Sad…
H/T: BCF
Sad…
H/T: BCF
A few days ago, I posted on the 2nd Amendment and a pro-gun ownership ad. After a short comment exchange, I received this response from CodeSlinger which, in my never-humble-opinion, deserves a full post of its own.
It is that important!
CodeSlinger says:
And this ramifies into the whole issue of the source and nature of rights and morals.
By claiming that rights are conferred by the state and morals are a matter of consensus, the neo-liberals utterly destroy the concepts of rights and morals. They reduce rights to the status of mere privileges, and they reduce morals to the status of mere laws.
In this way, neo-liberalism is no better than the religions it denigrates. Neo-liberals claim that rights and morals are handed down by the state, while religious people claim that rights and morals are handed down by God. They do not recognize that a man has rights simply by virtue of existing, nor do they understand that right and wrong are determined solely by what kind of creature a man is.
A man is a living creature capable of reason and compassion. From this it follows immediately that his inalienable rights are life, liberty, privacy, property, self-defence and self-expression. It also follows directly that whatever causes a man harm by violating his rights is wrong, and whatever is not wrong is right.
Recognition of these principles places strict limits on the rightful power of the state vis-à-vis the individual, much the same way that the American Constitution was intended to do, only more so. It leads to the understanding that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to equally protect the equal rights of each and every individual. Everything the state does beyond that causes more harm than good.
And, of course, this flies in the face of everything the neo-liberals want, which is why they hate the Constitution and the principles of inalienable individual rights and universal morality on which it is based.
These principles give them freedom to do as they please, but also burden them with responsibility to take care of themselves — all without violating the rights of such others as have not violated theirs.
But neo-liberals would rather give up their rights and freedoms and bow down to the state, which they want to make all-powerful, because they foolishly think an all-powerful state will take care of them. This desire is hopelessly unrealistic and childish, and it is exactly what religious people want from their God.
Thus when neo-liberals call themselves citizens of a state, they mean exactly the same thing that religious people mean when they call themselves children of God. In this regard, religious people are more honest than neo-liberals, because they acknowledge that being taken care of by an all-powerful entity reduces them to the status of children — or chattel, which they acknowledge when they compare themselves a flock of sheep.
Neo-liberals seek to spare themselves this admission by secularizing their beliefs and values. But a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
The cultural Marxists who created neo-liberalism, complete with its politically correct self-sacrificial secular Edenism, were highly accomplished psychologists and sociologists. They knew perfectly well that this would happen. If they tore down traditional religious and family values and created widespread conditions leading to arrested emotional development, there would be only one possible replacement that could meet the subconscious psychological needs of the resulting post-modern tribe of hopelessly lost adult children: the apotheosis of the totalitarian state.
That’s right, neo-liberals worship the totalitarian state, even while they fancy themselves to be oh-so-sophisticated and secular.
This is what really underlies their rabidly relentless attack on the Constitution and the principles it is based upon.
Last Saturday, there was a ‘multi-faith’ protest against the blasphemous movie, ‘Innocence of the Muslims’.
In so many parts of the worlds, these protests have been extremely violent and, well, deadly. And not just from the primary rioting: in many places of the world, Muslims who were not deemed to be sufficiently ardent in protesting have faced violence. In one famous example, a man who declined to close his shop in order to join the riots in Pakistan has been charged with ‘blasphemy’ and is facing life in jail or a death sentence. In another example, journalists whom the rioters suspected of not giving their riots sufficient coverage (or casting them in positive enough light – depending on which sources you read) were violently attacked and barely escaped with their lives.
So, I am very happy to report that the Toronto protests were all peaceful.
Well, peaceful in the sense that the people protesting did not riot – and that is a good thing. That some of the protesters called for violence – and even the death of the moviemakers – that is less good.
Here are some videos of both the protest and the coverage thereof by Sun Media:
Ezra Levant with Raheel Raza:
If you’d like to check it out – Muslims Facing Tomorrow website is here.
