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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Samizdata quote of the day At least her blasphemy law would be religiously inclusive. She namechecked Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Ram, Buddha and Guru Nanak as some figures whose dignity should also be protected, concluding: ‘When striking the careful balance to protect such emotional harms, can there and should there be a hierarchy of sentiments?’
So there we have it – a British MP in 2021 wondering out loud if people should be punished for disrespecting gods, messiahs, gurus and prophets. It goes without saying that if Shah were ever to succeed in this, it would be curtains for free speech any more than it already is: free speech was, after all, built on the right to blaspheme.
– Tom Slater
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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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I wish we would stop selecting and electing intolerant and stupid people to public service.
What? She left out Satan, Bacchus, Cthulhu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
It also goes without saying that if there were an anti-blasphemy law then it would be applied very unevenly.
Firstly, being mutually contradictory, the different religions mostly blaspheme each other just by existing. Secondly, aren’t any of these gods powerful enough to do their own smiting when they get insulted?
Stonyground –
But what if the Gods didn’t smite someone whom you believe desperately deserves to be smitten? At least in your mind. Would it hurt anything to “help things along”?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the kind of person who seeks high office is also the kind of person who would destroy our liberties precisely because they are stupid and intolerant.
Or put it another way – anyone who wants to run for parliament should be immediately barred from doing so for life and run out of town on the sharp end of a pitchfork. The kind of person fitted to such a role is the kind of person who would run a mile at the very thought.
Would a formal blasphemy law that covered all religions be worse than the current situation, in which you will be arrested on social order charges of one type or another for blaspheming against the tenants of the most sensitive?
In one of his Hitchhikers novels, the late Douglas Adams wrote of the problem of power and who gets to exercise it, saying that anyone who actively seeks power ought on no account to be allowed anywhere near it.
His solution was the unnamed character known as ‘The Man In The Shack’ – in short, the ultimate power of ‘Ruler of the Universe’ was vested in a semi-autistic recluse who lived in a ramshackle beach hut on an otherwise deserted planet, with only a cat for company. He had no idea of the power he held and would not have had a clue what to do with it even if he did – which, of course, was precisely why he was the perfect person to be trusted with it.
Updated to the modern day, we could have the country run by a dough boy in his mum’s basement who thinks he’s playing a sim.
I rather agree with Longrider, but in addition, I think we are getting the calibre of people that we educate. Who in turn are being educated by a lower calibre of, ‘educator’ who having been credentialed and spewed forth by the State ‘educator’ factory.
It’s an effect that has taken the best part of a century. But here we are.
We elect people to office if they promise to give us (free) stuff- so who is the real moron?
The current laws are equitably phrased but inequitably enforced. Another equitably phrased anti-free-speech law will not change that. On the contrary, increasing the number and scope of laws against free speech instead of diminishing them sends a message that is more likely to make the situation worse. The cultures and attitudes that complain most see themselves being rewarded. Those who practice the old common-sense restraint see themselves treated as chumps.
We elect people to office if they promise to give us (free) stuff- so who is the real moron?
The voters who elect people to office if they promise not to take our stuff.
She admitted making racist comments and now feels qualified to lecture the rest of us on a matter like this.
Perhaps she has been emboldened by the decision of the Labour Party to promote her after the racism incident, and the huge increases in her majorities which also followed it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36802075
“All gods” is to conceal that it’s criminal to blaspheme against left-wing, pro-government deities, saints, prophets, gurus, etc. The equivalent right-wing, anti-government figures are demons and evil ones, and blaspheming against them is not covered because doing so is a virtue.
The only sin recognized by those people is to be right-wing. You can commit every horror in the Black Book of Communism and it’s all good – as long as you are not right-wing.
Muhammed is a deeply controversial historical figure.
Muhammed was a military and political genius – that is clear. But his doctrines and moral behaviour have been attacked by most (yes most) Western historians and intellectuals – including Prime Minister Gladstone and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and they often used very strong language indeed.
What the lady is saying is that everything before the last few years in the Western World was wrong – and that most of the intellectual leaders of the Western World should have been sent to prison. Essentially that Western Civilisation should not exist – and should never have existed, going all the way back to the Emperor Heraclius and the Byzantine Empire back in the early 7th century A.D. – which resisted the expansion of Islam.
However, it is NOT politicians alone – it is the entire modern establishment, including the “Law Commission” (that abomination set up some decades ago).
And this is general in the Western World – even in the United States, in spite of the 1st Amendment. Those who attack Muhammed and Islam find themselves persecuted. And the persecution is NOT normally from Muslims – the persecution is normally from the “liberal” left establishment.
The de facto alliance of the left establishment (which controls virtually everything in the West now) with Islam is bizarre – after all Islam condemns feminism, abortion, homosexual acts and so on.
Islam (like all great religions) is Socially Conservative – yet the left establishment have made a weird de facto alliance with it, even though the left establishment is largely atheist.
By the way there is little “need” for a new law – after all (with some stretching) such legislation as the 2010 Equalities Act can do the job of ending Freedom of Speech (or what is left of it) this and other pieces of legislation essentially already embody “Cancel Culture” into British law.
The American Frank Luntz has been visiting Britain – warning us against “American Cancel Culture” and seemingly being unaware that it has been the law here for many years now – but then as Mr Luntz makes his money running P.R. for opiate pushers (who have killed thousands of Americans – with the help of corrupt doctors), I doubt he is really interested in these matters.
The alliance of the left with Islam does seem bizarre at first glance, but I regard our left not as an ideology but as a coalition of groups that despise the patriotic white male, and from that perspective it is not so strange. I would suggest that you can predict the left’s attitude to any issue by considering some archetype, John Wayne for example, then the left’s position is the opposite of what the Duke’s would be.
When William of Orange popped over to London to become King of England, he made a speech. He meant to say that he had come for the good of all, but the actual words he uttered were, “I have come for all of your goods.” An example of honest Government?
Roue le Jour.
The left hate it when one points out that the wife of John Wayne was Mexican, and that in many of his films the closest allies of the characters he plays are often from other racial groups to his own.
The left prefers to judge men by words (even jokes) rather than deeds.
Men often use mocking terms for their closest friends – people they would gladly die for, the army has always been well known for this.