Civilized people worldwide must demand to be armed, or become slaves

The Belfast Telegraph reports (link below) the comments of a reporter who witnessed the shootings in the Mumbai train station.

Armed police stood by and did nothing while people were being shot. The photographer expressed a wish to have had a gun rather than a camera.

I think he has the right idea. The nice, reasonable, civilized people of the world have, to far too great an extent, played along with the notion that legally owned guns in private hands are a vice to be restricted or banned, rather than the great (I would say indispensable, in a democracy) force for social good they actually are.

It is a mark of the genius of the criminal and dictatorial classes of the world that they have managed to convince millions that the instrument of their individual freedom and security is actually something to be feared. Freud would undoubtedly have had something to say about this.

In those few countries that permit wide legal ownership of guns (which does NOT include India), crime rates tend to be low and shootings rare. In the US, shootings are frequent and crime is high only in those few jurisdictions (such as NYC, Chicago and LA) where guns are tightly restricted. In those jurisdictions, as in Mumbai, criminals have free reign to abuse and shoot whom they please, with a high likelihood of getting away with it.

There has been talk, long before John McCain mentioned the idea, of an international League of Democracies. I would say that a requirement for membership should be that those countries grant their citizens the legal right to gun ownership and carry (pending a background check, as is the case in most US states), and to bring those weapons along when traveling between those countries.

The initial membership would be small. It would include Norway, Switzerland, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the USA, and perhaps a few others.

It would be nice to think that England, and perhaps India, might someday aspire to be full members. It's a bit sad to reflect that England would once have led the club, in days when gun ownership in the UK was wide and crime numbers a tiny fraction of today's.

If just a few UK and Indian victims of the Mumbai shootings had been armed, many lives might have been saved.

And perhaps the terrorists might never dared to have mount the attack to begin with. The best crime is the one that never occurs, because of quiet deterrence. That deterrence was not permitted to operate in Mumbai, and we have seen the results.

Until and unless the reasonable, civilized people of the world demand their governments get the hell out of the way of their right and means to effective self-defense, I fear we will see more cases like Mumbai.

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http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article14086308.ece

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

"What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/asia/hotel.php

The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its hotels, but these are unarmed, Oberoi said. Obtaining a license for even a single officer to carry a gun is extremely difficult in India, which has tight gun control laws.

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http://www.abhijeetsingh.com/arms/india/

Gun Ownership in India, by Abhijeet Singh

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mahatma Gandhi

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When will we see someone like Dr Susanna Gratia Hupp on the international stage?

http://www.wmsa.net/gratia-hupp_1992.htm

Twilight of the slow suicide of Liberalism in the UK

When reasonable, fair-minded people render themselves defenseless, and sociopolitically prostrate before thugs, sooner or later they end up dominated in all aspects of their lives by those thugs.

Sharia law should be introduced into legal system, says leading barrister

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3523672/Sharia-law-should-be-introduced-into-legal-system-says-leading-barrister.html

And what does this brave man have to say about such minor issues as the treatment of women under Sharia?

Sharia law has been criticised for its prevention of some rights for women. Mr Hockman reportedly conceded: “The position of women is one area where the emphasis is, to the say the least, rather different.”

Do tell. And what do you propose to do about that, exactly? Offer to keep women at home, barefoot and pregnant?

He said: “I am also sometimes confronted by those who point out that there are elements within the Muslim community who pose a threat to our very security. My answer is not to dispute them but to suggest that it is for those of us forming part of the majority community to address such problems.”

By choosing to submit to a system that is promoted and administered by the most extreme representatives of that community?

This person reminds me of those German Jews who cooperated with Hitler in the rounding up and ghettoization of their co-religionists, in the belief that by cozying up to a murderer, he might treat them more mercifully. Or the collaborators at least.

These disgusting collaborators ended up in the camps like everyone else.

Who the "Fairness Doctrine" is really for

The Fairness Doctrine isn't about making sure all ideas are heard equally. That tends to happen naturally in a society with free speech AND where people can feel free to speak without something bad "unofficially" happening to them afterward.

