Barrel Strength

 An Egyptian court rejected a request by a man who converted to Christianity from Islam to have his new religion written on his identity card.

Egyptian judges ruled as follows 

‘ Judges said Mohammed Higazi, 25, had not followed the proper legal procedures and in any case people cannot convert “to an older religion.”

“Monotheistic religions were sent by God in chronological order…As a result, it is unusual to go from the latest religion to the one that preceded it.

“The person who has such an attitude is straying from the right path and threatening the principles, values and precepts of Islam and of Egyptian traditions.”

The article continues:

‘Mr. Higazi, who says he converted at the age of 16, hit the headlines in August of last year after going into hiding saying he feared for his life after Islamists said he committed apostasy. ’

National Post, January 30, 2008, page A-15 electronic version

Awfully good of them.

Once again we find the Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury pursuing relentlessly his seeming plan to drive the established church into oblivion:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.

Dr Williams, who has seen his own Anglican Communion riven by fierce invective over homosexuality, said the current blasphemy law was “unworkable” and he had no objection to its repeal.

But whatever replaces it should “send a signal” about what was acceptable.

This should be done by “stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours” that have the effect of silencing argument.

[...] 

“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said.

The article notes that the last conviction under Britain’s blasphemy law was 1979. It is not so much an unworkable law as one blithely unenforced. As for Dr. Williams, his intellectual rigour is exemplified in his abortive attempt to denounce Freemasonry as a secret anti-Christian society… just as he was being inducted as a Welsh White Druid.

 The archbishop’s own style: cruel? A tad. Thoughtless? QED.

We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war, and it nearly makes me erase that sentence it sounds so dramatic, false, and trivial. The Soviet Union, a militantly hostile state, whose goal was the overthrow of the capitalist system, and which held Eastern Europe in its prison-like embrace, and which subsidized revolution the world, lasted until 1989. The communists did not lack for mouthpieces within western liberal societies, at every level, and we spent a good deal of time in university having to take Karl Marx in large doses. Marxists seized microphones at the Student Union and, with their spokesmen telling us there was no free speech in a capitalist university, their thugs prevented any further discussion. Such were the late sixties and early seventies.

President Jimmy Carter was colossally inept, and seemed to agree with our enemies that the United States was in inevitable decline. It was a very bad time for freedom, capitalism, and for liberal-democratic society. It took the election of Reagan and Thatcher, together with the Polish Pope, to reject the assumptions of decline and defeat. It was a crisis and we overcame it. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1989 proved, more decisively than we could have imagined, that everything we had been saying about that place was true. Indeed, we had not had enough faith that the whole system of communism was built on lies at every level. I had thought that communism would decline for centuries, like the Ottoman Empire. I had heard of a Hungarian taxi-driver, when asked by a visitor about the political situation in 1985, simply say: “It’s over”, but we had no way of knowing that Communism would collapse so catastrophically. It reminded me of the fall of Sauron’s Tower, the Baradûr, in the final battle in Lord of the Rings. Everything built with the power of the One Ring (”one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them”) turned to dust.

Read the rest…

What happens when leftist dogma encounters scary notions like popular taste and basic economic principles? Find out in this series of video clips from a documentary that in part examines the fate of News on Sunday, the failed 1987 British tabloid cobbled together with money from local governments and trade unions and frittered away by the Usual Suspects™ in an unhinged style more befitting the later dotcom bubble.

At times jaw-dropping but mostly filled with tasty gleeful schadenfreude for the sane reader.

And now you know why they have of late resorted to institutional stealth tactics.

The right has been in a swivet about the blasphemy trial of Ezra Levant. But Human Rights Commissions are not the only enemy of free discussion. The pretensions of the guardians of intellectual property are as pernicious. My interest was stimulated by this morning’s article on Michael Geist by Deirdre McMurdy. McMurdy intimates that the opposition to copyright reform is an anti-Conservative phenomenon and worthy of suspicion, if not worse. That is a fundamental misreading of the relationship of intellectual property (IP) to conservative values. Conservatives do not wish for the infinite and eternal extension of private property rights over ideas, at the expense of free discussion.

In a capitalist society it is not forbidden to wish to own everything. If you could appropriate the words “and”, “but” and “for”, and charge a millionth of a cent for every use of those words everywhere in the world through ubiquitous machine intelligence, you could make a tidy packet. To do this you would need to embed monitoring software in every computer to see whether your ownership rights were being respected. You would need to criminalize the evasion of these ubiquitous monitors. As you can imagine, the ability to embed such monitoring devices is well within the reach of modern technology. The ability to record, upload to some central point, and bill for such use of someone’s intellectual property is now quite feasible. What cannot be done yet is to make the English language the subject of private appropriation and, second, to order such pervasive monitoring into every computer. You need a law on copyright reform to do this.

Read the rest…

I had the pleasure of dining with Lord Hugh of Auchentoshan the other night. Lord Hugh is an English Catholic, what they used to call a recusant; his family never saw the benefits of the Reformation and so, unlike many Irish or Scottish Catholics, their attachment to the Roman religion was to them an intensely familial tradition rather than a tribal identification. You all know dozens of Catholics; you may be one yourself. My experience has been that Catholics have a hard time accepting parts of their religious upbringing, and if I may venture this observation, the difficulty seems to arise mostly from their strong aversion to the conflation of the institution of the Church with the message of Christianity. For a protestant, these things are separate; for a Catholic, these are nearly unitary. So among my many Catholic friends maybe two or three attend Mass and take it seriously enough to argue about it, favourably or unfavourably. The proportion of protestant friends who are believers is not much higher, but they are a lot less angry with their native churches.

