Joe Sacco has drawn a genuinely excellent, thoughtful cartoon about the Charlie Hebdo attacks. It made me stop and think, so I think it was a very effective use of the medium, and I recommend you all go look at it now.
But it has one problem: it did make me think, and think about the attacks, and the outrage of the people who committed them, and the cartoonist who was commenting on them. And I didn’t find myself entirely in agreement with Sacco.
Here’s the third panel of the cartoon.
Sacco says, “Though tweaking the noses of Muslims might be as permissible as it is now believed to be dangerous, it has never struck me as anything other than a vapid way to use the pen.” That’s a judgment of Charlie Hebdo’s output.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Charlie Hebdo other than the scattering of cover images I’ve seen. I’ve never read it; I can’t read it. It’s in French. I know scarcely any French, other than “oui” and “non” and a scattering of nouns that mostly have to do with food. As far as I know, the magazine could be total crap and Sacco was being incredibly generous to suggest it was merely vapid, or it could have been the great shining beacon of modern revolutionary French literature. I wouldn’t know. I don’t care. The quality of their work shouldn’t be a consideration, nor is the identity of their preferred targets: it wouldn’t make it right to blow up the offices of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan for publishing racist tripe, and it doesn’t make it right to murder a dozen people for drawing “vapid” cartoons. That’s our only consideration here.
Even if the satire was of the abominable quality of the Morris Northstar, just a label slapped on flagrant racism as a fig leaf (and again, I have no idea of the quality of Charlie Hebdo), it doesn’t warrant sending a hit squad to their offices. If the satire were as biting and sharp as a Twain or a Mencken…well, you might feel totally inadequate to respond in kind, but it also doesn’t justify executing them.
If the concern was that this was bad comedy that was punching down on an oppressed group, I would have some sympathy for the principle, but I’d still say that nothing in this argument excuses murder. If it did, I can think of several comedians who would be riddled with bullets every time they opened their mouth.
It’s also complicated. Muslims in France can be an ethnic minority, in which case you are definitely punching down if you pick on their status as immigrants who are discriminated against. But at the same time, being religious puts you in the majority and gives you cultural clout that unbelievers lack (when Bill Donohue sides with Muslim terrorists, you know the religious are finding common cause), and yes, you should feel free to mock bad ideas, like Islam…or Catholicism, even if other aspects of the target make them unfairly vulnerable.
Religions and religious figures are mocked and lampooned for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it’s sometimes done for no other reason than to upset the religious. Let me be clear that I don’t approve of that (though I do defend the right of others to do it).
However, more often than not, the lampooning is done with intention of shattering, if only for a moment, the protective façade of reverence and deference that has been erected around some iconic figure or belief, so that we can all catch a glimpse of how things really are. At such times, lampooning can become great art.
Again, I don’t know if Charlie Hebdo was “great art” or petty sniping at the oppressed. The difference is rendered irrelevant by the actions of their killers. This is a case in which I am uninterested in defending the quality of the satire, because I can’t and because I shouldn’t have to — yet people keep trying to bring it up as an issue.
It’s a shame, too, because it weakens the real questions in Sacco’s comic.
Here are the eightth and ninth panels of the cartoon.
Are Muslims the subject of injustice, do they have a legitimate reason to be angry? Yes they are, yes they do. They shouldn’t even be expected to merely laugh off the horrors of Abu Ghraib, or even the routine discrimination against brown-skinned people at border checkpoints. It is understandable that they can’t simply laugh away bad jokes that contribute to a climate of fear, or policies that do deep harm to them. But let’s not forget that the world also has images of real people having their heads chopped off, or the bloody floor at the Charlie Hebdo offices, and we could argue that everyone is justified in being angry at everyone else for some reason, therefore answering with hot lead is a rational reaction. A minority in the Islamic world is doing a masterful job of providing provocative commentary, even more powerful than anything a few French satirists ever did, so perhaps we should argue that drone strikes and military invasions are reasonable responses?
I don’t think so.
There are appropriate ways to react, and I think a majority of Muslims are capable of recognizing that terror isn’t the answer, on either side. It’s not as if Muslims have no recourse other than murder, or don’t oppose what happened in France.
“This murder is the most precious gift that terror has given racism in France,” Moroccan columnist Hamid Zid wrote Thursday. “Those murders killed not only the journalists, but the millions of Muslims who live in France, and have also justified Islam’s murderous image. They have plunged a knife into the heart of Islam and Muslims worldwide.”
Liberal, secular and religious Muslims again find themselves on the defense, as though they were responsible for creating an environment inducive to terror. Their voices usually go unheard. They do not appear on talk shows, and television series on Islam are not interested in them. They represent that which is self-evident and allow their homelands, in Europe or the Middle East, to boast of multiculturalism.
