Hxstory

[Ryika]

There's nothing that bars the terrorists from attacking multiple newspapers.

What a stupid thing to say. There are tons of things that make attacking multiple Newspapers more difficult than attacking a single Newspaper. The additional amount of organization required alone already drives up the risk of making a mistake that puts the police at them, they need more men, they need more weapons.

Yes, the amount of attacks is very likely to go up, but to assume that terrorists could just keep up with newspapers all over the place is simply BS. If there were that many terrorists and if they were so well equipped, then Newspapers would not be their prime targets.

When speech is obligatory

You have been told multiple times that nobody says speech should be obligatory, stop being dumb. Nobody is saying: "Every newspaper must show the cartoons!!!". What people are saying is: "The fact that most newspapers chose to not show the cartoons foreshadows a possible problem in the future."

No one is saying that newspapers should be silent.

Of course you are. The offense are the cartoons, that's why the Newspaper got attacked. All that needs to happen is for the offense to change to talking about something and you have a situation where your arguments advocate for silence.

If your response to this is: "Yeah, but that situation did not occur." - correct. That's why I'm telling you that the attitude is dangerous, not that not showing these cartoons somehow made the world stop working.

 

[BvBPL]

What a stupid thing to say. There are tons of things that make attacking multiple Newspapers more difficult than attacking a single Newspaper. The additional amount of organization required alone already drives up the risk of making a mistake that puts the police at them, they need more men, they need more weapons.

So some newspapers will get bombed, but in the end it will be okay because they will run out of bombs or get bored before we run out of newspapers.

Journalists may be volunteers, as you posit in a previous post, but that doesn't mean they volunteered to be canon fodder to soak up the hate of the terrorists until the bombs run out.

You have been told multiple times that nobody says speech should be obligatory, stop being dumb.

Not quite.

This is exactly why the cartoons had to be shown by the media throughout the free world. To spread the risk. As I mentioned before, a local newspaper in Germany got bombed for showing the cartoons. The cartoon contest in Garland Texas was attacked because people drew pictures. Drawing the picture of a certain person has become a life-threatening endeavour. The only way to combat this madness and to restore free speech is to spread the risk and publish pictures like this everywhere. The jihadists can attack single events or news outlets, but they can't attack everyone. Only this way can we make it clear that free speech is not negotiable.

Only = obligatory.

Of course you are. The offense are the cartoons, that's why the Newspaper got attacked. All that needs to happen is for the offense to change to talking about something and you have a situation where your arguments advocate for silence.

All that needs to happen is for you to change my argument to make it invalid.

Cute.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Because
Aside from that this isn't about being "allowed" to do something or not, the whole issue of self-censorship is only so significant because there are people out there who demand this censorship. If criticising Islam wasn't a problem, if people weren't being constantly threatened, attacked and killed for treating Islam like every other topic, there would be no problem for freedom of speech. Nobody would be talking about this issue; I certainly wouldn't be arguing the significance of publishing cartoons over pages in an Internet forum.
The reason showing the cartoons is so important is because people are intimidating us not to do so. If an adherent of an ideology demands that we cannot say something because it doesn't comply with his rules, then it becomes especially important to say it. The importance is exacerbated and becomes an absolute necessity if we are threatened with violence or even death for merely acting by the standards of our free society.

To me it just seems silly to do something you didn't want to do anyway just to prove a point to someone who's telling you not to do it. And the point I was making before was that to me it would just be an absurd situation to keep doing that thing until you reached the point where it was normalised to the point where they gave up telling you to not do it. But that's going to be such a gradual process that eventually you'll just realise one day that you're repeatedly doing something you have no interest in doing, and no-one's challenging you about it anyway. At which point you'd probably start wondering how you got into this position of wasting your life away.

If someone tells me not to do something that I have no desire to do and no interest in then I'm not going to then go out of my way to do it just to annoy them. That would STILL be giving them power over me and letting them dictate what I do/say, which is just silly.

 

[Ryika]

All that needs to happen is for you to change my argument to make it invalid.

Cute.

I should get a job as fortuneteller.

Overall you seem to be arguing against Funky's points (or rather the strawman of what you think he said), not actually replying to what I said, so whatever.

 

[Cheetah]

If the only reason we don't publish racist and hateful cartoons is a fear of being attacked, there's something wrong with us.

I'm not sure what you qualify as a "racist and hateful cartoon", but in the case of the Muhammad cartoons there was an actual and legitimate journalistic interest behind the original publication.

The reactions to that publication showed that there was a problem wrt. freedom of expression, as one could not safely publish cartoons of Muhammad.

The question then is what to do about it. I get the feeling that you are okay with de-facto banning cartoons of Muhammad, and hiding behind a potential "It is still legal to publish it, but you shouldn't!". While me and others wonder if it wouldn't in fact have been better to go all out and demonstrate that the press would not back down in the face of threats?

