Liberty and Freedom

Please watch this club-carrying primitive

ArgusEyes — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:27:41 GMT

This is exactly how I envisage club-carrying bloodthirsty barbarians as behaving.

Some people in the skeptical blogosphere have been attacking people who are perceived as attacking Hitchens after he’s dead. Nothing comes close in vileness than P.Z. Myers own comments. Truly, there are no enemies on the left.

..That’s about how it works

ArgusEyes — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:58:58 GMT

Be careful what you ask for

ArgusEyes — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:09:46 GMT

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2413

Liberty askew

ArgusEyes — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:59:12 GMT

I spend a lot of time ripping into the left on this blog and in my videos. Many assume that makes me some sort of right winger. Well, not quite. By the original meanings of the terms “right” and “left”, colour me a lefty any day. However, the problem with those terms is they are so monumentally vague, that saying you’re on the left, whilst being statistically presumptive, is not enough to know the entirety of what a person things about any one issue.

I read all sites of the spectrum. I listen to podcasts, and read blogs, that come from all sorts of angles. Conservative talk radio, Right-leaning conservative, hard leftist, left leaning, atheist, skeptic, creationist, religious. From what I’ve experienced with many people, this is a rare thing indeed. Many blogs are echo chambers for one side of view and I hope I don’t do that here, one such blog is “Dispatches from the culture wars”, Ed Brayton’s blog. That said, he criticise democrats from time to time but it’s mostly a conservative bashing blog.

Either way, Brayton makes an excellent point that I’ve frequently felt myself:

Michele Bachmann was the first Republican candidate to sign a pledge by the Family Leader, an Iowa wingnut group.

by signing the pledge Bachmann "vows" to "uphold the institution of marriage as only between one man and one woman" by committing herself to 14 specifics steps. The ninth step calls for the banning of "all forms" of pornography. The pledge also states that homosexuality is both a choice and a health risk.

See, it's all about smaller government. Small enough to fit a camera in your bedroom to make sure you aren't looking at unapproved pictures or having sex in anything other than the missionary position with a member of the opposite sex. In Bachmann's delusions, aking a census destroys liberty; throwing gays in jail and banning books doesn't.

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2011/07/bachmanns_version_of_smaller_g.php

I’ve frequently felt that when American Republicans go on about liberty so much, they mean only a very specific version of liberty. Sure, they want the liberty to earn money and be taxed less but they don’t value liberty as a principle. Not really. How about the liberty to grow and smoke a reasonably innocuous plant in the safety of your own home? Never! Both republicans and democrats are united in the tyranny of controlling what we do with our own bodies.

The Michele Bachmann situation quoted above is informative too. If it offends their religious sensibilities then they'll find rationalisations to explain why our liberty to interact as adults must be compromised. Remember. They don’t believe in liberty, they believe in liberty for certain things they want. Republicans want liberty from tax, democrats want liberty from worldly wants.

Teachers with past lives.. and a particularly vicious screed

ArgusEyes — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:14:36 GMT

Every so-often you see a case of a teacher who is fired for some reason not relating to their conduct as a teachers. Maybe they write saucy novels in their spare time. Maybe, like Melissa Petro, they were a former sex worker.

I have two master's degrees, five years' experience in the nonprofit sector and three years' experience teaching -- and I cannot get a job. Why? Just google me. I'm the "Hooker Teacher" -- at least that's what I've come to be called ever since Sept. 27, 2010, when I found myself on the cover of the New York Post.