…
Not only “Western civilization” is mobilizing against Islamic terror organizations. The “Islamic civilization” is doing the same, viewing extreme terrorism as a danger to its culture and its reputation.
We must ferociously speak out against terrorism, without qualifications, and without respect for authority — whether it’s committed by the relatively powerless, or those with obscene amounts of power. When we start qualifying our approval of criticism based on its artistic quality, we play right into the hands of those with the money and resources to commission the very best propaganda. I don’t think the appropriate response to Sacco’s comic is to consider backing off on criticising Islam, or the bloody actions of fundamentalist Islamists…it ought to be to step up our rebuke of militarists who think bombs are the answer to our problems.
Because right now Dick Cheney is probably squatting in a vat of virgins’ blood in a secure location, sipping on a cocktail made with the tears of innocents, and chortling at the fact that his enemies are butchering effete French literateurs and refocusing the world’s contempt on Muslims, rather than hauling his ass off to the Hague for a war crimes trial.
If you want to get an idea what it is to be a Maghrebien in France, think of black in the USA: Long history of colonization, crimes against humanity, no real analysis and reparation for those crimes, contiued discriminisation and disenfranchisement of the youth, especially the men.
The hatred and radicalism isn’t bred in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s bred in Paris (and Berlin, and London). Combined with a special French flavour of “colourblind” racism.
Here’s an overview of attacks, some of which clearly qualify as terrorist against French muslims and their places
And here’s a very good article about what it means to be a French muslim
sorry to quote so extensively, but I agree with this:
But I wonder why it follows your approving quote of this:
While the first line is accurate, this and too many responses seem to elide the fact that racism is an actor as much as terrorism is. If terror can give, racism can exploit. Terror hasn’t plunged a knife into the heart of Islam or the Umma, terror merely handed racism/religious oppression the knife. If racists choose to stab at muslims’ hearts, we must still hold accountable the racists themselves.
Slightly unconnected points about the CH thing:
1. One of the police killed defending CH was Islamic. Putting Voltaire’s words into action. When we say “Muslims” are unable to “take a joke” or “shrug off an image” we erase people like him. Muslims or even French Muslims aren’t a single unit any more than Christians are.
2. Immigrants in France from predominantly Islamic countries face considerable prejudice, not unlike and possibly worse than the prejudice faced by blacks in the US. This does not justify the attack any more than the Ferguson justifies the shooting of the two police in NYC but it does give context into why not just Muslims but specifically some French Muslims are to the point where they might think that violence was their only option. Martyrdom looks more attractive when your life is shit than when your life is good.
3. Acts of violence by Islamic people are getting more press than similar acts by non-Islamic people. Are the attacks on mosques throughout France headline news in the NYT? No, didn’t think so. Was the attempted bombing of the NAACP? Nope. (True it failed, but compare coverage of the failed NAACP bombing to the failed Times Square bombing a few years ago.) I don’t know the statistics for France, but in the US the FBI reports that about 12% of religiously motivated hate crimes were committed against Muslims, who are less than 1% of the total US population. This suggests that “Islam” does not specifically cause violence (at least in the US) so much as it causes attention to violence (committed by people of that religion.)
As usual, there’s not “the problem.” There are many problems, and they don’t typically go away because you personally are not “interested” in them. (Or because you’re incapable of addressing them … but of course in this case translations exist, so you could search for them, if you cared enough to do so.)
Well, maybe you don’t. But you pretty quickly move into talking about what “our” job is. Who are “we”?
On what planet is that the only consideration? If there’s something to criticize about their output, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen. That would not mean it’s right to blow up anybody or anything, because there’s no way it would have any fucking thing to do with that. That is, unless the only possible form of “criticism” there could be is murdering artists or claiming they should be murdered. But I think we have gotten along just fine so far using more traditional and peaceful methods.
Something’s definitely irrelevant here. It’s not as if we’re stuck only thinking about one absolutely trivial concept (that murdering people is wrong) and can’t use our brains for anything else now. That would be pretty fucking stupid of us.
There wouldn’t be any need for that sort of qualification. These are two separate independent groups of people (or their ideas) that we’re talking about, both of which can be criticized appropriately. For fuck’s sake, you obviously don’t have to lessen your criticism of terrorists at all just to criticize a fucking comic. (It also wouldn’t have anything to do with taking away their Freeze Peach, for what that’s worth.) And propaganda works best when people lack the critical tools they need to counter it, not when you insist that’s all irrelevant because it doesn’t suit your interests or your abilities or it’s the kind of propaganda you are most comfortable with. People can dump all kinds of money into “fancy” propaganda, and it’s still completely fucking useless if you’re willing to take a good hard look at what it’s saying and doing.
I just do not grok where the fuck you’re coming from here. It’s not clear that you really mean any of this. But I can’t figure out how this isn’t what you’re saying, even if you don’t intend it. Am I missing something? If I had to guess, you simply don’t have a clear idea about what you’re saying, or at least you’re not spelling it out clearly enough for me. It happens. What shouldn’t we be considering, or what can’t we do, according to you?
