I’m offended

So what does Chris think, you ask?

A brilliant blow in the war on moderation and tolerance!

Beautiful!

Being in the ‘World Politics’ section and including a reference to foreign languages, I presume Chris is talking about the burning this weekend of foreign embassies in Syria and Lebanon. However, it could be a text referred to practically any issue involving civil liberties consolidated in Western democracies which are actively violated in other countries. In its essence, I would agree 100% with the argument. However (and I’m not justifying here any human rights violations, quite the contrary), convincing the power elites (the only ones who could make a real difference) in such other contries that they should adapt to the West’s views in these issues is very difficult if we go around invading countries, savagely exploiting they natural and human resources, etc. A dangerous world, indeed.

I, too, am outraged by this outrageous outrage!

Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s really a lot of fuss about nothing. I can’t understand why everyone is getting so worked up about this rather trivial issue, when there are so many far more important things to think about. I almost suspect that there is some alternative agenda behind these oh-so-carefully-orchestrated displays of outrage.

Clever, I do believe Stalin used this same tactic to expose everyones views … then, you know the rest of the story.
BB

Big deal. Of course I agree with you in principle but it’s crazy to get so worked up about it. Your lot have done exactly the same things to our lot and were you offended then? I don’t think so. All the time that’s going on, don’t expect any sympathy from me. And is it really wrong anyway? Something will be done about it, of course, because it is, of course, wrong, as I have always aknowledged, but I just don’t see the point in talking or thinking about it.

Hey. I thought this was written by an offended Muslim and now I read the comments and find out that the opposite is the case? I am offended. I am outraged. My assumptions pale in the face of your assumptions. For shame for shame.

I am offended too.

I am offended that you seem to consider an all-out war on free speech to be something worth joking over.

Buildings are being torched. People have been murdered. And here, you’re making light of it all.

Look: All right-minded people should be offended when random Danes are being threatened abroad for the cartoons drawn by someone else with the same ethnicity. That really is wrong.

But please, spare me this stuff about those awful Other People and how “their nature” being essentially corrupt. That’s a fanaticism, too, and I am sure that you know better. It is the idea, not the person, that we must struggle against.

It’s also not a question of distinguishing between “those people and the other people.” An Islam — for example — that respects the freedom of speech could exist, and therefore the quarrel, if any, is not between Us and the Muslims. It’s between us and certain fanatical ideas.

How do I know? Well, Christianity didn’t used to be too tolerant of blasphemy, either, and it managed to change its ways, too. You probably know the story of the Chevalier de la Barre just as well as I do, but the rest would be well advised to Google it.

It’s between us and certain fanatical ideas.

This needs to be added to the post.

19: the quarrel, if any, is not between Us and the Muslims.

The quarrel “if any”? Why these weasel words after taking Chris to task for joking about an “all-out war”? Could it be you’re insufficiently dedicated to the quarrel, the struggle, the all-out war between “us” and “certain fanatical ideas”?

See, I think more people should be joking about it, quite frankly. Too much that’s laughable on all sides to do otherwise, and it’s not as though the mount-the-barricades rhetoric does much to pull things back into perspective.

People have been murdered.

Who’s been murdered? I’ve been following the reports and I’ve seen no mention of that.

Look: All right-minded people should be offended when random Danes are being threatened abroad for the cartoons drawn by someone else with the same ethnicity. That really is wrong.

But shouldn’t all the right-minded people also be offended when random Muslims are being threatened at home for terrorist acts committed by someone else with the same religion?

Jason Kuznicki has rendered further humor superfluous.

Excellent job, Chris. Perhaps you could do up a piece, next, on the odd dichotomy that Arab newspapers run anti-Semitic cartoons because they are bigots, but European newspapers run anti-Muslim cartoons because they love freedom.

aside from a satirical view, that is…

Isn’t the endgame of the irony that might makes right?

Seahawks? I’m offended. This is clearly about those cheating divers at Chelsea.

Actually this ironic stance of Chris’s is not clever/funny. Interesting yes but not for the reason most of the people here think. It is interesting *only* because it shows that Chris has nothing to say on the matter ; moral quietism ?

This really is perfect. It’s like a Rorschach test – people just read into it whatever commentary they expect to see.

Zdenek: You say it’s not funny, and yet I laughed. Your stance against humor shows that the terrorists have already won.

So what they say about the Left becomming morally degenerate is true , interesting. For two days complete silence ( sullen , resentful silence ) and now this pathetic juvenile , sophomoric reaction ( that is Chris ) and from the comment gallery ? same degenerate moral relativism and resentment. The right has been characterising the left in this way for some time see for instance Scruton in ‘West and the rest’ but some writers on the left have been making similar criticism : Martha Nussbaum’s take on Judith Butler.
What is interesting is that now we see this hollowness / decadence that these philosophers are drawing attention to in action. The problem clearly are not the islamonazis but rather ourselves , just listen to yourselves guys for a moment if you can.

“But shouldn’t all the right-minded people also be offended when random Muslims are being threatened at home for terrorist acts committed by someone else with the same religion?”

Indeed they should.

“People have been murdered.”

I wasn’t exaggerating. Consider Theo van Gogh, who most certainly was murdered for offending Muslims. Or consider that several people involved in the translation and publication of The Satanic Verses met the same fate.

Please, let’s not put our heads in the sands about these matters.

“The quarrel “if any”? Why these weasel words after taking Chris to task for joking about an “all-out war”?”

I spoke this way because it did not appear that Chris was at all interested in conceding that there was a war, a quarrel, or anything of the sort. I happen to think that there is, and I wanted to show him why. I trust it’s not forbidden (in the name of patriotism, or irony, or what have you) to indulge in a few concessions for the sake of argument.

Incidentally, I subscribe entirely to comment #37 above.

Walt: that wasn’t laughter you were experiencing, it was…

moral degeneracy.

(Tastes just as great, but only half as filling.)

Since I believe only in what is right, anyone who disagrees with me is by definition wrong. And all right-thinking people agree with me!

I took it to be about the nexus of politics and language, neil- and not only on one “side”. Orwell would have understood.

Reuben: Huh?

On the model of truthiness, we need a word for this: offenciness. Two words summing up the politics of the last five years.

Secondly what is wrong with taking sides ? The left has traditionally done this e.g. the struggle against apartheid or struggle against Nazism.

Some on the left do take sides. They equate the current campaign against Muslims with Nazi campaign against Jews. See this, for example: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/02/muslims-are-coming-again.html. So, everything is fine now, right? There is no hollowness/decadence?

Gee, itty-bitty commenter, you’ve now made just one self-congratulatory comment with zero content. You’ll have to work overtime to catch up.

abb1- the idea is not to take sides just for taking sides sake but rather to take sides based on traditional left commitments ( basically enlightnment values )which provide moral content. This is why the perverse inversion that is involved in comparing criticism of izlamofascism with nazi attack on jews is incompatible with the Left outlook . Again it makes sense to you (the inversin of enlightnment values )because like a lunatic you think morality is just a game .

Any reason to riot in the Middle East is a good reason. I’m surprised it’s taken so long to find a pretext.

Steve,
The content of my post was that you come across like a complete ass. Thanks for the opportunity to repeat it.

Everyone here seems to agree that Chris wrote a brilliant piece of satire, and I certainly think so. The question some of us are raising is whether satire is the appropriate reaction to the current events which I personally find deeply unsettling.

Teeny-weeny opinionator, I made the content of my views clear in #34. Speaking of not addressing points made in comments, I don’t see you dealing with my point that, like the riots, the predictable right-wing-chorus of “see, we told you THEY were like that” is also deeply unsettling, and in addition fronts for an actual power to do harm which is far in excess of that of the rioters.

