#GE2010: the Returns

Demotix: "Londoners cast their votes in General Elections" (images)

Tweeting the British #leadersdebate

The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher

Reason TV present John Blundell and the legacy of The Iron Lady:

View in a pod "The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher", posted with vodpod
More on John Blundell's biography of Margaret Thatcher.

Politicians Under Fire by Loose Pomo Canons (updated)

Today we witness two separate cases of the primacy of politics being overrun by postmodern servants of the law.

Do you remember the police searching and ransacking Britain's MP Damian Green's office last year? Well it's happened again - but then, should we be surprised of such assaults, with the British police's infestation with Common Purpose members - employees and civil servants who's motto is to "act beyond authority"?

In the Netherlands it was announced today that counter-jihad MP Geert Wilders will be prosecuted after all, despite earlier extensive investigations, conducted over a period of over six months, that concluded there was no case.

But first, let's return to Britain.

BBC: "Police 'entered Tory MP's office'"

A Conservative MP has alleged that police entered his Commons office without a search warrant demanding to see constituency correspondence. Daniel Kawczynski said he found it "disgraceful" after the controversy over the arrest of shadow immigration minister Damian Green last year. (...) He said he had been informed by his office about a police raid as he was due to make a speech in a debate. (...) Fellow Tory MP Tobias Ellwood demanded that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith make a statement to MPs about the matter. (...) >>>

Of course it can always get worse. Geert Wilders was in for a shock when a 33 page indictment landed on his desk this morning. It accuses as well as convicts him of disseminating hatred, by lumping the Koran with Corporal Hitler's war manual "Mein Kampf", and calling for an end to unbridled immigration from Islamic countries of origin, to the Netherlands.

Think for a moment of the abomination of subordinating the freedom of speech - of an MP no less - to the' right' of a religious group not to be insulted; a minority we might add, who are outraged to the limits of their tolerance, at the drop of a hat.

The subjective right not to be insulted is considered primary over the objective freedom of speech, while the equalizers are out in force, pointing out how shocking it would be of someone were to call for an end to Jewish or Christian immigration to the country (honest! I'm not making this up!).

To cite this CNN item, the video "Fitna" "includes images of terror attacks; bloodied victims; beheadings of hostages; executions of women in hijab, the traditional full-body covering; and footage, with subtitles, of Islamic leaders preaching inflammatory sermons against Jews and Christians" ...

... and none of that is actually happening and it is unrelated to the noble religion of peace, let alone that lumping that faith with Nazism would be in order.

Wilders raising the matter on the other hand - as is his duty as an MP - is "inciting hatred" on a par with Rwanda's Milles Collines hate radio. This statement was just made by one of the pomo lawyers who lodged the complaint against Wilders.

But to the reality denier everything is 'the same': sound waves and violence, uniforms and Nazis, male sexuality and rape; the murder of whales is a daily occurrence in their version of the universe. They draw the line at terrorism and ... well, terror.

You get a measure of the hypocrisy of the people involved, when you realize that these defenders of Islamic religious groups don't hesitate to press charges against a segment of the Christian community for their refusal to allow women membership of their political party on Biblical grounds. The dialectics at work.

The world has been turned on its head. It is a clear example of 'thought creates reality'. Reality is not an objective state of affairs, independent of human thought, but rather the result of it. So, if Wilders can be made to shut up, all will be well in the universe of atoms and molecules (so they believe).

But what the pomo sympathizers of Islam are doing on a moral level, is providing succor to fanatics while leaving potential moderate reformers out in the cold.

On the other hand, Wilders' denunciation of radical Islam would trigger liberals to stop tolerating their religion being hijacked by radicals. Once that awakening takes place, we might actually get somewhere.

The appeasement of evil has never led anywhere. Anyone with half a brain cell can understand that. The postmodernists, for all the indignation, have an entirely different agenda!

You can sign a petition in support of Wilders and civil liberties here, and here's a link to the Facebook Group.

You can also watch "Fitna" on our Vodpod and see how intolerant it is of the intolerant.

