'Free Speech' and Wahhabist Islamic Nutjobs - Once Again Missing the Point

So yet again we have some Wahhbist Islamic nut jobs attacking a European cartoonist - this time in Denmark - oh and then they went off and killed some Jews, you know, just on principle.

There is this mindless debate about whether free speech allows people to insult the prophet Mohammed - many people seem to think that it was the victim's fault for deliberately inflaming religious tensions.  But this is missing the point entirely.

There are currently about 7 billion people in the world.  They say all kinds of things.  Suppose I demanded that, if any single one of these people say or write anything that I find offensive - for example, that they dislike the color orange - that I will run amok and and blow things up and shoot some Jews.  Would you:

A. Say of course free speech is not an unlimited license to defame people's deeply held beliefs, and we must censor the internet and the newspapers across the entire planet to make sure that nothing anywhere is ever said that might upset me.  Nobody will ever be allowed to say anything bad about the color orange ever again.  And if they do, and I kill a bunch of random people, well it was not my fault because I was provoked.

B. Say that is it good and noble to write insulting and disgusting things about anything and that this must be celebrated with mass public exhibits of insulting and disgusting things.

C. Say that I am clearly an unstable nut job and this has nothing at all to do with free speech and that people like me should be locked up or at least exiled to some godforsaken place with others of my mindset where we can vent our rage on each other without endangering decent people.

If you answered C, congratulations, you are sane.  And, for now, very much in the minority.

The world is a big and messy place.  If you look carefully, you can certainly find all kinds of things here and there that will offend you.  If that sets you into a murderous rage, well, then you have serious issues dealing with reality.

I could see getting unhappy if, for example, a government or media conglomerate pushed something offensive as an official policy - like Jews are subhuman and must be exterminated - but to fly off the handle because of an individual comment?  Really?

Wahhabist Islam is the religion of perpetual outrage.  Someone draws a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban - and of course they go and blow things up (!!!).  They see women not treated like animals, or a Jew, or a Christian church, or a bible, or a Hindu - there is a very long list here - and they get offended, and when Wahhabists get offended people die.

If the extremist Islamics are so readily offended by the world, perhaps Islam and the world should have an amicable divorce.  The Wahhabists should retreat to their own lands, break off all communications with the infidels, and seal themselves into a bubble of piety.  I think that the Wahhabists would be much happier that way.  I know that the rest of the world would be.

The Prospect for America: More Doom Ahead

It has recently been reported that since 2009, Barack Obama has given about 5 million work permits to foreign nationals that they were not legally authorized to have.  This is in addition to his executive amnesty for another 5 million illegals, and his ongoing opening of the border and inviting we don’t even know how many other illegals and third-world refugees into the country, and also not including multiple massive streams of legal immigration.

This led to a small fuss on the DrudgeReport, but of course was effectively censored from the mainstream media, and other than Senator Jeff Sessions – perhaps the last decent American politician – almost nobody of import has spoken out against this.

The outrages are piling on so fast and so heavy that we are becoming numb.  It’s hard to even know where to start with this one.  So let me break it down into sections.

1. America is Doomed.  Well, at least, America as we currently (think that we) know it. The rich are going whole-hog and working around the clock to ignite a population explosion.  Given that there is no check on their behavior, it looks like they will succeed.  Once they get enough young and high-fertility rate third-world refugees into the country, demographic momentum (look it up on wikipedia) will take over and there will be no way to stop the process even if the American people do somehow regain control of their country (although there is zero objective evidence of this happening).

This won’t work out.  Every time that the rich have engineered a population explosion the results have always been brutal poverty for the many and great profits for the few.  Mexico, India, Syria, England… America as a land of opportunity, as a place where anyone willing to work moderately hard can earn a decent living, as a country with abundant resources, that America is swiftly headed into the history books. 

2. The American Elites Despise the American people.  It is tempting to blame this all on the ‘Imperial Presidency’ of Barack Obama, but that is an error.  Obama is just an errand boy.  A particularly glib and well-paid errand boy, but an errand boy all the same.  Obama could never get away with this without the support of the elites of the United States.  For that matter, he would never have become president had he not been selected and the deck stacked in his favor. 

During the great depression the American people had a very low fertility rate, because they were worried about having children that they could not support.  During the 1950’s they had somewhat more children, because times were good.  This is how a decent people behave.  The low fertility rate in the depression no more made the American people extinct than the high rates in the 1950’s caused overpopulation, because these were appropriate reactions to the existing circumstances.  Now with the economy being crushed, times are not so good, so Americans are once again having fewer children.  Jeb Bush has recently said that this is terrible, that Americans are not having ‘enough’ children to suit him and his fellow oligarchs, so they need massive third-world immigration to cancel out the effect of the personal decisions of the American people.