Since we have known each other for decades, Lord Hugh and I do not have to pretend about anything. He arrived with a couple of bottles of wine and some cheese, which is always a good sign in a guest. It means they intend to stay and have a good time. Over steak and good red wine we discussed Lord Hugh’s favourite topic, Roman Catholicism.

Read the rest…

The MSM is focusing on SocGen trading fiasco and asking questions about why this fiasco wasn’t interrupted sooner. We here at Barrel Strength don’t know the answer to that question but as the Latin Scholar, Sen. Edward Kennedy, is fond of saying when stumped, “that is a good question, but a better question is” how was this information disseminated to the central banks?

Our informed banking sources tell us that all banks have historically had to disclose material risk positions to the central bank and regulators on a daily basis. Under Basle I there was some discretion as to how the reporting occurred and what was disclosed. Under Basle II this is not an option. Reality has to be reported.

Given that, it is obvious that Monsieur Jean-Claude Trichet, must have been rudely interrupted by one of his colleagues, as he toasted Martin Luther King Day, to inform him of this. How is it then that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was unaware of this? Are the haughty French still treating the uncivilized and uncouth Yankees with disdain?

Lake Superior State University maintains a registry of what they call “Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. ” I have a distinctly Canadian contribution for the next round of updates: “detainees”.

This word has caused a cycle of media feeding frenzies over the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. And how appropriate that the Canadian mainstream media embrace a term that is genuinely Orwellian. For me, “detainees” evokes images of helpless victims of ruthless governments of the sort one would see in a Costa Gravas political thriller. It would never occur to me to associate the term with ragtag fanatical pillagers, bombers and extortionists. Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary supports the former conclusion.

The Taliban irregulars captured in battle by Canadian troops are not being “detained” for political reasons. These are individuals who have used deadly force against our soldiers and innocent civilians, period. That they have embraced the authority of medievally-minded tyrants is secondary to the fact that they meet the legal definition of pirates:

Until 1856, international law recognized only two legal entities: people and states. People were subject to the laws of their own governments; states were subject to the laws made amongst themselves. The Declaration of Paris created a third entity: people who lacked both the individual rights and protections of law for citizens and the legitimacy and sovereignty of states. This understanding of pirates as a legally distinct category of international criminals persists to the present day, and was echoed in the 1958 and 1982 U.N. Conventions on the Law of the Sea. The latter defines the crime of piracy as “any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends.” This definition of piracy as private war for private ends may hold the crux of a new legal definition of international terrorists.

The rights of captured Taliban irregulars would in a strict sense amount to roughly zero. But sensible military commanders recognize the wisdom in the words of Prince Faisal in “Lawrence of Arabia”: 

With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable. 

Letting your enemy know that he may be treated with some modicum of dignity in captivity makes it far more likely that waverers will surrender rather than fight to the death. The goal is to save Canadian lives, and not to attribute rights to lawless brigands.

When Canadian society is allowing fundamental rights like freedom of speech to be snatched away quietly by witless agents of the state, we need not waste our time creating an artificial set of rights for irregular criminals. Start by letting LSSU have its way with the word “detainees” in their next list: we have pirates to capture.

Update: The Torch outlines just how far the current government has to go in mastering honest communications about the Afghanistan mission

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office is pursuing a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor’s solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they’ve done nothing wrong.

What is regarded by many as the world’s most famous debating society has slipped the surly bonds of reason to punch the face of God:

Oxford University’s debating society is being accused of childishness and sensationalism by Jewish groups after inviting participants with alleged anti-Israel backgrounds to support a motion questioning Israel’s right to exist in a debate on Thursday.

[...]

Proposing the motion are Norman Finkelstein, formally of De Paul University in Chicago, and Ted Honderich, professor of philosophy at University College London.

[...]

Finkelstein is speaking at a number of campuses in the UK this week. His “UK tour,” entitled “Palestine’s occupation: Roots of conflict and prospects for peace,” is organized by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which support a “one-state” solution, and supported by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Action on Palestine.

At a rally in New York opposing the 2006 Lebanon war, Finkelstein said: “Every victory for Hizbullah over Israel is… a victory for liberty and a victory for freedom…”

For his part, Honderich, in his book After the Terror, published in 2003, wrote: “All of us should take part in all forms of boycott against retail stores and other businesses dealing with neo-Zionist Israel, divestment, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, not voting, picketing, ostracism, naming, symbolic public acts, strikes and whatever else is rational against neo-Zionism.”

I’m prepared to venture that the topic remains within the boundary of the debatable: the UN has certainly expended much time and oxygen on the matter. And from experience I know that in competitive collegiate debate one is sometimes required to defend propositions that may not tally with one’s personal beliefs: that’s the challenge in learning expert argumentation.

But staging a public debate in which the proposition side speakers are akin to a defrocked priest uttering a faithless benediction beggars credibility. How much genuine clash can one foresee in a match-up more fitting of an in-house round at a madrassah?

If this is a benchmark of the coming ruling elite, God help Brittania. 

If you have not watched the Ezra videos on Youtube, they are necessary background for this.

The four who filed the Maclean’s complaint had an article on the Globe’s web pages today. Tarek Fatah posted this response.

It’s got to be a former President of the United States of America.

To paraphrase William S. Burroughs, there are no honourable bargains involving exchanges of quantitative goods like votes for qualitative items like one’s good name or historical legacy.

The four law students in the CHRC complaint against Mark Steyn shift gears by adopting the trusty legal defence of, “Do as we say and nobody gets hurt.”

Censorship: the new poverty law. Well, intellectual poverty, I suppose.