Interesting Images — Just Because

I've been following the story about the lion killed by a US dentist. A lot of folks are very upset about the lion being killed — a lot more upset about that than they are about the killing of US military personnel in the US and the selling of baby parts from aborted babies. Of course, not everyone is upset.

Things like that have spawned another question.

Yes, Planned Parenthood is a really dangerous place for unborn babies. That's because

Maybe we can use some of that. Maybe this is a good message to press.

That Iran treaty Obama had Kerry "negotiate"? Sorry, it's not allowed to be a treaty because . . . .

Michael Ramirez, understated as always. Obviously, the "negotiations" with Iran produced a deal, not a treaty. 'Cause Kerry wouldn't lie, would he? Any more than would his predecessor at the State Department. Right?

I guess that's how politics is (are?) these days. And that's really too bad.

Four Key Comments on Current US Politics

A single Althouse posting collected two particularly important comments. One comment is

Anyone else find it creepy that new standard what we may and may not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an obviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?

A second comment notes

Well, it's been that way for a long time. Centralized media helped a lot. Now, the truth gets out. And, yes, it started with El Rushbo.

The Left has always hated the truth.

Gateway Pundit noted a consistency some months ago, saying

When leftists can’t win an intelligent argument they historically resort to violence. Whether they’re communists, socialists, Nazis or members of the SEIU, the game is the same.

Something similar was noted nearly five years ago

You can understand the outlines of all of American politics (and, it now appears, Canadian politics as well) if you remember just one thing:

Conservatives think liberals are misguided
Liberals think conservatives are evil

(I have sometimes heard "ignorant" used instead of "misguided".)

The People, Revolting

After I wrote my prior post on the TSA's offensive new procedures, I saw where others had weighed in on the topic. Herewith, a small selection — a trio — of representative comments:

• Scott Johnson at Powerline:
  “The TSA is bound by a form of political correctness that has long rendered it a joke. With its newly implemented scanning and patdown procedures, however, the TSA has become something worse than a joke. It has become intrusive and humiliating to a degree that is difficult to accept.” ... “In its absurd intrusiveness and glaring incompetence, the TSA has become a perfect metaphor for the Obama administration. Thus the revolt.”

  
  

• Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:
  “The junk man’s revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy.”

  
  

• Security and terrorism expert Bruce Schneier, on the TSA Scans:
  “Q: Is this security theater?
  “A: 100 percent. It won't catch anybody.”

Meanwhile, the TSA response is to up the ante:

“The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also will not be permitted to simply leave the airport.” (emphasis in the original)

Nor was this an idle threat. There has already been a man arrested and marched through two separate airport terminals in handcuffs and underwear by TSA thugs. His crime: He demonstrated that TSA was only interested in its defined process and not in results. He stripped down to his underwear, which “left nothing to the imagination,” so TSA could verify nothing illegal was being carried without him having to be groped. “But that wasn’t enough for the TSA supervisor who was called to the scene and asked me to put my clothes on so I could be properly patted down.” In other words, TSA insisted on coercing him into submitting to a sexual assault (which TSA pretends isn't a sexual assault because it's being done in an airport by the government). In this and its other actions (like strip searches of children), TSA has demonstrated it's just a bureaucracy of thugs.

And our Dear Leader is less than sympathetic:

“Barack Obama admitted today during his NATO Question and Answer session that he does not worry about the TSA gropings because he does not fly commercial. (Thank you for enlightening us on that, Mr. President. We almost forgot your were the Commander in Chief.) But, he added that he had no problem with ordinary Americans getting groped by TSA agents at airports.”

Obama's comments produced some interesting responses on that posting:

• Always the false choices with this chump. Sure, build a coal plant, if you want, but you’ll go bankrupt. Sure, go ahead and opt out of government-healthcare, you’ll be fined. Want to fly? Sure, get sexually assaulted. Typical fascist bs from a typical fascist loser. I’m not accepting this “conditioning” for a totalitarian police state. Period.

