Against this progressive clerical censorship.

I was considering that they are not the most obnoxious people who turn up. That is either the Statistics department people or the electioneering. There is an election in September, and people are knocking on doors saying vote for me.

National’s fundraising is going well, and the leader’s popularity plays an important part in that.

But there is a lot more to the party’s preparedness than big-ticket fundraisers.

National’s the only party which can still count its members in the 10s of thousands. Those members have been, and will continue, working with MPs and candidates doing the old-fashioned campaigning which includes knocking on a lot more than 10,000 doors.

A wee party might be able to get away with cherry-picking in what they regard as friendly territory.

But a major party which is standing candidates in every general electorate knocks doors in every one of them, and not just over one weekend but at every opportunity the volunteers have.

For some years I have met these people and told them to stop wasting their time, the National candidate has my electorate vote, and my list vote is none of their business. But I’m wondering if that will now have a blow back on me. I’m not a member of any particular party, nor have I contributed to political parties. But perhaps I should be worried. My Dad asks me for help at times, advice, or how to deal with the intertubez. Ever since NZ had a referendum to legalize homosexuality, he’s worked with the ex-gay ministries — because if he opposes something he thinks he should help those who struggle with the issue. This group no longer has charitable status in NZ. And the homosexualists are offended that people from this group even publicize their existence within churches.

pic.twitter.com/QnvX3ovGYi

— cain (@caainu) June 15, 2014

This blog, and the fact that I do not follow the accepted secular pieties, may affect me. My job means that I would usually fit within the elite of the nation: but at this time I do not. And if I say what I think, even to someone who comes to my house, it could now blow back on me. But that does not seem to matter. Instead, people are talking past each other: in a society where everything has to be correct, and everyone can be damned, calling something sexist becomes just noise. And this is the problem with the clerisy and their censorship.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive.

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.

The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.

The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

This is how I work. @vaughndavis too methinks. pic.twitter.com/DBihi7Dizo

— Bill Bennett (@billbennettnz) June 17, 2014

The trouble is that these people think they are righteous. They are right on, they are correct. And woe betide you if you do not agree with their issues of the day, for you are evil, and you must be destroyed.

Particularly if you are warning them about their own destruction.

They think that people who don’t share their opinions are evil. Left-wingers are the most tolerant people on earth – until they encounter someone who disagrees with them. Disagreement offends their sense of righteousness, and turns champions of free speech and free love into 17th-century Puritans. If you don’t believe me, follow this simple exercise. A) Post this article on your Facebook page. B) Take note of all the people who write that “Tim Stanley is the love child of Adolf Hitler and Kenneth Williams AND HE SHOULD BE SHOT.” C) Unfriend those people immediately. That’ll sort the Right-wing wheat from the Left-wing chaff.

Besides, this is the time of peak liberalism. This is the time when the mask is off the progressive project, and the consequences of paternalistic provision to the feckless (because ideology) has become abundantly clear.

Ignore the media. ignore the messages from the state. Hold fast to the truth, and remain secure as all else shifts like sand during a spring tide, while you are secure above the storm. The state is not built on a sure foundation, no matter how pretty their buildings are.

Inside the elaborate US Embassy in Iraq: http://t.co/KvaVR3UL2w – @currycolleen pic.twitter.com/0ryvDuq7Bc

— ABC News (@ABC) June 17, 2014

Throughout the 18th century, for example, France was the greatest superpower in Europe, if not the world. But they became complacent, believing that they had some sort of ‘divine right’ to reign supreme, and that they could be as fiscally irresponsible as they liked.

The French government spent money like drunken sailors; they had substantial welfare programs, free hospitals, and grand monuments. They held vast territories overseas, engaged in constant warfare, and even had their own intrusive intelligence service that spied on King and subject alike.

Of course, they couldn’t pay for any of this. French budget deficits were out of control, and they resorted to going heavily into debt and rapidly debasing their currency. Stop me when this sounds familiar. The French economy ultimately failed, bringing with it a 26-year period of hyperinflation, civil war, military conquest, and genocide.

History is full of examples, from ancient Mesopotamia to the Soviet Union, which show that whenever societies reach unsustainable levels of resource consumption and allocation, they collapse.

America's capital stock is an astounding 13% below its pre-crisis trend http://t.co/0NEgXr0RCr pic.twitter.com/7zDrrNwWfC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 17, 2014

I am very fortunate: I was born in NZ, a small country with one great virtue: we can turn grass into milk, mutton, wool and beef. We almost went bankrupt trying to increase our industrial capacity (making generic iron from ironsand ore, and selling hydro power cheap to smelt aluminium, among other follies). We know we cannot afford this: the USA has yet to learn this. Other countries with the same blessings, such as Argentina never did learn that there are limits to the social welfare system — until they defaulted on their loans.

But the, we don’t build beautiful monuments to our impotence. We leave that to the current clerisy, who as they do this forget that their time, too, will pass.