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The (Free) French Resistance has cause for joy because The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Blogosphere is back! Let’s hear it for The Dissident Frogman! 
cliquez ici Soon he will be back blogging regularly. I feel like I am in the final scene of Casablanca when I say “Welcome back to the fight”. February 3rd, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the ‘Satanic Cartoons’ saga in London earlier today. 
click for larger image The placards read Behead those who insult Islam & Butcher those who mock Islam & Slay those who disrespect Islam etc. etc. Freedom of expression is quite literally intolerable to them. And we cannot and must not tolerate that. It makes no logical sense to tolerate intolerance. With thanks to H for the picture And for those of you who say “It’s just a protest”…  February 3rd, 2006 | 149 comments - (Comments are closed)
And so as Palestinian gunmen surround the EU mission in Palestine…  Tonight at Samizdata.net HQ, dinner will include…  A trivial thing for sure but it is the thought that counts. The UK newspapers may be too craven to republish them but we always have the internet… and here are the offending cartoons again. February 3rd, 2006 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
In order to show some solidarity with Denmark, who are facing remarkable pressure over the Jyllands-Posten ‘Satanic Cartoons’ incident, I for one will be stocking up with Danish products at every opportunity. I find it offensive that they are being threatened by Islamist thugs and pissant Muslim governments for daring to be a tolerant western nation. So, what recipes can liberty lovers think up that use Lurpak butter, Danish bacon (lots of yummy Danish bacon), Havarti cheese, Carlsberg & Tuborg beer and smoked herring? And as every campaign needs a ‘face’… 
February 2nd, 2006 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
The bizarre desire of Islamists to prolong the Jyllands-Posten ‘Satanic Cartoon’ saga has now escalated the whole issue and caused French newspaper France Soir to join the fight for freedom of expression and also republish the offending cartoons. To quote what a commenter called Max wrote in an earlier article here on Samizdata whilst arguing with an outraged Muslim commenter:
Aux armes, mes amis! February 1st, 2006 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Big Pharoah has some rather rational things to say about the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Indeed. February 1st, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The story of the satirical pictures of the Prophet Muhammed published by Jyllands-Posten just refuses to die away. I first posted an article about this on 12 November 2005, followed by another on 9 December 2005, indirectly on 10 December 2005 and finally on 23 December 2005 [with a picture of the cartoons]. Usually, a week or so after an article has appeared on Samizdata.net and fallen off the front page, comments pretty much drop to zero 99% of the time. Yet there has been a steady trickle of comments still coming in, presumably via Google hits. For the most part what is so interesting is what a complete non-meeting of minds these comments represent and they fall into three broad categories:
Not being a religious person myself, I find it particularly baffling that so many comments by earnest Muslims start with flowery religious language and go on to make religious statements, as if that was going to convince what must obviously be an audience of very secular non-Muslim blog readers. I like to think that if I went to a Muslim site and left a comment, I would at least make some attempt to phrase my remarks in language that at least tried to address the manifest axioms of the readers, even if I intended to challenge those axioms. Yet to all intent and purposes, this might as well be a ‘dialogue’ between different species. It really does seem to be a dialogue of the deaf. The internet is awash with anti-Christian images, or ones that make profane use of Christian imagery that many would find offensive and yet do you see many vocal Christians getting so bent out of shape about it that they call for temporal ‘punishment’ for the people expressing those views? No. Most have the maturity to just say “Oh, another one of those daft atheists/agnostics” and keep moving, not accepting what they see but tolerating its expression just as most atheists generally tolerate expressions of religion they may find offensive (provided they are not being asked to pay for it) without actually accepting there is any truth to them. But what is it about the Muslim psyche that makes the contempt of others who do not share their beliefs so intolerable? By the way, here is a better link to the ‘satanic cartoons’ so you can see what all the fuss is about. January 30th, 2006 | 249 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Tories could simply abolish entire government departments that the ‘man in the street’ really does not give a damn about (such as the DTI for example) and save huge amounts of money… but far from cutting pointless state expenditures, Cameron is in the process of making it politically impossible for him to do anything but ape Blair. Why? Because there has been no meaningful attempt by the Tories to even make the idea of a smaller state something that is simply a feature of normal political discourse. They have left the thinking to the other side and now have to fight every battle on ground Tony Blair has chosen for them. The Tories have had more than a decade to put in the intellectual ground work for cutting the scope of the state and to argue their positions on the basis of several rights, and yet have done nothing of the sort