  
  

• It’s better that a million innocent children get groped than one Muslim extremist get profiled. It’s in the Consitution! Somewhere…

  
  

• Has the nation gone bat sh** crazy? Where are all of the leftards who were screaming about losing constitutional rights during the Bush administration over the Patriot Act? Where are they? Do absolutely none of them fly or are they all closet gropers or exhibitionists and voyeurs?

  
  

• As far as the TSA having the authority to do this, well they have the same authority to do it as the EPA has to refuse to give operating permits to 80% of the oil refineries. All of this over reaching from the executive into the private lives and private businesses to keep the masses in line.

  
  

• You Know How to Combat the march to 1984? ………. 1776 !!!

I'm with Scott Johnson, Charles Krauthammer, and Bruce Schneier. These new TSA policies and procedures are political “security theater”, completely worthless in providing any actual security. The public “will tolerate only so much idiocy.” “Thus the revolt.”

The only solution is to disband the Transportation Security Agency and turn their responsibilities over to someone who at least has some concept of what the responsibility entails.

PC Run Amok + Bureaucratic Overreach

“Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.”

It may be a fluke, but I feel a little prescient. Almost a year ago, I asked “Since this guy had his PETN explosive in his underwear, will we have to start taking ours off for TSA?” The answer is apparently yes, though TSA is doing is doing this with a combination of (a) technology (full-body scanners) and (b) “enhanced pat-downs” — in a coercive environment — in place of traditional strip searches. In other words, TSA is making their employees into a combination of peepers and gropers, both varieties of sex offenders who would have to register with law enforcement (and would face jail time) if they weren't government employees.

I also said “It looks to me like the bureaucrats of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) really don't know what they're doing. As a result, they are mainly just hassling ordinary passengers without doing what's needed to make us safer.” And I see no reason to change that assessment.

The bottom line is this: Limited by its bureaucrats' ideology, the TSA has no idea what to do to make actual improvements in aviation safety. So they opt for the “politically correct” solution, thereby harassing (sexually and otherwise) millions of passengers they already have reason to know are innocent while detecting no hijackers or terrorists. That's bureaucratic overreach at its best.

I would categorize this as deliberate stupidity. Somebody obviously said words like “Do something, even if it's wrong.”

As usual, Trever identifies the situation best.

It looks to me like the only solution is to disband the Transportation Security Agency and turn their responsibilities over to someone who at least has some concept of what the responsibility entails — like concentrating on who gets on the plane, instead of assaulting everyone because TSA won't focus on actual (real and projected) threats.

That way, too, we can get away from the combination of political correctness run amok combined with bureaucratic overreach — the current toxic combination that gives a program that fulfills bureaucracy's promise by being offensive, stupid, and ineffective.

Zero Tolerance Is Zero Intelligence

... suitable only for those with no capacity for judgment.

Preemptive Surrender at Yale

The Yale University Press has apparently decided to surrender to a threat that has not yet been made. It will publish a book about the controversy over the "Mohammed cartoons" without showing the cartoons that were (supposedly) the cause of the furor.

This kind of cowardice is incredible, and illogical. The people who have made such threats in the past, and may in the future, do not need reasons for their threats and violence. They have consistently shown they will invent whatever excuse/pretense they may feel the need for.

Therefore, to make life easier for the Yale University Press, and as a public service, I provide here a re-link to a post from February 2006 showing the cartoons and providing some context from the time period in which they were originally published. (The link is also provided among my favorites, on the right of this web page.) And I have checked — most of the links still work!

The Reality of Islam

Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands you respect, but has no respect for you.

This is a quotation (emphasis added) from the speech Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders would have given at the House of Lords if Britain hadn't decided pandering to violent Muslims was more important than freedom of speech.

Let Freedom Reign!

It's been two years since the initial round of threats, phony outrage, and riots over publication of cartoons by the Jyllands-Posten Danish newspaper five months before. Some writers, like Michelle Malkin, wrote about the cartoons at the time. She and many others (including Laughing Wolf and me) wrote about it at the time. The Freedom for Egyptians blog noted that an Egyptian newspaper had also published the Danish cartoons, without incident, at the same time the Danes had.