It is of course, somewhat of a hypothetical, as the world in general chose the first option, and the press has more or less imposed a self-censorship on itself. In reality, the terrorists won, as no respectable newspaper wants to publish any image of Muhammad anymore. The silver lining is that it currently seems that people are more willing to discuss other problems with Islam, which is progress, I suppose.

 

[BvBPL]

Overall you seem to be arguing against Funky's points (or rather the strawman of what you think he said), not actually replying to what I said, so whatever.

If you don't stand by your man Funky after you've jumped into it to provide a unitary message and reduce the risk between the two of you then the terrorists have already won. By choosing to remain silent, all my word bombs will be directed at Funky, rather than you. If you love free speech then you need to step in and support Funky.

Oh, wait, that's using Funky logic. Sorry. My mistake.

In any case, you might want to study up so you understand probability prior to your career change.

 

[Flying Pig]

I'm not sure what you qualify as a "racist and hateful cartoon", but in the case of the Muhammad cartoons there was an actual and legitimate journalistic interest behind the original publication.

The reactions to that publication showed that there was a problem wrt. freedom of expression, as one could not safely publish cartoons of Muhammad.

The question then is what to do about it. I get the feeling that you are okay with de-facto banning cartoons of Muhammad, and hiding behind a potential "It is still legal to publish it, but you shouldn't!". While me and others wonder if it wouldn't in fact have been better to go all out and demonstrate that the press would not back down in the face of threats?

It is of course, somewhat of a hypothetical, as the world in general chose the first option, and the press has more or less imposed a self-censorship on itself. In reality, the terrorists won, as no respectable newspaper wants to publish any image of Muhammad anymore. The silver lining is that it currently seems that people are more willing to discuss other problems with Islam, which is progress, I suppose.

I'm not sure the problem was entirely that the cartoons depicted Mohammad, but that they depicted him with a bomb for a turban. It's quite different to make a joke about religion using Mohammad and to unsubtly and unfunnily say that Mohammad was a terrorist, all the while drawing parallels between different ethnic/religious costume and terrorism. Put another way, there's a huge difference between these two:

Interestingly, I found both of those from googling 'Jesus cartoon' and 'Mohammad cartoon': there's a level of aggression and hatred in the second set that you don't really find in the first. The problem isn't just that the cartoon has Mohammad in it. Would there be terrorist attacks as a result of cartoons of Mohammad that looked more like the first one? I don't know, but severely doubt it: where we've seen attacks on cartoonists, the cartoons have always been in the second camp.

EDIT: I also found this one on the same search, which may be appropriate:

 

[Senethro]

Stop expecting to be able to outsource your Islamophobia onto newspapers and go poke the snake yourself guys. Take on some of that risk you want shared.

 

[Cheetah]

I'm not sure the problem was entirely that the cartoons depicted Mohammad, but that they depicted him with a bomb for a turban. It's quite different to make a joke about religion using Mohammad and to unsubtly and unfunnily say that Mohammad was a terrorist, all the while drawing parallels between different ethnic/religious costume and terrorism. Put another way, there's a huge difference between these two:

[...]

Interestingly, I found both of those from googling 'Jesus cartoon' and 'Mohammad cartoon': there's a level of aggression and hatred in the second set that you don't really find in the first. The problem isn't just that the cartoon has Mohammad in it. Would there be terrorist attacks as a result of cartoons of Mohammad that looked more like the first one? I don't know, but severely doubt it: where we've seen attacks on cartoonists, the cartoons have always been in the second camp.

Well, in all fairness, the Jesus character is a much less violent type than the Muhammad character. It's somewhat hard to find any violence to mock Jesus for.

Among the twelve initial cartoons, there is a variety of different types of cartoons.

And I don't think that the depiction with the bomb in the turban is especially egregious. Lots of symbolism, sure, but it's not racist or hateful. The artist drew him in a way that might have resembled him (including typical headgear for the time), and included a bomb in the hat. Seeing as he was a religio-political leader and has followers some of which have used violence and suicide bombers, I don't find it inappropriate. The bomb could also be interpreted to something about "explosive ideas" (though no one cares for that interpretation, apparently). Several of the other cartoons are quite mild, and not even directly mocking Muhammad or Islam.

And let's not forget that the imams who went around the Middle East to rile people up, included other pictures which had nothing to do with this publication, and claiming those were also supposed to depict Muhammad. Like this one from some French competition:

Such actions seems to indicate that any particular attributes of the cartoon might not have changed the situation.

And again, this whole debacle started out with a writer looking for an illustrator for his children's book The Qur'an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Asking for an illustration of Muhammad can't really get much more benign than that.

Finally, while I can't find any directly violent cartoons of Jesus, do you think any of these would have fared better, the same, or worse if we exchanged Jesus with Muhammad?

Stop expecting to be able to outsource your Islamophobia onto newspapers and go poke the snake yourself guys. Take on some of that risk you want shared.

I'm not expecting anything. Why does it continuously seem like our arguments get twisted into some demands about what we require other people to do? We're simply arguing that another course of actions might have been a better way.

And while I don't have any publishing houses of my own, I am quite happy to discuss this with people, and trying to change minds that way. I discuss here, and in real life. Sometimes even with Muslims.