Updating throughout:

The principled pacifist shows more common sense than the mentally putrified! Now would be a good time to follow his lead!

The Times of India: "Non-violence can't tackle terror: Dalai"

The Dalai Lama, a lifelong champion of non-violence on Saturday candidly stated that terrorism cannot be tackled by applying the principle of ahimsa because the minds of terrorists are closed (...) "They (terrorists) are very brilliant and educated...but a strong ill feeling is bred in them. Their minds are closed," the Dalai Lama said. (...) Read it all >>>

Front Page Magazine: "The War on Wilders", by Jacob Laksin

(..,) To understand just how outrageous is the court’s order it is necessary to consider the substance, such as it is, of the charges against Wilders. It does not exaggerate the case to say that Wilders is being accused of nothing more than holding an opinion with which the court’s judges disagree. (One cannot call it an unpopular opinion since, if recent polling is any guide, majorities of the Dutch public share Wilders’s apprehensions about Islam and Muslims' ability to assimilate.) Thus, the court cites Wilders’s “insulting statements” and complains that his “presentation is characterized by biased, strongly generalizing [sic] phrasings with a radical meaning, ongoing reiteration and an increasing intensity.” In fact (...) >>>

Middle East Forum: "Death to Free Speech in the Netherlands", by Brooke M. Goldstein and Aaron Meyer

(...) the court has done an about-face and decreed that charges may be brought against the politician, and that prosecuting him is somehow in "the public interest." (...) Suspiciously, the wording of the appellate court's ruling strongly echoes public criticism made by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) when the earlier prosecution was dropped, where the OIC censured prosecutors for ignoring the "thin line separating freedom of speech and the instigation of hatred, animosity and discrimination." (...)

Wilders' "crime" is what the OIC has been working to criminalize on a global level through the United Nations, while advocating the punishment of Westerners who speak out against radical Islam, terrorism, and its sources of financing. It is clear that the OIC's successes in the United Nations -- where the General Assembly passed its "Combating Defamation of Religions" resolution last year -- are already resulting in direct action. This is no victory for the Netherlands, or for anyone -- save the OIC and Islamo-fascists. The damage being done to free speech, however, is a defeat that will be felt everywhere. (...) >>>

Atlas Shrugs: "FREEDOM OF SPEECH VS JIHAD: ISLAM'S NEXT VICTIM, SUSANNE WINTER, AUSTRIAN POLITICIAN CONVICTED!"

It is with stunning speed that the house of Western civilization falls. Austrian politician convicted of "anti-Muslim incitement" Jihadwatch (hat tip Randall)

Free Speech Death Watch Update -- more on this story: "Austrian far-right legislator convicted of anti-Muslim incitement," from DPA, January 22 (thanks to Gudrun): Vienna - Austrian far-right parliamentarian Susanne Winter was convicted Thursday of incitement because of her anti-Muslim statements, including the claim that Islam's prophet Mohammed was a paedophile. Is truth no defense? Of course, the whole concept of pedophilia did not exist in Muhammad's day, but when he is taken as the supreme example of human conduct and imitated today, what results is...pedophilia. (...) >>>

... another petition to the European Court of Justice, and another Facebook group ...

- Filed on Articles in "Ruled by the Mob" and "In Defense of Liberty" -

R.I.P. Parliamentary Democracy

To those who haven't noticed, to the dim of wit, the socialights, the evaders and the hard of hearing: WE ARE THROAT-DEEP IN HORSE MANURE, primarily because we are encouraged to voluntarily forfeit the faculty that makes us humans human: to reason, the ability to properly identify, to integrate concepts into a mental body of ideas that conform to reality. And then there's the inability to weigh the portent of a particular case. The march of the debilitizers rolls on.

Because of an uptick in both frequency and severity we yesterday felt the necessity to open up a new dossier on Articles named "Ruled by the Mob" (not to be confused with the tyranny of the majority, or mob rule). It consists in a political innovation (at least in our time), that is now temporarily culminating in a case in Britain: the criminalization of the opposition.

Thanks to the Obama campaign in the US - which was as close to total war as one can get without actual bloodshed - the dossier is already quite lengthy.

