We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

Expect more half-hearted bleating that this has nothing to do with Islam, but in any case even if it did, Islam is a religion of peace along with weasel words about “responsibility” to the effect that the magazine should not have “inflamed passions”. Simultaneously, expect a huge PR drive – supported by various lefty idiots – from Muslim groups who make it all about them, how they feel, and how they are now scared of a backlash before the bodies have even cooled. This is precisely what we saw in Australia a few weeks ago, and I don’t expect much from European politicians.

Tim Newman commenting here.

32 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Paul Marks

    Yes, quite correct Mr Newman.

    Indeed it is already happening.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    When presented with this sort of waffling, the thing to do is ask the wafflers if they really believe that, or are they just afraid of being killed? And perhaps ask them how we can tell the difference.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    From the Daily Telegraph today:

    In October last year, imprisoned Syrian journalist Mazen Darwish managed to smuggle a note from his Damascus cell to the free speech charity English PEN. Darwish had been singled out for an award by PEN and Salman Rushdie, and he took the opportunity to address Rushdie directly, writing:

    “[W]e committed an unforgivable sin in the Arab world when we responded with indifference to the fatwas and calls for your death. So indifferent were we that we colluded – even if just by our silent complicity – in excluding and eliminating difference, while acting as if the whole thing had nothing to do with us. And so here we are today, paying the high, bloodsoaked price of that collusion, and finding ourselves the main victims of the obscurantist ideology now infiltrating our homes and our cities.

    What a great shame that it has taken us all of this bloodshed to arrive at the belief that we are the ones who will pay the price for preventing those with whom we disagree from expressing their views – and that we will pay with our lives and our futures. What a shame this much blood has had to be spilled for us to realise, finally, that we are digging our own graves when we allow thought to be crushed by accusations of unbelief, calling people infidels, and when we allow opinion to be countered with violence.”

    Today’s obscenity may shock us, but we must not be rendered speechless.

  • ajf

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9f90f482-9672-11e4-a40b-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fcompanies_media%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct&siteedition=uk#axzz3O9Bd0WLF

    Not sure how to work the links, but anyway, this is a pretty despicable article from the FT imo. Victim blaming etc. But the commentators are almost universally appalled.

  • Regional

    Is it true that a Frogistan Gendarme tried to surrender to the perps and they rejected his offer?

  • Rob

    The FT share the great delusion in mistaking the Islamist’s excuses for terror as reasons or causes.

    They have yet to understand that they will cease to be targets on the day they submit to Islam, completely and irrevocably.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    The FT is a truly mixed bag. It’s only recent great moment was in fisking the pile of nonsense from Thomas Piketty.

  • Cal

    >Is it true that a Frogistan Gendarme tried to surrender to the perps and they rejected his offer?

    There is unedited footage on YouTube of them running up to an injured officer who is lying on the ground, who puts his arm up to them, either in surrender or to indicate to them not to shoot (he is lying helpless), and they shoot him in the head from point-blank range.

  • Snag

    It’s quite clear that No True Muslim would carry out such an atrocity.

  • Looking at the link Cal posted, I wonder whether these couple of pricks would have been as confident had the citizenry been carrying rifles instead of iPhones. I’ve yet to hear of an attack like this in Texas.

  • Just nuke Mecca, Medina and qom next Hajj time and I don’t mean a nice nuking. I mean multiple patterned air-bursts to utterly destroy the places and then repeated ground-bursts to take them out for a million years. Do that and then ask some beards round to an ecumenical conference.

  • D. Neilson

    Well there was the University of Texas Tower shooting. Though it depends on how much you mean ‘like’. I always felt the generic pathetic nuts who commit mass or spree killings are more like the various Islamic attacks than anything. The obvious output of a mixture of ego and subnormal intelligence. Just in the west it is not seen as the vanguard of something, but as the degeneracy it is.

  • Rob

    One symbolic thing France could do straight away: all the dead get into the Legion d’Honneur. Today.

  • They are not subnormal in terms of intelligence. Well, some are but this is evil not thickness.

  • Well there was the University of Texas Tower shooting.

    I thought about that, but considered that the perpetrator at least had to hole up in a tower and not just saunter around killing people willy-nilly. Those two dickheads in the video would have been dropped instantly had somebody in the building had a rifle handy.

    But yes, I agree there is a similarity between Islamic nutters and the spree shooters in the US.

  • Cal

    From the Mail:
    “The editor-in-chief of British satire website The Daily Mash has also spoken of his shock at the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.
    Neil Rafferty said he and the website’s team of writers felt the murderous attack was ‘beyond belief’.
    He said that his site, which has already expressed solidarity with the French magazine on Twitter and Facebook, was planning its own response.
    The former news journalist said: ‘We are a little bit shocked. I think me and the writers think it is beyond belief really.
    ‘You think if it is possible that these sorts of extremists would turn their guns on writers and satirists. It seems such an extreme possibility that when it happens it shocks you to the core.'”