Now the Jyllands-Posten has re-posted one of the cartoons (the upper one on the right) in connection with the arrests of five extremists plotting to murder the cartoonist who drew it. It was also published by other newspapers in Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and the Netherlands — but not the United States. One of the newspapers said "We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend." I join Laughing Wolf, Blackfive, Michelle Malkin, and thousands of others in solidarity with them. And with them, I say "Let freedom reign!"

Personal postscript: Yes, this is a little late, but I'm back from vacation now.

Lionheart Faces Arrest

A blogger is to be arrested for blogging. We know to expect that in Russia and China, and we've seen it recently in Saudi Arabia. But this one is in Britain. And he's not going to go quietly.

As an American, believing in free speech and the protection of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I find that as intolerable in Britain as in China and Saudi Arabia — and as I would find it in Canada or here. Here are some of the reasons, in the words of some of those who write better than I do:

David Warren:

“Freedom of expression” did not develop in the West from purely idealistic motives. Nor is it necessarily a pretty thing. Like so much in civil society, we put up with it because the alternative is worse, and we'd rather cope with free speech, than with the free intimidation that results from its suppression.

Gates of Vienna (comment):

The civilized answer to speech is counter-speech, not government supression, 'holy' terror, or self-silencing via cowering intellectual (and eventually literal) suicide.

Gates of Vienna:

One cannot pick and choose freedom of speech, it either exists, in which case one lives in a democracy, or it does not, and one does not. Islam is not simply a religion; it is also a political ideology. The EU has therefore made the protest of a political movement illegal. This is totalitarianism.

James Lewis:

The solution to totalitarianism is well-known. It has been known since the European enlightenment, or perhaps since ancient Athens: It includes such standards as genuine tolerance for debate, a willingness to compete economically in open markets, a reliance on free speech and respect for the individual - because when you respect individuals there is no problem of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Goethe, Voltaire, Kant, Montaigne, Erasmus, Spinoza, Aquinas, Jefferson, Chesterton and a hundred others -- the entire enlightened ethical tradition of Western civilization -- stands ready to be used. Europe only needs to look to its own strengths to defeat today's "totalitarian temptations."

The struggle between enlightenment and the totalitarian temptation has never yet ceased, and it may never cease. Totalitarians are experts in the art of demagogy, sophistry and manipulation, but the bottom line is always destroying free speech, free thoughts and free actions. So it's not that hard to tell the sides from each other, even when the colors change from Black to Red to Green. The question is always: Can you tolerate open debate? If not, as in today's European Union, then you are at bottom a totalitarian. If yes, then you are a classical liberal --- or a modern democratic conservative.

On the other hand, let's give the devil his due. If the British want to prosecute Lionheart, and potentially give him a prison sentence longer than that given pedophiles and rapists, the we must insist on at least a pretense of even-handedness. In this context, that would require — at the very least — the prosecution under the same "hate speech" statute of all the imams from all the mosques whose hate speech was documented by Britain's Channel 4.

Free Speech

“Freedom of expression” did not develop in the West from purely idealistic motives. Nor is it necessarily a pretty thing. Like so much in civil society, we put up with it because the alternative is worse, and we'd rather cope with free speech, than with the free intimidation that results from its suppression.

David Warren is exactly right. That's why, in this country, no one has a right not to be offended. I, myself, am frequently offended — especially by those who insult my intelligence with their stupid propaganda. But, ....

The proper response to offensive speech and to stupid speech is more free speech, not less. Let them talk, and they will demonstrate conclusively the stupidity of their position. Censor them, and you make martyrs of people who don't merit being listened to — and you make it possible for other idiots to build support for them without having to admit what they actually said.

In the case of the David Warren column, some members of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage^TM are offended that Maclean's published an excerpt of a Mark Steyn book, and have filed complaints with the national and provincial "Human Rights Commissions" in Canada. On this, David Warren says

My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean's will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people -- especially journalists, of all political persuasions -- to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada's free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result, is if the case fails to produce this response.

I'm with him.