To “liberals”, apostasy is the greatest sin ...

American Buffaloed.

By Mark Steyn    

Andrew Ferguson has a lively profile of the playwright David Mamet:

His fame was enough to fill the stalls of Memorial Hall at Stanford University when he came to give a talk one evening a couple of years ago. About half the audience were students. The rest were aging faculty out on a cheap date with their wives or husbands. You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-’n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’… The unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

What happens when you decide, as Mamet did, that your membership in the tribe is no longer lifelong?

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

I wrote about what Mr Mamet could expect a couple of years back:

In The Village Voice the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he’s begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he’s wondering what he’s in for a year or two down the line, here’s how Newsweek’s Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation:

“Toward the end of The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s new book on the roots and impact of 9/11, the British novelist describes a fellow writer as ‘an oddity: his thoughts and themes are… serious — but he writes like a maniac. A talented maniac, but a maniac.’ Amis is describing Mark Steyn, a controversial anti-Islam polemicist, but he could just as well be describing another angry, Muslim-bashing firebrand: himself. Talented, yes. Serious, yes. But also, judging from the new book, a maniac.”

Poor chap. What did Martin Amis ever do to deserve being compared to me? As Mr. Tepperman concludes, the new Amis is “painful for the legion of Amis fans who still love him for novels like The Rachel Papers and his masterpiece, London Fields.”

Likewise, the new Mamet will be “painful for the legion of [Mamet] fans who still love him for [plays] like [American Buffalo] and his masterpiece, [Glengarry Glen Ross]“. And pretty soon at all those colleges the received wisdom will be either that only the early Mamet is worth reading – or that even those first works were hopelessly overrated and don’t stand the test of time. To “liberals”, apostasy is the greatest sin, and they’re serious enforcers.

How fast can a country go down the drain? Real fast

Once Upon a Time in Egypt

In 1959, Elie Moreno, then a 19-year-old sophomore engineering student at Purdue University in Indiana, visited the Egyptian port city of Alexandria on his summer vacation, and brought his camera. Moreno, an Egyptian of Sephardic Jewish descent, had been born in Alexandria and raised in Cairo. But the Egypt in which he had grown up, the milieu of the country's multi-ethnic urban elite, was fast disappearing; the summer of 1959 was the last Moreno would see of it.

The late 1950s marked the end of an era in Alexandria that had begun in the late 19th century, when the port -- then the largest on the eastern Mediterranean -- emerged as one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities. Europeans -- Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Germans -- had gravitated to Alexandria in the mid-19th century during the boom years of the Suez Canal's construction, staying through the British invasion of the port in 1882 and the permissive rule of King Farouk in the 1930s and 1940s. Foreign visitors and Egyptians alike flocked to the city's beaches in the summers, where revealing bathing suits were as ordinary as they would be extraordinary today.

But by midcentury, King Farouk -- a lackadaisical ruler in the best of times -- had grown deeply unpopular among Egyptians and was deposed in a CIA-backed coup in 1952. Cosmopolitan Alexandria's polyglot identity -- half a dozen languages were spoken on the city's streets -- and indelible links to Egypt's colonial past were an uncomfortable fit with the pan-Arab nationalism that took root under President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the late 1950s and 1960s. "[W]hat is this city of ours?" British novelist Lawrence Durrell, who served as a press attaché in the British Embassy in Alexandria during World War II, wrote despairingly in 1957 in the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, his tetralogy set in the city during its heyday as an expatriate haven. "In a flash my mind's eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today -- and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either." By the time of Hosni Mubarak's rule (and largely in response to his secularism), Egypt's second-largest city had become synonymous with devout, and deeply conservative, Islam.

The pictures from Moreno's collection, taken on the 1959 visit and several beach trips in previous years, capture the last days of an Alexandria that would be all but unrecognizable today, in which affluent young Egyptians of Arab, Sephardic, and European descent frolic in a landscape of white sand beaches, sailboats, and seaside cabanas. Two years later, in 1961, the structural steel company Moreno's father ran was nationalized by Nasser, and his family left for the United States shortly thereafter. Moreno, who went on to found a semiconductor company in Los Angeles, wouldn't visit his birthplace until he was well into middle age.

