92 today. Good innings and all that.
But wait! Yes….I’m getting….yes….OK….this just in from the Blessed Abattoir of the Sacred Cow….
Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.
Ah well, I guess even divinities made flesh are entitled to the occasional bad day at the office.
So the Lars Vilks affair is back in the news again. Did anyone really ever think it would go away?
Following His Grace, Archbishop Cranmer’s contribution to the debate on religion and free speech, I thought I’d weigh in with my own two penn’orth.
The whole object of political cartooning is to confront us with unpalatable details and observations. They are by their very nature excessive. An excess of caricature is preferable to an excess of censorship or the timid pronouncements of those yielding ground to latter-day book burners, who are only using a contrived issue as yet another proxy for anti-enlightenment hysteria.
Who decides what is offensive to Christians, Jews or Muslims? Which are to be considered protected species?
The cartoon is not gratuitously offensive, bland and not very funny, yes, but offensive?
The depiction of Mohammed as a dog is a fairly neat encapsulation of what radicalised religion has come to mean for more and more people appalled by the violence committed in its name. Subsequent reactions – flag burning, fatwas, death threats – only vindicate this perception. The drawings are designed to provoke a response, of that there is no doubt, but political cartoons are provocative. It simply comes back to who decides what is ‘gratuitously insulting’. When you have a group that places itself above all others while at the same time practising an absurdly transparent hypocrisy, then they are an obvious target for parody.
Can any objective person satisfy themselves that public beheadings, massacres and bloodcurdling invocations by religious zealots with mediaeval attitudes are not, by contrast, far more offensive to the senses than a few cartoons in a newspaper? Or how about the officially sanctioned contest in Iran to produce the most offensive holocaust cartoon? There is certainly no moral advantage to be gained there.
The greater part of the debate in our guilt-ridden society has been whether Nerikes-Allehanda was ‘responsible’ in printing the cartoon. The only sense in which they might not have been was the concern that they might result in just such an up welling of fury as we are once again witnessing. Once you start bowing to, and legislating for such behaviour, you only encourage it.
This is just an excuse, a proxy by which they can express their hatred and fear of democracy and pluralism, and it’s a racing certainty they’ll find another before long.
Final word on the matter from Zombietime….
In solidarity with His Grace, Archbishop Cranmer, whose religious beliefs I do not share, but whose trenchant support for free speech I applaud wholeheartedly, I publish this….
….and challenge the Crown Prosecution Service to do their worst.
“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions.” Edmund Burke, Bristol, 1780
STRONGEST POSSIBLE CONTENT WARNING! NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
Not that I imagine that this is by any means an isolated incident, but it is evidence of something free thinkers have long known to be self-evident, namely that the warped logic of the fanatical political extremist eventually leads him to his own self-destruction.
Thanks to the estimable Charles Crawford for flagging this.
It would appear that there are limits to Sarah Palin’s objections to political correctness….
And yet, a mere five days earlier….
I think, kind of tougher to put our arms around, but allowing America’s spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we’re not afraid to say especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we’re not afraid to say, you know, we don’t have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again. To have people involved in government who aren’t afraid to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness that you know – they have to be afraid of what the media said about them if they were to proclaim their alliance to our creator.
Can you run that by us one more time, Sarah, love? Only this time in English?
There are millions of Americans who want to hand the launch keys to this rapture-ready loon.
They are also allowed to consume alcohol, drive, rear children, carry firearms and operate heavy machinery.
Is the truth about to become illegal in the EUSSR?
As for what he says about Moroccans, it is factually correct, but as one of the prosecutors said before the trial: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”.
How can the country that produced Spinoza have become so retarded?
I’m fucking speechless.
And a respectful tug of the forelock to The Final Redoubt for this comparison with another show trial from the pages of history.
Welcome, my friends, to the age of diversity fundamentalism.
recent lies and distortions