Gosh, I wish we could all agree that “being offended” and talking about it is different from “being offended” and torching an embassy. Is that concept too simplistic for advanced thinkers?

There might be a little bit of a difference between being offended by death threats (carried out and not) against those who make artistic depictions of Islam and being offended by (frankly not all that offensive by the standard of rude cartoons about religion) cartoons. There might also be a bit of difference between the legitimate reactions to offense.

Or perhaps, if you are Chris, there might not.

Sebastian, if you had to work, as I do, with right-wing assholes of the “nuke Mecca today!” variety, perhaps you’d see that the offense does not lie only on one “side”. And much of that same outlook went into energizing popular support for the Iraq invasion, which has killed orders of magnitude more innocent people than the rioters have.

Madness is madness. Calling it by its right name, wherever it’s found, is simply morality, not “moral equivalence”.

On all sides passionate intensity has become a hallmark of the worst. Lacking all conviction, the best retreat to neutral ground – only to find it eroding at their feet, and too crowded anyway.
Ironic detachment will save us.
Or it won’t.
Who cares.

Some people here don’t seem to realize that after 9/11 everything’s changed.

74: just redicule your critic or use ad hominem does not cut it but it seems that thats all you have

So, you have nothing to say in response to either 71 or 72, say? Too bad. Guess your talk about what “does not cut it” is going to seem pretty hollow…

I’m offended.

Duly noted. ;) A masterful example of hyperbole of emotionally laden phrases. A rant waiting to be aimed at something; a rant-in-a-can. :)

Yarha, Rent-a-Rant

ABB1,
That is your reply? Pretty sad.

Commenterlein – yeah, that’s my reply. What’s your reply?

honor-based society vs morality-based society

The issue.

Would Chris be writing a similar post if a Christian group threatened to kill people over an offense taken on the Creation Science issue? I think he might find a few words against that kind of religious craziness that wouldn’t amount to “Oh lots of people take offense at lots of things. How naughty of them.”

What I find amusing is that the “it’s not funny” side is accusing the “it’s funny” side of moral relativism, when, in fact, its only funny if you are not a thoroughgoing relativist.

A true relativist would find it too obvious to be funny. A true relativist understands intuitively that there is no reason that We are right and They are wrong, that’s just the way it is.

A true relativist has a hard time understanding why anyone would bother having reasons to fight.

Isn’t it obvious that people fight because they are human?

abb1– thanks for your comment . The content of the cartoons of course does not represent enlightnment values but only specific view of islam ( and that view may be right or wrong . I am thinking of the link that some people think exists between islam and violence ). What you are being asked to show solidarity with is the right of the cartoonists to draw and publish those cartoons.
It is this specific right that I call enlightnment value just to highlight its ancestry ( Kant ). So the argument then is between supporters of enlightnment value in this case freedom of expression on one hand and on the other side are people who want to say that religious doctrine must have upper hand.
The point I want to make is that it is silly if you are on the left to not take sides here because by our own principles we should oppose any move to impose the religious doctrine on public domain. And so its totally off the wall to campare thse efforts with Nazis’ s criticism of jews ( the slur also implies that there is similar hegemonic agenda which is crazy ).

Sebastian, speaking of game playing, making the next move in the game that lies behind your comment is like shooting fish in a barrel. “Yes, but suggesting that illegally a invading a country and causing the needless deaths of thousands of civilians is the same kind or intensity of madness as burning down multiple embassies and subjecting random Danish people in the Middle East to death threats isn’t morality, it is moral equivalence game playing.” And once again, the “warblogger” mentality was a very large part of energizing public support for that einvasion, so there is real guilt on “our side”.

We could go back and forth like that for quite a while, I expect. I say: Screw the “my grievance is bigger than your grievance” crap, that’s EXACTLY the kind of insanity that fuels the rioters. Opposing bad things when and as they occur, regardless of whether they’re on “our side” or “their side”, is where sanity lies. By the way, addressing not so much you as some of the other commenters, where did I say one word to suggest that the cartoons should not have been published or that the cartoonists, newspapers, or publishers should be forced to apologize? I happen to have a pretty absolutist conception of freedom of speech. I don’t favor suppressing the Mark Steyns of the world either- I favor ridiculing them.

88: The point I want to make is that it is silly if you are on the left to not take sides here

Oh, but plenty of us on “the left” do take sides — we just don’t draw the sides up along the “clash of civilizations” lines you’d apparently like to see, which is apparently what galls you. Many of us don’t, for example, believe that many of the people who are so worked up about the Islamofascist Threat to Freedom actually give a shit about “enlightenment values.” As Steve quite perspicaciously pointed out earlier.

Guys, you’re all taking yourselves far too seriously. Part of the point of this comment was to take a look at both yourselves and “the other side”, see how hollow much of the rhetoric we all spew out is, and laugh at ourselves.

We wouldn’t have half as much of the trouble we have in this world if we’d do that occasionally.

Over two thousand years ago the Hebrew Bible settled the ‘problems’ of subjective notions of honor and face with objective rights and wrongs that trump family/tribe insults.

Regarding how do we know that our so called enlightnment values are not same as nazi values :
for this we must go to Kant/Rawls . basically we need to show that our values would be chosen by process that provides foundation/justification wheras their values do not have such foundation and hence lack the appropriate moral objectivity. How do you do this ? You ask yourself what set of values would people who were placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ choose ( the veil screens bias )and then see whether they would chhoose Enlightnment values or Nazi values . And there is no doubt that one of the values that would be agreed upon by these volks would be freedom of expresion. In any case this is well known and understood and refutes any idea that there is some sort of moral equivalance ( see Rawls ‘theory of Justice 1972 ).

The louder right-wing trolls talk about “Enlightenment values”, the faster I count tmy spoons.

Steve LaBonne,

“I happen to have a pretty absolutist conception of freedom of speech. I don’t favor suppressing the Mark Steyns of the world either- I favor ridiculing them.”

But ridiculing extremist Muslims is a problem because…?

And if you say that ridiculing extremist Muslims is allowed (though perhaps unwise) you don’t really get very far from my position.

Scott Lemieux, I think you either don’t understand the term strawman or you don’t understand the rhetorical device Chris uses in drawing parallelisms. The purpose of using parallelism in analogy is to offer indirect argument that similar things should be dealt with similarly. Since the two thing alluded to are the publishing of cartoons and the Muslim reaction to the cartoons (which includes death threats, kidnapping threats, and actual arson), my explicit drawing of them is not a strawman argument. It is engaging Chris’ argument. Of course Chris can’t be explicit in his argument because outright saying that burning down embassies is similar to publishing cartoons would expose the brilliance of the argument.

Zdenek,
What you are being asked to show solidarity with is the right of the cartoonists to draw and publish those cartoons.

Sorry, but your point is trivial and meaningless; no one here is disputing the right of the cartoonists to draw anything they want.

See, it just seems too easy and convenient for you to show solidarity in this particular case – demonizing the official enemy; why don’t you pick something a bit more challenging: some holocaust denialist or some anti-semitic cartoon or article – and express your solidarity there? That would make more sense.

Take this David Irving guy, for example – he is actually in jail, incarcerated in a Western country, and for actual speech. Why don’t you show solidarity, organize protest or something? Let me know, I may just join you or send you few bucks.

Thanks.

“Sorry, but your point is trivial and meaningless; no one here is disputing the right of the cartoonists to draw anything they want.”

