Information Landmine

"The Americans keep telling us how successful their system is. Then they remind us not to stray too far from our hotel at night." - An un-named EU trade representative quoted during international trade talks in Denver, Colorado, 1997.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Send the buggers back!

Politics is full of opportunities for people to make themselves look like hypocritical arseholes. But for pure instances of two entirely contradictory positions being argued for simultaneously by someone too narrow-minded and stupid to see three inches in front of their prejudices, the whole Islam/freedom of speech debate is hard to beat. Until recently I thought that the single most shining example of this, the gold double standard against which other bouts of "one rule for them and none for me" would forever be measured, was the whole kerfuffle around the Mohamed cartoons.

Until now: an anti-immigration Dutch politician is getting upset that British immigration has sent him back to his country of origin, arguing that freedom of speech demands that he be allowed to show his film in which he argues for the banning of the Koran.

Of course, in a limited sense he is right. There's nothing about freedom of speech that means you have to be logically coherent. Hell, inflammatory post-titles notwithstanding, I'd like to see him over here: anyone who wants to come to the country and make racists look stupid is ok in my book.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Support the Open Rights Group Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.