"Meet Melissa Petro," the story began," the teacher who gives a new twist to sex ed." The piece describes me as a "tattooed former hooker and stripper" who was "shockingly upfront about her past." Indeed, earlier that month, I'd written an Op-Ed on the Huffington Post that criticized the recent censoring of the adult services section of Craigslist and came clean about my own sex-worker past. Because I was arguing that sex workers shouldn't be ashamed to speak for themselves, I signed my name to it. The New York Post wasn't interested in my politics, however; its interest seemed only in cooking up shock that an elementary school teacher would dare admit such a shady history.

http://www.salon.com/life/sex_work/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/05/04/hooker_teacher_what_i_was_thinking

Now, my opinion on this is that people are allowed to have past lives. Their qualities as a teacher should be judged on what they do in the now in the classroom. To eject people who had shady pasts who are perfectly fine teachers now (yes, that is an assumption – I have seen no criticisms of her performance as an actual teacher in all of this) is to ensure that actual humans, with experiences that can shed new perspectives on their craft, cannot become members of a certain profession.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction to try to maintain purity in certain kinds of professions. It happens in politics mainly, where any kind of event from the past can be used against political opponents. We get bland mindless barby and ken doll politicians because they couldn’t be anything but, any sign of individuality can be used to sow doubt and voters will be “just not sure”.

That aside, there is another chapter in this sordid tale I want to bring up here. A particularly vile and viscious article that has been written against Melissa Petro entitled “Idiot prosti-teacher didn't learn lesson”.

The amount of vileness in this piece is astounding. One cannot even skip past the title, which is a slanderous lie. As if a past history of being a prostitute means she is a “prosti-teacher”? Please. The first paragraph of the piece is:

This is one whore with chutzpah.

Excuse me? What did you just write there? Again, does a past define you forever? Is Melissa forever a “whore”. What kind of blatant thuggery is this piece? The amount of pejoratives as verbs and blatant bleeding of hatred into the descriptive language is enough, in my mind, to ensure in any decent world that the writer, Andrea Peyser, should never be employable as a writer again.

Melissa Petro, the stripper/hooker who was reborn a public-school teacher, thinks her Bronx art students are too dumb to understand Petro's written ravings about her career as a proud and empowered slut.

…

Petro floated into the National Arts Club yesterday in a virginal white mohair coat, navy-blue minidress, and brown sky-high platform do-me pumps.

…

she responded in a high-pitched, little-girl lisp.

…

"I don't think my thtudents could comprehend my work, and if they did, they deserve an A," she said condescendingly.

…

She'd been outed by this newspaper as a former sex worker, then charged by the school system with "conduct unbecoming a teacher." More like conduct unbecoming a human being.

…

The bleached-blond Petro, who lives in Manhattan, wrote a filthy and "racially insensitive" 2007 article in Post Road Magazine about stripping and whoring in Cincinnati, the investigator noted.

…

Melissa Petro, Happy-Hooker-turned-social-giant. Wrap her in police tape, and hide the kids.

What about the children! Hold them close to mother’s breast and whisper in their ear that everything will be alright. The irony of the second-to-last paragraph is great, glass houses Andrea, stones, avoid.

Women in spaaaaaace

ArgusEyes — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:56:39 GMT

So Phil Plait, a nice guy to be sure, has made another preening post wringing his hands about the lamentable status of women in the field of science. I don’t know about you, but when I look around the office here, I don’t see women doing too badly.

I am not an expert in gender diversity in the sciences, but through my reading and talking about it with scientists, it appears that big strides have been made in the past decade or two, but the goal of gender equity is obviously still a ways off.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/04/29/women-as-planetary-science-role-models/

“The goal of gender equity”. As if it’s a given. I don’t understand how leftists make this argument. The goal of gender equity amongst nurses and hair stylists is still a long way off. However, it should always be a long way off, or near, or past it, depending solely upon the free decisions of individuals who want to enter the field. I don’t want the leviathan to coerce the people to go into certain fields based upon what is basically a religion, Phil’s not doing that here though:

One thing I do know is that all disciplines need role models, and I just found out about an interesting web site called Women in Planetary Sciences (motto: "Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?") which has a series of interviews with women planetary scientists. I know a few of these folks — like Emily Lakdawalla, Heidi Hammel, and Sara Seager, names that may be familiar to regular BA readers — and reading their stories is pretty interesting.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/04/29/women-as-planetary-science-role-models/

You know what? Fine. I’m fine with passive role-models being made available to girls to get them into science. This is activism that is not forced down our throats like the fascistic 40% women on boards law. I find his motto telling. "Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?". This confuses me slightly. Why not half the scientists? Because women and men are not the same. It’s not even a question to me that women and men will trend to different things, we have different minds and different bodies. It’s not a burr in my psyche that this is true, it’s not something that I’m going to victimize myself over or toss and turn at night over.