Michael Coren’s (who made it to the protest personally) coverage is here:
BTW – I oppose the laws that forbid the denial of the holocaust. Not because I don’t thing it happened – my mother, as a small child, guided by her mother – actually sneaked food to Jewish concentration camp inmates when they were on a work detail in her neighbourhood. My grandmother saw, with her own eyes, a prisoner, dive onto a compost heap to eat some potato peels – and how, for this, he was beaten to death by his guard…using a beam with a nail in it… Yes, I know it happened and I have heard 1st person testimony of just how nightmarish it was. That, of course, is not the point: even if they are vicious lies, people must be free to say them, and say them publicly. To me, freedom of speech is absolute.
BlazingaCatFur – who was also there – asks some very basic questions:
SDAMatt2a, who also attended the event in order to report on it, captured the protester’s assertion that ‘Islam condones racism’. In case you think this is a linguistic error, please, do consider that the Koran itself considers the supremacy of Arabs over other races (and the Qureshi tribe is given supremacy over other Arabs) and that under Sharia – even today, it is not just illegal for any non-Muslim men to marry a Muslim woman, it is also illegal for non-white Muslim men to marry white Muslim women, it is illegal for non-Arab Muslim men to marry Arab Muslim women and it is illegal for non-Qureshi Muslim men to marry Qureshi Muslim women. That is recognized by ALL the ‘schools’ of Sharia and women whose wali (legal guardian) who agrees on their behalf to a marriage contract (as women cannot agree on their own – that power is reserved for their guardian alone) to a man in contradiction of this race-based rule have the right to sue for divorce on the grounds of having been married ‘below their racial status’. All schools of Islamic jurisprudence recognize this and side with the race-based ‘status’. I personally think this is wrong – but I do not have any influence over Sharia…
Sad.
So sad…
What is the cost of freedom?
Many have bought it for us, their descendants, with their lives.
Still, in our everyday life, most of us do not have to ask ourselves just how much of our income we would be willing to spend to protect our freedom of speech – in the public square as well as on the internet.
But, not everyone has that luxury.
Consider the case of Costance and Mark Fournier who run the Free Dominion forum. They have become targets of a serial suer, Richard Warman, and his minions.
From setting a legal precedent for protecting online privacy to proving that linking to online content does not constitute copyright infringement, they have done it. And more.
They have had to decide if they should comply with what they considered to be abuse of our (or, their subscribers) civil liberties or if they are willing to pay the money to defend themselves in a lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit…
If you hang out on the internet and comment on things or click on links, you are directly benefiting from the battles the Fourniers have fought and paid for on behalf of all of us!
(And not just in Canada – because of the related nature of our legal systems, Canadian legal precedents are quoted and considered in US rulings and vice versa….after all, we are all children of the Magna Carta!!!)
Yet, they are still facing more lawsuits against them!
They have launched a fundraising campaign to replenish their war chest.
Give generously, please!
This is something very important – something we do not pay sufficient attention to: common law.
It is the basis of our freedoms: the legislature with all its lawmakers are not the source of our rights and freedoms – they do not grant them to us from above. Rather, core rights and freedoms are something we are born with, not something that comes from the state.
Yes, we recognize that in order to co-exist with others, we may agree to put some restrictions on our freedoms: that is the role of our elected representatives.
In common law, there is the explicit recognition that rights come from within each individual and that governments – all governments – are there to restrict these freedoms. The less (smaller) the government, the fewer restrictions on our rights and the more free we will be. The bigger th government, the more restrictions and the fewer freedoms….
This is a philosophy which views each human being as an individual, full of potential and free to fulfill this potential or not.
It is in sharp contrast to the view that every person is born as a cog in a machine, a member of a society which has the ultimate power over her or him. Under this philosophy, it is the society which is the source of right in as much as it permits each member of the society to fulfil a role it deems most beneficial for the society. In this type of a set up, one only has the options that the society opens for them, no freedoms to choose things or actions outside of what the group would benefit from. This is called the civil law…
We must never forget the distinction between the two – and we must never give up our heritage of freedom for the gilded cage of civil law.
Just last night, I was reading to my son a 19th century traveller’s description of the Magna Carta Island – and the writer had permitted his imagination to float back across the centuries to that unforgettable June morning in 1215 when King John was brought there and forced to acknowledge this principle – already old then, but in danger of being eroded…
Sure, the Magna Carta is an imperfect document – as all human products are. But, it is the source of – and vastly superior to – all further re-tellings of it, from the US Constitution to the Canadian one, and so on. Along the way, the documents have become more and more cumbersome and less and less perfected…so we can trace just how much of our birthright we are permitting ourselves to give up in order to live in ‘civilized’ society.
