Damian Grant is quite likely enjoying himself this week. Look at him being talked about on social media! Look at him being talked about by Sir Ian Taylor in Stuff! Never mind that it’s saying Damian Grant is a dick and here are fourteen different examples — it’s saying Damian Grant, Damian Grant. There’s nothing more satisfying for an attention seeker.
It is for that reason that I hardly ever mention him. Dedicated Google vanity searching will quickly lead him to your door the moment you do. Even though he has appeared fewer than half a dozen times in 1600 editions of this newsletter, you can guarantee a tweet will swiftly appear asking coquettishly: Why is David Slack so obsessed with me?
The schtick never varies. Stick-poking; Darwinistic pose-striking; doctrinaire libertarianism, the heart of stone worn demonstratively upon the sleeve. The more contrarian he gets, the more erect the prose becomes, the more extravagant the assertions. And yet because we are talking about a fervent supporter of the ACT party and the Taxpayers’ Union, it will come entangled in expressions of devotion to vested interests and the status quo.
It’s just a waste of time. When COVID brought a phone call from the Sunday paper editor letting me know they would be chucking all the freelancers like me overboard, she mentioned she was wondering what to do with Damian because he’d offered to stay on and work for nothing. I have no idea what ensued but there he remains.
This weekend he turned his gaze to beautiful, otherworldly Central Otago, a part of the country he happily declares he’s never visited, to declare his great disapproval of the stand longtime local Sam Neill has taken against the proposal to dig a bloody great mine there.
The opinion piece offered the usual dross: reasoning failures, bald assertions, stay in your lane edicts, a strident defence of the right of people with money to do whatever they want and fuck everything and everybody else.
Also, there was a patronising lecture on the need for the country to make money so it can pay for the things it needs. This argument, when so presented, could equally be used to bolster the case for filling the Canterbury Plains with poppy fields producing the world’s most eco-friendly heroin. Try our new range with manuka honey!
Jeez, Professor, tell us more about this concept of needing money to pay for things we want, about which we understand fucking nothing. Perhaps you might like to try a bit harder to tell us how something of such finite duration and limited scope for employment and royalties makes much of an economic case at all.
You know what would make much more sense? An entire economy utilising our abundant potential for renewable energy. But good luck getting an antediluvian to give that a minute’s consideration.
So what happened next was this:
Sam put a video on Instagram in his winning way — avuncular and slightly bemused — to describe a shitload of invective that has been sprayed in his direction, all the way up to death threats.
Light touch, paper stand, clear. Sir Ian Taylor responded in Sam’s defence. The usual suspects took all this as the red rag they’re always ready to be aroused by, and came charging in. Naturally this included Sean Plunket. Naturally they’re making a self-righteous sanctimonious meal of it.
How they seem to pine for the way things were when a man could say what he thought and eat as many pies as he liked and drive however he wanted and no castrating bitch would get all shrill about keeping your paws to yourself and no-one had pronouns and people understood that the weather has always been like that, and if somebody came up with an idea for making a buck then we would just let him get on with it forfucksake.
Such a stale world they inhabit, as described here.
a chest-beating Darwinism that owes most of its philosophical debt to Ayn Rand and On The Mat
Has anything evolved since then? Nope, that’s the point. They really don’t like the idea of changing anything.