The problem is that everyone is making comments of the form, “Yes yes, freedom of speech, but…” and then go on to lambaste the cartoon publishers. When freedom of speech recieves such a cursory mention, especially in comparision to “yes, but” part of the comment, it raises serious questions about just how serious the authors actual commitment to freedom of speech is. Liberalism has to be more than just a perfunctory acknowledgement.

#74: “…the left is disconnected…from traditional enlight(e)nment values…”

Umm…but don’t “traditional” Enlightenment “values” involve an abstraction from or rejection of all claims to tradition, as transgressing the bounds of a supposedly “autonomous” and self-grounding reason, while relying on a presumed culture-independent knowledge of nature, conceived in curiously harmonistic terms as a singular unity, inconsistently as the normative ground of social criticism and historical progress? Further, aren’t Enlightenment “values” founded on a “clear” distinction and separation of facts from “values”, such that such “values” are left curiously suspended in mid-air, removed from the conditions, implications and consequences of any actual instantiation? (You might want to consult Hegel on that one, as at once the most trenchant early critic and worst offender.) And, on the contrary, haven’t leftist thinkings and positions/perspectives always been based on the insuperability of worldly existence, such that all perspectives are embedded in real and socially and historically determined or structured conditions, such that any claim to any “absolute” perspective, whether Platonically or transcendentally conceived, which would spare one the taint of pernicious “relativism” and allow one to “neutrally” decide upon values and validities, is tautologically self-confirming, uninformative and ultimately specious or delusive? The upshot of that, then, would be that there are real relativities or differences in perspectives, which cannot be merely dismissed as pernicious “relativism” from some self-enclosed standpoint above the fray, but which generate real or potential conflicts and oppositions, beyond any possibility of “neutral” theoretical arbitration, (including self-enclosed, self-confirming claims to possession of “universal” morality). The further consequence is that any mediation or resolution of conflicts between perspectives can only take place on the basis of actual practical reason, in terms of appeals and projects that generate actually informative interpretations and analyses that aim at the practical tranformation of the conditions and organizations that have brought about irreconcilable conflicts in the first place. In sum, the “left” has always been a bit askew with respect to “traditional Enlightenment values”, and, if the “left” does not blindly affirm their loyalty to them, it is because, disappointments with historical “progress” aside, they can not be attained through a fundamentalistic restoration. So rather than self-righteously affirming one’s own moral “purity” by casting aspersions on the hypocrisy and decadence of others, perhaps attention to the actual conceptual grammar of differing positions/perspectives might be in order. C.B.’s clever satire was, after all, an effort in that direction.

Sebastian, if you had to work, as I do, with right-wing assholes of the “nuke Mecca today!” variety, perhaps you’d see that the offense does not lie only on one “side”.

Er, European right wing assholes don’t often go round saying “nuke Mecca”. Also because we don’t have the nukes here.

But I reckon you were talking about Americans, right? Ah yes. How much less entertaining would this whole mess be if we didn’t filter it through the internal US political debate, which is about as relevant to this as the internal political debate in China.

So now, US right wingers are the other side of the burning mobs. Cool. So neat that we can reduce everything to a binary equation. Now it’ll all be simpler. We only need to explain to protesters that they burnt the wrong embassies, and had to target the US ones. Wouldn’t that have been a lot more interesting in terms of repercussions.

The problem is that everyone is making comments of the form, “Yes yes, freedom of speech, but…” and then go on to lambaste the cartoon publishers. When freedom of speech recieves such a cursory mention, especially in comparision to “yes, but” part of the comment, it raises serious questions about just how serious the authors actual commitment to freedom of speech is.

No, it doesn’t. In fact this is exactly what ‘freedom of speech’ is all about. It doesn’t entail agreeing with the speaker. “Yes, but” is exactly the correct way to react to stupid racist crap.

well: “Of course Chris can’t be explicit in his argument because outright saying that burning down embassies is similar to publishing cartoons would expose the brilliance of the argument”

this is cute on many levels, to wit:

1. there isn’t any actual evidence that this post is about cartoons at all.

2. to the extent that we might assume that it is, the words “Others have intimated that I spend my time trawling the internet looking for obscure TV clips and articles in foreign languages to be offended by” would tend to suggest the offended party being satirised is in fact only the embassy burner, and

3. it’s sort of a hilarious reduction to imagine that the only perspectives here are between (a) people who publish cartoons, and (b) people who burn down embassies, when there is just as much evidence to fallaciously reduce the comix conflict to (a) bigots and (b) boycotters of foreign products.

incidentally, sebastian, the reduction in 3 is one of your strawmen.

If you don’t think this post has anything to do with the cartoon issue, I have nice bridge I can sell you.

When I see “scare quotes” used 17 times in one post, I do wonder what was behind the selection of those words not marked in that way.

soru

# 63 Any reason to riot in the Middle East is a good reason. I’m surprised it’s taken so long to find a pretext.

Serious or satire?

so you accept your comic publishers vs embassy burners conflict is a straw man?

Just because one has reached the end of one’s rope doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to end in a noose…Strangling dissent is worse than assenting to anger…and anger has always been essential to keeping one’s freedom…
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s nobody spying on you…
But on the whole I’m suddenly, laughingly AWOL in the war upon moderation and tolerance.
Nice work.

to be clear, my #126 comment hails Chris Bertram’s hilarious generic rant, and nods to Charles Stross’s #3.

Boycotting a country for its government action is one thing. Boycotting a country for the action of a miniscule company inside it is silly.

Sebastian Holsclaw, usually your posts are utterly unworthy of any response but this time you appear to have accidentally stumbled onto something interesting.

McCormack at the US State Department expressed our free-press ideal admirably. And it’s important that it get expressed well because for large parts of the world, that ideal simply does not exist.

In china, when Sun Yat Sen proposed democracy, he specifically thought it should be a 5-fold system of checks and balances — legislative, executive, judicial, examinative, and censorial. He felt that the examination system and the censors would help reduce the abuses of elections.

During the time that europeans started developing our ideal, most of the arab world was run by other people’s empires, which of course had no use for free speech among their subjects. And the muslim ideal like the christian one involved teaching everybody about religion. Before there was much of a press, that was hard. It was so hard just to get one set of ideas across, there weren’t a lot of resources available for spreading competing ideas. And in countries where illiteracy was high a generation ago, there are lots of divisive superstitious ideas. When the saudis say they’re concerned about polytheism arising again they aren’t just blowing smoke. In 1500 it wasn’t too late for wiccans to revive in christian areas. We allow free speech coming from a background where pretty much everybody is a product of mass culture. They don’t have their mass culture developed yet.

In most arab countries, things are published without government approval in at most two circumstances — either they are so innocuous that no approval is needed, or they are so universally believed that the government might as well let them be said, approving or not.

They don’t understand us, right? When antisemitic cartoons are published in their press the government has approved. When anti-muslim cartoons are published in the danish press, would they stop to think that the government hasn’t given its approval? The idea that the government would let the press publish just anything at all — how alien! So holding the government responsible is not unreasonable given their understanding. Boycotting that government’s economy would make sense to them.

I’m not saying they’re right. I’m saying that they’re being reasonable given what they know.

I wonder how we could get across the idea to them that censorship is bad and should not be allowed. They don’t have that idea. Not only can they expect weak governments to censor trying to maintain power — they feel that their government is responsible for public decency, and must censor things like pornography and blasphemy. There’s the problem for them that a weak government that censors political ideas will remain weak — political opposition gets driven underground where it can’t easily get co-opted into the government. They can’t get a consensus when people have to be silent and lie. The very methods they use to keep their weak government in power prevents them from getting a strong government that might help them cooperate better.