What it's really about is "fairness" to people who are saying things that can't stand up to scrutiny, or who are doing things that are indefensible -- things that no one could credibly justify or defend verbally if people knew what they were doing.

Consider this. If someone's doing something they'd be ashamed of and for which they have no justifiable explanation, or which is explicitly criminal and would get them arrested, the only response they have is to try to shut the person up who's spotlighting them.

As we know, the "fairness doctrine" in some countries (and a few US cities) is that journalists or others who point out unflattering things about the powerful simply end up dead or in mental hospitals.

But come on! That's a small price to pay. Consider the self-esteem of the person doing the unjustifiable thing in question.

Can you imagine how embarassing it must be for them to be doing something indefensible, and to have someone point out both what they're doing AND its indefensibility?

Why, it's just not FAIR. The poor little dears.

We just can't have that kind of unfairness. So we need the Fairness Doctrine to make sure it doesn't happen.

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Of course, some people might suggest those people could avoid this embarassment by not doing things that are indefensible, or saying things that don't stand up to scrutiny.

But that suggestion would be judgemental. And God knows, people being judgemental is simply the worst thing that can possibly happen in a society.

The true causes of terrorism?

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists

Bruce Schneier
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0810.html#1

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States (or some other parts of the world, like rough Muslim neighborhoods in France).

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

It makes sense to me. If joining the "official establishment" means you and your family have to grovel before thugs, either in the government or the local crime world or both, and therefore there is, from a certain point of view, a limited number of honorable or respectable ways to advance in that model, there will be a lot of pressure to join an alternative "social group".

For example: If, in a place like New York City, you grow up in any but the most luxurious neighborhoods, you and your family have essentially no right or means to protect yourselves or any business you own, unless one or more family members are connected to a local gang.

Kids will be under pressure from gangs to join the gangs, or else. If their parents try to interfere, they may be beaten or killed, and/or their homes or businesses sabotaged. The businesses will need to pay "protection money" to the local gang in any case.

There is no way to move ahead OR to have any kind of "respect" or protection except to join the gang. And even then, if a senior gang member wants to go out with your sister, or steal your wife, there's not much you can do about it, unless you want to take him out and take his place.

Why should standing up for honor or principle need to be such a dangerous and expensive choice?

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

Yes.

And part of that is not so binding and enslaving civilians in their own societies, and making them absurdly defenseless before the ruthless and lawless, that the only way out for them is for their families to associate themselves with gangs and similar organizations, or to grovel before them and hope for the best.

Say the wrong thing, end up in an EU jail?

The EU courts have ruled (in the Marta Andreessen case), and EU officials have asserted publicly, that criticism of the EU is in the same league as blasphemy and therefore not necessarily protected speech.

I have frequently criticized elements of EU and UK law online. Would I, like the Australian citizen in this article (whose opinions I repudiate) be risking arrest by visiting the EU?

It seems we must all start asking ourselves this question.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/10/05/dl0502.xml

Dr Fredrick Toben's arrest should alarm us all

The right to voice unpopular, or even untrue and unpleasant, opinions is essential to free speech - and free speech is one of the most basic values of any liberal democracy.

Free speech cannot flourish when the individual may express only those opinions which the state has decided it will permit. Once that happens, it evokes George Orwell's nightmare of the Ministry of Truth, in which the state throttles all independent thought and destroys free expression completely.

His opinions are wrong and offensive - but error and offensiveness are not grounds for banning an opinion, still less for imprisoning the individual who expresses it.

No wonder the "democratic" West is at risk of being overwhelmed by "undemocratic" hordes.

In many places, and for a long time, it's been transforming into faux democracy (not to mention faux adulterated capitalism) for a long time. Go far enough down that road, and there is no enthusiasm, cultural strength or even economic strength to resist collapse.

Who has enthusiasm for defending a slave pen with a democracy sign hung on it? Who has the energy or ability to fight when they are half-starved with a shackle around one ankle?