But the memories aren't all bittersweet. The woman on the far left in the above photograph, taken on Alexandria's Mediterranean coast in 1955, is Odette Tawil, whom Moreno first met in Alexandria in the summer of 1959. Reunited in the United States years later, they visited Egypt together in 1998, to get married.

Courtesy of Elie Moreno

Beachgoers on Alexandria's Stanley Beach, 1931.

How fast can a country go down the drain? Real fast.

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan…

Record stores, Mad Men furniture, and pencil skirts -- when Kabul had rock 'n' roll, not rockets.

BY MOHAMMAD QAYOUMI 

View the photos.

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a 1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages.

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew p in Kabul in the 1950s and '60s. When I was in middle school, I remember that on one visit to a city market, I bought a photobook about the country published by Afghanistan's planning ministry. Most of the images dated from the 1950s. I had largely forgotten about that book until recently; I left Afghanistan in 1968 on a U.S.-funded scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, and subsequently worked in the Middle East and now the United States. But recently, I decided to seek out another copy. Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country's history didn't mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the truth. Through a colleague, I received a copy of the book and recognized it as a time capsule of the Afghanistan I had once known -- perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials, but a far more realistic picture of my homeland than one often sees today.

I have since had the images in that book digitized. Remembering Afghanistan's hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. Some captions in the book are difficult to read today: "Afghanistan's racial diversity has little meaning except to an ethnologist. Ask any Afghan to identify a neighbor and he calls him only a brother." "Skilled workers like these press operators are building new standards for themselves and their country." "Hundreds of Afghan youngsters take active part in Scout programs." But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan's youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.

Original caption: "Kabul University students changing classes. Enrollment has doubled in last four years."

Government 'workers' of the Americas unite

The Dreamliner nightmare

By George F. Will, 

This summer, the huge Boeing assembly plant here will begin producing 787 Dreamliners — up to three a month, priced at $185 million apiece. It will, unless the National Labor Relations Board, controlled by Democrats and encouraged by Barack Obama’s reverberating silence, gets its way.

Last month — 17 months after Boeing announced plans to build here and with the $2 billion plant nearing completion — the NLRB, collaborating with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), charged that Boeing’s decision violated the rights of its unionized workers in Washington state, where some Dreamliners are assembled and still will be even after the plant here is operational. The NLRB has read a 76-year-old statute (the 1935 Wagner Act) perversely, disregarded almost half a century of NLRB and Supreme Court rulings, and patently misrepresented statements by Boeing officials.

South Carolina is one of 22 — so far — right-to-work states, where workers cannot be compelled to join a union. When in September 2009, Boeing’s South Carolina workers — fuselage sections of 787s already are built here — voted to end their representation by IAM, the union did not accuse Boeing of pre-vote misbehavior. Now, however, the NLRB seeks to establish the principle that moving businesses to such states from non-right-to-work states constitutes prima facie evidence of “unfair labor practices,” including intimidation and coercion of labor. This principle would be a powerful incentive for new companies to locate only in right-to-work states.

The NLRB complaint fictitiously says Boeing has decided to “remove” or “transfer” work from Washington. Actually, Boeing has so far added more than 2,000 workers in Washington, where planned production — seven 787s a month, full capacity for that facility — will not be reduced. Besides, how can locating a new plant here violate the rights of IAM members whose collective bargaining agreement with Boeing gives the company the right to locate new production facilities where it deems best?

The NLRB says that Boeing has come here “because” IAM strikes have disrupted production and “to discourage” future strikes.

Since 1995, IAM has stopped Boeing’s production in three of five labor negotiations, including a 58-day walkout in 2008 that cost the company $1.8 billion and a diminished reputation with customers.

White man's burden part II

Political Repression and Kokonut Democracies

by George B.N. Ayittey
The political situation in many African countries continues to remain distressing. The euphoria that gripped Africans as the "winds of change" swept across the continent, following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has largely dissipated and been replaced with a sense of disillusionment. While a few African despots were toppled, in the large majority of African nations they successfully beat back the democratic challenge. True, “elections” have been held in many African countries since 1990 to lend a veneer of ‘democracy” to authoritarian regimes. But as The Economist (23 Nov 1996) observed:
  'Boundaries, the media, the economy and the voters’ roll are all manipulated. Opponents are squashed. Soldiers have also learnt how to play the game. Half the countries of west and central Africa are ruled by “elected” ex-soldiers, among them the bosses of The Gambia and Niger, both voted into office after recently overthrowing democratically-elected governments (21).'

