Free Speechifying Part Deux

The fight for free speech has a very real and measurable impact. I'll let Christopher Hitchens take over:

"two decades ago the theocratic head of a foreign state offered a large sum of money, in his own name, in public, to suborn the murder of a writer of fiction who was not himself an Iranian."

Three people died as a result of this and Salmon Rushdie had to spend the good part of 20 years under police protection. Note the importance of this. Some dude, in another country, not known to you, decides that what you say or write about is unacceptable, and commands his followers to hunt you down and kill you if they can. They then make life so difficult for you and anyone involved with you that the ideas you speak of are no longer spoken of because you know, who the hell wants to be on the end of a credible death threat?

The ever so notorious Mohammed cartoons, that caused so much trouble, riots, property damage and death, that no sane publisher in the West is going to attempt the same. The media is constantly pushing our leaders to enter into "dialogue" with Muslims, to see if we can resolve the differences. Interfaith leaders (read: religious leaders from different denominations) keep telling us we must keep open a dialogue with our "Muslim brothers" so that such terrible things as the current Pope quoting an Emperor from the middle ages does not happen, or Burger King stops making blasphemous sunday cup lids, or any other multitude of evil offensive things the West generally does to offend Muslims.

“Where does [the dialogue] start? Would it start, for instance, with making a joke? Contra Mr Khomeini – not a funny man. Or, would it start with an article, perhaps? Would it start, perhaps, with a film? It did, a few years ago, with Submission, and Theo van Gogh was killed. Could it start with making a joke, perhaps? A joke in a cartoon? Well, apparently not, because we know there were burnings and killings and lootings and rioting across the globe in reaction to those cartoons. If you’re going to start a dialogue, what could you do that would be smaller than drawing a cartoon? This dialogue which we keep on being offered is not reciprocated.”
--Douglas Murray, 9th Oct 2007, Debate topic:
We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values

Another dread cartoon that offended the "wrong" people (notwithstanding their deliberate misunderstanding of the image)

Infrared Photos

Because they look really cool. Go check 'em out (via david thompson)

Free Speechifying Part 1

The "right" to free speech is a difficult one to understand. The fact that our civilization is literally built on this right is one often forgotten and obscured. Today, organizations with names ending in "... Human Rights Commissions" are gradually eroding this right to free speech in the name of political correctness. The central axiom of political correctness is the idea that one must not utter nor think thoughts that could be harmful to others, because causing offense, as opposed to causing grievous bodily harm or property damage, is the worst sin one could commit.

How did we get here? Have the populations in liberal democracies been lulled into thinking that things are how they are and will ever be? Real blood was spilled in the major conflicts of the last century (WW1 and WW2) on the "idea" of freedom. Men, women and children sacrificed creature comforts, food and property, and in many instances their lives, so that the "idea" of liberal democracy could thrive. Central to the idea of a liberal democracy is the concept that dissent can be voiced, heard and then hopefully resolved in a manner that avoids bloodshed. I don't believe this is the "end-game" of liberal democracies, just that this is where we are now.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) - source: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html
[also attributed to Mark Twain - Jack]

The right to free speech can be boiled down to the right to offend. It is inevitable that the free exchange of ideas, that certain ideas will offend people. Copernicus would never have published his heliocentric theory (that the sun is the center of the solar system and not Earth) in the 16th century if he was worried about the potential offense to the religious authorities of the day. His theories became the foundations on which Newton and others built our current day understanding of the solar system. Not a bad trade off for the potential to cause offense.

Among western countries, the Canadian Human Rights commissions have been the most active in prosecuting "incorrect thoughts". Canadian agent provocateur Ezra Levant has been on the wrong side of a Human Rights action and had to spend over $100,000 defending himself. The hypocrisy of the action is well documented. The commissions only want more power in the pursuit of an impossible, politically correct future. As Mark Steyn said when commenting about these Human Wrongs Rights commissions:

"When you subordinate legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril and that's the state in Ontario today. If you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you don't believe in free speech at all."

The last word from a column in The Australian:

"But the West is killing free speech slowly - by more subtle means - through state-sponsored censorship under the grand name of protecting human rights."

What a change that would make if those institutions so interested in "human rights" actually focused on real human rights, as opposed to the PC garbage they promote.

Links:

Copernicus Reference:

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/
• http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Copernicus.html

The most ultimate totally awesome rubber band gun eva!

I so want one of these...