That wasn’t remotely Joe Sacco’s argument, PZ. It’s not quality, it’s the nature of the message. He’s asking why do we think Hebdo’s taking the piss out of French Muslims is morally different from, say, the “Jewkeesian” charicatures made by the Photoshop warriors of GamerGate.
Interesting. It’s like we read completely different cartoons. I’d say you missed Sacco’s point, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say with this post.
I’m very much interested in the next issue of Charlie Hebdo. They can send a strong message, honour their colleagues and not back down in their criticism of Islam, pissing off the right people and not pissing on the wrong people… or they can put out something bad. It will be admired either way. That‘s a problem.
Either way, Charlie Hebdo is a symbol now. Simply putting out the next issues is sending a message- one that I approve of, the content will be of even greater importance.
He made it his argument when he said that criticizing religion was “vapid”.
Maybe there’s no difference between taking the piss out of French Muslims or the Jewkeesian caricatures — I don’t know, since I literally do not know what Charlie Hebdo was publishing. If a bunch of redditors who hated Anita Sarkeesian were violently murdered, would we be speculating about whether the caricatures were good reasons to kill them?
If you think my point was that the only possibilities are that murdering people is wrong, and there’s nothing else we can do, I’m not the one who is confused.
Except he wasn’t talking about “criticizing religion.” He was talking about “tweaking the noses of muslims.”
Of course not. Then again nobody is doing that about CH either.
Neither can any of the people I see posting it all over Facebook and Twitter. The images I see are hook nosed racist caricatures. I’m not going to start mindlessly throwing around those cartoons because it’s fashionable. What does it say to my Muslim friends when I do that? Instead of pointlessly causing offense in an act of defiance directed against nobody in particular, I’ll counter the terrorists by not being afraid and by being kind to the wonderful Muslims in my life.
Bookmarking this page for those people who think the Horde agrees with PZ all the time.
PZ
No, he didn’t. He made the argument that the cartoons were vapid.
You know, like we call the smarter than thou atheist “you religios you stupid me smart” arguments vapid.
As a starter to what people are now hailing, Libby Anne has a good overview.
PZ
That#s the only consideration when we condemn the terrorist attacks. But that leaves us powerless when examining the bigger picture.
You’re a scientist, you wouldn’t ever stop at looking at a phenomenin, carefully describing it and then NOT going to find out how that happened.
Why are there young men in the west, born and bred in secular societies who want to do nothing more than destroy them? Those people weren’t raised in very religious families and indoctrinated from birth. Maybe that’s a point Americans have troubles understanding. You think christian homeschooling, quiverful, the sort of environments that tend to breed US christian extremists. That’s not what is happening in Europe.
+++
Maybe, just maybe, if we truely believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, we should wield that weapon carefully.
II don’t feel this is true in France where the majority are militantly secular and it is considered inappropriate, if not disgusting, to drag religion out of the private sphere. It really does cause adverse comment in France when the speeches of American politicians are translated and turn out to contain references to religion. In fact, this is one of the causes of conflict between the non-Muslim majority and French Muslims. Even in the UK, I feel that THE local religion is Islam, because the other ones are not prominent and most people are what I call the 3 A’s: Apathetic, Agnostic or Atheistic.
@11 – Gilliel
That’s a very interesting point. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are forces in our society that typically produce a kind of drop-out culture among the young. Sometimes it goes to quite extreme lengths and involve cult-like behaviors. Without going into all sorts of details as to what they are, I think that for young Muslims, an alternative is being presented – one of dropping in, or at least it looks like dropping in, to something empowering and meaningful.
Again without going into all the details, it has to be said that this is a hard time for all our youth, with prolonged periods of some kind of socio-economic wasteland between adolescence and full adulthood.
#10: You must bookmark a lot of pages.
I did go a bit more into what Charlie Hebdo were doing in recent days (I’m French BTW). I wouldn’t call what they were doing vapid and suspect Sacco has co-opted them to talk about the general point of cartooning Muhammad. Their cartoon criticisms were generally sharp, harsh and relevant. I think there is a debate by people who actually knew their work as to whether the visual language in which they were making those criticisms was acceptable. Of course, it would be easier to have that discussion (and the French did, regularly), before they were shot for it. There is no doubt that what their work merited was criticism or appreciation, approval or disapproval, discussion and debate. Never violence.
In a way, perhaps it is a tribute to them to continue to treat their work as they intended so there is no need for us to remain silent over what we think of it. If we were silent, we would have effectively let terrorists shut down a process in which they were very deliberately and self-consciously engaged.
After seeing those images Libby Ann posted, I’ll agree: Charlie Hebdo is a rather ugly, racist, and worse-than-vapid publication.
