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]
You do not need autocomplete in order to predict what sort of results that search term produces. Good thing, as autocomplete seems not to be working for those words on many browsers.
Because you all already knew what Palestinian celebrations involve, I did not have to post the video of what was done to Shani Louk. This link does not take you to the video. The Times of India report it does take you to is bad enough: it describes how two Hamas members were filmed as they sat, grinning, on her naked corpse in the back of a pickup truck, while the mob whooped and shouted “Allahu Akbar”. This video was not taken secretly. It was filmed and put on the internet by a Palestinian who was enjoying the show.
For most nations, the equivalent search term would garner images of that nation’s traditional festivities, and the case is no different for Palestinians. Here is a BBC story from 26th September 2001: “Arafat closes ‘suicide bombing’ art show”. Astonishingly, if you hover over the URL for that BBC story, you will see that it is classified as “entertainment/arts”. To be fair to the BBC, the URL may have been generated automatically, but to the Palestinians of 2001 it was indeed entertainment and art.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has closed down an art exhibit which featured a recreation of the scene of a suicide bombing.
The exhibition, at An-Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, was organised to mark the first anniversary of the Palestinian intifada.
A security official confirmed that Mr Arafat ordered the early closure of the show which featured a recreation of last month’s attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria.
“The president was gravely disturbed and offended by the images in the exhibit,” the official said.
The room-sized installation had broken tables splattered with fake blood and body parts.
A university branch of the militant Palestinian group Hamas built the exhibit, which recreates the scene of last month’s attack on Sbarro Pizza house in Jerusalem.
A suicide bomber – Ezzaldin Almasri – blew himself and 15 other people up during a busy lunchtime at the restaurant.
The installation included a portrait of the bomber holding a koran and a rifle.
Underneath, in a reference to the military wing of Hamas – Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades – the artist had written: “Qassami Pizza is more delicious.”
I am afraid I cannot now find the link, but after I posted something about the Sbarro bombing on the Biased BBC blog in the mid-2000’s, the father of one of the victims, a 15 year old girl called Malki Roth, commented there. This is an account of Malki’s last day, and the way that one of her murderers, a woman called Ahlam Tamimi, has become a celebrity in the Arab world.
All nations have atrocities in their past and many have them in their present. But I do not think there is another nation or culture on the planet that currently exhibits such public delight in murder as the Palestinians do.
That said, we should never forget that horrible things would happen to any Palestinian who protested at what was done to Shani Louk in 2023 or Malki Roth in 2001. That’s one reason why the culture of exhibiting the murdered corpses of young women or images thereof has gone on for so long. Another reason is the currently fashionable pretence that all cultures are equal.
Hot on the heels of the latest atrocity in Ukraine, I am seeing video after video after video of Israeli civilians being either brutalised and then kidnapped or just murdered in broad daylight by Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends Hamas.
I am overflowing with questions.
Israel seems to have been taken by complete strategic surprise on every level, comparable to 1973, by a Tet Offensive style assault. How did that happen?
And what is the Hamas endgame? Typically the effects of substantive military surprise last about three days, at which point it is hard to imagine an Israeli response that is not completely and utterly unrestrained.
An unprivate death.Instapundit met with some opposition when he showed the famous photograph of a man falling to his death upside down, having leapt from the burning World Trade Centre.
You can’t help wondering: did he know as he jumped that he’d turn in the air and spend his last seconds upside down? Mortal insult added to mortal injury. If he had known, would he have chosen the other death? I had a friend who died when both parachutes failed to open. I think of her when I see that picture. I don’t know if she fell upside down. I hope not.
I say, show it. Show it often. I know all about hating to see it: like most of you I can remember first seeing that picture on September 11 – only in my case it was September 11 2002. Out of all the hundreds of hours of film and the thousands of photos taken of the slaughter on September 11 2001, I saw only a few seconds of footage until a year later. On that day I didn’t want the children seeing people die on camera (though we talked about it, of course), particularly as I didn’t know if there were more attacks to come. My fear of the children seeing it flowed from my fear of me seeing it. I’ve always disliked even fictional images of modern-day, realistic violence, the sort of violence that can happen to me and mine; and this dislike has hardened into almost a (controlled) phobia since I had children. It’s a thousand times worse when the images are real. Yet my hunger to know more about what had happened was as primal, as voracious, as anyone’s. That hunger is a survival trait. (Refined and systemised, it is also a victory trait: the defining victory trait of Western civilisation. It will win us this war, too – if a fatal squeamishness more sickly by far than my purely visual queasiness doesn’t rot our guts first.)
