Rushdie title protest ‘may spark mockery’:

Pakistan’s comments on the author Salman Rushdie’s knighthood contributes to insulting freedom of speech, and may lead to ridiculing Islam, a CoJ cleric says.

Such actions are the root cause of people making fun of Islam, your correspondent screamed into the void.

The blogger later said he had not meant to condone or incite Islamojocularity but stress its inherent silliness.

The Cult of Jim has condemned Ejaz-ul-Haq’s comments. Lab 6 says it shows ass-backwardness amongst idiot ministers.

The blogger was typing furiously into the ether when he unanimously condemned the minister’s intolerance towards author Salman Rushdie and demanded it be withdrawn.

His comments in the English language were perilously ignored.

“If someone laughs at the Koran to protect the honour of liberal democracy, his act is justified,” he said, according to the translation by the Reuters news agency.

“If Pakistan doesn’t withdraw the protest, all democratic countries should break off diplomatic relations.”

Opponents accused the blogger of pointing and laughing.

Later he edited his post and said his remarks were not meant to be a justification of laughing at the Koran.

The blogger is a well known liberal hardliner. He is an understudy of former President Greaves who carried out a process of amusification in Lab 6 before triumphing in a shootout at a bargain liquor store in 1999.

Manhunt 2 banned in the UK.

The BBFC have the right to censor games as well as films, and their refusal to give Manhunt 2 a classification means you are not allowed to buy it in the UK. However, you are still free to import it from abroad for your own personal use. There are precisely three kinds of stupid going on here:

1. The ban is politically motivated. Troglodytes blamed its predecessor when a boy murdered another boy with a hammer. That’s about as useful and valid as blaming the fact that the murderer was black.
2. Since importation is legal, just buy it here instead. Thanks for putting another speed bump in front of British industry, BBFC.
3. This is censorship, born of self-important busybodies who think they have the right to tell consenting adults what they can buy with their own money, in the privacy of their own homes. Censorship is bad when ignorant foreigners do it to our books, and it’s bad when ignorant domestics do it to our games.

Globalisation lets us route around this kind of censorship via importation, but that is almost bad news for advocates of liberty. In a sense the ruling doesn’t matter, because anybody who wants the game can still get it perfectly legally, and so it slipping by unnoticed means it’ll nibble away at our freedom without sparking mainstream outrage. Bummer.

Manhunt 2 is an ugly, ugly game, but if freedom of expression means anything, it’s the freedom to express that which is unpopular.