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]
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The Danish media has taken note of the Buy Danish campaigns that have sprung up spontaneously over the least week or so in response to the boycott from Islamic countries. Danes seem to be quite willing to stoutly resist the pressure to limit free speech but it is important they realise that millions of people worldwide are urging them to stand firm and so although buying Danish goods or putting a supportive graphic on your site may be a token, it is by no means pointless. Below is a translation of an article in Børsen.
Buy Danish campaigns in large markets like the USA and Germany might give Danish companies enough increased turnover to cover the losses from the Arabian boycotts.
Companies like Arla, Lego, and Carlsberg believe in increased sales when they check their books next time, and Dominique Bouchet, professor in marketing and sociology at the University of Southern Denmark also expects a plus.
“It just might give a good effect. Normally there is a greater effect the other way around, when you signal disgust and irritation through a boycott. But the present situation is completely unusual, and many dislikes the Muslim boycott and the extremists reactions to the drawings. It is expressed through the buying of Danish goods”, says Dominique Bouchet.
He emphasises that there has never been comparable situations, so it is difficult to predict how large the effect will become.
Denmark is, as most people are aware, caught in the middle of a Middle Eastern sandwich, where the hateful reactions to the Prophet drawings have become so extreme that the crisis is going straight on to front pages in media around the world.
This releases a counter expression via buy Danish campaigns, where the customers are encouraged to buy Danish goods to support Denmark in the conflict. A simple search on Google gives more than 100.000 “buy Danish” pages.”
With thanks to Kristina for the translation.
I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an ‘icon of England’… and they have just written back accepting the nomination.
Interesting.
Muslim Action Committee are calling for changes to the law in Britain to implement an aspect of sharia law and they want the British state to do it for them. What they want is to legally ban people from displaying pictures of Mohammed, the seventh century warlord who founded their religion, because it annoys them. Never mind that showing images of this historical figure does not threaten them with violence or prevent their exercise of religion, they want to make it illegal to annoy them.
They are planning to stage a protest march in London on 18 February, expecting to attract 20,000 to 50,000 people. I hope the number is considerably larger because I am sure as hell going to be there expressing my views as well.
If they get their way, we will undoubtedly be prosecuted as Samizdata’s response to this islamo-fascist proposal will be a “Mohammed Picture of the Day”, each day and every day until hell freezes over or we run out of server space. Intolerant Islam does not like being annoyed? Well guys, you ain’t seen nothing yet, I promise you that. Our Dutch friends at The Amazing Retecool are a fairly good place to start for interesting interpretations of Mohammed’s image.
If this ever becomes law and I personally get dragged into court over what Samizdata will most certainly do, rest assured that as we are hosted in the USA we will remain on-line and ‘expressive’ regardless, even if I have to ‘host’ myself in the USA a few years earlier that I expected. So to all your intolerant Islamic fascists out there who think it is within your power to silence all the voices you dislike, with all due respect (i.e. none), you are very much mistaken.
… in October of last year and nothing happened.
So obviously it took a while for the people who wanted to blow this up some time to get all those highly inflammable Danish flags made and organise the outrage. Maybe we are looking in all the wrong places for the people behind this. Radical Islamic clerics? Nah, it was all a conspiracy by Middle Eastern flag makers.
The main thing that the Jyllands-Posten incident was intended to do was to assert the right of freedom of expression as a way of defending that right, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Given the climate of abridgement regarding freedom of expression and civil rights generally in Britain and elsewhere, I can only offer my heartfelt thanks to not just Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten for publishing those aesthetically unremarkable cartoons and forcing this issue onto the front page where it belongs, but to everyone involved in this drama.
In other words I would like to thank not just those august Danes but also offer a hat-tip to the millions of screaming Muslim activists and blood curdling placard bearing demonstrators who underlined and put into bold what those Danes did, giving them publicity but above all proving their point. If you guys had not taken the bait hook, line and sinker, this would have been a non-event.
Yet now only the most gibbering purblind Chomskyite will claim that Muslim activists have not created a climate of fear and intimidation regarding what people can and cannot say about them, or that is it all about Israel (sorry, Palestine) and BushMcHitler. Without the help and support of all those guys in Kabul, London, Beirut, Cairo, Copenhagen and Damascus, this incident would have been a foot note rather than a global headline. As I have said before, with enemies like them, who needs friends?
We now have a powerful set of memes to use against the enemies of liberty, both domestic and foreign. I suggest we use them for all they are worth and assert our rights, continually pushing the boundaries just to defend what we have. Someone wants to curtail what you can say? Point out they are appeasing the guys with the signs reading “WE WILL BEHEAD ANY WHO INSULT ISLAM”.