Furthermore, whatever happened to "I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it"?

Is that gem no longer considered a jewel in the crown of European culture?

Beat up the good students and steal their stuff

Kremlin's heavy hand triggers foreign exodus
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/07/31/cnrussia131.xml

What? Surely not!

Give skilled capitalists and/or foreigners free reign for a while to get things working, then kick them out or kill them, and steal the results of their labour.

When things are a mess again, repeat the cycle.

It's an old trick of kleptocracies the world wide. The wonder is that some of us keep falling for it.

Beat up the good students, get them to do the maths homework, then steal their lunch money.

In the freer countries, the good students are working rather more for themselves, and rather less for thieving bullies (the efforts of the Brownites notwithstanding, so far).

Needless to say, the kleptocrats and bullies hate this. Who do those good students think they are, running around un-owned? Someone needs to put them in their place!

And there, in a nutshell, is the basis for the anti-Western attitudes and rhetoric of kleptocratic leaders worldwide. What else would we expect?

On rites of passage to adulthood

Some have commented in recent years that something missing from modern upbringing is an official "rite of passage".

There are some unofficial modern rituals which are not without meaning, perhaps one of the more important being obtaining one's driving license. At the age of 16 or 18, society is entrusting you with the correct piloting of a ton of hurtling metal in public spaces.

However, for many children growing up in recent generations, there is little beyond that, unless the children invent their own, a bit like Lord of the Flies. Hazing, drinking contests, drugs, sex, games of chicken with cars, crime.

Other times, people endure harrowing life experiences that are more of a true "rite of passage" that anyone could ever think up on their own, and have earned "adulthood" more surely than most who've gone through such rituals.

Other people, never having had either kind of experience, may constantly make trouble for themselves, and realize only many years into adulthood that it was those experiences that served, perhaps with far too much pain and expense not only to them but to those around them, as their own rite of passage into adulthood.

It is thought that such rituals and experiences are necessary to the human psyche, hence their frequent independent invention in place of (or sometimes in addition to) more formal rituals a society may observe.

But what is the purpose and use of such rituals? I think it's as follows.

In most societies, no matter how primitive or advanced, when children are infants and preteens they are (ideally) at all times in the bosom of their mothers, families and the community. There is a bright, warm campfire at night, and a warm blanket to sleep under. Society provides for the needs of the child. The child gradually learns that there is a bigger world out there, but essentially they come to think it's normal and expected that there is light, warmth and food everywhere, and that such things are, and should be expected to be, provided automatically as part of life.

I think one thing adult initiation rituals do, is illustrate clearly and starkly, and possibly painfully and frighteningly, that there is darkness outside the firelight, and that possibilities for pain and even death lurk among life and in the bright daylight. They see how close the precipice is even to daily life.

And most importantly, they learn that the campfire, the blankets and the food don't maintain themselves. It will be up to THEM to keep the campfire burning, to find the food, to protect the village. If they weren't viscerally aware of that before, they will be after the ritual.

They then return from the ritual back into the community, who celebrate their accomplishment, mourning a bit for the passing of childhood, but cherishing these new fledgling adults whose eyes are now more fully open, and who, through their travails in the ritual, have earned the right to be truly considered adults.

I think that in most cases, the human mind wants to learn, and the human soul feels the need to engage and awaken. Where society or family fail to provide official channels for these things, it seems the mind may serve the yearnings of the soul and, for better or worse, create its own methods.

I think one of the really sad things about badly broken social systems is that children are likely to go through harrowing experiences at very young ages, "unofficial" rituals that are heavily negative and which carry few positive connotations. And coming as they do early in childhood, those individuals are deprived of the chance for their minds and souls to develop peacefully in the bosom of their family and community, until they are old and tough enough to endure the ritual without the more humane parts of their personalities being shattered and stunted by the experience. This is what it means to be robbed of childhood.

So much better to be shown and guided through these fearsome things by caring elders who'll let them see the precipice but not fall over it... or so it seems to me.