Is there any way they can get there from here?

If you would like to argue that this post ‘occasioned by a specific controversy’ nevertheless makes no comment on that specific controversy, feel free. You are wrong, but whatever.

If on the occasion of a race riot someone were to make a facially neutral comment like “Certain people, lacking some of the higher intellectual capabilites of others are less able to control their animal instincts and cannot be expected to do other than what their base impulses tell them to do when they feel agitated or threatened, even if their feelings of agitation or perception of threat would be unreasonable if analyzed by a neutral observer.” it would and should be interpreted as a deeply racist remark.

Try this one, ‘occasioned’ by maybe your response or maybe not, who knows?

Faux intellectuals often say things which sound deep, but on further inspection merely run from the topic being discussed by throwing up rhetorical smoke to obscure their inability to say anything analytically useful. They are especially likely to hide behind the use of metaphors and when pinned down like to pretend that their metaphors don’t mean anything like what any normal reader would interpret them as meaning. This tends to suggest either that they have no great facility for the real-life use of language, or that they intentionally use their facility for language to obscure rather than reveal.

I presume you will read it as you have read Chris’ post. Other readers might not agree.

Well (as Reagan used to say) — Well, jet, I tend to agree with you that it’s an excellent a right-wing-o-matic. But it also works as a rioter rationialization; the rioters, after all, are fighting for the fine conservative principle of That Old-Time Religion (“some principles are absolute”). Also, “[our] people have suffered enough and deserve a break” works on the rioter side.

The thing that I find hilarious is our blogger’s ego — look how it begins! And the blogger “calls upon” people, as though assuming the mighty power of a Streisand. It is to laugh.

Sebastian, your liberals-are-evil pathology is reaching new heights. Be honest: you could give a shit about the Danes, or the torched embassies, or the boycotts. What really gets you interested is the chance to stick it to the liberals one more time.

I happen to think that the behavior in the Arab world over these cartoons is both deplorable and nutty, and makes me doubt that anything positive is in their long-term future. The cartoons were intended to trigger a particular reaction to make a particular point, and voila, they triggered that very reaction. Similarly, I suspect Chris wrote his post in order to trigger a particular reaction, and he did.

Jet, how can you say this?
As an unapologetic leftist, let alone a liberal, I feel myself stung to the core, grabbed by my own uninterruptable lapels, throttled by my dispassionate memes…How can you see this as a political challenge to the right, when it’s a poignant rant about our human condition? It’s hilarious, and it’s about both of us. Laugh!

Deeper it was that awakened a compassion in me for ‘those in the wrong,’ that I’d thought I’d lost along with my church. Clearly, sadly it did not awaken any such uninterruptable feeling in you, except what appears as the very righteous anger Chris so deftly satirizes. But he satirizes the Fustian Cubist as musch as he does the Fustian Jet . Perhaps this is because for us perceiving through a glass, darkly– clearly is impossible for such of us as is human timber.

If you don’t think this post has anything to do with the cartoon issue, I have nice bridge I can sell you

If you think you’ve understood exactly the point Chris is trying to make, how about a nice game of backgammon, table stakes?

I happen to think that the behavior in the Arab world over these cartoons is both deplorable and nutty, and makes me doubt that anything positive is in their long-term future.

Hmm, the opposite here – I thought the behavior was exemplary and it made me optimistic, but the excuse for this behavior provided by the Europeans sucked and makes me doubt etc.

Btw, I think the way it went might have something to do with the way various embassies are guarded. If you’ve ever seen an American or British embassy, you know that there’s no chance to even get close – barbed wire, cement barriers, etc. Danish embassies (I guess) were wide open, easy to attack.

Why not, Sebastian? Had a bunch of German embassies been burned by rioters around 1934-35 in response to racist crap that was published there – things might’ve changed.

Might be, why not? Or it may lead to futher escalation. Who knows.

Chris’s take involves mockery and parody of the two sides and in this way he thinks we can subvert them ; subversion by parodic performance. Very hip of course but can you not hear the note of despair ? The big hope , the hope of real justice has been banished and Chris’s type of mockery is a comprehensive response to the difficulty of realizing justice in the world. But it is a bad response because it involves collaboration with evil. We require more and deserve more.

Point, there is enough pressure on Arab (and all other) governments already to suppress antisemitic cartoons.

Yeah, and what do you make of this:

Snow White and The Madness of Truth (Swedish: Snövit och sanningens vansinne) is a work of art by Israeli-born Swedish composer/musician Dror Feiler (music) and his Swedish wife artist Gunilla Sköld-Feiler (visuals), in the Museum of National Antiquities (Historiska muséet) in Stockholm, Sweden. In early 2004 the artwork made a brief splash of international news after the Israeli ambassador Zvi Mazel vandalized it on January 16, 2004, by disconnecting the electricity and tipping one of the lights into the water causing a short circuit. The entire event was filmed by a news team. Zvi Mazel was asked to leave, but refused and had to be escorted out by museum security. Zvi Mazel has later given contradicting statements about the attack. To the Swedish media, he said it was done in the heat of the moment, but to Israeli media he said the attack was planned before he even had seen the artwork.

—————————
Yeah, and clearly there are signs of Muslims being the new Jews in Europe; I posted link to the lenin’s tomb above, feel free to read it.

More from this “Snow White and The Madness of Truth” article:

On January 18, 2004, an as yet unidentified man attacked Thomas Nordanstad who is responsible for the exhibition and tried to push him down the stairs. Recently, he has received over 400 e-mails with various threats. In addition, both Kristian Berg, head of the museum, and the artist have received many threats. On Sunday, a museum guard had to remove a group of people throwing various objects in to the water.

The problem with the post is that it can’t make up its mind.

” muslims are the new jews of europe ” — the idea must be that there is strong similarity ( why else make the comparison ) between Nazi attitude and current European/Western attitude towards the minority in question. Both must be racist , aimed at killing the people in question . Secondly it must be some sort of official policy based in widely accepted ideology + its enshrined in law .
Argument can be made to show that this was true about the nazi persrcution of the jews but what nonstupid arguments ( i.e. something that can be taken seriously , not just some sort of joke or hip stunt etc.) are there for showing that Europeans are making same moves ? ( please dont reply by pointing to right wing groups because that does not show that there is public doctrine supported by legislation as we had with nazis )

bb1– the final solution idea comes to be cooked by 1941 and implemented 1942 but that is just working out of the nazi racist outlook which is there right from the start and secondly it is a consequence of nazi drive to replace politics of negotiation and compromise we get with democracy with politics of violence/force /intimidation.
So the plan to kill jews is tacid in the ideology .
Now where is the parralel with the EU outlook which nazis would compare to Weimar ? EU outlook is behind legistlation which stigmatises racism sexism etc. where are the parralels you see ?

I’m not saying or implying that fascism and nazism are taking over in Europe. What I am saying is that there seems to be a tendency to demonize a group of people based on their religion/ethnicity. That is what happened in Germany recently, in the 1930s. That’s all there is to it. Everything else may be (and probably is) different.

Those people, by their actions, have demonstrated the essentially corrupt nature of their society and culture. Their behaviour, which all right-minded people should be offended by, should be universally condemned. If anything shows that we are right and they are wrong, this is it.

Bertram’s post mocks guilt by association, tribal loyalty, the situational ethics of self-invented elects. So those of you whining that he trivialises values – what values do you believe you defend against his post? And what rights – the right to bigoted generalisation, the right to define the Other by cherrypicked instances?

robw– your question has been already answered and number of times so get off your but and read them ( oops maybe you have read them but dont get them )

Denek,
no jews living in Europe aimed at implementing totalitarian antimodern racist , sexist ( and this is ideology you are collaborating with )idelogy totally at odds with European secular traditions.