Alternative Ideas

(via Melanie Phillips)

From the charter of IPCC, the primo organization that along with the Goracle and his posse, are the ones pretty much responsible for the entire Warming hysteria:

"Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. "

Sounds pretty objective to me. Waddareckon the odds are that they would consider any alternative hypothesis (such as say, natural climate cycles) ?

(idea for this post kinda stolen from here)

Hypocrisy, thy name is Peace

A good column describing the hypocrisy of Western "peace" movements when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Some of the juice:

"For the many Americans, the math is pretty simple. Leaders who want to promote the well-being of the people they lead do not launch rockets into neighboring territory from densely populated civilian neighborhoods and people who merely want a state of their own do not go about screaming incessantly about destroying somebody else's."

It would be nice if the media were to pick up on that particular point.

"On this score, Christian peacemakers are doing what pacifists have always done - avert their eyes from those aspects of reality would force them to come to grips with human sin in a meaningful manner. "

Could be a problem with all religions on that one, but I'll keep that diatribe for another day.

Links

• From the article, US Congress' resolution condemning Hamas.

Words fail me

Before you jump on a high horse to decry the evil American Imperialist crusaders in Iraq, take a moment to examine the tactics of the other guys:

From AP (via LGF):

"In a separate prison interview with The Associated Press, with interrogators nearby, the woman said she was part of a plot in which young women were raped and then sent to her for matronly advice. She said she would try to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame and to reclaim their honor."
...
"She said she was "able to persuade women to become suicide bombers ... broken women, especially those who were raped."

A noble resistance indeed.

Please let this be BS....

(picture source)

I hope to the bottom of my heart and pray to the Almighty Space Monkey that this story is crap and a beat up. Allegedy, The Age had it up and then pulled it (possibly because it was BS, or maybe not..):

"A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for “Forest Jihad.”
...
"The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.” "

A futile retraction

picture source

(via LGF)

You may recall a month ago, the world was agog (agog! I tell you) that Israel had the temerity to respond to constant shelling of it's civilian population by shooting at the fuckers that were launching rockets. Allegedly one of the shells struck a school where 40 Palestinian civilians were sheltering and they were all killed.

• Daily Mail: "Gaza's darkest day: 40 die as Israel bombs 'safe haven' UN school"
  
• The Guardian: "Gaza's day of carnage - 40 dead as Israelis bomb two UN schools"
• The Times: "Ban Ki-Moon lambasts shelling of UN in Gaza"

Protests ensued and swastikas were bandied about, rhetoric got heated and the media and everyone got all very nasty at Israel about it's clearly disproportionate retaliation and lack of perfect weaponry that only kills bad guys.

And now a month later, when no one any longer gives a rat's arse (especially the media because they are too busy covering Obama's latest bowel movement) and the damage is done, the agency that first reported this 'war crime' (hint: it begins with a U and ends with an N) has now retracted the report that started all this rage and international condemnation.

What's the bet you're going to see that story in any paper soon?

Hubris

"We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name."
-- President Barak H Obama in an interview with Al-Arabiya TV, 27th Jan, 2009

In an attempt at outreach to the "Muslim world", Prez Obama did an interview on Al-Arabiya TV channel. The intent was noble, the message...well I can't do any justice to the fisking by Charles Krauthammer.

A taster:

"Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn't just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq."

Read it all.

Links:

YouTube interview: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_lLttxxrs

Al-Arabiya transcript: http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/01/27/65087.html

Heresy

Long story short, the supervisor at NASA of James Hansen, Mr "Science is Settled and Al Gore is my bro" (my post about him here), has now officially declared himself a skeptic. Amongst all the other evil the ex US president George W. Bush was supposed to have done, it was alleged in a media frenzy two years ago that he was attempting to "muzzle" NASA's research in support of man made global warming.

That's right, one of the really really high up dudes at NASA is now an official Warming Skeptic.

From the article:

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”

And a replay for those that missed out on my emphasis above:

we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it

Amen.

So lets have a quick look at The Age to see how they are questioning their assumptions on this hot button issue with this news. Whingeing that the Global Financial Crisis has pushed the "climate change" debate out of the media and political eye, what seems to be a press release from some unknown lobby group:

"Almost without exception, the ethical implications of climate change — for the developing world, for the larger biotic community, for future generations — are being overlooked."

Note that the author feels that discussion of "climate change" solutions etc.. should supersede debate about the economy. How does one protect the environment without an economy?

"It is often argued that we have to come up with a practical solution to climate change, and that this involves leaving the wider issues of environmental justice until a later date."

Environmental justice?? Seriously, WTF is Environmental justice?!? Does the natural world have an ethical framework that some agency can enforce punishment and regulation??

"Environmental justice" at work