RE: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 17:47:51 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LizR

 

This is all very interesting but I still don't think they deserved to be killed 
whatever they said. I might or might not object - possibly with verbal violence 
- to the content of the cartoons, if I knew more about them. E.g. I might argue 
that they were racist, not funny etc - I can't judge that on the basis of the 
examples given (I might say the same about the film about North Korea, plus add 
in that case that they were crossing the line, satire-wise, by insulting a real 
living person rather than an invented version). I'd also argue that the Charlie 
people were perhaps stupid to take risks when the world is full of mindless, 
evil bigots who might react by killing them.

 

Liz, No one, certainly not I, am suggesting that they deserved to die (even 
though I am frankly unsurprised… you can piss in someone else’s pot for only so 
long before bad things happen) Christian fanatics kill have also been known to 
try to kill people whose free speech they don’t like (for example: Larry Flint 
– not the most sympathetic character perhaps)

France, and most of Europe as well, by now are multicultural societies. Yet in 
each case European countries are still run as if they were ethnically 
homogenous. The faces of today’s France can be Vietnamese, Senegalese, 
Algerian… from all corners of France’s prior colonial empire. It is somewhat 
difficult to get good demographic statistics in France because of that nations 
prickly Republican ideology; whereas in America there is  a checkbox for 
everything (maybe too far the other way) J 

 

 

One point about this, perhaps - not to mention "The Interview" and "The Satanic 
Verses" - is that it often seems to be people from a well off liberal 
background who insult the people of a less well off country/region. So it could 
be taken in some cases as intellectual snobbery (or maybe just snobbery). I'm 
not sure if that applies in this case, though.

 

I believe the wise way to evaluate whether something is funny or not; whether 
it is satire or just a slur  is to see how members of  target feel when exposed 
to it. If a person of color feels insulted by some cartoon, a white person does 
not have the right to say that it’s just all in his head and that only a fool 
would see it in any other way.

Seeing the imagery of those cartoons I really don’t think that anyone would be 
able to find a lot of French of Arab or African descent laughing along with the 
“ironic intent”; rather more likely that they would feel humiliated, insulted, 
and certainly *unwelcome* 

By that metric, by the metric of the effect those cartoons had on the targets 
of its “irony” the merit and intent of that published work should be judged. 
Perhaps this is a uniquely American view and sensitivity not shared in Europe, 
but it is a necessary behavior in order for any 
multicultural/multi-racial/multi-sectarian/multi-ethnic society to work. 

What happened to the Golden Rule?

-Chris

 

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