    Extreme? Beyond belief? More like inevitable. Didn’t he notice the fire-bombing a few years ago? And, er, everything else that’s been happening in the world involving Moozies? You’d think the editor of a satirical news site would be paying more attention.

  • The Wobbly Guy

    @Tim,

    A trained team of terrorists in a planned operation can probably outmaneuver any well-intentioned armed citizenry, moving quickly and decisively to avoid getting bogged down. Even more so if they had already faced actual combat in the Middle East, as seems to be the case with these fellows.

    It would have been good if the cartoonists have been ready with firearms of their own. At least they would have put up a fight. But as leftists, they probably fell into the ‘guns are evil’ camp. Oh well.

    As for Texas… why in the world would Islamic Terrorists conduct any attack there when there are juicier and more relevant targets out there? I don’t think the threat of CCW would necessarily stop them if they were really determined, it just increases the difficulty level.

  • Regional

    In a Seppo County where it’s compulsory to carry concealed weapons a perp tried to hold up a bar, 38 bits of lead were extracted from his body, no stray rounds.

  • Those two dickheads in the video would have been dropped instantly had somebody in the building had a rifle handy.

    Hand guns are handier. We are “allowed” to have them in the US. In fact it is our right.

  • It would be amusing if Islam in a round about way restored the rights of Englishmen.

  • James Waterton

    Shorter SQOTD fodder from Claire Berlinski:

    You motherfuckers. We will kill you. Every one of you. Believe it. #JeSuisCharlie

  • Vinegar Joe

    Regarding the Texas tower shooting:

    “many students had risked their own lives to fire back at the unseen sniper, or to help wounded strangers to safety.”

    http://www.texasmonthly.com/topics/ut-tower-shooting

  • Hand guns are handier.

    Yes, but the range is quite far for a moving target, and if you end up missing or glancing one of them and they return fire with an AK-47, then you’re going to be outgunned. But somebody competent with a rifle would have put the two on their backs before they knew what hit them.

  • Schrodinger's Dog

    Perry, you’re quite right: this is a civilisational level attack. I am absolutely apoplectic.

    The West needs to impose an immediate and total moratorium on immigration from majority Muslim countries. Our leaders will doubtless say that is just not possible, while reassuring us, for the umpteenth time, that Islam is a religion of peace. Which brings me to the second item on my to do list: new leaders. The current bunch are utterly unfit for purpose, across a whole range of areas. When confronted by Islamism, their collective response reminds me of nothing more than a deer in the headlights.

  • Tim,
    Agreed but who is going to carry a rifle? Hand guns are pretty much by def handier. Not leaste because most of the time you ain’t shooting fuckers. That is the whole point. It is the same reason folks are more likely to drive a Honda Accord than an MRAP. Think of it. I’m much more likely to go out with laptop, phone, keys, fags (and lighter), bank cards etc and a pistol than the above and a rifle! You can kill someone with a pencil if you really want. The issue is not the weapons but the desire. That is the problem. Quite how you argue with folks who worship a Dark-Age camel-fucker is beyond me… Other than nuke them back to spakka-land.

  • Agreed but who is going to carry a rifle?

    That’s a good point. I wasn’t so much saying that a rifle is easier to carry, only that somebody with a rifle could have taken down those two without much trouble if he was proficient. That was my first thought when I saw them brazenly standing in the street, I though that makes a lovely target for anyone with a rifle to hand (but not a handgun).

    Then I thought about the Beslan siege when several of the parents went home to get their rifles, frustrated at the bungling of the government forces. Of course the whole thing ended in a clusterfuck and you don’t want citizens turning up to a siege with their own weapons, but two gunmen standing around in a narrow Parisian street blasting away at a police car? Would be nice if one or two ex-soldiers had a FAMAS to hand instead of an iPhone.

  • ajf

    As a follow up, that FT article I linked to above has been subject to a lot of abuse since publication…quite rightly.

  • Gene

    Do our ever-so-sensitive media understand that they are now not only, as one commentator has suggested, enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws, they will from now on have to enforce blasphemy laws for everyone?

    I eagerly await the uproar the next time a media outlet or celebrity publishes one of its common screeds against Catholics, Jews or Southern Baptists … they are asking for a shitstorm of outrage and they’ll deserve it.

  • Mr Ed

    Of course, a massacre in Nigeria by Boko Haram can be ignored by most of the media, an Hon. Exception below, by concentrating on the marches in Paris.

    #BlametheFrontNationale

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/551346/Boko-Haram-massacre-2-000-feared-dead-Baga-Amnesty-International

  • Mr Ed

    Had Charlie Hebdo been ignored, and a certain French political party that was excluded from the march been targeted instead, would there even have been a march? Or would it have been ‘Oh dear, how sad, never mind’?