Fuck the royal family

ArgusEyes — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:11:36 GMT

My escape from the UK hasn’t stopped royal wedding from being thrust down my throat on multiple occasions.

Those who know me know my opinion of the monarchy. I don’t have a lot of time to write about it now, but given current events, I thought I should offer some thoughts.

I read a while ago, a serious new piece about the problems of Kate Middleton being a commoner and what implications this would have for her engagement. Commoner. Seriously?

I don’t know about you, but when you use the term ‘commoner’ with someone, it is rarely a praise. But this is what we all are in Britain, commoners, peasents, peons, people divided by a blood-based caste system into un-breachable layers of state-granted privilege.

This is an idea that should be repugnant to any liberty-loving enlightened person living in the 21st century.

Are people outraged? Are they fuck? Yay! Excitement! A big royal wedding and lots of goss! They’re good for the tourism don’t you know? After all, they don’t have any power anyhow.

I’ve heard the arguments above in real life (the most prominent being the tourism and “no real power”) ones. Most people don’t care that there’s a royal family. I don’t get it. This teaches me two things.

Most people don’t want freedom. Community, a sense of belonging, leaders or gods to follow and worship. People care more about these things than the abstract concept of liberty and freedom.
Most people wouldn’t know a serious philosophical idea if it bit them on the arse. It’s rare to meet someone who is acquainted with the meaning of political terms, a knowledge of thought systems and logical fallacies. The overarching ideas of the affront to democracy and republicanism, the use of constitutions, these things are not considered when people think about royalty. The aforementioned tourism argument is an example of this, if a person considers this to be a valid point, then they’ve got their priorities mixed up a little bit on my opinion.

I will make a full video on the monarchy one of these days.

To Kate and Princy-boy. This’s for you, sing it Johnny!

Jonah Goldberg: See You Next Tyranny Day!

ArgusEyes — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:26:46 GMT

Excellent article from Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his mega-best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, China banned plastic bags a few years ago. “Bam! Just like that — 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags,” he gushed. “Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.”

China’s got us beat, suggests Friedman, because its leaders aren’t hung up on democracy, checks and balances, or any of the other dusty old impediments found in the American system. Friedman has proclaimed his envy for China’s authoritarian system countless times. It’s why he titled one of the chapters in his book “China for a Day.” The idea — he calls it his “fantasy” — is that if we could just be China for a day, the experts could impose by diktat what they cannot win through democratic debate.

…

Such arguments are as old as they are dangerous. And they are arrogant beyond description. People like Friedman automatically assume that their preferred policies are so obviously right, so objectively enlightened, that there’s no need to debate them or vote on them.

…

Such arrogance is dangerous. The literature on the unintended consequences of policies crafted by experts is at least as old as the field of economics. Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century economist, noted all that separated the good economist from the bad is the ability to appreciate the possibility of the unforeseen. Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek demonstrated that healthy economies couldn’t be controlled by experts, because the experts will always have a “knowledge problem.” They can never know all of the variables and never fully predict how their theories will play out in reality.

Watch out for the envy police

ArgusEyes — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:51:42 GMT

Occasionally I take a comment that someone has entered elsewhere in the site, and write it up as a new post. I do this when I feel the answers and questions are prominent enough to be featured. Commenter “goLookGoRead” has posted the following on my “women are more sexist than men” video as well as many others. The first two parts have been omitted because I didn’t have a lot to say to them. I am starting a couple of paragraphs in.