It occurred last Thursday November 27 when the anti-terrorist squad of the Metropolitan police arrested Shadow Minister for Immigration, Damian Green MP, while his private papers and computer files in his home and office in the House of Commons were ransacked and confiscated.

This violation against the state of parliamentary democracy happened on thinly veiled, trumped up charges of possible "intent to disrupt the visit of the Queen to the Houses of Parliament". What's next, one might ask: Jesuits thrown in dungeons for disturbing the peace in St Peter's? But that's not the point!

The following question is intriguing, but it also misses the essence: who has been infiltrating swathes of British society and has propagated to act over and beyond his or her authority? If the surfacing of the black hand of Common Purpose (CP) cabal is too contrived for you, try this.

Roger Kimball on his blog on Pajamas Media deals with the case in "How Democracies Perish, British Edition": "The Honorable Member’s offense? Embarrassing Gordon Brown’s government. How did he do this? By revealing in debate on the floor of the House of Commons and in various lapses, failures, and dirty-little-secrets about the government’s immigration policy (...) Mr. Green was doing exactly what a member of the Opposition should do: shedding light on the government’s failures in order to make it more accountable to the public."

Kimball goes on to quote Janet Daley in the London Telegraph:

"The object of the exercise seems to have been intimidation and the flaunting of power. Short of an outright, totalitarian suspension of democracy, this is about as serious as it gets. Freedom is under threat in ways that we would not have thought conceivable a generation ago. The threat seems to be coming in various forms from a government desperate to save its own credibility and to be so convinced of its moral righteousness that it can justify the most blatant abuses of what we had taken to be the fundamental principles of a free society."

Some of the comments to the post are worth quoting in full:

#7: “…it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect” --George Orwell

#8: "As Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, put it “This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.” Socrates would beg to differ. If you want to avoid going down the road that leads to this sort of thing, it helps to know how we got here in the first place. The Left’s substitution of “democracy” for freedom is a key first step to their overall goal of taking the shackles off government and placing them back on the wrists of individuals. What makes a society free is a limited government, not an elected one."

So much for Barack Obama and his contempt for negative rights, which he popularly described as "what government cannot do to you". Rather than suffering the horrors of neglect by the state, he prefers the positive rights that chain a free individual once again to the risk-free nursery of the tribal collective.

The case is also born out in an excellent article by essayist Fjordman on the site of The Brussels Journal: "The Importance of Cicero in Western Thought". It's lengthy, but worth reading in its full glory. Here's one excerpt from Hayek's work "Constitution of Liberty" that's relevant to the case in hand (p. 146):

- Caption: young Cicero, reading - mural by Vincenzo Foppa, ca. 1464 -

"Cicero indeed became the main authority for modern liberalism, and we owe to him many of the most effective formulations of freedom under the law (...) that we obey the law in order to be free (...) during the classical period of Roman law it was fully understood that there is no conflict between law and freedom and that freedom is dependent upon certain attributes of the law, its generality and certainty, and the restrictions it places on the discretion of authority."

Freedom, as well as free will are often confused with acting on whim - another case of wrongful identification - which is indeed associated with mob rule, or tyranny by the majority which is in fact democracy.

As Sam Holliday pointed out in a recent essay on this blog, "A US Weimar Republic? Red Flags: Our Republic": [America's Founding Fathers] "created a federal republic, and wrote the Constitution of the United States, based on the tenets of classical republicanism, which is dependent on sovereignty being held by citizens themselves. The Founders shared a fear of tyranny, either by dictators or Caesars, and sought ways to protect freedom; their solutions were decentralization and checks and balances. It was a remarkable compromise designed as a safe guard against mass emotionalism."

The Left and increasingly also some on the Right are blind to the perils of recent trends towards emocracy, collectivism, bailouts and nationalizations, corporatism, peace-offerings and libations to theofascists and now, demonization and criminalization of the opposition. The Government that perpetrated this abomination is - to this moment - in power.

We stand by what we concluded yesterday in a note on the precursors of censorship: "Tolerate it at your peril."