because that is not what most of them believe. That is hardly surprising given the pathologies of the sort of people who are drawn to politics: they do not get involved because they want to wield less power than the previous guys who ran things. Understanding politicians and what they are likely to do is much easier once you realise that almost everyone in politics (even the ‘nice guys’ who wear sensible cardigans and remind you of Wallace and Gromit) have more in common psychologically and morally with your typical member of a street gang than with most of the people who actually vote for them. However where does that leave people who do want a less intrusive state and cannot bring themselves to believe the Tory party does not give a damn about them? Well it leaves them trying to convince themselves that Cameron is just playing a clever game because the alternative is just too dreadful. He is the man who will save us from those who are incrementally destroying our competitiveness and strangling our civil liberties because, well, he has to be, who else is there? But even if his conversion to ‘soft socialist’ economics is because he is going after LibDem voters who think high taxes and regulations are a good thing, it would at least require Cameron to also make a pitch based on civil liberties, the one differentiating issue where the LibDems make sense, and yet the main thrust of the inconstant Tory opposition to ID cards is based on their cost. Those of you who think Cameron is just being clever should go watch Peter Sellers in ‘Being There’ and realise that what you are mistaking for cleverness is in fact just emptiness. January 24th, 2006 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ‘Conservative’ Party is now admitting what any twit should have figured out long ago: voting Tory will not result in lower taxes. Moreover they are trying to make it seem like a virtue. One sound axiom is that whenever a Tory politician uses the word ‘sensible’, it is time to bend over and think of England because they are using the word as a euphemism for either surrendering power to Brussels or keeping your taxes nice and high, and this is clearly the Tory party at its most ‘sensible’. It always makes me laugh when people like Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne blather on about how they will provide ‘stability’ as if the economy is something that could not possibly work without constant political interference. The Tories are quick to tell us how Labour has squandered Britain’s economic advantages (as indeed they have) and yet Cameron’s boys seem to bend over backwards to assure everyone that a Tory government will be nothing more than Blue Rinse Blairism. Yet if ‘stability’ is so important rather than a radical change, surely the most ‘stable’ thing would be to just leave the current Blairites in government. January 23rd, 2006 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a given in Middle Eastern politics that whenever a politician is feeling the heat, the default tactic for distracting people from whatever woes are pissing them off is to start throwing wild accusations at Israel. For extra added points they can even accuse the ‘Zionist entity’ of whatever it is that you are in fact doing. Given that Israel had the opportunity to kill Yassir Arafat a thousand times over once he became a (more or less) regular political figure with a regular address in Palestine and a daily routine, for Assad of Syria to start suddenly claiming that Israel assassinated Arafat, a man who was well known to be sick and old and who was really an increasingly irrelevant figure towards the end, strikes me as the sort of thing that would be done by a man who is frantically looking to divert attention away from something else (like maybe his propensity to bump people off in Lebanon). The Israelis are usually pretty upfront about their willingness to conduct assassination against their enemies, so perhaps it is time the Israeli airforce paid Assad a visit and when asked why they killed him, they should reply “Why not? We wanted to give folks in Lebanon something to smile about and in any case we would have been accused of killing him anyway regardless of how he eventually snuffed it”. January 22nd, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Efforts continue to use powers of eminent domain (UK = compulsory purchase) to take US Supreme Court Judge David Souter’s home away from him in order to use the land for a hotel and tourist attraction called the Lost Liberty Hotel. However New Hampshire State Representative Neal Kurk, in spite of being behind worthy measures to prohibit in his state the sort of abuses of eminent domain that the US Supreme Court okayed with their monstrous Kelo judgement, is nevertheless opposed to the plan to use eminent domain against Souter.
Why not? If Souter was part of the system underwriting a grotesque abridgement of liberty, who not grotesquely abridge his liberty? I suppose being a politician himself, the notion of using laws against the people responsible for them might be a little too close to home for Kurk even if he is sponsoring a measure to prevent such abuses in New Hampshire. Yet why should people whose liberty is abridged and rights to property threatened not want to punish the guilty parties with the tools they themselves have no problem seeing used against others? I am a great believer in revenge. Do unto others as they do unto you. January 21st, 2006 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue? All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.” There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong. January 19th, 2006 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
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