Saturday, February 04, 2006

THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS



I guess most readers have heard about Europe's cartoon uproar by now. Without much support from other governments, the Danish government has been defending the right to free speech in Denmark. That right is under attack because a Danish newspaper printed cartoons about Mohammed. As a result, Muslims have of course started putting pressure on Denmark -- including calls for a boycott of Danish goods and services (Since a major Danish export is ham and bacon, that has its amusing side). So it is encouraging that quite a few European newspapers have now defied Muslim hysteria and reprinted the cartoons. Even the BBC has broadcast glimpses of them. Maybe Europeans are finally getting fed up with the constant demands for special treatment by Muslims. An unusually feisty British reader writes:

"What is vastly more offensive than any cartoon could ever be, is:-

* The Personality Cult demanding special respect for a criminal thug, intolerant aggressive war-monger against peaceful people, inciter and practitioner of rape, piracy, pillage, slavery, nastiest-possible desecration of others' most sacred things, and of deceit. (All extensively documented as he died the Emperor of his warlord empire-on-earth.)

* The book he would have you know to be the flawless, unchangeable Last word of God, which just happens to be one of the nastiest and most stupid books ever written. Why would a real God be so obsessed with details of sex, warmongering and financial arrangements? And make so many glaring self-contradictions in the process?

* The Jihad Denial pretending away of the many millions of murders of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, etc, a still-ongoing global genocide directly inspired by the cult of that thug and his nasty book. That's the GENUINE Islam.

The Mohammedo-Fascists' preoccupation with not being offended stands in the most stupendous contrast to their own tradition of being maximally nasty about the most sacred things of peaceful Hindus, Buddhists, etc: ... which started with Mohammed's own desecration of other peoples' sacred idols in Mecca. Why should such a thug be worthy of any special respect himself?


And, of course, BUY DANISH goods if you see them anywhere. There is an unusually sensible Muslim comment here. One of the cartoons concerned is reproduced above and they are all here -- where it rightly comments: "These cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and other pols".

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ELSEWHERE

A good comment from Dick McDonald: "Yesterday when I asked a Floridian guest to the RAID rally why he was blaming Republicans for running up the national debt and borrowing from China to pay for tax cuts for the rich and sticking our children with this enormous burden, he had no earthly idea what our external debt was. When I told him the debt was a mere $4.6 trillion in a country worth $120-180 Trillion, he breathed a sigh of relief. When I explained that we were only obligated to China for a mere $250 Billion out of the $4.6 Trillion, his leftist propaganda started to drain from his body. When I informed him that China with a 10% growth rate(which I doubt they can sustain for long) and a GDP of $1.6 Trillion will take many years to catch the US with a $12.5 Trillion GDP and a 4% growth rate, the leftist liquid drained from his eyes. Facts have a way of doing that. Too bad Americans live in a vacuum of myths written by scriptwriters at the NYT. Fill your quiver with facts and you will eventually decimate our enemy. It will take an effort."

More TSA stupidity: ""Margaret Jackson is the blond, bespectacled, fiftyish chairman of Qantas Airlines. She seems as Australian as kangaroos and koalas: cheerful, plucky, and no-nonsense. Only someone completely bonkers could suspect her of being an Islamic terrorist a la the 9/11 hijackers. Which means, of course, that the TSA did. A screener named Bill rifled Maggie's briefcase last year at Los Angeles International Airport. In it he found the sorts of papers you might expect an airline's CEO to carry, specifically, cross-sections and diagrams of an aircraft. Well. The nitwits who strive to protect us from deadly nail clippers and grandmothers in sandals came out swinging. According to Maggie, our man Bill asked her, 'Why have you got all of this?' She told him, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas.' And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'. Boy, nothing gets past the TSA these days."

Beware of ad hominem fallacies: "An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are considered intellectual ammunition in the war of ideas. The only valid response to a persuasive argument is an equally persuasive argument towards a different conclusion. Yet the witch hunters' central argument has nothing to do with the virtues of the arguments presented by Bandow and others. Their argument is, essentially, that because the writer has not disclosed information about his income, he is essentially untrustworthy and his opinions should not be given the time of day. This argument is flawed enough to make it invalid. In logic, that's called a fallacy."

Praise be to tax competition!: "Tax competition occurs when a government uses its tax system to try to attract capital, business activity, or wealthy individuals from other countries. At its most obvious this could be a 'tax haven' with very low (or even zero) tax rates, but it could include more subtle provisions such as tax breaks for specific businesses relocating into a country. Game theory suggests that if the low-tax countries successfully attract international investment then other governments will respond, leading to a competitive spiral of tax reductions as they all compete for mobile capital."

Smarter Muslims don't like Islam?: "An increasing number of Muslims living in Norway have over the past few years chosen to send their children to private Christian schools, NRK reports. At the Christian Regnbuen school in Oslo, 20 out of a hundred students are Muslims. Other private schools in Oslo, like St Sunniva and Kristelig Gymnasium, also have many Muslim students. - I believe they feel that their faith is taken more seriously here, that Christian schools have greater respect and understanding for their faith than they find in public schools, says Dean Lars Bjoerge Holm at Kristelig Gymnasium to Dagsavisen".

Phrenology lives! There is a satirical graphic of a Leftist brain here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)


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