It is very easy to fall into a mindset of 'envy' (I think of envy as the worst kind of hate - because it leads to racism, misogyny and man-bashing behaviour) irrespective of gender or race, it is 'envy' itself that creates urban rude behaviour. Stop labelling people racist or politically correct/incorrect, male or female and start talking about being 'envious' for what 'envy' really is - the most divisive thing in the universe!

The mindset of “envy” seems to be what you take up later on in your comment where you suggest that the government must steal the money from the wealthy and give it to the poor (I.E. you) but it’s other people’s envy that’s the problem isn’t it? Like how socialists cry about the greed of capitalists but their own personal greed’s and wants go unnoticed. That makes me feel like re-posting this:

That aside, the idea that “envy” (or “greed” as some state) leads to racism, misogyny and man-bashing behaviour seems, to me, to be foolish. You are welcome to develop that idea more but when I think of these problems then envy doesn’t come into it. What is the racist envious of? What is the misogynist envious of?

Let’s take racism. What causes racism in my mind? Well, I happen to think it is an indelible part of human nature, the de-humanisation of other groups because of their physical race differences. Racism is founded on hate, to state that another race is different but deserve equal rights is not racist, to argue that another race or sex is “inferior” in a whole and intractable way is irrational and founded on hatred for that race or sex. Feminists do this all the time. Where does it come from? The victimisation complex.

The English as a people are aghast at racism against certain groups (say, an African for example) but we allow ourselves to be fairly bigoted towards the French and Germans. Feminists coo at how they are the progressive ones in society but they are some of the most tyrannical people out there. Their own bigotry is wrapped up in the self-justification of the various ways they have been slighted (or think they have) and this slides their route down the pyramid oppression towards those they feel have slighted them. The feminist, the victim, comes to oppress men. The black, the victim, acts more racist then whites do. Bigotry never goes away, it simply shifts from group to group. Bigotry is human and human is bigotry.

Political Correctness and Racism - Harlesden and Brent, the 'Heinz 57' borough of London, is where I experience arrogance, and rudeness everyday whenever I step out of my front door. The politically correct intelligentsia haven't got a clue because they have a choice not to live in Harlesden. I do not call my neighbourhood 'multi-cultured' because 'culture' (imnsho) can't exist alongside council estate ghettoism combined with a selfish type of street culture. The only genuine 'multi-cultured' society happens in more affluent parts of London where everybody can afford to live decent lives among well educated and polite society.

That is why, as I always said to people, I would never live in London. It’s overcrowded, it’s too violent, the people are rude and it smells. Why are you there? You seem to dislike it too. No one is going to save you, you need to move if you dislike it so much.

I am a white woman and I live in Harlesden in London. I hate living in Harlesden, but Harlesden is where I can afford to exist (I would not call it 'a life', in the sense of living, because I don't like the quality of my life here in Harlesden - even though it is a relatively green borough and it is quite close to the centre of London).

I’m confused. Is living in London cheaper then every other part of the country? There’s nothing to stop you moving if you don’t want to live there. I moved from the UK completely and move from Devon, to Wales, to Cambridgeshire when I did live in the UK.

In an ideal world we would get a government who would rob from the rich and give to the poor, but that is never going to happen! So 'envy' control is a logical approach. So I shut up and put up hoping that one day me, and my man, will afford to escape the country or escape to the country.

Your utopia has been tried and it has failed. Envy is the cause of so much evil in your mind but your own envy on this matter is fine? Also, how would a world be “ideal” when it would rest on a fundamental sin (theft) to keep it going? Would the moral spirit of people living under a system be unimpeachable as their subsistence is dependent on a moral wrong?

If the wealth producers in society have the produce of their hard work, capital, taken from them, then they will simply stop producing capital or will be massively de-incentivised to do so. The “pie” of wealth that people seem to think comprises societies’ money like some zero-sum game will shrink and the pieces that it doles out to the people will become miniscule. Again, this is not abstract theory, this has been tried over and over again.