We must also refuse to tolerate the intolerance that wraps itself in worlds like ‘respect’ and ‘acceptance’ because whilst we must tolerate our enemies provided they do not threaten us with force, we should feel no obligation to respect them or to accept their views any more than they must respect or accept us.
Tolerance for us however is non-negotiable and methinks it is time to stop being polite when we make that point .
Update: this is something these guys understand.
I get the impression that somewhere in France, a middle finger is being raised.
Update: It has been suggested that this be printed on a tee-shirt with the following caption…
My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt Sorry, I just had to share that 
The Cardiff University newspaper Gair Rhydd [link down as of late 7 Feb] reprinted one of the Jyllands-Posten ‘Satanic Cartoons’ and as a result, the edition was recalled and pulped by the university authorities. Now as the paper is no doubt the property of the university, I do not contest their right to do as they please with their property. However the statements from them make no sence whatsoever
“The opinions expressed in that publication are those of the editorial team independently of the students’ union or university. The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility.”
So they recalled the edition, destroyed all the copies, suspended the editor and are ‘investigating’ three of their journalists but the editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK. As we say on the internet, WTF?
Several newspapers in Europe and elsewhere (and I do not mean student newspapers) have reprinted the cartoons, so this is hardly an act of unprofessional behaviour seeing as several editors who actually do this for a living decided it was in the interests of their readers to publish the damn things.
Had they said “it is our paper and we will pulp anything that bucks the party line”, well fine, but please, I will thank Cardiff University to not declaim as if they were on the moral high ground when all they are doing is covering their politically correct arses.
On the Adam Smith Institute blog, Eamonn Butler points out that millions of people in the USA who vote Republican and Democrat nevertheless subscribe to values which are broadly ‘libertarian’.
And of course when you add in the millions who decline to vote at all not (just) because of apathy but because there is no party which really reflects their world view (and that may well include the US Libertarian Party), it does make you wonder at the disconnect between those numbers and what you see reflected in the media and political system.
I am often asked why so many libertarians/classical liberals/minarchists are averse to pursuing careers in politics and I usually reply that the question is like asking why so many honest people do not pursue careers in mugging and armed robbery.
This is why we are at an inherent disadvantage against statists when playing by their rules and why I have long suspected that the idea of small-state parties may be a waste of time*. The type of people who are attracted to politics are almost always psychologically predisposed to solutions which are force based as a preference to some social solution, particular as it is rare for force to be effectively directed back at them personally in a non-abstract way. As I have said before, people who go into politics generally have more in common with members of street gangs (although with less need for personal fortitude) both psychologically and morally than with most of the people who vote for them. Do Tory or Republican politicians really want to wield significantly less power over the nation when it is their turn in power compared to their Labour or Democrat counter-parts? It is very hard indeed to be a genuinely decent person and a politician.
* = I would be more than happy to be convinced I am wrong on this
This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.
update: question answered – not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists
The ever industrious Dissident Frogman was toiling into the wee hours last night to produce some splendid graphics for blogs and other websites who want to show their support for Denmark. We now sport one of these graphics in our sidebar because we need to defend our imperfect but hard won rights to free speech in the western world.
The fact that a group of intolerant Muslims in South Africa, where they are a minority, have use the force of law to both prevent freedom of expression pre-emptively should make it clear that complacency is not an option.
Certainly we cannot just assume the media will defend itself… listen to this (mp3 sound file… may take a moment to download) and contrast the snooty BBC journalist with the Danish gentleman (a member of Parliament) who defends liberty regardless of the cost in economic terms.
Tehran, Feb.05 (ISNA)-Following the insults of some western countries’ media to Holy Prophet of Islam, Iran’s President, Dr. Ahmadi Nejad ordered Commerce Minister to set up a council on “reviewing and cancellation of economic contracts and commercial exchanges with these countries”.
Excellent! Who needs sanctions when these guys will impose them on themselves. Wow, with enemies like that, who needs friends?
Just as newspapers around Europe and beyond are coming to the support of Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, US State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper has said that freedom of expression in a European country is “not acceptable”.
Firstly, who the hell asked the US State Department to opine on something in a newspaper in Denmark? Secondly, if they are going to take a side here, are religious extremists so deeply entrenched in the US political establishment that they cannot understand the importance maintaining secular rights to free expression in the face of attempts at religious censorship and overt intimidation?
Land of the free, home of the brave, eh? Not in Washington DC it seems. Rather than face down the intolerant face of radical Islam, the US State Department is pandering to it. This is a national disgrace and I hope some US newspapers will show how they feel by supporting their colleagues in Denmark and publishing the damn cartoons themselves and telling Kurtis Cooper where he can stick his political master’s craven opinions.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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