Sunday, July 13, 2008

Outlaw journalist David Warren disparages Extraterrestrials- and WHERE is the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

Where, I ask you?

What do we pay taxes for if not to watch our neighbours destroyed if someone, somewhere is offended by their ideas?

All the Canadian Commission needs to do is classify aliens as humans (just as Spain has granted "human" rights to apes), and they can sure go after Warren, usually of the Ottawa Citizen, but here writing in the Sunday Spectator ("Abducted by aliens", May 18, 2008) words that are "likely" to expose the extraterrestrials to hatred and contempt (that's the word the law uses):

The group I intend to slur today are the Extraterrestrials. I’m not sure how the courts will interpret “hate-speech” and “hate-thought” towards this group, which is not yet specifically protected under any of Canada’s awkwardly-worded “rights” codes. Arguably, any attack on Extraterrestrials could be taken as personal attacks on members, former members, outriders and hangers-on of the HRCs themselves, and therefore provoke the next round of vexatious lawsuits.

Still, if Canada is to recover free speech and freedom of the press, journalists will have to be brave and bold, and I’m prepared, like a Boy Scout, to do my bit. I don’t care what the personal consequences to me -- they can sue me, they can throw me in prison (I’ve already been hauled before the Ontario Press Council by one of these trolls, for writing disparagingly about Islamist terrorists) -- but I’m going to speak out. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think about Extraterrestrials.

I think they don’t exist. (And what could be more demeaning!)

While I acknowledge the belief that highly intelligent, super-evolved beings must inhabit other planets -- if not in this galaxy, then surely in some others -- is dear to the post-Christian “liberal” mind, my own views are old-fashioned, sceptical, and Catholic.

These are dangerous views, as I discovered this week, when I lapsed into email exchanges first with a fairly sane, sensible, Darwinian atheist in Texas, and then with several more strident correspondents from the Darwinian camp. I had no idea, until I provoked them, just how powerfully the desire to believe in “little green men” can animate the thinking of minds bereft of sound religion, and/or common sense.

But while their arguments struck me as simpleton, and ludicrous, I could nevertheless reformulate them into something vaguely plausible. Consider:

[ ... ]

And pray for me, that I don’t get abducted by the aliens up here in Canada.

We can but hope.

The image, from Wiki COmmons, shows extraterrestrials looking really, really in need of a big bureaucracy to come to their rescue.