If you believe the Nazis – they did aim at all that and more. So, why should I believe your ravings about “militant islam dimention” now?

do you think that jihadist groups are misunderstood freedom fighters who require our support ?

Well, isn’t that what you, folks, believed only about 20 years ago? IIRC, incomparable Mr. Reagan called them “moral equivalent of our founding fathers”. Any thoughts on that?

bb1– the view that jews were bend on world wide hegemony was supplied by the nazi propaganda but we dont go to some elite in charge of anti Islamic information today ,we go via internet straight to the groups themselves . This is the crucial difference .

I mean are you suggesting that the beheading tapes the speaches in which nonbelievers are described as ‘kafirs’ , the videotapes showing combat and used for training purposes are propaganda ? ( these things are freely available on the internet.)
I am starting to get a feeling that you are wearing a tinfoil hat.

Denek
the view that jews were bend on world wide hegemony was supplied by the nazi propaganda but we dont go to some elite in charge of anti Islamic information today

The Germans didn’t have to go to some elite either, it was right in the newspapers and magazines, just like it is now. Frankly, I don’t see any point here at all, let alone “crucial difference”.

Yeah, that, and also I think what I am suggesting is that “beheading tapes the speaches in which nonbelievers are described as ‘kafirs’” reflect on 1.2 billion Muslims in 2006 just about as much as a bunch of Jewish bankers, abstract artists and Bolsheviks reflected on 12 million Jews in 1935.

Sebastian, you misunderstood Chris’s post.

It wasn’t about the controversy you’re arguing about, not at all.

It was about you. It said that you have been acting like a stupid ideology-driven git.

And what was your response? You kept right on acting like a stupid ideology-driven git, only you responded to him as if he’d been talking about your issue.

If you had the slightest bit of self-reflection you would first get very, very embarrassed, and then you would get very, very mad at Chris. But you don’t. You didn’t notice that he was mocking you.

Sigh. I know Chris’ has as a large component of his post the poking fun at those on my side who take offense at the violent overreaction of some Muslims to the cartoons. It isn’t that I failed to notice the mockery. My whole response has been centered around an acknowledgement of the mockery. The point of my response, and a number of other people here, is that the mockery is based on metaphorical parallels which do not hold up. See dan simon at #96. See me at #106. I’m perfectly aware that those who defend the cartoons are being compared to those who have overreacted to the cartoons–see my response to someone who said I was misinterpreting the post by seeing such parallels at #124.

I would normally extend to you the courtesy of assuming that you failed to read those particular comments as this is a longish thread. But you responded directly to that part of the thread at #133 so your current contention that I just don’t get it seems very odd.

Sebastian and Zdenek, the problem here is that you really just don’t get it.

I don’t know how to explain it to you. You think you get it but you don’t.

“In any case, to suggest that what we have done bears comparison with what they have done is itself deeply offensive and such sentiments betray the inner corruption of those who utter them.”

He nailed you. And you still don’t get it. You don’t understand that when you’re wrong, it doesn’t help to point at somebody else who looks wronger. You’re still wrong.

Hope that helps, but I don’t have a lot of hope.

“the mockery is based on metaphorical parallels which do not hold up”.

I’m offended! I Don’t know why, but I feel that I must be before there’s two hundred messages without me commenting.

I’ll buy the bridge, and raise you 2 mEU’s. (moral equivalence units, for those still not on metric)

I, for one, am outraged by Chris’ failure to be outraged enough. This failure, in the face, the very teeth themselves of the forces of barbarism of the decadent culture that opposes us, is itself a form of moral treason, and the lack of any obvious spittle flecking your visage is proof.

(Of course, that’s what the MSM would like us to think.)

Moral equivalence behind the parody:
the move Chris makes ( which lots of people think is so hip ) is to assume that he can stand outside the discourse regarding right and wrong and somehow make neutral comment. The comment is supposed to be made from an “archimedian ” point of view i.e. outside the moral discourse and so assume authority that the judgements made at the nonironic level do not posses. This is why it is thought that it works as a form of analysis/criticism. And this is how it buys people here moral supperiority.
The point that some people have noticed but most have failed to see is that this ironic stance is just another judgement just like the once that Chris is parodying i.e. it is also a value judgement . What some of us have gone on to point out is that the content of this moral claim ( pretenciously disguised as neutrality couthed in hip parody ) is that the two positions in the debate are morally equivalent. So this involves:
1) moral judgement which is itself evaluation just like anyone elses and the claimed supperiority is a conceit.
2) the content of the position in question is moral nihilism.
This is a fair criticism to make and it is correct to demand some sort of justification. My personal suspicion is that the view is incoherent when it is unpacked but that is intellectually ok. What gets me is this pretencious cloak of moral supperiority which is being offered an disguised as some sort of moral purity . It is nothing of the sort : its worse that what it parodies !

#175: Ah! There you go again. Leftists, who are a singular identifiable group, due to the necessity of typological thinking, are infantile, incoherent, dangerously relativistic, morally degenerate, as witness X (Ward Churchill, Stalin, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, or any variable of your choosing), and because of their betrayal of “traditional Enlightenment values”, collaborate with EVIL. But, no, pass out the wafers, ’cause there’s more than enough evil in this world to go all around. And you really don’t get it. Bertram’s post was a meta-communication and its “topic” was bilateral symmetry, “mirror relations”, since, ya know, there are more than two sides to an issue and taking account of the many-sided, perspectival complexion of any real worldly issue is a crucial part of any rational discussion or debate that would substantively address the issue and advance toward potential rational understandings and resolutions of the issues involved. But instead you persist in responding to Bertram’s post in terms of the wrong level of logical type, the very confusion of logical types (and much else) that Bertram’s post was implicating. And that just self-generates the implication of Bertram’s nefarious purpose, since he’s not being “serious”. Oh, he isn’t, is he?

#181 & #184: Perhaps it’s worth noting that Dante put Saladin in heaven.

Right, all those benighted pagans- the Romans, for example- didn’t know anything about law…

j thomas– sorry dude I think I deal with this in my 185 posting .

My #131 above makes no sense without my original post, which showed up as #126, then disappeared. Here’s the post:
Just because one has reached the end of one’s rope doesn’t mean that it has to end in a noose…Strangling dissent is worse than assenting to anger…and anger has always been essential to keeping one’s freedom…
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s nobody spying on you.
But on the whole I’m suddenly, laughingly AWOL from the war on moderation and tolerance.
Nice work.

J Thomas,

How do you know the post is showing that someone is wrong and is funny?

Why isn’t it showing that both are right in an obviously symmetrical way?

cubist,

Perhaps I can do a shorter Chris from your point of view. Chris sees the set Z which contains A,B,C. A is the blind ideologues on one side, and B are the blind ideologues on the other side. Group C is the non-blind non-ideologue who sees that A and B are similar in their blindness and in their inability to see anyone else’s ideology. But this all takes place in the set Z which only hast the “bad” value of “blind idealogue” and the “good” value of “bemoaned purist wondering why everyone can’t see how wrong they are”. In this set, A and B are exactly alike and C is the implied “good” value.

What a wonderful world that must be, where we don’t have to make value decisions, and the cool kids are the ones who sit back and laugh at all those silly blind people pushing their silly ideologies, be that ideology the (obtuse interpretation of) Sharia or the Enlightenment.