OK, then. I guess it was fine to murder them.
Oh, wait, no — I meant that how awful the comics were shouldn’t be a factor in excusing the murder of their authors.
EXACTLY.
There’s a QFT if ever there was one.
@dysomniak:
Okay, but were the tweaks accomplished through criticizing religion? Check out the lounge just now where they have the CH cover portraying a masculine muslim kissing a masculine CH cartoonist. Is there nothing in that that criticizes religion?
@Giliell & PZ:
Quoting PZ:
Quoting Giliell:
Okay, to be fairest to Sacco, what he actually said was that “tweaking the noses of muslims” is vapid.
PZ seems to be coming from the perspective that since at least some of the tweaking was accomplished through religious criticism, the argument must of necessity reduce religious criticism to vapidity since it doesn’t carve out an exception for criticism-induced tweaking.
Giliell seems to be coming from the perspective that since all of the tweaking referenced was done through CH cartoons, the argument is only reasonably interpreted as “CH cartooning was [at least at times, at least during the muslim-nose tweaking] vapid”.
Meh. Whatever. I don’t see them quite the way either of you seem to perceive the issues, but this is another case where I think if we interpreted the Sacco cartoon the same way, we’d likely have less disagreement on the substance than we do in our conclusions giving different starting premises about the Sacco cartoon.
I have a headache, or maybe I’d have more coherent things to say. But I think I can only leave it here.
PZ,
Entirely correct.
Was anyone in this comment section saying differently?
Who are you arguing with here? Who has said anything close to this?
FYI, a response from a survivor, a cartoonist who missed the meeting:
http://news.yahoo.com/vomit-charlies-sudden-friends-staff-cartoonist-163403612.html
<blockquote"We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh," Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published Saturday. …
Not exactly vapid; in fact, quite provocative.
PZ
Seriously, there must be some internet goblins
What I write is: Murder is wrong, seriously, especially for cartoons. Also, those cartoons are racist.
What people read: Those cartoons are racist, therefore they got what they deserved.
Is that a known virus?
It is a shame that the cartoonists didn’t do nice safe unoffensive work that everyone liked, then they wouldn’t have brought this on themselves, Muslims are oppressed so it ‘s understandable that they resent these cartoons and react violently / Muslim apologist off
@Giliell:
And when does the vaccine enter human trials?
Seriously, and here we were all panicky about mere Ebola.
The tragic irony is that Charlie Hebdo was going to disappear because it has a lot of financial troubles.
Now, it won’t.
As for racism, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Charlie Hebdo was a far left atheist journal
They were against all religions, against the military. They mocked the police, the army, the politicians and everybody else by the way.
And Anne is right at #10 : being overly religious in France is as popular as being atheist in the US.
President Hollande is openly atheist, and the few openly pious politicians are mocked.
Did I say anything different? I’m told this is a thread where everyone is disagreeing with me.
As a guy who did read Charlie from time to time, allow me to answer:
Yes.
Yes to both: it was (and hopefully still is) childish petulant NSFW crap that would make vapid literature look nobel-worthy by comparison And a shining beacon of modern revolutionary French journalism.
The problem with satire is not satire itself, but those who mimic its style and codes in order to make their agenda look principled: some french racists have tried in the past (and will most certainly try even more now) to imitate Charlie’s style in order to disguise their intent, but bellow the faked satire always lied the intent to disenfranchise minorities and reestablish in France the old, backward parasitic rule by dynastic nobility.
***
And despite this discrimination, many French of Muslim descent still managed to climb their way up toward the middle-class or above: they are the real targets of the racists who fake sympathy toward Charlie today: racists simply can’t stomach the fact that despite decades of discrimination, the children and grandchildren of underpaid factory workers, janitors and housemaids still have a shot at becoming wealthier and more educated than their own offsprings.
euclide @ 25
And far left atheists can also be sexist, racist, homophobic assholes. This is why words like “manarchist” and “brocialist” and “brogressive” got coined. It’s actually frustratingly common to run into. Mocking the police, the army, and politicians is irrelevant to the bigotry they reflected in those cartoons.
That doesn’t mean anyone who worked there deserved to be killed; there’s no justification for this violence whatsoever. It just means that left politics don’t magically erase racism, sexism, and homophobia.
The context isn’t exact, but I’m reminded of this H L Mencken quote:
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
I have yet to see a single criticism of the racism and misogyny in CH’s work that didn’t also include a clear statement that absolutely nothing justifies murder, period. I think you might find, through the smoke of battle, PZ, you’ve found yourself opposite a bale of mattress stuffing, and have fiercely disembowelled it.
I just say that, being French, knowing the context behind the cartoons and having see interviews of the cartoonists I can let say they were a bunch of sexist, racist, homophobic assholes, based on a selection of some covers.