The scent of fascism inherent in your desires is confirmed by the term “envy control”. Images of 1984 thought police and the secret service coming to take you away in the night for “envy crimes” come to mind. Put England to the sword in the name of your theories? Such is the fate of when society’s path is set by an oligarchy of people who see themselves as the enlightened ones. It will be another lesson for history that to do so will lead to failure. Freedom, despite its flaws, is a better way.

Dalrymple: Sympathy Deformed

ArgusEyes — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:34:30 GMT

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_otbie-sympathy.html

How do feminist oppress men? Plus other questions

ArgusEyes — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:52:25 GMT

From my previous answering questions post comes yet more questions from “bob”. So here they are:

“How do feminist oppress men, or how do they take away men's rights?”

Two ways:

One way is by pushing ideas into the zeitgeist that are anti-male, a good example of this is the Norwegian board of women law (where 40% of the boards of companies must be female) and any quota based law. These laws are not necessarily passed by feminists but are the result of feminist/leftist memes that hold that equal outcomes are necessarily the product of systemic sexism against women and therefore laws must be passed to pass power from the privileged (men) to the underprivileged (women). That unequal outcomes point absolutely to sexism is a though based upon the meme that men and women are the same. After all, if they’re not the same then that difference might explain the differences in outcomes in certain professions – an idea that feminist do not entertain.

The second way is direct action my feminists be it male only university courses (May Daly) or by self-professed feminists who are usually in the government. A good example of this is Harriett Harman who would actually pack the board of a bank with women. Which is direct sexism.

“What rights don''t[sic] men have?”

I make videos for a reason. If I may quote a section from my “Men are more oppressed than women” video.

First unlike the example above this pension tale is genuine oppression. Men in the UK have to work until 65 to qualify for a full pension, women have to work until 60 and generally make less and have more paternity leave. Laws that impose different standards on us based on our sex. Sounds like oppression to me.

How about the fact that discrimination against men is governmentally mandated. Forget about the companies and the universities. The most solid example of this is the new leader of the conservative party in the UK proposed quotas to get the shortlist of political candidates to be half women [2]. Where you see quotas read discrimination.

How about the right to reproductive control. When a woman becomes pregnant then she can abort, give up for adoption and in America shortly after the birth she can abandon the baby and resolve herself of parentage of that baby, this is called safe haven abandonment. When a man gets a woman pregnant then he is screwed, his entire life now becomes a script that the woman will write. If he wants the baby and she doesn’t tough for him, if he doesn’t want the baby and she does then tough for him also.

How about the right to equal protection? Our fascist police state will oppressively arrest a man for a woman’s violence because only men can abuse. A message that is spread by our system and our politicians.

How about the denial of parentage for men? When a split happens the man is treated as sub-human, completely controlled by the government who tell him when he can see his children and when he can’t like he is some sort of criminal.

How about divorce? Where a woman is entitled to her husbands assets and men are made to pay out large sums of money to their wives from businesses that they made succeed. A recent case involved a large payout and continual payouts every year for the rest of the woman’s life!

A man is more likely to be convicted and convicted for longer periods of time than a woman for a similar crime, like murder. We need only look at the attitudes surrounding the Clara Harris case and we see the sympathy that is poured on a woman murderer.

Health spending, for every £1 spend on men’s health care, £8 is spent on women’s health care [3]. Government and charity spending for breast cancer is 37 millions, it’s 10 million for prostate cancer, both diseases kill as many. So the government is spending more to protect a certain segment of the population, how about that?

http://www.true-equality.net/archive/2008/05/10/men-are-more-oppressed-than-women.aspx

“What power do the feminist have to do so if their only power is their voice?”

Ideas are powerful things. The mass murderers of history got into power, in part, by appealing to the masses with ideas. Theories on repressed memory syndrome were used to implant memories of abuse into the minds of patients, by psychologists, and led to convictions of completely innocent day-care workers (many of whom were women) and fathers.