 

[warpus]

People getting their panties in a knot over depictions of Mohammed is a fairly recent phenomenon. Depictions of the guy caused no problems at all, as early as... heck.. 15 years ago? 10 years ago?

But now, you draw his nose, and everyone goes crazy... I blame MJWs, Muslim Justice Warriors.

 

[Lexicus]

People getting their panties in a knot over depictions of Mohammed is a fairly recent phenomenon. Depictions of the guy caused no problems at all, as early as... heck.. 15 years ago? 10 years ago?

Are you thinking of that South Park episode?

 

[warpus]

Yeah, but not only that.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, but not only that.

Yeah, figured so. I remember the episode where they had Muhammad as a member of Super Best Friends quite well.

My attitude is that it is of course ridiculous to get so worked up over "blasphemy" and violence against people who portray Muhammad is completely unacceptable. But I equally don't understand why some people seem to be so eager for society to go out of its way to insult Muslims.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Would there be terrorist attacks as a result of cartoons of Mohammad that looked more like the first one? I don't know, but severely doubt it: where we've seen attacks on cartoonists, the cartoons have always been in the second camp.

Victim blaming!

Okay, to be fair, you're just describing what you think would have happened, not apportioning blame, but even so... killing someone over any cartoon is completely unreasonable and unjustifiable, so comparing the relative offensiveness of various cartoons is surely completely irrelevant to the issue. Which is kind of why I think showing the cartoons was irrelevant to the news reports.

 

[Lexicus]

killing someone over any cartoon is completely unreasonable and justifiable,

Now if only we could be so adamant that invading and occupying Iraq was completely unreasonable and unjustifiable.

I estimate that Islamophobia contributed to perhaps a million deaths, while Muslim anger over Muhammad's portrayal in cartoons has thus far killed, what, a few dozen at most?

This is the sort of perspective that seems sorely lacking around here...

 

[Manfred Belheim]

This is the sort of perspective that seems sorely lacking around here...

So I say that something that is unjustifiable is unjustifiable. You bring up something different... how is that perspective?

You're comparing drawing cartoons to occupying a country?!?! What the fu...

 

[Lexicus]

So I say that something that is unjustifiable is unjustifiable. You bring up something different... how is that perspective?

Well 'perspective' in this case refers to zooming out a bit so you can see more than one thing, and how they're interrelated and so forth...

You're comparing drawing cartoons to occupying a country?!?! What the fu...

You really should learn to read more carefully. I compared the response to the cartoons to invading and occupying a country. Of course, it isn't really accurate to say "Muslim anger" because it's terrorist anger, the great majority of Muslims were as disgusted by those Hebdo attacks as all of us were.

EDIT: And hey, at least with the Hebdo attacks they actually did publish the cartoons. We just made up some BS about nukes as an excuse to attack Iraq.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, figured so. I remember the episode where they had Muhammad as a member of Super Best Friends quite well.

My attitude is that it is of course ridiculous to get so worked up over "blasphemy" and violence against people who portray Muhammad is completely unacceptable. But I equally don't understand why some people seem to be so eager for society to go out of its way to insult Muslims.

If Mormons were chopping people's heads off when people were making fun of Joseph Smith, this would be directed at them. If it was the Scientologists, same thing.

Nobody has a right to not be offended in free & secular society, and so those who scream "I'm offended!" the loudest usually see the most pushback.

 

[Lexicus]

If Mormons were chopping people's heads off when people were making fun of Joseph Smith, this would be directed at them. If it was the Scientologists, same thing.

Well, in such a case I don't believe it would reflect broadly on Mormons, any more than the KKK or the Westboro Baptists reflect broadly on Christians.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Well 'perspective' in this case refers to zooming out a bit so you can see more than one thing, and how they're interrelated and so forth...



You really should learn to read more carefully. I compared the response to the cartoons to invading and occupying a country. Of course, it isn't really accurate to say "Muslim anger" because it's terrorist anger, the great majority of Muslims were as disgusted by those Hebdo attacks as all of us were.

So which part of "killing people for drawing cartoons is completely unreasonable and unjustifiable" do you disagree with?

I mean, to me, it seems like a perfectly cogent and self-contained point that doesn't really require a discussion of any other issues to determine whether or not it's valid. It kind of stands on its own two feet. Which is why discussions of how offensive or inoffensive the cartoons are is irrelevant. The statement doesn't depend on what qualifier you attach to "cartoons" because it's valid (I would argue) in all cases.

EDIT: And hey, at least with the Hebdo attacks they actually did publish the cartoons. We just made up some BS about nukes as an excuse to attack Iraq.

How does my opinion on how right or wrong it is to kill someone over drawing cartoons remotely depend on anything to do with invading Iraq? If I was talking about how right or wrong it was to kill people over INVADING IRAQ I could see the point of bringing it up, but in response to what I was saying it's just a total non sequitur. I'm not talking about Iraq. I'm expressing no opinion on Iraq. It has no bearing on what I said.