They were mocking absolutely everything and everyone, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists, LGBT people, straight people, right politicians, left politicians, black people, white people, martians…
Give me a group of people, I’m pretty sure I can find some Charlie Hebdo cartoon which they will find offensive.
Quite a lot of the CH cartoons aim to send up racist/extreme right wing views; of course sometimes the intended piss-take is difficult/impossible to tell from the “straight up” version of racist/extreme right wing views, and this is where they can fuck up.
And as others have pointed out, a big part of their style is the whole there-are-no-sacred-cows thing; it’s enough for someone to say a topic ought to be off-limits for them to immediately seize on it. Yeah, which is great when they’re refusing to tiptoe round a pope or a politician, not so great when they’re also refusing to tiptoe round people who are not powerful.
I think Giliell had a good way of putting it the other day when she said their schtick is to tread on all toes, no matter whose, but they ignore the fact that some people they are treading on are already barefoot while others are wearing steel-toecapped boots.
uclide @ 25:
People always say this about a satirist as though it is the highest compliment, either on the grounds of fairness (“equal opportunity offense”) or out of an odd celebration of satire for the sake of satire, so that the more people you insult, the better. But I can’t help thinking that when you mock everyone, you mock no one. If your reaction to an atheist is that she can’t possibly be certain, your reaction to a theist is that he believes in an unproven superstition, and your reaction to an agnostic is that she should just make up her damn mind, then taken all together, you don’t have any sort of serious criticism of anyone. I’m not saying that CH literally did all that (I doubt it), but their work may have had a similar effect.
As a side note, their ultra-irreverent attitude does make the sudden worldwide reverence/worship of them a tad ironic, and I am pleased with the “vomit” remark; it demonstrates courage of convictions (the person who said that isn’t just a foul-weather enemy!). Maybe that will be the theme of their next cover, though I doubt it.
I’m with the others who don’t quite get where PZ is bringing “Oh, I guess that makes murder okay” into this. It makes me picture a conversation where everyone is criticizing the less-than-liberal policies of the Obama administration, and someone sarcastically says “Yeah, if we had a Republican in charge it would be so much better!” Only this is worse than that, because (unlike whether to vote Democrat, Republican, or Green) not-murdering is super-basic. It should be understood as such a basic plank of our ethical platforms that even the demand that someone condemn it can be insulting to that someone. (Which, by the way, is the core problem with “Where are the moderate Muslims condemning this?”)
Maybe it’s just the soonness? Like here in 2015, we can make reasonable criticism of JFK’s policies, but maybe right after he was killed would have been a bad time, and might even imply sympathy with Lee Harvey Oswald. (Ironic given that JFK’s major opponents were conservatives and Oswald was a communist, but that’s a side note.) If Obama were assassinated, it would be better to hold off on critique. But if that’s the argument, I’d rather it be made front and center: “You may be right, but please just wait.”
I appreciate Anne Fenwick’s point about French secularism. American atheist liberals have to take this to heart not just as “Yeah, France is awesome!” (which I’m sure it is, and the secularism is part of that) but as a reminder that politics is never the same in two places. Someone whose only experience with the patriarchy is one of Victorian-style sexual repression might think that a more sexually free culture is necessarily more feminist, but they could be wrong. Likewise, if a certain group is mistrusted by others for being outwardly religious, don’t assume it’s a story of enlightened humanists being wary of slick scripture-thumping politicians or televangelists — the mistrusted group could very well be the one that most needs us to listen and respect.
Yes. They reflected bigotry. That’s what satirists do.
They stood against it.
It’s very easy to rip satire out of context and call it bigotry.
“We make fun of everyone.”
“All lives matter.”
Satire that punches down has a different significance than satire that punches up.
euclide @ 31
And is the harm in racial caricature against Black people less than, equal to, or greater than the harm in racial caricature against white people? If I went around punching everyone I met, some people would not be harmed by that punch, while other people (say, three month old infants) might die. Mocking everyone only works when everyone is equal.
Also consider that in solidarity with CH, people are now tossing around those images online. I know a couple of Black women who do not speak French who were triggered by the racism and sexism in those images. If there is context that makes it okay in France (color me skeptical), that context is getting stripped now and hurting people.
Wrong. He was specifically pointing to Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of Muslims in contemporary France. “In this time and place”, the comic says. He’s saying that it’s vapid to seek to offend for the sake of offending, and that, in this context, it might be punching down.
Anjem Choudary and Bill Donahue are the only two people I’ve heard of so far actually saying something along the lines of “Those cartoonists brought it upon themselves,” or, “The racism of those cartoons excuses the murders.”
Are you talking to them, PZ? You felt it necessary to make a blog post to correct those two guys? Maybe I missed something.