Feminists are an advocacy group who have the current position, of representing women and being equated with what is good for women. I don’t believe this is so but nonetheless, they can influence policy, craft laws and last but not least they can indoctrinate young women and men with their ideas through the apparatus of university.

Never. Ever. Underestimate the power of ideas.

“What's wrong with protesting,[sic] isn't being active part of activism?”

I believe they are protesting on behalf of bad values. That is what I object to in feminism. Are you talking about physical protests? I expect it. Any protest that gets to obnoxious and loud will irritate me, even if I support the cause (tea parties for example).

“Also, are you anti any other movements?”

I am anti any movement that stands against liberty or/and on the side of political correctness.

I am against antiquated and corrupted victimist movements such as feminist and “blackism” or minority racist movements such as the modern black movements or any that is based upon race.

I am against pure racist movements such as the black panthers, K.K.K or white supremacists in general.

I am against the general milieu of anti-freedom movements such as socialism, Nazism, communism, Maoism, Islamism, etc.

I am against radical animal rights movements which are based on the idea of equating humans and animals (like P.E.T.A.), not the ones which want decent treatment for animals.

I am against movements based upon magic, which want the consequences of that magic to be influenced upon others. Such as creationism pseudoscience and religious movements.

I am against anti-science movements such as creationism and anti-vaccination and feminism (yes, many victimist movements have strong anti-science components).

I think I covered most of the bases. In short, I am against most movements as well as the idea of movements. Because at heart, movements are made up of people who represent a certain mindset, the mindset that the world revolves around their particular issue and they tend to view it in the extreme. Movements inevitably tend towards degradation such as feminist fighting for genuine equal rights for women to become the twisted movement it is today. They get invested in perpetuating the movement, and do so, normally by shifting the goalposts of what they oppose and manufacturing new controversies to fight.

True Equality besieged by Thai mob. I yawn.

ArgusEyes — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:04:13 GMT

Oh my. About a week ago I suddenly received a huge influx of emails for a couple of days, which slowed down to a trickle of about three or four a day since then. A bunch of Thais have found my video over again and are writing in to give me a piece of their rather tiny little minds. Let’s dive in and take a random pick shall we?! No kidding, I will now select, um, ten emails at random from the batch I received.

FUCK YOU, SON OF A BITCHMOTHER FUCKER, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT MY COUNTRY. DON'T SAY A WORD CONCERN TO MY HOMELAND AGAIN, JUST GO TO HELL.

pueng4426@gmail.com

Say it in caps!

go to hell, fuck your mother,stupid man, don't mention to our country and my king, we don't like about your you tube video if we complaint your country about rape, streetwalker, pollution, murder, to trade abuses your prime minister, please ask yourself that you are the one in your country or you are fucking ass with animal,

kongo_bkk@hotmail.com

This is actually quite cogent by the standards set by the rest.

you guys are either gay or have no life. get over it, be a man! haha

Yes. Those are the only two viable options.

YOU ARE NOT THAI .. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING IN THAILAND !!!! STOP YOUR MOUTH AND GO TO THE HELL !!!

im.finethanks@yahoo.com

Ass hole, Man. You are a stupid through the world. You don't know everything of our king and Thailand.
If you don't have everything to do, will push you finger in plug.

thaksinnolive@gmail.com

Nerd !

And proud of it!

don't say anything about ours king , because u really doesn't understand the culture in Thailand and The Love of My King. BE PANSY....SOMEWHERE ELSE

ppprem23@gmail.com

If you still want to live in this world.Should stop saying what is and is not true.I speak to you with human Language.

I don’t know what language you’re speaking mate.

your mouth smell like rotten dog.go to hell dead buried in a hole.

Best. Insult. Ever.

Our country and Our law are not your business. Many things in your country are waiting for you to do, especially taking care your parents.
We love our King and even there is no this kind of law, it will not change our love to our beloved King.