I have nothing to add to what I wrote twenty years ago, and nothing to subtract either.
I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and several other movies inspired by it, such as Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.
Then if that were not enough they try to run the same ridiculous “We can act like something whose existence is thunderingly obvious never existed at all and no one will notice” plotline past the public in the newspapers. I refer, of course, to the article by Oliver Moody that appeared in the Times on 6th February 2023. The headline is “Swedish police demand tools to fight ‘unprecedented’ gang crime” and the subheading is “Nation with peaceful reputation averaged one shooting or bombing a day last month”
Swedish police chiefs have warned that crime is hitting “extremely serious and unprecedented” levels after 19 shootings in Stockholm and the surrounding towns since Christmas.
Gun violence between gangs competing over the increasingly lucrative drugs trade has been rising since the turn of the millennium, culminating in a record 63 fatal shootings last year. The country also has the European Union’s highest numbers of drug offences, burglaries and thefts per head, according to the bloc’s statistics agency.
While the firearms murders were already the dominant issue at the general election last September, the concerns have worsened as several gang conflicts in the Stockholm region escalated over the past six weeks.
At least four teenagers and young men have been shot dead in the latest spate of violence. There was on average of one shooting or bombing a day in the area over the four weeks from December 25.
In the most recent incident an adult and two children were targeted at their flat in Arboga, 75 miles west of the capital. Their front door was peppered with bullets twice in the space of a week, although no one was hurt.
Ten police leaders including Anders Thornberg, head of the national police authority, said their agencies were under “historically high” strain. “Day and night our staff are working to deal with fatal shootings, bombings and other serious violent crimes,” they wrote in Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
“But despite this hard and determined work 24 hours a day, and despite the fact that police and prosecutors have never before deprived so many people of their liberty, the detention centres and prisons are full to bursting — more needs to be done.”
The senior police officers said crimes were harder to solve because victims and witnesses have become more reluctant to testify.
Gangs are believed to be hiring children as young as 13 or 14 to intimidate their rivals with gunshots or explosives. Thornberg and his colleagues said the investigations were getting “ever harder to deal with” because of the number of officials involved in youth cases.
The most recommended comment was by J Sture and said, “This article appears to be missing a crucial element. Are we to suppose that this rise in gang warfare and drugs is all to with the native Swedish population? Just asking…”. At the time of writing there are 137 comments to Oliver’s Moody’s article. By my reckoning around 120 of them mock the author for not mentioning that the gangs driving the unprecedented increase in Sweden’s crime rate are made up of Muslim immigrants or their immediate descendants.
Burying the lede can work as a strategy if no one even suspects there ever was a lede there in the first place. When people know damn well what is not being said, it has the opposite effect. This helps nobody and harms everybody, including Sweden’s Muslims. A problem that cannot be named cannot be solved.
How do we properly punish Islamophobes? As a lecturer in cultural geography at Oxford University, I have used my research skills to draw up an index of Islamophobia to help police, prosecutors, victims and analysts work out when to take legal action and how to map out the routes towards such action. Importantly, this is the first time an index to measure a hate crime has been proposed and it remains an open project. It is inspired by the way crimes such as domestic violence are processed, placing victim testimony and experience at the heart.
Published last week, this index of Islamophobia is accompanied by a pathways-to-prosecution form, which helps identify the laws breached and scores each hate crime on the basis of intensity, intention, impact and recklessness.
How might it work? Let’s look at some flagrant examples of Islamophobia, including Boris Johnson’s infamous comments on burqa-wearing Muslim women as “letterboxes”, the distribution of violence-inducing “Punish a Muslim Day” letters, a headscarf being torn from a Muslim woman, and being called Shamima Begum in the workplace.
The middle two of those would be crimes by any definition (incitement to violence and assault), and the final one is a verbal insult which should not be a crime but which would and should be considered unacceptable behaviour in any decent workplace.
The first one consisted of Boris Johnson making a less than reverential quip about the appearance of women wearing burkas in the process of defending their right to wear them.