Me, I started talking about the racism in the cartoons because people were re-posting them in the aftermath of the attacks. To me that seemed obviously destined to dovetail with the inevitable anti-Muslim violent backlash which has already begun in France. I thought it was irresponsible in light of that to spread and promote those images at a time when we all know that racists are already feeling encouraged and empowered to act out their violent fantasies.
Let’s not forget that racists are also terrorists, sometimes, and it’s wrong and irresponsible to encourage and support their views, because racism also kills people.
Punching down? That’s not how Charlie Hebdo’s staff (including their murdered copy editor, a Muslim Algerian immigrant) saw it.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/01/guest-post-the-community-of-the-potentially-mockable/
From what I can see, Charlie Hebdo was about as leftist and anti-racist as Bill Maher. That is, if your only reference point is the world as it existed in 1968, they do look pretty progressive, anti-racist, and subversive. But the world has changed since then. Our standards have changed, and that’s a good thing.
And, further, if #jesuisCharlie, and if it’s true that #alllivesmatter, and it’s about showing those Islamist extremists that we’re not scared, and not about furthering racist anti-Muslim bigotry, how come we are not all from Baga, Nigeria today?
In a perfect world, racial/religious/whatever caricature should not hurt anyone.
If you’re not happy with a cartoon, you ignore it, or you speak to the people who give it to you to try to understand his point of view. Or you draw your own caricature.
Some of Charlie Hebdo cartoons make me laugh, some not, and some are mocking values are cherish. It didn’t come to my mind to start some legal procedure or to try to harm the cartoonist. I just ignored the cartoons I didn’t like. As I said, the journal was dying anyway.
But some mad criminals killed a bunch of old kind pacifist guys because they didn’t like their drawings. That is really hurting.
Worse, the criminals won’t be charged : they try to kill cops and had to be put down. And there is a good chance we lose some more civil rights to “protect” the Democracy from these madmen. And I don’t want to think of what some far right nut-job could do to “punish” Muslims.
The bad taste of some drawing has no real importance.
Racism is not mere bad taste. Racism actually kills people. Racism causes people to get discriminated against, raped, beaten up.
That’s why it’s important to talk about this right now.
If all these conversations end with a lot more people realizing that just because your politics are left-wing doesn’t mean you’re incapable of making racist material or saying racist things, the world will be a better place for it.
Yeah, that’s never how the people who actually make taht stuff see it. Suddenly, intent is very magic.
Really, suggesting that the solution to Hollande’s romantic troubles is that his ex should get together with somebody who has a reputation for killing his female partners suddenly is pro-women.
Also, I have a personal message for all you armchair warriors who are now all so brave while jumping at my throat (and I really, really, really had a lot of that shit this week).
I just talked with my husband about how I am really, actually afraid of right wing fascism on the rise and I told him a bit about my youth.
About how I was hiding in school because a bunch of neonazis was searching the school area to “teach me a lesson”
About how I used to carry a big cable to defend myself because I knew I was on their evil lefties list (this was a time when the right in Germany had and distributed deathlists.)
I was 14 at that time.
About how we did a project in school against xenophobia and how when we wanted to present it we had to relocate to a differnt place because there were bomb threats.
We were 12 and 13 year old kids.
It was a time when terrorist attacks against migrants killed dozens, when bombs blew up buildings.
I come from a family whose members died in concentration camps and who suffered in Nazi prisons.
Yeah, so I fucking well know what it means to actually fear because you stand up for your convictions. Probably better than most of you so give me a fucking break.
Sally
People are currently calculating how many Nigerians = 1 French Person
Yes, I’m a professional cynic, why’re you asking?
Giliell,
Honestly, I’d have to ask how many people, at least in France know about what happened in Algeria.
With the way the massacre has been reported about in my own and English speaking countries, I’m not sure whether there was enough place or time for coverage in French media with them being preoccupied with the attacks in France.
I read those cartoons by sacco I agree that killing for speech is wrong even very distasteful cartoons but I have to say I was with sacco at first but he lost me very soon I had no idea what his point was other than gratuitous racist images and the following arguments in this thread were often completely opaque.
Maybe it is the subject of terrorist attack on cartoonist that makes it so charged.
uncle frogy
Huzzah PZ. I’m sick of this love the sinner, hate the sin bullshit that’s been coming out lately. It feels to me, that they’re snidely insinuating that the Charlie Hebdo writers had it coming. Due to hurt feels over Muhammed. Would we be having the same debate if a radical Catholic had killed them all, because of a cartoon about the Pope?
I don’t deny that there is racism against Muslims in France, but to say it’s the root of radicalization in young men there is rather simplistic in my view. There’s a powerful appeal in radical Islam. It flames your anger, and makes you feel as if you gain power from it. Then it gives you the justification to go out, and commit atrocities in the name of your anger.
To my mind it is no different to White Supremacy, and MRA.
Yes and the gamergate boys see it as all about ethics in journalism, but does that make it so?
