By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 12/03/2020

As observed in last week’s overview of Natural Rights according to John Locke, America’s Founding Fathers beautifully echoed Locke’s liberty rights in the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These liberty rights require nothing from others, except that they exercise the virtue of tolerance (live and let live), hence being often referred to as “negative rights.”

Thus Locke’s concept of a liberty-oriented, self-governing society based on natural law placed rigorous personal independence and responsibility at the very heart of its potential to flourish.

James Madison penned these words during the framing of the Constitution:

“…what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” [James Madison, The Federalist, 51]

As we all know, human beings are far from perfect and some folk are even downright malevolent. The justification for creating governments instituted by men lies in this fact and so also does the conviction of the Founding Fathers that government be limited and have its powers continually restrained – hence the Bill of Rights which sets amendments of the Constitution into federal law.

But since Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s pet project – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – was adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, natural rights have been completely flipped on their head.

Instead of continuing to develop a system of rights, and laws to protect those rights built upon the bases of reason and personal independence, ie, universal human identity in a state of nature, the new laws began to supplant the old on the bases of weakness and personal dependence. 

What was once a natural right to “the pursuit of happiness” was rewritten in empathetic-sounding language to mean a right “to demand happiness” via the vehicle of constant approval and acquiescence from all other citizens.
Consider the wording of these new rights in the UDHR:

The Right to Social Security #22 – “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.”

The Right to Work #23 – “3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

The Right to Play #24 – “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” 

The Right to Education #26 – “2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

Responsibility #29 – “1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

If one reads through all of the rights laid out in the UNDHR, the term “dignity” is used a lot – and so is this strange term: “and the free development of his personality,” along with, “due recognition and respect for the rights and freedom of others.”  These phrasings can facilitate a shit-load lot of nonsense and have done so. 

As just one example illustrates so well, the charge of the Woke Brigade has been campaigning to compel others (everyone) to use nonsensical pronouns like “zir,” or “ze,” in deference to the demands of neurotic, gender-obsessed individuals.
 
It was this point which rocketed Professor Jordan Peterson into the public eye when Canada sought to enact Bill C-16, an amendment to the Human Rights Act and their Criminal Code, making it illegal to not recognise and respect the rights of gender identity and gender expression.  Not using correct personal pronouns, which are not even in the English language, was to become a crime, and now is.
 
Peterson always stated that he didn’t have a big problem with using pronouns like “zir” or “ze” to individual students if they asked him to; what got his goat was the State making laws to force people to use language they would not normally use. That, in Peterson’s mind, was a giant leap too far and something reminiscent of totalitarian regimes and Orwellian “Newspeak”.  He was right.

This is exactly what “due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society” means.  If you don’t willingly give such active due recognition and respect etc, you’re a criminal. 

When Peterson said, “No! I will not be compelled to speak a state-imposed language,” he felt the full brunt of Canada’s human rights laws come down upon his head.  His own traditional natural rights and freedoms were irrelevant.
 
Freedom in the classical liberal sense now means something quite different than that which John Locke’s liberty rights conceived of, and that which the Founding Fathers midwifed into existence during the birth of American liberty in 1776. The purveyors of the ever-widening dimensions of so-called human rights have sought to overthrow them – and they are by no means done yet.
 
Rather than societies flourishing on a foundation of personal independence and individual responsibility which requires only tolerance from others of the live and let live variety, the new rights compel citizens to acquiesce to the weak-spirited subjective-happiness-demands of others as they cite their “right to be recognised and respected,” over everything from their diverse cultural and religious scruples to the active development of their personality and gender-fluidity.
   
And hell help you if you don’t.  

By Olivia Pierson
First published onInsight@theBFD 5/03/2020

No discussion of human rights can ever be embarked upon without at least a basic summary understanding about the thoughts of English political philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704).

In his work Two Treatises on Government, Locke, who had just returned from exile in Holland when the 1688 Glorious Revolution saw William of Orange take the throne, argued against the divine right of kings while his contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, had made arguments for it – Filmer because he believed kingship was a sovereign right ordained by God, and Hobbes because he believed man to be so base and corrupted that he must be subject to external controls, i.e, absolute governance. 

Locke’s ideas about personal liberty were indeed truly radical.  He believed that man had an absolute right to fight off an abusive government, a right which rested on the same principle that afforded a man “in a state of nature” the right to fight off an intruder into his home.

In a state of nature, thought Locke, man was born free and equal, and in possession of certain faculties, namely – reason and the power to imagine abstractly (a conceptual mind). The ability to personally govern our will, passions and desires is dependent upon our natural mental ability to abstract, i.e, to project our consciousness into past, present and future scenarios, all the while relating them to the self, in order to rationally regulate and choose our own actions through judgement.
 