…Judeo-Christian values, which are rooted in the Jewish belief that God is just…

So, Bro. Bartleby, (off-topic) is it your thesis that God is just but not all-powerful?

Those cartoons were war propaganda, not the healthy skewering of inflated pomposities. Their lineage is the buck-toothed yellow peril caricatures of WW2-era Japanese, not Thomas Nast’s Tammany Hall thugs.
And as that bastion of good sense sometimes – it is The Guardian I mean – printed just yesterday or the day before, the same Danish paper turned down some Christian lampooning cartooning on the grounds it would offend their readership’s “sensibilities”.
Open and shut case.

zdenek: you have officially made your point. Your point is officially made. You may now go on to make other points. You do not need to return to this one. Ever.

I know it is a tired and dismal joke to say, “oh, look, I just saved the lives of ten protestors and embassy workers by setting some blogger straight about an issue over which he clearly has no fucking control whatsoever,” but it is very hard not to conclude that the intensity of some of this argument is inversely proportional to the number of actual people it can affect. And I am indeed a hypocrite for choosing one thread on one blog on one day to make a very general point, but this one is as good as any, it seems.

Be careful, as you (all) argue, not to confuse the urgency of your real concerns about people’s moral reasoning with the urgency of your real concerns about other people’s violent acts. They are not necessarily the same thing. Have any of you ever talked to anyone with real power over the pressing issues of our day? Would you speak to him or her in the same tone of voice you use for “[insert right/left political epithet] idiots” online? Why or why not? And do you at least see the difference between talking to powerful people and talking to powerless people? Why do the idiots online get the bulk of the intensity and the scorn? If this were a real argument, it probably wouldn’t be an argument. You *can’t* go off half-cocked when you’ve got live bullets.

Perhaps I can do a shorter Chris from your point of view. Chris sees the set Z which contains A,B,C. A is the blind ideologues on one side, and B are the blind ideologues on the other side. Group C is the non-blind non-ideologue who sees that A and B are similar in their blindness and in their inability to see anyone else’s ideology.

You’re the one who added C. Chris has repeated A and B, without comment. Readers C, D, E, F, etc get to read it and see that A and B are similar in their outrage.

Everybody gets to see that point except of course A and B, who don’t get to see it because they are blind ideologues. It’s the blindness that gets them.

But this all takes place in the set Z which only hast the “bad” value of “blind idealogue” and the “good” value of “bemoaned purist wondering why everyone can’t see how wrong they are”. In this set, A and B are exactly alike and C is the implied “good” value.

You are reading that in. He only repeated the blind ideologues, without comment.

What a wonderful world that must be, where we don’t have to make value decisions,

But we do have a wonderful world where you don’t have to make value decisions based on blind ideology. Unless you do have to … but perhaps people might heal from that.

J Thomas, you ignore the context of Chris’ comment in order to force it to be comment free.

Bertram’s post mocks guilt by association, tribal loyalty, the situational ethics of self-invented elects. So those of you whining that he trivialises values – what values do you believe you defend against his post? And what rights – the right to bigoted generalisation, the right to define the Other by cherrypicked instances?
————-
robw—your question has been already answered and number of times so get off your but and read them ( oops maybe you have read them but dont get them )

Oh, I carefully read through the entire thread. All I saw was twits trying to pass off bigotry as an exercise of Enlightenment values.

Reading the thread gave me the chance to see Bro. Bartleby’s idea which is interesting and deserves a lot of careful refinement.

It isn’t and doesn’t – it’s Orientalist bilge. Bartleby implies – he doesn’t appear to have the stones to come right out and say it – that Islamic societies are mired in primitivistic “honour” thinking while us Westerners have moved on to the broad sunlit uplands of true moral reasoning, a viewpoint anyone who has spent even a second observing the behaviour of Western societies, particularly in our most JudaeoChristian aspect, will recognise as self-congratulatory tripe.

robw,

All I saw was twits trying to pass off bigotry as an exercise of Enlightenment values.

So defending the right of someone to make a statement without having death threats made to them is “…twits trying to pass off bigotry…”? You brits never did really understand how important it is to protect the freedom of speech. You should hope you don’t find your ideas on the fringe of society and outlawed as bigotry, anti-progress, or perhaps (chuckle here) anti-revolutionary.

There is no right to make a statement without having death threats made to you. There’s only the right to make statements

Stalin: Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.

It is certainly true that dead people have few, if any, rights.

soru

j thomas,
Isn’t Salman Rushdie still in hiding and weren’t several of his collegues killed within a few days of each other (while in seperate countries). And weren’t the groups that called for their deaths some of the same groups, or similiar, to the ones calling for Danish deaths today?

And don’t you feel a little dirty playing off these death threats as no big deal, when without a doubt they are having an impact on Western rights to free speech?

Oh snap! robw, the preacher man just took you to church!

jet says: You brits never did really understand how important it is to protect the freedom of speech.

Americans sure do, though. That’s why you see people from right across the USA political spectrum leaping to Cindy Sheehan’s defense when she gets arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt. It’s not like they’re selective about what sort of free speech calls them to the barricades, no sir.

a new bro. bartleby classic: I suggest you travel the world by foot, and take with a grain of salt book travel adventures.

Walk the Earth, robw. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu. Meet people, have adventures. That’ll learn you.

I’ll probably get death threats for saying it, but goddamn, this thread is just too much fun.

I realise commenting on a 200+ post thread probably won’t make any difference to the debate, but I think Chris misses the point.

Some Islamists are offended by the cartoons. But is the complaint from the pro-cartoon side really that they’re offended by the Islamists?

My problem with the reaction to the cartoons (and the problem that caused the cartoons to be printed) is that people are using extra-judicial violence and intimidation in order to supress freedom of speech. My problem with the reactions of the governments of some Islamic countries is that I don’t think a bunch of Middle Eastern autocrats should be telling my government what to do. My problem isn’t that I’m ‘offended’ by the Islamist reaction, it is that they’re straight forwardly attempting to breach people’s rights. Not that rioting and death threats offend my delicate sensibilities.

I don’t think the parallel that’s suggested exists. It’s a shame CT hasn’t posted more that just this on the cartoons. In years to come it will be be seen as a defining moment.

The post reminds me of this pack of trolls on my site yesterday.

And don’t you feel a little dirty playing off these death threats as no big deal, when without a doubt they are having an impact on Western rights to free speech?

Jet, no, not at all.

When people make death threats, we have police to catch them after they kill somebody and get them prosecuted. That’s how it works in this country.

I am not a lawyer, but the way the local police have explained it to me is compatible with the idea that death threates are included as free speech. At least when they’re made against me. Threaten to kill somebody and the police won’t do anything about it. But be careful who you threaten because if you threaten them and then somebody else kills them, the police are likely to come looking for you.

You seem to be upset that some people make death threats and then carry them out. OK, what do you think should be done about that? Do our current laws need to be changed?

Or should we figure that arab death threats are different from other death threats, and make special laws about them? Or send in the Marines? Or nuke them? Or what?

Didn’t we get the witness protection program because of american death threats, some of which were carried out? Why do you single out arabs in this, except that you feel like being outraged about arabs?

If you walk the streets of any American inner city you will find honor-based societies that we have labeled ‘gangs.’

Yes. And police departments. And political parties.

Hmm. Could it be that we have a very large honor-based component in our society? One that supercedes the morality stuff at least as often as it’s deflected by it?

J Thomas,

…death threates are included as free speech.

Have you heard of “assult and battery”? Well a death threat would be the “assult” part of that phrase, my legally challenged friend.

