Meanwhile, in US provinces,

the Iraqi government moves to ban sites deemed harmful to the public, to require Internet cafes to register with the authorities and to press publishers to censor books.

The government, which has been proceeding quietly on the new censorship laws, said prohibitions were necessary because material currently available in the country had had the effect of encouraging sectarian violence in the fragile democracy and of warping the minds of the young. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/world/middleeast/04censor.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

I guess Post #180099

The concept of human rights did not originate in either the USA or France, but in Haiti,

writes Jean-Michel Caroit, in an article about the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the subject of a recent conference in Paris: "According to the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this revolution was "unthinkable" because it was so radical in the context of the dominant thinking of the time. It transcends the French or the American revolution because the concept of human rights was applied to the humanity as a whole, with no differentiation between races or sexes. The authors of the human rights declaration of 1789 were referring to the 'white' western man when they wrote 'Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et egaux en droit.' The Haitian revolution adds the word 'all': 'All human beings...'" (http://www.signandsight.com/features/1911.html)

I was on a plane once sitting next to an official at Detroit's Convention and Visitors Bureau.  I suggested he rebrand the city, perhaps playing on "exotic" imagery.  I proposed Detroit — We're America's Haiti.

I thought it was catchy, but he ended up calling me a racist....

Back in the real world, I find all this free expression a royal pain.  I'd say we should get over our "shariaphobia" and let the bearded reactionaries do our thinking for us...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Originally written by Jacek K. on October 13, 2009 11:31 AM     http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Warsaw International Film Festival has bowed under pressure from the Amway direct sale retailer and withdrawn a critical documentary on the controversial company.

The film, directed by Polish film maker Henryk Dederko, “reveals a number of the Amway corporation’s secrets – including obvious violations of Polish law,” claims the Warsaw Film Festival web site.

“To prevent these seeing the light of day, Amway obtained a court ban [in 1998] on the film, preventing its release. Director Henryk Dederko and producer Jacek Gwizda?a were sued by Amway several times on various counts. This was the first case of preventive censorship in the history of Polish cinema after 1989,” the web site continues as part of the original blurb on the film, enticing cinema goers to see this as yet unseen documentary in Poland.

Showing the film as part of the festival would have been the first time that a Polish audience could decide for themselves about Amway’s alleged “cult-like practices” and “pyramid selling structures”. www.polskieradio.pl/.../artykul117859_amway_documentary_removed_from_warsaw_film_fest.html

Originally written by Jacek K. on October 13, 2009 11:31 AM    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/charlie-brooker-super-injunctions

A super-injunction is an injunction that prevents you from telling anyone that an injunction exists. If taking out a regular injunction is like putting a gag round someone's mouth, whipping out a super-injunction is the equivalent of putting a gag round someone's mouth, then pulling a bag over their head, tying them to a chair and stealing their phone so they can't text for help. Or to put it another way: if a tree lands in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? No one knows, because thanks to a super-injunction we're not allowed to report the existence of the forest. ...

That's effectively what the Guardian did last week, except that there was no beloved actor, but rather a whopping great multinational company accused of dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast, following which a lot of people got rather sick and more than a little upset. In an apparent bid to save face, the company instructed its lawyers (Carter-Ruck) to sail up and down the media coastline, knowingly dumping toxic injunctions. Eventually they went completely berserk and issued a super-injunction preventing the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question about one of their previous super-injunctions. This was too much for common sense or modern technology to bear. Private Eye printed the question, the Twittersphere went bonkers; soon everyone knew about it, and Trafigura's name was toxic mud. ...

And never mind super-injunctions – are there other kinds of injunction we don't know about? If you slap a super-injunction on top of another super-injunction, do you get a "hyper-injunction" that makes it illegal to even think about protesting? Can someone get an injunction that prevents your eyes from accurately telling your brain what they're looking at, so half your field of vision is pixelated out? Can you ban reporters from using the alphabet? Come to think of it, are there any additional letters of the alphabet we're not allowed to know about? There could be hundreds. Millions.

What worries me is that all this meddlesome injunctioneering could soon threaten the fabric of reason itself, causing a black hole of logic that sucks everything in the universe through to neverwhere. For the sake of all mankind, I sincerely hope that in future, any corporations trying to cover something up would do the decent thing and simply start strangling journalists and bombing their offices. Same results, less paperwork. Dead men tell no tales. And even if they try, Carter-Ruck can probably issue a gagging order that follows them into the afterlife and kicks their larynx off its hinges.

---

IN ANY CASE

Isn't it time to stop making a big deal about the tenous association between a particular event and the number of people who died coincidentally?

I'm more worried about basic freedoms, and don't think they can be undermined by "corporate" interests.

From Steyn:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/10/15/thinking-about-the-old-ignatieff/#more-86129

But do collective rights come at the expense of individual rights and thus, as Ignatieff suggested, lead to tyranny? The evidence suggests so. In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist was arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator was invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but was banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported. The state, in mediating group relations in a multicultural society, is ever more assertive. If you point out that, for example, European Union prohibitions on “xenophobia” would be unconstitutional in the United States, the more thoughtful Europeans will respond ruefully that things like the First Amendment presuppose a social consensus that across the Atlantic simply doesn’t exist. There are certainly points of tension between post-Christian Euro-hedonists and the Continent’s restive Muslim populations. But Hindu businessmen and gay parenting and all the rest? The reality is that, as Ignatieff discerned, collective rights inflation diminishes the core rights, and provides a very wide licence for tyranny.