Update:

Times just reported that the police acted without a warrant and in the course of an investigation into a series of leaks traced back to the Home Office. We are not in a position to investigate, but will show no signs of surprise if Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson or the directly responsible underling, as was the case in the De Menezes shooting, turns out to have undergone training by the nefarious Common Purpose (CP), "to act beyond authority" (see above). N.B. There was one (1) Labour MP who protested the matter during the Commons Debate. Kudos to him; the rest are too demoralized to compute the longer-term course of their ideas.

- Filed on Articles in "Ruled by the Mob" -

Exploding the Postmodern Myth of Moral Neutrality

UK's Tory leader David Cameron told the fat and the poor yesterday they must bear some of the responsibility for their own conditions.

The shift from personal responsibility to victimhood - man shunned of Free Will and reduced to a mere plaything of God, Nature and circumstance - has always been primary to the traditional Left. In fact, it is an existential precondition.

Postmodernism has added another dimension to the concept of victimhood on the philosophical level. The entire field of ethics got cancelled out: truth, as well as the qualifiers good and bad, true and false, conveniently collapse before the rejection of objective reality.

The result is the relativist attitude that renders fact mere personal opinion: everybody is right from his or her point of view. As a consequence any critical response, or 'passing moral judgment' has become a social no-no in the etiquette of polite society.

The postmodern version of petty bourgeois morality - political correctness - does the rest for the paradox that passes moral judgment on moral judgment, rejecting it as unevolved and a tool for oppression wielded by white patriarchists.

This inconsistency, and many others like it, has not resulted in the rejection of relativism as a fallacy. On the contrary it is taken as a phenomenon typical of all 'interesting' concepts. Indeed, the absence of contradiction would have made it intellectually suspect in postmodern eyes!

Postmodern relativism survives thanks to sophisms, rhetorical tricks and the tolerance of fallacies. The myth of moral neutrality has applications all over the Western world: from religiously neutral public spaces - the French approach to the separation of Church and State - to appeasement and moral cowardice in the face of evil.

Here's a preview from the draft of "The Dystopia of Paradise" in which the matter is explained from the Aristotelian position:

Just as atheism is not a position of religious neutrality, but on the contrary, is the belief that God does not exist, so a relativist stance is not morally neutral either, but is in fact the conviction that all morality is relative.

The supposed ethically neutral stance that Western politicians are trying to maintain towards Muslims, the radicals lumped with the moderates, are a mistake as well as a deal with the devil.

Postmodern relativists have an inherent belief in a place of complete impartiality. No judgments nor any offer of personal views are allowed. A neutral posture towards the moral convictions of others is supposed to be the essence of tolerance. Greg Koukl, founder and President of Stand to Reason, an American institute for Christian apologetics, has falsified the notion.

Koukl points out that relativists by not 'passing moral judgment' actually imply that - because some circumstances are ethically ambiguous - there are no moral certainties at all! The assumption however that there is no particular universally valid set of values other than your own, does not constitute neutrality. It is a particular view of morality, called relativism. In relativism, relativism itself is the value!

Relativists heartily promote their 'value-free' stance. We should respect an other's view, and they assert how morally despicable - yes, immoral - it is to foist your own convictions on others.

- Caption: courtesy "Friendly Atheist" -

Did you spot the paradoxymoron [2] lurking in that statement? The 'syllogism' just committed suicide, by imposing the view on you that if you disagree with it, your view is not valid, while it just stated that all views are valid.

We see that, far from being tolerant, fair and neutral, relativism is dictatorial, intolerant, fallacious and morally bankrupt. If in your dealings with a multiculturalist you are overcome by a sudden awareness of being in the presence of a bigoted hypocrite, you may have mentally picked up this implied fact.

Give an opinion and your neutral stance has been forfeited. If it wasn't for the eloquence of body language, the only place for neutrality would be silence.

Even more vigorously enforced is the idea that lumping innocent Muslims with terrorists and radicals is unfair towards moderates. It is a line that will not be crossed. The problem is that at this point an ethical inversion takes place, as terrorists share in the untouchable 'moral neutrality' towards the innocent.