And since you are so cocksure that there is no chilling of freedom of speech from these death threats, perhaps you could use the short and fast as to why those cartoons were created in the first place.

The idea for the Prophet Muhammad drawings stemmed from a complaint by author Kaare Bluitgen, who said he could not find an illustrator for his planned children’s book about the prophet.

Jyllands-Posten’s culture page put the matter to several cartoonists, questioning whether sensitivities over Islam were prompting self-censorship. The Sept. 30 portfolio of a dozen drawings was the result.

And yes, the fate of Salmon Rushdie and his friends was an issue.

Jet:

Hit a nerve, did we?

Jet, I am not a lawyer. It sounds like you’re saying that every time somebody has threatened me with death I could have sued them for assault! And I didn’t know. Well, I learn something new every day.

Ah, how often does that actually work out? Do we get many assault charges from death threats before they’re carried out?

A quick Google search on “assault prosecution”. The first 50 hits. 4 of them were from zaire involving assault by police. One was from NY about mental health physicians charging their patients with assault while the patients were resisting being immobilised. One was about a supreme court case where the assault involved stabbing somebody in the stomach with a knife. The others were all sexual assault and domestic assault.

Screening out the sexual cases I get a canadian guide that says simple assault is rarely prosecuted in canada.

“Nigel de Gruchy, leader of the NASUWT teachers’ union, said the level of violence in society was such that the authorities were usually reluctant to prosecute in cases of common assault.” But this one is talking about physical assaults in britain.

In scotland in 2003 they had 57,528 prosecutions for simple assault and battery, 4 for religiously aggravated common assault, 750 for racially aggravated common assault, 62 for religiously or racially aggravated common assault, and then few hundred charges for various sorts of wounding.

Then I found something from massachusetts.

—-
Assault With Intent to Murder or Maim

….

A conviction for assault with intent to murder requires that the prosecution prove that the defendant assaulted the victim with the specific intent to kill him and that he did so with malice. This means that no mitigating factors existed such as provocation, sudden combat, or self-defense. To support the charge of assault with intent to murder, the prosecution must demonstrate an actual intent to kill on the part of the defendant.

….

The maximum sentence for assault with intent to murder or maim is imprisonment for ten years or a one thousand dollar fine.
—-

I dunno. It looks like something that might vary from state to state. Have you successfully sued anybody for assault without battery? At this point it looks to me like something people usually get away with. Not that I’d try it myself based on the strictly limited research I’ve done. But so far everybody who’s threatened to kill me has gotten off without an arrest, and I don’t know anybody who’s made a death threat who’s been arrested for it, or anybody who’s gotten a death threat whose threatener got arrested. That’s a few hundred examples.

If we have a law against something but it isn’t enforced, isn’t that like we really do tolerate it? My own experience in several US states has been that police take note of death threats but don’t arrest anybody until after the murder.

j thomas, the point was that death threats are not protected speech. Do I need to repeat that? Bold it?

And while assult tht is not followed by battery is usually just harsh meaningless words, so are most of the death threats coming from the muslim world. But just as a death threat from a known murderer is taken seriously, so must the threats from organizations that have carried out assasinations in the past.

But unless you’re thinking of curtailing our freedom of speech, the proper response is yeah it sucks having your religion mocked, but too bad so sad, people have a right to express themselves.

Jet, if there’s no enforcement, what’s the difference?

Are you making some deep philosophical point entirely apart from the real world?

When the Church of Scientology threatens lawsuits to get censorship that’s fine, but when poor arabs halfway around the world make deaththreats we ought to — do — what?

If it is self-censorship because people are afraid to express your opinion, then that is a real problem.

So, Jet, if I want to insult you publically – you personally, you and your mommy – but I am afraid that you may respond by punching me in the face – should I have you arrested first – to avoid me being self-censored and thus having my rights to make statements violated? I am sure you’ll turn youself in to the nearest prison – for the sake of freedom of speech.

Jet,
Can’t you see an inconsistency in your applying of free speech law here? That if Muslims feel we have gratuitously defiled their version of Jesus, tough for them, but don’t anybody come to a public gathering in my Church of the American Civil Religion wearing the wrong clothes. (Re Cindy Sheehan, it was not a banner; she wore a T-shirt with no more than a number and the name of a single country on it, and she was quietly seated in the public balcony when she was arrested.)

abb1 I’m not saying or implying that fascism and nazism are taking over in Europe. What I am saying is that there seems to be a tendency to demonize a group of people based on their religion/ethnicity. That is what happened in Germany recently, in the 1930s. That’s all there is to it. Everything else may be (and probably is) different.

Yeah, well, if it’s all different, then it’s not the same.

If the only thing in common is the existence of racists, then no, there is no “the new Jews” in Europe today, because the defining thing wasn’t racist cartoons but the Holocaust.

If all racist demonisation equals nazis, then the world, including the Arab world, is full of nazis and nazism means nothing.

“Eh, spoken like someone for whom the ‘blogosphere’ has replaced the real world.”

Okay, I’ll need to update “I suggest you travel the world by foot, and take with a grain of salt book travel adventures.”

with:

“I suggest you travel the world by foot, and take with a grain of salt blogging adventures.”

248: ‘The new Jews in Europe’ seems accurate to me.

The whole pattern of contemporary Islamophobia, particularly in Europe (though mirrored in America) is actually quite reminiscent of the 1930s. Chillingly so. Muslim militants play the role of Jewish communists as the excuse to scapegoat the entire group, and conspiracy theories — complete with the notion that “liberals” are unwitting dupes or active puppets of the evil Semites — are rife. Justifiable issues with the militants are readily inflated into hysterical, hectoring criticisms of “Islam,” and a thin veneer of religious criticism coats a fundamentally racial animus toward Maghrebis, Turks and Arabs — and is even pushed hardest by direct, neo-fascist ideological descendants of the Nazis themselves. (They are, of course, able to sucker a few intellectuals and artists who think they’re “defending Western culture.”) The notions of deporting or interning Muslim populations, and apologetics for doing so, are already very much in the air; and while it needn’t lead to a holocaust-type event per se, it’s hard not to recollect that the historical Holocaust started with the idea of “evacuating” the Jews. (By the same token, there’s no guarantee that Malkinite fantasies of a new internment regime on America’s side of the pond would stop at “just” internment.)

If there’s anything problematic about the parallel, it’s that large swathes of the European Muslim populations in question are virtually second-class citizens stemming from old “guest worker” policies — meaning that they’re resented and feared for their poverty (somewhat like America’s 19th-century Irish) rather than being targeted for their prosperity.

The whole pattern of contemporary Islamophobia, particularly in Europe (though mirrored in America) is actually quite reminiscent of the 1930s. Chillingly so. Muslim militants play the role of Jewish communists as the excuse to scapegoat the entire group, and conspiracy theories—complete with the notion that “liberals” are unwitting dupes or active puppets of the evil Semites—are rife.

Thank you, Doctor Slack, for demonstrating exactly why Chris’ posting was so vacuous. You are exactly right–in Germany in the 1930’s, there really were two groups of people, each of whom was “outraged” at the terrible threat posed by the other. The Nazis thought themselves besieged by an evil international Jewish conspiracy that aimed to destroy the German nation. The Jews thought themselves besieged by an evil Nazi conspiracy to exterminate them. Both sides could point to outrages committed by members of the other, and exculpate their own side by pointing to exaggerated accusations leveled at them by their opponents. In short, they fit Chris’ paradigm completely–two groups shouting angry outrage at each other, claiming to be innocent victims menaced by evil monsters.

Except that one side really was monstrous, and the other really did, for all intents and purposes, consist of innocent victims.

