They’re All Grifters Aren’t They?
April 26, 2023
By NZB3
The post from Peter Cresswell’s blog Don’t feed the grifters (March 2023) accurately identifies a species of Tourist Grifter that New Zealand receives from time to time. Posie Parker put in a little effort visiting Auckland and walked away with publicity and extra donations that money can’t buy after the stationary riot in Albert Park. PC identifies Brian Tamaki as a domestic grifter. Interestingly they were both peddling their grift at the same time in the same city. The griftmarket must be booming!
But what’s the difference between a grifter who drops in and out of our country for a performance or two like this and a musician holding a concert? Billy Joel, Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Harry Styles all swung in and out at about the same time too. Paid a bit of lip service to the local venue to help make headlines and sell some Tshirts or whatever. Swung out again, off to do it somewhere else. Ticket sales are one of their revenue streams but there are others which people like Posie Parker knows how to access too so as far as that goes it’s the same model.
“Well,” you might say, “strip away the ticket thing and the music part and they’re still not the same because those guys are providing a service.” Ah, but Posie Parker is providing a service too isn’t she? Plenty of ‘Voices for Freedom’ and ‘Reality Check Radio‘ and ‘Leighton Smith podcast’ and ‘The Platform‘ listeners get a big kick out of whatever it was she did. They feel validated, vindicated, cathartic. They get to come together for the event and they get to talk about their ‘war stories’ for years afterwards and interview each other about it on their radio shows. So too is there a valuable sociological function to those who hate the visitor. They too get to sell advertisements in their newspapers and radio shows by talking about how great it was driving Parker out. How cathartic and connected they felt doing it. Ask them. They’ll tell you it’s true.
“There are grifters everywhere, on every loud and voluble side. Making a living by making themselves live clickbait. This is all very exciting to the protagonists, I’m sure and to the newscasters who need them, because it fills up their news broadcasts and column inches with colourful but undemanding fare. Because it’s issues played out simply for live clickbait. Activism theatre. “Activists” observing an issue out there, and discovering how to make clickbait out of it.”
“There’s a certain genius to this kind of activism. To make an important stand and to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them? No, not at all: in order to attract more followers. And more clicks.” – Don’t feed the grifters, Not PC (March 2023)
“A missing market is a situation in microeconomics where a competitive market allowing the exchange of a commodity would be Pareto-efficient, but no such market exists.” – Wiki
So people like Parker, and Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern too, are providing a valuable service not met in our domestic market. It’s what we called at school a ‘Missing Market’ but for our international rescuers.
But then what’s the difference between this grifter tourism and the domestic economy? Scale?
What do you call ACT when it has just 1 MP? Or when it has 10? Is Sean Plunket a grifter and would he not be if he scaled up? Was Today FM? Is New Shub? How are they any different?
“And there is something obscene in the attitude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself” – Ayn Rand
“In it I discovered this great passage from St. Augustine, where he writes of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great: The Emperor angrily demanded of him, “How dare you molest the seas?” To which the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.” – york.ie
Strip away the mainstream media and the political spin-wonkers and who remains who is real? Who is really patriotic about New Zealand and cares about liberty and solving complex social problems? Who’s going for PC’s “reasonable and rational conclusions?” Look around. See anyone?
If there were anyone like that in ‘the arena’ they would be the enemy of all. They wouldn’t get much attention and they wouldn’t be raking in the cash from revenue streams. I listened to Posy Parker being interviewed by Kim Hill on RNZ and by Sean Plunket on The Platform. In one or both interviews she just referred to her cash funnel here as ‘selling Tshirts’ and she said she was ‘very good at it.’ I also watched Dancing With The Stars back in 2018 (disclaimer: someone we knew was on the show) and was interested to see how David Seymour was constantly on his phone doing political business. You wouldn’t think a low-power opposition electorate MP would have all that much wheeling and dealing to do yet he was at it full time as everyone kept pointing out. Grifters have to work hard too.
So my answer is that Posy Parker is just as ‘real’ as anyone in the political/social/cultural/celebrity arena we have. She’s also as fake as any of them. It’s all a performance, a game, and has been for quite some time even in New Zealand. There’s even a word for this: Kayfabe. “A convincing argument can be made that it’s time for the mainstream media to follow suit, and to admit that what they say does not reflect reality. Should they come out and admit that the product they sell is not information, but dramatic entertainment portrayed as political conflict? Is it time for the mainstream media to abandon kayfabe?” Ref. VJM (2020)
Go back again to PC’s issue about a genuine Kiwi making an important stand to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them. Well that would be like going into a movie set and thinking it were real and trying to really punch and fight bad guys and rescue people from CGI. Or, like trying to wrestle Hulk Hogan or The Rock for real without looking at the cameras. Or like really sawing a woman in half or making a the State of Liberty vanish as David Copperfield the magician did in 1983. If you did those things people would end up hurt, dead, appalled! You would be breaking The Matrix (The Statrix.) People would call the police. You’d go to jail or at the very least be hated by the audience as some kind of crazy person. They wouldn’t ask how come Hulk Hogan can’t take a punch. They’d consider it some kind of pitch invasion or cheating if you really had a fight in the arena rather than participate in the theater show.
I was recently learning about how Andreas Grüntzig developed angioplasty therapy and how it spread through the Western world through videos and teaching. He didn’t need to be a celebrity razzle-dazzle ‘Music Man’ and ‘Monorail’ salesman, did he? He presented his evidence, demonstrated his procedure, brought in a Khunian Paradigm Shift to the way we deal with broken hearts. I don’t know if you can do that in medicine these days or even the sciences. You certainly can’t do it in politics these days. No Clicks/Likes/Follows/Retweets in that! Certainly it wasn’t through reason and persuasion that the COVID Pandemic (a political pandemic) spread. It was spread through Clicks/Likes/Follows/Retweets into the herd.
So the good little Libertarian wishing to settle urgent problems about our society has a big problem. He can stay out of this arena and be irrelevant. That’s one option. The other choice is to participate in the arena, down in the weeds and the mud, competing for clicks and picking which true things to admit to and which lies to tell to keep his head in ‘the game’. One road leads to having no effect and the other leads to your effect being yet another pointless sideshow. But that isn’t the dilemma I set to solve today.
We’ve learned this much from this exploration: They’re all grifters, aren’t they. Not a question.
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