This occurs because in the face of two morally exclusive options, no choice is being made. The good can stand out only in the face of evil; in a world without wrong, in the end nothing appears to be right.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" -

Conservatives: Cameron Live Tonight

Just received following missive from the British Tories:

Tune in to Conservatives.com at 6.30pm tonight to watch a live stream of the latest Cameron Direct event. David will be live and unscripted, taking questions from a 150 strong audience.

You can take part as well by adding your comments to the live blog which will accompany the broadcast.

To get a taste of Cameron Direct, watch the highlights package from last week's event in Essex.

Make sure you don't miss tonight's webcast by adding our calendar update or go to the Cameron Direct page and use the reminder function.

	Go to the Cameron Direct live stream (broadcast starts at 6.30pm)
	Add the calendar update
	Watch highlights of Cameron Direct in Essex

Local Time? World Time Converter.

Today Devoted to British Election Results: the Light!

Times Online: "Election latest: David Cameron inflicts worst drubbing in 40 years"

The Conservatives made sweeping gains across the country early today as voters gave Gordon Brown a huge rebuff in his first electoral test as Prime Minister. David Cameron chalked up important successes in the North, the Midlands and the South, securing his top target of Bury in Greater Manchester and taking control of Nuneaton and Bedworth, and Southampton. The Conservatives also took seats in Labour strongholds of Sunderland and Wigan.

Labour suffered one of its worst electoral humiliations, with its national share of the vote dropping to 24 or 25 per cent. The Tory share was projected at 43 or 44 per cent, better than its most optimistic predictions. The margin was similar to the drubbing handed out to John Major in 1995 two years before Tony Blair entered Downing Street. (...) The Tories were heading for total gains of more than 200 seats and Labour’s losses were of a similar order.

The results will put further pressure on Mr Brown’s leadership after a dismal few months. His decision ... >>>

Breakthrough in the North - Tide turns in Wales - Mixed night for Lib Dems - Red Box blog - Analysis - Graphic: the election battlegrounds

Related: Aren't we all dying to know the opines of Polly "neglected-by-the-state" Toynbee and Yasmin "hands-off-Sadam" Alibhai Brown ...?

- Comments Central: "Bogus arguments against Boris", by David Finkelstein

Alongside the hyperventilating of various B listers, today has seen two quite astonishing sets of arguments against Boris Johnson. The first is canvassed by Zoe Williams but was also made earlier by Yasmin Alibhai Brown. It is best summarised by the pay off line of Williams's (incidentally brilliantly done) piece:

We know what London is. Boris is not London.

Who is this "we" that she refers to? And how dare they assume that they know what London is. (...) And I have to say that being lectured by Polly Toynbee that Boris Johnson is too posh is, oh forget it. The second astonishing idea is advanced by ... >>>

Here's an automatically updating Google News link to Boris' election news from London!

Updated:

The Christian Choice: "ITV & BBC Censor London Mayoral Election Broadcastin - In Fear of Radical Islam"

Papers are being filed Tuesday morning at the Royal Courts of Justice after the BBC and ITV instructed London Mayoral Candidate Alan Craig to censor his Party Election Broadcasts aired last Wednesday (23rd April). The two broadcasters demanded that The Christian Choice candidate not criticise radical Islamist group, Tablighi Jamaat, over their plans to build Europe's biggest mosque next to the Olympics site in West Ham. Use of the word 'separatist' was ruled out by both ITV & BBC.

Alan Craig is asking the High Court to ensure the electoral process and freedom of speech is not threatened by fear of Islam. He is calling on the other Mayoral candidates to endorse his concern about political censorship. Commenting ahead of the action against the BBC, Alan Craig said:"Elections are about open discourse and a free exchange of views. The action of the broadcasters closed down democratic discussion and showed the fear of both ITV and the BBC in offending a radical Islamic group. In preventing rational and moderate comment, the BBC and ITV have fuelled the sort of paranoia which extreme groups like the BNP have fed-off in this election." (...) >>>

Related: Articles - Big Bro's Smoke and Mirrors: Media Corruption

- Filed on Articles in "London Calling" -