This basis for self-governance arises from the concept of self-ownership, and to install by consent a government over the free citizens of a society, rights by compact, could only be successful if a population – and also a government – were capable of virtue. 

Locke wrote, “Every man has a property in his own Person.  This nobody has a right to, but himself.”

In Enlightenment parlance ‘personhood’ encompassed the personal realm of one’s body, one’s thoughts, one’s speech, one’s freedom, one’s conscience, one’s time, one’s happiness and one’s labour.  The term “property rights” did not narrowly pertain only to material acquisitions, it very much included this realm of the deeply personal – essential attributes of possessing a human identity.
 
We are born free and are self-owned. Locke referred broadly to a divine order which makes it so – as long as we are the property of Nature, Nature’s God or the Creator, we are the property of no other human being.

America’s Founding Fathers beautifully echoed Locke’s liberty rights in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These liberty rights require nothing from others, except that they exercise the virtue of tolerance (live and let live), hence being often referred to as “negative rights.”

Thus Locke’s concept of a liberty-oriented, self-governing society based on natural law placed rigorous personal independence and responsibility at the very heart of its potential to flourish.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

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By Olivia Pierson
First published onInsight@theBFD 27/02/2020

Outspoken pentecostal Christian and wannabe politician, Hannah Tamaki of Destiny Church, is the latest victim of a media bullying campaign because of her cultural views.  Scheduled to be a contestant on the next season of Dancing With the Stars, Mrs Tamaki was suddenly dropped by the woke MediaWorks team due to complaints that her views are bigoted, homophobic and racist (weep only for their lack of imagination).

A spokesperson for MediaWorks made an official statement yesterday:

“It was originally planned for Hannah to take part in the show. We now recognise this was a mistake and we apologise.

We have seen a very strong reaction, some of which has been extreme and concerning and MediaWorks does not condone bullying. We would be failing in our duty of care to everyone if we continued as planned.”

“Duty of care to everyone” – what role in our lives have these uppity people arrogated to themselves, that of our national doctors and therapists?

It has become a staggering pattern that in order to ostensibly protect some people from bullying, these self-appointed guardians of thought morph directly into the worst bullies imaginable. 

Social media boiled over with folks hollering out insults about Mrs Tamaki in the most self-righteous tones known to man, but worse than that, the Project’s TV show host, Kanoa Lloyd, sounding every inch the millennial snowflake, said these very silly words on television:

“The ideas that the Tamakis have can actually be deadly. There would be no Christchurch mosque shootings if it wasn’t for dangerous ideals like that… that stuff is properly dangerous.”

“That stuff” which Ms Lloyd refers to in the dialect of Bimboian, is likely to be a reference to Mrs Tamaki’s anti-Islamic views.  There is no need to go into the Tamakis’ homophobic views when Brian Tamaki, with his wife at his side, made a very public apology to the gay community for espousing them – which is more than any apostle of Islam has ever done, given that in Islamic countries homosexuals are frequently put to death by the more devout in their midst.

Shortly after the Christchurch mosque massacre in March 2019, where 51 people lost their lives, Sri Lanka suffered multiple, co-ordinated Islamic terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday where 259 people lost their lives, including 45 foreign nationals.  Three churches, three luxury hotels and a guesthouse were the targets. I don’t remember our media machine condemning any aspect of Islamic thought, despite these types of attacks being horrifically commonplace all over the world, including the West. They were still too busy crying “They are Us!”

As I write this, Christians all over the Middle East and Africa are being raped, attacked, beaten, murdered and genocided out of existence.  This is an ongoing religious cleansing wherever Islam holds sway: Nigeria, Egypt, Cameroon, Uganda, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.  

​Christians happen to be the most currently persecuted group of people on our planet – at the hands of Muslims – and an ignorant little wokey-two-shoes such as Ms Lloyd would do well to get an education on these indisputable facts before sounding-off to excoriate any Christian for holding anti-Islam views.
 
Islam is not a race, it’s a theocratic ideology – and a backward, violent, uncivilised one.  It’s every human being’s right to openly critique any ideology in play, especially the worst of them. 

The selectors of Dancing With the Stars have the right to choose who gets to dance in their kitsch show, hardly anyone watches it and therefore no one cares anyway. A controversial alpha personality like Hannah Tamaki would’ve actually been a ratings draw-card. But MediaWorks should cut the delusional crap about “their duty of care” when referring to NZ citizens as if we’re all mentally frail invalids who cannot think for ourselves any more.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"