But, do not lose heart!
Precisely because from Magna Carta on, all these documents are mere affirmations of our pre-existing rights, it is our rights that are supreme should there ever be a disagreement. Precisely because it was the rights that were pre-existing!
Now, if we could only have judges who see it as clearly as this!
If only more of the #occupy folks were like this…
With the Harper Conservatives poised to scrap the long-gun registry, this is a timely message: freedom of speech can only be exercised as long as we have the means to defend ourselves from any government that would usurp onto themselves the power to muzzle us.
Our right to be armed at all times, in all places, is essential for us to retain the most core of our innate and unalienable rights, the very cornerstone of our society: the freedom of speech!
(And, yes, I AM one of the proponents of the idea that ALL teachers ought to be required by law to be fully gun-certified and armed at all times while we entrust our children to their care: it is of little consolation that the best 9-1-1 response times to schools are at under 10 minutes….a lot of kids can be shot by an intruder in 10 minutes! If we entrust our children to their care, each teacher MUST be personally responsible for their protection – even from an armed attack.)
The government’s right to possess and use arms derives from us, the citizens: we may, if we choose to, confer upon the government the right to carry arms and, as our proxy, use violence in our defense as we, the citizens, have the responsibility to. This does not, in any way, abrogate our right – or diminish our responsibility – to do so ourselves at all times.
Any attempt at arms regulation – and I DO mean ANY regulation – by the governmenonly weakens the government’s own power to arm its agents and use violence on out behalf!
As someone somewhere put it:
Video H/T: CodeSlinger
I know I have posted these videos before, but…
…over time, some of the links got broken.
Plus, we cannot be remided often enough that the ‘LEFT-WING’ vs. ‘RIGHT-WING’ labels are woefully inadequate. Even the ‘Libertarian vs. Totalitarian’ distinction is not as useful as some may think….
Personally, the one political label that most closely describes me (if I HAD TO pick one) would be ‘individualist’.
Why?
Because the smallest ‘group’ that can potentially exist, the minimum number of members it can have is: ‘one’.
Because if the rights of each and every member of any given group are protected equally, then the rights of the group as a whole cannot possibly be violated.
The converse, however, is not true!
Therefore, in my never-humble-opinion, the default position MUST be to protect the rights of the individuals – this way, nobody is left out in the cold, with their rights stripped away simply because they do not happen to be members of he currently favoured ‘group’….
Without further fuss, here are the videos (sorry about the annoying background music – the alternative ones don’t work so well any more…)
Introduction:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 5:
After all, as John Robson says: we ARE the children of the Magna Carta and any constitution imposed upon us muxt be interpreted in that context, as an imperfect re-statement of the Magna Carta – and as subordinate to it:
A police spokesman said: ‘‘We have investigated a number of incidents across the internet after they were brought to our attention last year. ‘We have yet to analyse what has been seized and will then be in a better to look at what, if any, offences have been committed.’‘
Correct me if I am wrong, but the way I read this is:
Where to start…
Well, perhaps with my yesterday’s post – where, in his speech, John Robson explains the meaning of English common law and how it had been affirmed by the Magna Carta. It looks like the proud Englishmen have turned their back on their heritage…
How corrupt has the system of common law and the liberties it is supposed to guarantee become that something a person says causes him to be arbitrarily deprived of liberty and property?
But, this is even worse…
What about the police officers – how come they are obeying this obviously illegal order?
Because arresting a person and siezing their property first, and only then trying to figure out IF there has even been a crime commited, is contrary to everything the English common law stands for!
What to do?
I don’t know.
Sure, we can all work to post on other people’s behalf and mirror videos and all that, but that is just trying to stick a band-aid over a severed jugular.
But, I have been giving this a lot of thought.
What we need to do, in my never-humble-opinion, is to hold each and every individual police officer criminally and civilly responsible for carrying out orders which are obviously contrary to English common law. And not just in Joly old England, or even the whole Commonwealth: we must do this everywhere where the heritage of English Common Law exists.
Because it is only by making individuals within ‘the system’ accountable can we affect change of the system as a whole!
No, it is not easy.
But is just may be doable.
Let’s try!