I support what Gilliel said @44 to some extent. In Europe, post-Holocaust, we are more intensely aware than Americans of the fact that speech can kill, it can cause harm. Permitted denigration creates an environment in which violence also becomes permissible. I’ve shared Gilliel’s experience of living with xenophobic abuse shading into violence. I can hardly tell you how debilitating that is, and yes, the verbal abuse becomes triggering in itself, especially when you don’t know when or whether violence will also result.
For that matter, the permitted denigration of non-Muslims, their values, morality and worth as human beings with extremist Muslim groups also very certainly feeds into producing terrorist and extremist Muslim activity. I’m currently as afraid as Gilliel obviously is about where the increased permissibility of denigrating and demonising Muslims may be taking us. We have to have free speech and yet speech isn’t necessarily harmless. She’s not wrong for pointing this out and taking the issue seriously.
What I personally feel is that offense doesn’t count as a sufficient harm from the point of view of earning my disapproval. Nobody has the right not to be offended, though everyone has a right to complain when they are, if they so choose. What I do disapprove of is speech which in my view ‘slanders’ groups of people, let alone speech which threatens them. I’m undecided on whether Charlie crossed my personal line. I haven’t really seen enough of their work, but I have seen that the decontextualisation of their work makes it more likely that it would become slanderous rather than merely offensive to some.
I wonder what Gilliel thinks of Sacco’s full cartoon which also presented very offensive actions and stereotypes, I saw it before PZ posted this and was particularly troubled by the last box, showing Europeans kicking European Muslims out of our countries. I felt very uneasy that he left us with that as a conclusion, and offered no clear condemnation of it either. I don’t know enough about his work to know his views on that and his view wasn’t inherent in the work, I can only choose to give him the benefit of the doubt,
gijoel asked@47:
Would we be having the same debate if a radical Catholic had killed them all, because of a cartoon about the Pope?
There would have been a lot greater chance the attack would have been written off as the behaviour of a madman, or claimed to be atypical. No one would shouting for Catholics to condemn the attack or be seen as supportive, and ignoring the condemnations that were made.
Put the intent of the Charlie Hebdo artists aside. We have to let that go. Nobody here is French. Nobody here is speaking with any kind of authority or referring to reliable sources as to what these cartoons mean. This a complicated subject, and we’re talking about it here without any Charlie Hebdo readers or French Muslims present. We don’t know the culture. This blog post and these comments are an all male panel explaining feminism and an all white panel talking about race in America.
There is, however, a fairly straightforward conversation we should have. What message do we send when we re-post the images ignorantly and support them blindly? When we don’t understand the culture doing the mocking, what are we telling people marginalized in our culture when we jump on board? In our culture, these images are racist. When we broadcasting the comics,the relevant context is our culture, not the intent of the artists. Coopting them the way people are on social media is lazy, disrespectful to the cartoonists, alienating to Muslims in our culture, and tacitly supporting bigotry.
Painting “negro” on your house in giant letters is racist. It doesn’t matter what the word means in Spanish.
T’as bien raison!
When we broadcasting the comics,the relevant context is our culture, not the intent of the artists. Coopting them the way people are on social media is lazy, disrespectful to the cartoonists, alienating to Muslims in our culture, and tacitly supporting bigotry.
That is a good point. It’s wrong to kill people over a cartoon, regardless of if it is punching up, down or everywhere. I hope we all agree on that.
That doesn’t mean you have to repost the cartoon to tweak the Muslim fundamentalists when it looks hella racist to your local Middle Eastern-descended population and makes them worry that you can’t be counted on to be a non-racist, considerate neighbor.
(If you are in a place where your local Middle Eastern-descended population say such cartoons are not-racist and not just in the ‘don’t make waves by saying what you really think’, then carry on.)
gijoel:
(ignore previous, with blockquote fail)
gijoel @ 47:
Suppose a group of MRAs were murdered for their beliefs. Would you think MRA is therefore not actually sexist? Or, would you say the victims “had it coming”? Or maybe it doesn’t have to be one or the other?
I guess I’m trying to figure out whether you (and others) ultimately object because you think the accusations of racism are simply incorrect, or because of a more general principle when it comes to situations where people are killed for their ideas.
Here is a map of reprisal attacks against French Muslims carried out since Monday.
From the article:
It is perfectly appropriate to talk about the racism in various of the Charlie Hebdo images that were being spread around in the aftermath. And it has nothing to do with whether or not the cartoonists deserved it or brought it on themselves.
As long as we’re changing the situation, what if it didn’t happen in the here and now? What if it happened in 19th century Ireland. Say, about the time of the potato famine. Suppose Irish Catholics in that time and place stormed the office of a British based satire magazine and shot a bunch of people because they made a cartoon about the Pope. Would we conclude from that act that the problem was that Catholics or Irish are inherently more violent and need to be suppressed? Would we assume that anyone who said, “You know, Irish Catholics have it kind of hard and that might have contributed to this occurrence” was justifying violence? Conversely, would we say that the violence was justified? I hope the answer to all of the above is “no”.