When someone suffers from a fear of flying, the usual strategy to help them overcome it is to educate them about how planes work and how safe air travel is, combined with getting them to experience flight in a supportive and friendly environment, so that they can come to realise that their phobia is irrational.
Given that Dr Bi is a lecturer at Oxford, one would think that, as a Muslim herself and an educator at one of our most prominent universities, she would be ideally placed to advise and promote a similar strategy of education and familiarisation in order to dispel Islamophobia. However she appears to think that a strategy of punishment would be more effective.
I was going to stop there. Nice bit of snark, that. I could rely on the reader to supply the conclusion that the correlation between knowledge and fear of flying is negative while the correlation between knowledge and fear of Islam is positive because flying is actually safe while Islam is actually dangerous. But in the spirit of Chr…, er, “the holidays”, let’s look a little deeper.
The great strength of these [Iranian] protests – the sudden, overwhelming way in which they have spread, fuelled by social media – could also be their undoing. As we saw so tragically in the wake of the Arab Spring, this new generation of leaderless, internet-based movements can lack the coordination, durability and ideological focus to topple the despotic leaders they rage against.
Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested by the morality police for having an improperly adjusted hijab. Witnesses say that she was beaten in the police van. Her relatives published pictures of her lying in a coma in intensive care. They wanted the world to know what had been done to her. She never woke from that coma.
Anything a social media company might do pales in comparison to the evil of beating a woman to death because she did not cover her hair in the approved way – but what Twitter did next is still worth noting.
I’ve just spoken to @AlinejadMasih. @Twitter chose to suspend her account because she shared the picture of #MahsaAmini, 22-year-old Iranian girl in coma after she was severely beaten by the hijab police and later died.
Alinejad Masih’s post was mass-reported by supporters and hirelings of the Iranian regime. The grounds for suspension of her account were that she had included an image of “graphic violence” in her tweet. The fact that it was a true image of Iranian government brutality that Mahsa Amini’s family wanted the world to see was ignored. This is how a system of pre-emptive censorship inevitably works.
Reporter #1: “Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?”
President Biden: “No. It is not. Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 – well-equipped- as well equipped as any army in the world – and an air force – against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable”
Reporter #2: “Mr President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.”
Pres. Biden: “That is not true.”
Reporter: “Is it – Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not.”
Pres. Biden: “That is not true. They did not reach that conclusion.”
Reporter: “So what is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse?”
Pres. Biden: “The Afghan government, the leadership, has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
Reporter: “Do you see any parallels with this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam? With some people feeling…”
Pres. Biden: “None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy. Six if I’m not mistaken.”
“The Taliban is not the South – the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
– President Joe Biden, press briefing, 8th July 2021. Kabul fell on 15th August.
“What’s on your mind?” asks the WordPress dashboard at the top of the little box where you put your content. This. This is on my mind. Salman Rushdie getting stabbed. Back in the 1990s I bought a copy of The Satanic Verses as a contribution to his security costs. I’ve read it, and Midnight’s Children, and found them memorable but they were not books to which I wished to return. I thought all that stuff about the Iranian fatwa had faded away. I guess not.
Don’t have anything particularly clearheaded to say, but the stabbing of Salman Rushdie (though it has decades-old origins) alongside the campaign of threats and intimidation against drag queens in the US makes it feel like a very grim, dangerous time for artistic expression.
Forty people were killed in the attack at the Church of St Francis in the Owo district in the Ondo region of Nigeria on June 5. Over 126 people also suffered injuries following the attack.
In a statement last week, President Higgins appeared to link the attack with climate change.
His comments have drawn criticism from the bishop of the Catholic Ondo diocese, Jude Ayodeki Aroguande, who acknowledged and thanked the president for his condemnation but said the “incorrect and far-fetched” link drawn between the slaughter and climate change was “rubbing salt to the injuries of all who have suffered terrorism in Nigeria”.
In his statement, President Higgins had condemned those responsible for the attack and cautioned against “any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change”.
The Labour politician also called for solidarity with “all those impacted not only by this horrible event, but in the struggle by the most vulnerable, on whom the consequences of climate change have been inflicted”.
The former president shared the message on Twitter Wednesday in the wake of the massacre at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two fourth-grade teachers.
“As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer.” Obama tweeted. “His killing stays with us all to this day, especially those who loved him.”
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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