Brendan O'Neill: All great truths begin as blasphemies

‘We shall soon be in a world’, wrote GK Chesterton, ‘in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure’. We’re in that world now. Witness the fury of the genderqueer mob that confronted Kathleen Stock at Oxford University last week. Stock is a she-devil in their eyes, an utterer of lethal blasphemies. Her heresy? She calls a man a man. She says human beings with XY chromosomes and penises are male. It is for this – the biological equivalent of saying a triangle is a three-sided thing – that the woke witchfinders demand her banishment from public life.

Martin Hanson: When an incontrovertible statement is ‘controversial’

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” George Orwell, Nineteen eighty four

In Two & Two, a Bafta-nominated short film, a male teacher and twelve schoolboys are in a grey, featureless classroom. Via a loudspeaker the headmaster announces that there are going to be changes and that the students must follow all instructions to the letter. The teacher starts the lesson by writing 2 + 2 = 5 on the blackboard. When the boys protest, he orders them to be silent. He then orders the boys to repeat the equation, and when one student raises his hand to say that two plus two is four, the teacher says, "Don't think, you don't have to think," and again tells the boys that the answer is five. 

Derek Mackie: Wake up and smell the coffee NZ!

The breakneck speed at which all things woke are being foisted on society by our Left-wing “movers and shakers”, or should that be “spoilers and breakers”, can make even the tightest screwed head spin. 

 Going out to a local cafe is something many of us appreciate and is one of the few public havens where you can enjoy your coffee and cake, untroubled by gender, race or pronouns. An opportunity to exchange views freely with friends or just sit on your own and contemplate the dire state NZ is in. 

 But for how much longer? 

If our current ideological imbeciles secure another parliamentary term this last bastion of public discourse and free speech may fall to the forces of woke conformity, minority worship and pro-Maori propaganda. 

Placing your order could be like learning a new language - Wokespeak! 

This already permeates our public sector, media, academia and corporate companies. In all likelihood, it could soon be coming to a cafe near you, giving your favourite menu a PC makeover! 

Derek Mackie: Terms of Engagement

The recent jolt to World security and peace, caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, got me pondering how NZ would react to an aggressor if our armed forces were subjected to the same insufferable woke treatment being administered to every other area of public life. 

 With that in mind, what follows is a scenario that NZ Defence Force personnel may very well face in the near-future before engaging an enemy, and reflects the current obsession our Establishment has with co-governance, positive discrimination of minorities, cultural awareness and inclusivity across NZ society as a whole. 

    A: Captain H’Ardern-up 

   M: Sergeant “Nine Lives” Mahuta

    J: Corporal “Talk ‘em dead” Jackson 

A: Right squad, gather round and pay attention. 

M: You heard the Captain. Come on you lot, kia tere! 

Derek Mackie: Prince Harry's Woke Travel Tips

You’ve got to hand it to Prince Harry. He could easily have settled for a cushy, but coma-inducing life as a major Royal, being paid an extortionate amount to smile, wave and open public events. 

But no! He’s decided to be his own man - if that’s not an offensive term these days - and go forge a new existence with his actress wife in a $20 million (NZ) dollar mansion in California, close to the woke elites he reveres. 

 Discarding all the trappings and perks of his royal heritage, apart from his title, which can open many a-door in Hollywood - as Prince Andrew demonstrated and now wishes that he had chosen not to knock on - Harry has forged a new identity for himself…as a sustainable travel guru. 

 The Duke of Suckeggs is spearheading Travalyst, a “sustainability” scoring system to impart his “state the bleeding obvious” wisdom and encourage more of us to become sustainable travellers. 

And to promote his new venture he has made a video in which New Zealand, but mostly Maori in particular, are singled out as sustainability pioneers. 

According to Harry, “Maori culture inherently understands sustainable practices and how to take better care of our life-giving land” 

Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto

The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. 

There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

Derek Mackie: The 12 Days of Christmas - 2021 version

Reflecting on another festive season and year gone by, I thought it would be nice to revive that good old yuletide classic - the 12 Days of Christmas - and give it a make-over to represent all the woke stuff so common in New Zealand life these days.

 

Unsurprisingly, I was spoilt for choice, with a plethora of PC paraphernalia and social justice crusaders to fill my 12 days. These are the ones that made the cut. 

 A one, two, three…. 

Derek Mackie: The Age of Woke

Yes people, like it or not, we live in the Woke Age. Hard to put a start date on it but my personal guess is the late 1990’s, but feel free to disagree - a concept which will be conspicuous by its absence in the rest of this article. That’s when a whole raft of issues, which used to be minority concerns, suddenly reared up and became the central focus for many Western governments. 

 Up to now, this new “age of enlightenment”, as woke followers would call it, is largely constrained to traditional wealthy democracies found in Europe, North America and Australasia. In other words, most of the world, by population, is yet to feel the woke wave or has decided it’s just not for them. Poor ignorant souls, still able to give their misplaced opinions on issues which have been ruled on by our woke leaders as unfit for public debate. 

 But where did the term “woke” come from? According to Wikipedia, “By the mid-20th century, it had come to mean well-informed or aware, especially in a political or cultural sense. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest such usage to a 1962 New York Times Magazine article titled "If You're Woke You Dig It" by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley”. 

Karl du Fresne: Kowtowing to censorious "stakeholders"

Oh, the irony.

The Featherston Booktown Festival, to be held on the weekend of May 6-9, will include a panel discussion on cancel culture, the anti-democratic phenomenon whereby ideas and opinions deemed heretical are silenced and suppressed to protect a small but noisy minority that claims to be harmed by them.

But oh, dear: the festival organisers have announced that they won’t be repeating a popular Harry Potter quiz, a feature of the last festival in 2019. The reason? The quiz might upset members of the so-called LGBT community, some of whom are offended by J K Rowling’s forthright opposition to the trans-gender lobby’s demands that trans people should be treated as authentic women, in denial of biological reality.

Andrew Bolt: Woke Culture Becomes a Security Threat

 

Andrew Bolt Transcript: Woke Culture Becomes a Security Threat 

There's a mind rot – this woke culture. In fact, being woke is now a national security threat. And to prove it let me introduce New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister Nania Mahuta – as woke as they come.