The arrogance of this.  It is to treat the American people like cattle.  Jeb Bush and his ilk probably wish they could directly assign Americans to breed the requisite number of children, so that they could be assured of ‘affordable labor costs’.  Astonishing.  There are also other quotes to the effect that Jeb Bush in general feels that American people are lazy and stupid and the foreigners are so much better.  Again, the contempt of Jeb Bush for his fellow citizens is breathtaking. 

And if the foreign nationals like the Mexican people are so much better than the American people, why then does Mexico suck?  Why do Mexicans want so badly to move to the United States, if they are so wonderful and having more children than you can afford to support is such a guaranteed producer of prosperity?

3. America is not a Democracy.  Think of this: starting in 2009 the government gave 5 million work permits to foreign nationals that they did not legally qualify for.  And it is 2015 and we are only now learning of this.  Think of all the government employees that knew of this – and they were under strict orders and strict surveillance to keep this secret from the American people.  Again, the arrogance.  The American people have no right to know what their government is doing to them.  They have no right to affect what their government is doing to them.  Anyone who ‘whistleblows’ will be made an enemy of the state and crushed.  Amazing.

Trade agreements are being negotiated – and the American people cannot know what is in them.  Hostile foreign powers know what is in them, multinational corporations know what is in them, wealthy Americans know - just not the American people.  Illegal immigrants are being sent all around the country and their children enrolled in schools without medical screening – and of course the American people cannot know how many or where they come from or where they have been sent.  And the list goes on.

To all those people who think that whistleblowers are somehow endangering American national security: say what?  How did not allowing the American people to know about all of these improperly handed out work permits endanger national security?  And as far as the NSA spying on American citizens: that’s not about looking for terrorists.  It’s about making sure that nobody can spill the beans on whatever the government is doing that it doesn’t want the American people to find out about.

You say that nobody should care about being spied on by the NSA if they have nothing to hide?  Well, suppose you find out that the government is doing something horrible and illegal.  You want to let your fellow citizens know – but you can’t, because the NSA can easily track you down.  Think long and hard about just what it means that the government can read all of your emails and know who you are calling on the phone and who you are sending letters to.  

There is no longer a rule of law.  The President – acting on behalf of the oligarchs who really run things – can simply order that someone be arrested for taking a picture in a public space of something the American people might want to know about.  And it stands.  He can order pretty much anything he wants.  Law be damned.

Someone once said that anything that 500 rich people want is not illegal.  We have moved beyond that: if the rich want something the law is irrelevant.  The judiciary won’t do anything because it is now accepted that if you label anything at all as an ‘administrative’ decision it cannot be overturned and it is not unconstitutional.   Additionally, it is now an established legal principle that the non-billionaire American people do not have any standing in court on issues that directly affect them. 

4. The Mainstream Press is Utterly Corrupt.  The mass-media corporate press is totally and completely corrupt.  Why was this giving of 5 million work permits since 2009 not dug out by the press before now?  Because they were told not to.  Indeed, while the DrudgeReport continues to perform yeoman service on this topic (for now), the mainstream press has effectively buried this news.  I checked Google news and found no hint of the issue – just stuff on Bruce Jenner’s sex change operation.

It should also be pointed out that, while better than nothing, the ‘alternative’ internet news sources and bloggers cannot fill the gap.  They don’t have the mass market to make an impact, and they don’t have the resources to conduct investigations on their own.  They are dependent on getting their information from mainstream corporate sources.  They can point out the contradictions in the mainstream news, but they cannot report on what is not reported – ultimately the mainstream news controls the terms of the debate. 

The censorship of the press has reached Soviet levels.  As just one example, any discussion of the bad effects of massive immigration – lowering wages, increasing traffic congestion, new diseases, water shortages, etc.etc. – is completely forbidden.  You can’t talk about that.  Journalism is dead.  The news is all scripted in advance at corporate headquarters.

Now a billionaire can legally buy up a newspaper like the New York Times, and have it print whatever propaganda in support of whatever issues and political candidates that he or she favors, and that's OK.  Under the Citizens United case, foreign interests can contribute unlimited money in support of a political agenda in secret.  Bankers can bribe politicians by offering them plum jobs after they leave office.  And recently we have heard that Wall Street is actually paying bankers to work for the government - it's effectively as if they were on both the public and private payroll at the same time.  But we have to regulate independent outlets like the DrudgeReport because, you know, we have to eliminate the toxic effect of money on politics and maybe somebody slipped Matt Drudge a twenty dollar bill once and it wasn't reported…  Words fail me.  Argh!

5. What is to be done?  I have no idea.  Things are falling apart so fast that it’s head-spinning.  I suggest that supporting people like Senator Jeff Sessions – in word and deed – could be useful.  Also refusing to ever vote for anyone who has ever been for massive cheap-labor immigration.  Remember: the track record for people who once voted for open borders ‘seeing the light’ and saying that yes we need to enforce the law and control the border, is nearly 100% that they will stab you in the back immediately after the election. Never forgive, never forget.  And yes, I’m thinking of you, Marco Rubio and John McCain.  Once a traitor, always a traitor.