In some countries opposition leaders were partly to blame. Their own divisiveness, fragmentation, and lack of imagination as well as their propensity to choose ineffective tactics played right into the hands of the dictators. Out of the 54 African countries, only 14 are democratic: Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde Islands, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, Sao Tome & Principe, Senegal, Seychelles Islands, South Africa, and Zambia. Even then, if a rigorous definition of democracy is applied, less than 5 would meet the requirements. Apart from periodic elections, they include a freely negotiated constitution, neutral and professional armed forces, an independent judiciary, an independent media and an independent central bank.

In the postcolonial period, three scenarios have emerged in the ouster of Africa's dictators. In the Doe scenario, those leaders who foolishly refused to accede to popular demands for democracy risked their own safety and the destruction of their countries: Doe of Liberia, Barre of Somalia, Mengistu of Ethiopia, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Congo). (Doe was killed in September 1990; Barre fled Mogadishu in a tank in January 1991; Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in February 1991; and Mobutu fled in May 1997.) African countries where this scenario is most likely to be repeated are Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Tunisia. 

‘Oh my god, what have I done? What was I thinking?’

Converting Mamet

A playwright’s progress

by Andrew Ferguson   -  May 23, 2011, 

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “ ‘F— you’ —David Mamet.” 
Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

The Worst of the Worst

A continent away from Kyrgyzstan, Africans like myself cheered this spring as a coalition of opposition groups ousted the country's dictator, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. "One coconut down, 39 more to harvest!" we shouted. There are at least 40 dictators around the world today, and approximately 1.9 billion people live under the grip of the 23 autocrats on this list alone. There are plenty of coconuts to go around.

The cost of all that despotism has been stultifying. Millions of lives have been lost, economies have collapsed, and whole states have failed under brutal repression. And what has made it worse is that the world is in denial. The end of the Cold War was also supposed to be the "End of History" -- when democracy swept the world and repression went the way of the dinosaurs. Instead, Freedom House reports that only 60 percent of the world's countries are democratic -- far more than the 28 percent in 1950, but still not much more than a majority. And many of those aren't real democracies at all, ruled instead by despots in disguise while the world takes their freedom for granted. As for the rest, they're just left to languish.

Although all dictators are bad in their own way, there's one insidious aspect of despotism that is most infuriating and galling to me: the disturbing frequency with which many despots, as in Kyrgyzstan, began their careers as erstwhile "freedom fighters" who were supposed to have liberated their people. Back in 2005, Bakiyev rode the crest of the so-called Tulip Revolution to oust the previous dictator. So familiar are Africans with this phenomenon that we have another saying: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power, and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba!" Darn!

I call these revolutionaries-turned-tyrants "crocodile liberators," joining the ranks of other fine specimens: the Swiss bank socialists who force the people to pay for economic losses while stashing personal gains abroad, the quack revolutionaries who betray the ideals that brought them to power, and the briefcase bandits who simply pillage and steal. Here's my list of the world's worst dictators. I have ranked them based on ignoble qualities of perfidy, cultural betrayal, and economic devastation. If this account of their evils makes you cringe, just imagine living under their rule.

1. KIM JONG IL of North Korea: A personality-cult-cultivating isolationist with a taste for fine French cognac, Kim has pauperized his people, allowed famine to run rampant, and thrown hundreds of thousands in prison camps (where as many as 200,000 languish today) -- all while spending his country's precious few resources on a nuclear program.
Years in power: 16

2. ROBERT MUGABE of Zimbabwe: A liberation "hero" in the struggle for independence who has since transformed himself into a murderous despot, Mugabe has arrested and tortured the opposition, squeezed his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation, and funneled off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts.
Years in power: 30

It's going to be very ugly before reaching equilibrium

The Arab spring unleashes Islamists on Egyptian Christians.

