be all ears
Either that or go over to The Standard – run by the world’s best ITC professional
Happy Friday OWT
@No Comment, This is true of the majority of blog readers including myself. The hypocrisy and chicanery of politicians and their press shills are too dreary and obvious.
Nevertheless a few blogs like ‘Strategic Culture or ‘New Eastern Outlook’ entertain no comments. Their articles though, are often worth reading. In the wind and deluge of racial rhetoric it is heartening to read about responses to the earthquake in Turkey. At the end of the article there is a link to a song in the sentence.
‘So who could hold back the tears when Masaka Kids Africana – a Ugandan kids’ choir – made a song for Turkey?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxKq0HB5VrM
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/03/02/africans-big-heart-for-turkey-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxKq0HB5VrM
You would be surprised by how many people feel uneasy or are frightened by religious zealots.
Indeed 5 year olds running thelibrary
The whole ‘Free Speech’ brigade is a bit of a farce to be frank.
You have David Cuming of the Israeli Institute ‘deep into it’ – on the board, until someone criticises Israel and suddenly you are an anti-semite.
I agree with ‘oncewastim’ bugger of and write your own blogs you are all so pure and on to it.
I have heard Tusiata Avia doing her poetry in public I thought she was fantastic. But then for most of you snowflakes you have probably never read or heard poetry anyway.
Fighting for your kind to be recognized, accepted and legitimized in a democracy is nothing new. Continue to advocate, educate and shout from the rooftops if you must, but just remember your lifestyles, opinions and worldview should and must remain open to scrutiny, rejection and yes even ridicule.
If you think this poem isn’t hate speech you may have suffered from a stroke please call a doctor immediately. Replace the word white with black and read it again. This art is racist garbage