More speakers arriving

Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, August 3rd, 2018 - 20 comments
Categories: tech industry, thinktank - Tags: ,

If you felt like being challenged but can’t quite imagine opening your leftie Facebook after going to Laura Southern, you could always open your minds for another for-profit event, with Dr Cornell West and Douglas Murray. Mediated by Mihingarangi Forbes, and then hopefully a decent scrappy argument with the audience, some cameras, rolling blogs, you get the picture.

The event is on Friday 17th of August at Auckland’s ASB Theatre.

No need to protest their entry into the country, fellow travellers.

Dr. Cornell West was neck deep in the Black Panther and Malcolm X. He loathed President Obama from beginning to end. And he was Councillor West in The Matrix. And worked with Andre3000. So yeah, cool. Plus Harvard Professor in philosophy. Like a walking hard-leftie tick-box.

Douglas Murray did a really interesting book in 2017 entitled “The Strange Death of Europe”. So you can get yourself for plenty of talk about the cultural influence of imported Islamic practices, and the problems of multiculturalism.

Cue outrage.

And who is this great conspiracy daring to bring such people into the country to test our actual practices with some non-mainstream facts? They are called Thinkinc.

They launched in 2014 with the mandate of creating a community where ideas can be shared, challenged, voiced and become a champion of democratising ideas. The kind of burn-stale-thinking that the left used to own and be proud of.

An actual group with actual people, who probably make a wee living doing it. Appalling I know.

20 comments on “More speakers arriving ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Bill 1
    3 August 2018 at 11:09 am

    How to get them the same amount of free publicity and oxygen as the challenged no-body’s from Canada. That’s the question.

    Anyone got a high horse pumping forth on legs of righteous intolerance that they’d like to lend out?

    • tsmithfield 1.1
      3 August 2018 at 11:33 am

      Would you like us righties to petition the government not to let them in? Maybe organise some protests. Maybe trash a few things?

  2. tsmithfield 2
    3 August 2018 at 11:11 am

    This actually looks like an interesting debate. It is always good to hear a debate from opposing perspectives.

    Are they coming to Christchurch?

  3. Carolyn_Nth 3
    3 August 2018 at 11:32 am

    Interesting concept.

    I had to click through a couple of links to find the price for the Auckland gig: $39-$127+

    So, not totally free speech.

    I have always found Cornell West to be worth reading.

    • Ad 3.1
      3 August 2018 at 11:38 am

      No freedom is cost-free.
      It’s not worth anything if it is.

      • Drowsy M. Kram 3.1.1
        3 August 2018 at 12:12 pm

        Where could one find information on approximate relative costs of various freedoms?

        Citizenship for Sale and the Neoliberal Political Economy of Belonging
        – Luca Marvelli (International Studies Quarterly, OUP, 2018-05-16)

        [Luca joined the University of Kent as a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in September 2012 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2014. Prior to this, Luca was a lecturer at the University of Surrey (2012), an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex (2011), and held teaching positions at the University of Queensland, Australia and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2010).]

        “I approach neoliberalism as a process of economization, which disseminates the model of the market to all spheres of human activity, even where money is not at stake. Neoliberal economization turns states and individuals into entrepreneurial actors that attempt to maximize their value, not just in economic and financial but also in moral and emotional terms. This process, I conclude, undermines political notions of citizenship grounded in reciprocity, equality, and solidarity, not by replacing these principles with economic ones but by rewriting these principles in economic terms.”

        https://academic.oup.com/isq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/isq/sqy004/4996972

    • veutoviper 3.2
      3 August 2018 at 11:54 am

      The range you quote ($39 -#127+) is the search range. Actual ticket costs are shown as $59, $89 and VIP meet and greet (and front row?) $249. All prices incur a $5 booking fee and possible delivery fees.

      http://www1.ticketmaster.co.nz/event/240054CCEEFC1BF1?mc_cid=4adf25f732&mc_eid=%5BUNIQID%5D

      PS – Kia kaha for tonight and be careful. What PR said.

  4. Dennis Frank 4
    3 August 2018 at 1:11 pm

    From Wikipedia’s Orwell page: “A statue of George Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. These are words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.”

    • Puckish Rogue 4.1
      3 August 2018 at 1:18 pm

      Yeah but what would Orwell know about real fascists, he didn’t even have a twitter account

      • Dennis Frank 4.1.1
        3 August 2018 at 1:56 pm

        Ha. So he was a writer who travelled to Spain & fought the fascists, unlike keyboard operators here who call people fascists even when there’s no evidence they are. Reminds me of Muldoon calling everyone who disagreed with him a communist. When you’re a hammer, everything else is a nail. Behaviourism?

        • Puckish Rogue 4.1.1.1
          3 August 2018 at 2:52 pm

          The problem, to me anyway, with labels is that over use mean the labels lessen their effectiveness, like the use of the term fascist simply because you don’t like someone elses view

          i remember when, for a time, activists used the term holocaust to describe the colonisation of NZ simply for shock value but the term lost its power

          • Stuart Munro 4.1.1.1.1
            3 August 2018 at 3:21 pm

            “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” – Kong Ja

            Not so much facists as pro-fascist activists.

            There’s a very odd equation going on with the likes of Southern:

            “You’ve been screwed by Wall street and the liberal left aren’t protecting your interests, therefore you should vote for a Cheeto-headed sock puppet for Putin who will screw you even worse.”

            We’ve got plenty of stupid in NZ already without importing more.

          • Dennis Frank 4.1.1.1.2
            3 August 2018 at 3:32 pm

            Yeah, totally agree. The people who misuse adjectives in a serious context reduce discourse to drivel.

            During the depression, half a decade earlier, Orwell had described himself as a “Tory-anarchist.” Fighting the fascists for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification may seem to make him Marxist but Wikipedia provides no evidence that he ever actually was. That party was then “painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organisation—was outlawed and under attack.” He & his wife managed to escape them, got back to England. The Republican government didn’t give up: “on 13 July 1937 a deposition was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason, Valencia, charging the Orwells with “rabid Trotskyism”.

            Leftists persecuting leftists instead of presenting a united front against the fascists – that would have raised his political consciousness considerably. So that’s where Animal Farm & 1984 came from. “Orwell stated in “Why I Write” (1946): “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe…” Today, he’d be a remainer. [quotes from his Wiki]