Screaming “With our blood and soul, we will defend you, Islam,” jihadists stormed the Virgin Mary Church in northwest Cairo last weekend. They torched the Coptic Christian house of worship, burned the nearby homes of two Copt families to the ground, attacked a residential complex, killed a dozen people, and wounded more than 200: just another day in this spontaneous democratic uprising by Muslim hearts yearning for freedom.

In the delusional vocabulary of the “Arab Spring,” this particular episode is known as a sectarian “clash.” That was the Washington Post’s take. Its headline reads “12 dead in Egypt as Christians and Muslims clash” — in the same way, one supposes, that a mugger’s fist can be said to “clash” with his victim’s face. The story goes on, in nauseating “cycle of violence” style, to describe “clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians” that “left” 12 dead, dozens more wounded, “and a church charred” — as if it were not crystal clear who were the clashers and who were the clashees, as if the church were somehow combusted into a flaming heap without some readily identifiable actors having done the charring.

The thugs in question were Egyptian Muslims. Were they representative of all Egyptian Muslims? No, but it would be more accurate to portray them as such than to suggest, as the Pollyanna narrative holds, that Egypt (and Tunisia, and Yemen, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Algeria, and …) is teeming with legions of Gamal al-Madisons.

Amazing. Our betters are only human (or worst)

I.M.F. Head Is Arrested and Accused of Sexual Attack

By AL BAKER

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken in custody on Saturday, minutes before he was to fly to Paris from John F. Kennedy International Airport, the authorities said.

He was accused of a sex attack on a maid earlier in the day at a Times Square hotel, the authorities said.  

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a candidate for president of France, was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and turned over to Manhattan detectives, according to a Port Authority spokesman. He was expected to be taken to the offices of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit at P.S.A. 5 in Manhattan, another official said.

It was about 4:45 p.m. when plainclothes detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suddenly boarded the plane, Air France Flight 23, as it idled on the tarmac at the airport 10 minutes before it was scheduled to take off and took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, according to an agency official.

The Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal attack of a woman employee at the hotel Sofitel New York, at 45 West 44th Street, in the heart of the city’s theater district.

The tyranny of science

by Tim Black 

More and more scientists fancy themselves as gods, with a duty to enlighten those who are ‘deluded to the point of perversity’.

It seems that certain men of science, like their hymn-sakes the Christian soldiers, are on the march. For these faithless crusaders, science is not simply a method by which we gain understanding and mastery of the physical world. No, it has become a weapon of enlightenment, a cudgel to be wielded against the ‘ignorant’ multitudes, ‘deluded to the point of perversity’ (to quote high priest of The Science, Richard Dawkins) by religious metaphysics and philosophical myth. For these Darwin-obsessed, unblinkingly deterministic culture-warmongers, science has become more than a method. It has become a mission.

Joining Richard Dawkins at the front line in the war against People With Wrong Beliefs, whether Christian or German Idealist, is Peter Atkins, former professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford and author of On Being – A scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence. It’s an unabashed attempt to show why the scientific method will come closer to answering the big ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions than – to sling Atkins’ mud –  all the theological fantasists, political storytellers and philosophical shysters put together. And to be fair to the scientistic Atkins, he certainly knows his onions, albeit from the sub-atomic level upwards.

Spontaneous Order

by John Stossel 

You are our Ruler. An entrepreneur tells you he wants to create something he calls a “skating rink.” Young and old will strap blades to their feet and speed through an oval arena, weaving patterns as moods strike them.

You’d probably say, “We need regulation—skating stoplights, speed limits, turn signals—and a rink director to police the skaters. You can’t expect skaters to navigate the rink on their own.”

And yet they do. They spontaneously create their own order.

At last January’s State of the Union, President Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know? For years, politicians have promised that more of us will want to commute by train, but it doesn’t happen. People like their cars. Some subsidized trains cost so much per commuter that it would be cheaper to buy them taxi rides.

The grand schemes of the politicians fail and fail again.

By contrast, the private sector, despite harassment from government, gives us better stuff for less money—without central planning. It’s called a spontaneous order.

Lawrence Reed, president of FEE, explains it this way:

“Spontaneous order is what happens when you leave people alone—when entrepreneurs . . . see the desires of people . . . and then provide for them.