Yes, it really is the same thing over and over again. We love our king shouted aloud as a mantra.

It really is scary to see such a mass force of wilfully stupid hyper emotional thugs. Whose iron-clad cognitive dissonance will not let one tiny ray of philosophy or reason enter their mind. This is the ugly side of the human animal, the side that leads to evil. I’ve said it before. When discussion of the king is completely off the table and backed up with punishment by the coercive force of government, then what happens when the next king is not such a good man? How will you feel about the apparatus of complete and utter tyranny being set up for such a man to impose his will upon you all? It’s the lesson of history. Concentrated power within an oligarchy leads to terror. Learn.

Good eats for the brain

ArgusEyes — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:43:45 GMT

Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) is a fantastic write who reads some of the most gripping and readable books around on the topics of modern society and culture. His book, Life at the bottom, should be mandatory reading for those who desire to understand human behaviour and life. He has penned an extremely short essay for City Journal called When Freedom Isn’t Free.

Freedom is freedom, not the means by which everyone comes to precisely the same conclusion and conducts himself in precisely the same way.

The depressing, and perhaps sinister, aspect of the public commentary on the case is how largely it has ignored the question of freedom. For liberals, it seems, any trampling on freedom or individual conscience is now justified if it conduces to an end of which they approve. Thus liberalism turns into its opposite, illiberalism.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0414td.html

Liberal Fascism at Pharyngula

ArgusEyes — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:44:03 GMT

My favourite blog is by a person I largely can’t stand. P.Z. Meyer’s Pharyngula has a post on a recent bloggingheads.tv kerfuffle.

“I've always rather liked Bloggingheads — at least the idea of it, with one-on-one discussions between interesting people. It flops in execution often, since some of the participants wouldn't recognize reason and evidence if it walked up and slapped them in the face with a large and pungent haddock (the right-winger political discussions are unwatchable, and it's always had this problem of giving people like Jonah Goldberg a platform), but their Science Saturday has been generally good. I don't always agree with the people they have on, but at least they're interesting and provocative. And Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer have been superstars of the format.”

Yes, the reason it “flops in execution often” is that it allows people on with differing views to P.Z. Meyers. The very same flop in execution applies to freedom of speech.

However, those of us who are adults can handle opposing viewpoints without throwing tantrums, and may possibly admit that what Meyers considers a flaw is really the biggest strength of freedom of speech.

bloggingheads.tv is a website that offers many views, although I can’t stand creationism I enjoy watching stuff like this and no doubt I would have enjoyed watching Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer too. However, they have pulled out of Bloggingheads because of the presence of creationist babble that was “insufficiently opposed” oh the horror! My first thoughts when I head this is that Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer are childish fools. Is depriving the site of their own opinion in order to curtail future creationist content a mature approach to the problem? If anything, this will give credence to the common creationist claim that they are “expelled” wherever they go.

I think that a creationist love fest is funny to watch, and my hackles certainly don’t get raised at the existence of such a thing.

Not even mentioning that science is a lot more decidable than political opinion is. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism. I recommend that Meyers should pick up a copy if he wants to understand how his “liberal” belief system is not so liberal anymore. As should be apparent by this ridiculous post of his.

Australia joins China in internet censorship

ArgusEyes — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:43:06 GMT

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.

Not much to say about this, run of the mill fascism. Let’s be clear here, the government has added a political thorn in its side to the list of sides which are banned, it also added an anti-abortion site. So this is censorship of views the political party on power agrees with. What could be the political orientation of the current Australian government be? Hmm, I took my guesses but looked it up as well.

The Australian Labor Party. Who are affiliated with Socialists International. Yup, I win. I give myself a hi-five and freedom dies some more. Let’s file this away under the “the threat to freedom comes from the left” case shall we?

Freedom of speech means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to speak and hear unpopular views.

Watch Hitchens for more: