Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Civil Liberties Campaigns ? It's All A Shami

So farewell then, David Copperfield. In retrospect, it stands to reason that he wouldn't have outed himself until after he'd finished digging an escape tunnel, except not really.

Copperfield was never a bomb thrower, an ideologue or an activist. True, there was a vaguely social conservative point to some of his posts, but compared to the agenda-driven nonsense emanating from some of the other players in the legal system, this was very thin gruel.

Of course, we should never underestimate the ability of the left's Offense Mining Squad to find something objectionable even in a Christmas cracker, but the point is that Copperfield was no political firebrand, he was a public servant, writing about how a public service goes about serving the public. In a democratic society, the mere act of writing about how the government goes about its work should not place a man in danger of losing his livelihood, and that goes double where those overtly pushing more politically palatable messages are given somewhat more latitude.

All of which is by way of saying that the persecution of people who question the official figures for tractor production is far more offensive to the spirit of liberty than anything to do with counter-terrorism, yet the supposed civil liberties campaigners metaphorically chaining themselves to the railings outside Tora Bora have nothing to say about the naked suppression of free speech. So screw them.

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