“They respond to market signals, to prices. Prices tell them what’s needed and how urgently and where. And it’s infinitely better and more productive than relying on a handful of elites in some distant bureaucracy.”

This idea is not intuitive. Good things will happen if we leave people alone? Some of us are stupid—Obama and his advisers are smart. It’s intuitive to think they should make decisions for the wider group.

“No,” Reed responded. “In a market society, the bits of information that are needed to make things work—to result in the production of things that people want—are interspersed throughout the economy. What brings them together are forces of supply and demand, of changing prices.”

The personal-computer revolution is a great example of spontaneous order.

“No politician, no bureaucrat, no central planner, no academic sat behind a desk before that happened, before Silicon Valley emerged and planned it,” Reed added. “It happened because of private entrepreneurs responding to market opportunities. And one of the great virtues of that is if they don’t get it right, they lose their shirts. The market sends a signal to do something else. When politicians get it wrong, you and I pay the price.

“We have this ingrained habit of thinking that if somebody plans it, if somebody lays down the law and writes the rules, order will follow,” he continued.

“And the absence of those things will somehow lead to chaos. But what you often get when you try to enforce mandates and restrictions from a distant bureaucracy is planned chaos, as the great economist Ludwig on Mises once said. We have to rely more upon what emerges spontaneously because it represents individuals’ personal tastes and choices, not those of distant politicians.”

The criminalization of the Link

by Mark Steyn

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the "hyperlink"- that's to say, if you include a link to a site "where hate material is posted", you could go to jail for two years.

I don't recall this figuring as a policy proposal during the election campaign. I would imagine that almost no Tory voter is in favour of the proposal: The vast majority would be either opposed or indifferent, or bewildered as to why it's happening at all. After all, at the last Conservative conference, the vote to scrap Section 13 was unanimous.

That last one - why's it happening? - is easy to answer. It's happening because it's the kind of remorseless incremental annexation of individual liberty to which the permanent bureaucracy has become addicted. And, as I always say, the lesson of the post-Second World War west is that you don't need a presidency-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. It's an outrageous law, poorly written. For example, you might link to a harmless bit of fluff at blandpap.com, but two years later somebody might have posted some "hate material" in a far corner of that site that you've never read and have never linked to. Tough. As the typically crappily drawn law currently stands, you're guilty of a crime. Richard Warman, Canada's leading Internet Nazi, has pronounced SteynOnline a "hate site" (and sued Blazing Cat Fur for linking to it). Suppose you're some harmless little jazz site and you link to one of my Song of the Week columns. Too bad. You might have thought you were linking to something about George Shearing or Johnny Mercer, but deep within the site is "hateful material" about Richard Warman's Nazi activities or Warren Kinsella's Sinophobic jokes. So you're looking at two years in the slammer.

Who'll determine what's "hateful material"? Three types of people: Weird self-aggrandizing creeps like Warman; ambitious social engineers like the BCHRT judges who just fined a stand-up comic 15 grand for putting down a heckler homophobically; and just plain stupid bureaucrats, like Shirlene McGovern, who "investigated" Ezra Levant at Alberta taxpayers' expense for years and couldn't be bothered to learn the differences between the real Mohammed cartoons and the fake ones. None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live - or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it's entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power. And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There's so much of this stuff around it's barely "ideological": it's just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn't it?

At the tail end of the Cold War, I used to meet charming, intelligent eastern Europeans and wonder how they could live as they did. How could an educated citizenry not chafe under daily tyranny? I remember one of them - an amusing Hungarian cynic - explaining it to me: For most people, "rights" are theoretical. After all, how many rights do you actively need to avail yourself of to get through the day? To do your job, buy some dinner, watch a little TV. Maybe "free speech" is a big deal if you want to be a poet or a playwright, but for the rest of us, not so much so. And he gave a Mitteleuropean shrug.

I was aghast. But I wouldn't be today. Why not criminalize the hyperlink? After all, as that Hungarian might have said, how many hyperlinks does the average Canadian need to get through the day? What does one more concession to statism really matter?

No government, least of all one that purports to be "conservative", should pass this legislation. The presence of Geert Wilders on Canadian soil and the pitiful airbrushing of even mildly approving pieces about him remind us of the increasingly cowed state of our public discourse. We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you