Fast-forwarding to today, we have, broadly speaking, a conflict between two groups, one of which is either evil American neoconservatives or the entire Western world–depending whom you ask–and the other of which consists either of Al Qaeda or the entire Muslim world–depending whom you ask. (In reality, both sides are most accurately identified as somewhere in between their narrowest and broadest characterizations.)

The two sides shout their outrage at each other. Perhaps they are, as Chris suggests, simply two loud, cacophonous sides of the same coin. Or perhaps one side is gearing up to massacre the other, which merely wishes to mind its own business.

To both of us, Doctor Slack, the answer is obviously the latter–although we clearly disagree as to which side is which. Perhaps we can agree, though, that your Godwin-conformant Nazi analogy disproves Chris’ original point. As you’ve demonstrated, we cannot look at two squabbling sides and simply pronounce them equally obnoxious. Sometimes, outraged accusations are perfectly legitimate. And sometimes they’re a prelude to barbaric slaughter.

Dan, you may have missed the historical stuff — a whole lot of germans were afraid not so much of jews as of communists. The nazis figured that jews were controlling the banking system and the Weimar Republic, and also controlling the communists. There were a lot of german communists who really were working for the USSR. The germans and the russians really were kind of mirror images, kind of, but the russians controlled a whole lot more resources.

But we are not at all mirror images of arabs/muslims. We are a superpower. They are very very weak. We spend $10 billion a month in iraq. They didn’t spend that much in iraq before we invaded them. We spend more just on Homeland Security than most arab nations spend on their whole government. We could utterly destroy them in 2 hours, and they couldn’t do anything about it — if we suffered from that it would be from the consequences of our own attack. They can’t destroy us at all, they can barely hurt us.

So no, the two sides are not mirror images here. Except in the thinking. For some utterly ridiculous reason a lot of us fear them as much as they fear us….

Rob of w,
Consider yourself chastised. I’m sure you wouldn’t stand before your students and announce that the class will be without standards and that in all fairness you will lecture to the lowest-common denominator. Any professor worth his or her salt lectures at a level that will challenge all students, and if some fail to take the challenge, or fail the challenge, does that mean that your lectures are a charade?
Bro. Bartleby

Chris — the gist of the entire # 101 is that moral equivalence is untenable and offers an argument for refuting such a view.

Chris– # 185 ” moral equivalence behind the parody move which Chris makes…” is an interpretation I make of your parody of the two sides on the 7 th. two days before Gerrard appears.
So the claim that your position involves moral equivalence is not from Gerrard ; you have shown no such thing . Well mybe her argument against your-type line is taken from her ? No her actual argument is different from mine I say your view is incoherent she argues that to prefer one outlook over another is justified by virtue of the fact that no one has yet come up with better idea for resolving conflict.

I don’t see that plagiarism should be an issue. If somebody has a good idea and you copy them on a blog, so what? It’s better to credit them, but then there’s a good chance they didn’t credit the one they heard it from. If it turns out to be important, the historians can look through the archives and possibly work out who said it first — in a political discussion it’s likely they’ll decide that Plato or somesuch said it first.

That aside, Zdenek’s claim is morally wrong.

Say two people are having an argument about something — say, whether iraq has nuclear weapons. And both of them are making up evidence to support their claims. And later it turns out that iraq does have nukes, or it doesn’t, either way. Does that mean the one who turned out to be right wasn’t a liar?

Suppose that two people are having an argument — say, about whether Bush is evil or stupid. The one who says he’s evil claims that nobody could have done such evil things so consistently by accident. The one who says he’s stupid claims that nobody could have messed up this badly on purpose. Does it matter to their logic which one turns out to be right? They’re both making the same mistake.

And you are making the same mistake as your opposite numbers in muslim lands.

Hope that helps, though it seems extremely unlikely that you can see it even now.

j thomas– if the situation between the two sides in the cartoon dispute was as simple as your axamples are there would be no debate because we would all agree . But you cannot say something as straight forward as ‘he is lying’ about either of the sides in the cartoon dispute . What exactly is the comparable error of a person who says :
‘I am offended by you trying to kill me for criticising your views ‘ and on the other side ‘I am offended by a kafir disrespecting god’ ?
Or take abortion dispute , or dispute between apartheid defender and member of ANC who is anti racist : you say they are making exactly same mistake , what is it ?

zdenek, do you see that the original words could fit either side? I mean, can you see that yet?

What is it you have failed to understand here?

Bro. Bartleby, let’s review the bidding.

If you believe that MAD won’t work with a particular opponent, what are your choices?

You can discuss mutual verifiable disarmament. They get rid of their nukes, you get rid of yours. If they go along with it, the world is a considerably safer place. But so far the USA has never ever agreed to that. On a lesser matter, we have never promised that we would not make a first strike, as the russians have. Our reasoning on that was rather byzantine. We said that the russians gained in world opinion by promising that, but if they ever wanted to treaten a nuclear strike they’d just break the promise, which cost them nothing to make. But we are honest, not liars, and if we made that promise we wouldn’t break it. So we’d be at a disadvantage.

We never promised that we wouldn’t nuke non-nuclear powers. We have sometimes pretended that our President was crazy and might start a big nuclear war. We have pretended to be a nuclear threat to the world. (Or maybe it’s been true.)

So the first approach fails. We have refused to consider nuclear disarmament.

The second choice is to nuke them now. If there’s a chance they’ll nuke you, and that’s unacceptable, you have to nuke them first.

Or then, there’s a third choice. You can wait until the last minute, when you think they’re about to nuke you, and nuke them first then. But that method requires constant vigilance. You have to live in constant fear, on a hair-trigger reaction, ready to nuke them at any moment. It’s a bad way to live. So if you don’t believe that MAD will work on somebody, and you can’t accept getting nuked, then you really do need to nuke them now.

How do you feel about that approach to life?

Myself, I figure that iran is susceptible to MAD. And if not, we’ll at least hit them back. That’s about all you can do. Nuking a country because you think they might nuke you someday is crazy. Particularly in a world with multiple nuclear nations. If you *prove* that you’re willing to nuke others just because they look dangerous, somebody else is likely to think you’re following the Golden Rule….

So my version of the Golden Rule is: Be ready to nuke everybody else, just in case that persuades them not to nuke us when they want to. But don’t actually do it unless they do it first.

Link here to Sullivan.

j thomas– what I fail to see is what Chris sees ( and people like him ) when he looks at the cartoon dispute : ” obsessive ideologues stygmatising whole populations and cultures… ” . This is crap posing as non-ideological insight. At best this is a crude caricature of the dispute ( see Gerrard criticism ) presented from west hating left perspective.

j thomas — to defend your take on the cartoons in this way ‘ you dont see what we see ‘ etc . is weak . In some sense it is true but my saying that I dont see what you see is just another way of saying that I disagree with you. I am not confessing that I have some sort of blindness when I say I disagree with you ; it is another way of saying that I believe that you are wrong.

Now if this is the situation and your ideologically coloured take on the cartoon dispute has been criticised i.e. it has been argued that your take involves believing that the two situations are morally equivalent then it is no good to just reply ‘you dont see what we see ‘ where this means ‘ you disagree with us ‘. Do you get that ? You need to offer philosophically appropriate reply i.e. show that Gerrard type criticisms do not work : the best would be if you could show that her argument is unsound or at least invalid.

The suspicion of course is ( only confirmed when Chris popped up ) that you cannot offer an *argument* ( as this is understood in analytic philosophy as opposed to English lit . ) but only rhetoric mixed with occasional attack on persons character. :-)