I won’t speak for anyone else, but what bothers me is that I’m expected to express solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, implicitly approving of what they publish. It’s the whole idea that there are only two possible sides: either you’re on Charlie Hebdo’s “side”, including approving of what they publish because Freeze Peach, or you’re on the side of their murderers and you are gung ho for killing anyone who disagrees with muslim extremists.
If those are the only positions I’m allowed, then I quit the game.
It seems to me that I ought to be able to both disapprove of killing people who publish things some consider offensive and also to disapprove of what they published.
Je crois pas qu’il y a des commenters régulier qui sont français ici à ce moment, mais il y a des gens qui ont vécu en France, pleins de francophones, et pleins d’Européens.
Ryan Cunningham has an excellent point regardless of whether he’s right about the lack of French people par ici.
I jumped ahead to comment so this may have been commented on already.
He made it his argument when he said that criticizing religion was “vapid”.
I didn’t read it that way – I read it to mean that criticizing religion via satirical cartoons was a vapid way to do it. I don’t agree with that by the way. I certainly didn’t take it to mean that religion should never be criticized.
I have two big problems with this cartoon.
The first is that the two images shown “for comparison – of the Jew and the black man – do not compare, for the simple reason that in the cases in question, there was no history of threats intended to silence criticism.
The point he makes with the Abu Ghraib picture ignores that the history of the use of violence to silence people goes back before the FIRST Gulf War – this is the latest in the same line of attacks and threats that were made famous with Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.
He’s making implications and comparisons that just completely ignore the history of this.
Ryan Cunningham @51:
A quick scan yielded two people in this thread saying they are French, and I think laurentweppe is as well.
Most people know about the abuses committed during Algeria’s independence war because that’s taught in school: you literally cannot finish high-school without knowing about abuses committed by french authorities nor about the gross inequality between the pied-noir upper class (the one percenters among the settler population) and everybody else.
People are less knowledgable about what happened before, for instance, that France starved to death one third of Algeria’s population after conquering the country by expelling many farmers from their lands and replacing subsistence farming (Which was very productive: Napoleon’s campaign were possible thanks to massive grain imports from Algeria… which we never paid back in full) with cash crops: the lie that Algeria was a backwater uncivilized country “uplifted” by white settlers is still popular among too many of my compatriots who get very defensive when told that our forefathers starved to death a million people, expelled from their lands another million, and reduced the remaining million to cattle and fucktoys to be disposed of at the whims of the colonial elites.
***
Chances that churches (or fast-food located near churches) would be attacked, or schoolkids beaten up in the streets under the pretense of retaliation would also be much lower.
***
Huh? Hello? French guy here, also occasional Charlie’s reader and part of the demonstration which happened yesterday… I’m not claiming that my opinion on the matter would be taken as absolute authority of the matter, but it turns out that there are people fluent enough in french to have forged their opinion directly from the source (and not only the cartoons, from the actual articles which accompanied these)
@SallyStrange #59
FWIW, in this very thread we are at least 3 people from France (damien75, laurentweppe, and myself) who had commented already. (That doesn’t make us regulars of course)
I agree that Ryan Cunningham’s point is very good. Deciding whether Charlie’s cartoons are racist from a French point of view (they are: I posted some links in another thread to articles in French discussing this long before the attacks) is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
@SallyStrange; #59
There is at least one French reader right now. How can I be of any help?
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her biography on Voltaire, to illustrate his beliefs, wrote the phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
I did not know that laurentweppe was French. My bad.
“Why I am not Charlie”
http://paper-bird.net/2015/01/09/why-i-am-not-charlie/
@Giliell #22
I think that’s an issue of conversational pragmatics—or, more specifically, the maxim of relevance. People will construe utterances as being relevant to the context—and the first sentence provides a context for the second. Obviously, both of the sentences that you write can be true and one is not connected to the other, in a logical sense, but there’s a fair chance that people will construe the relevance of the second in the context of the first—and, here, in a way that is different than you intended—especially if the second could be construed as being relevant.
Obviously, in this situation, where cartoonists were murdered for, presumably, the nature of their cartoons, the nature of their cartoons will inevitably be brought up—it is relevant, at the very least, to the fact that they were murdered—but it is irrelevant to assessing the rightness or wrongness of the murders themselves. In this instance, people may tend to impute relevance to the second statement (“those cartoons are racist”) as bearing on the first (“murder is wrong”)—i.e., it says something about how we should assess the rightness or wrongness of the murders—even though you are not. That doesn’t mean you can’t make both statements and have them be interpreted as you meant them—but I think it’s difficult to disclaim the relevancy maxim and have people “hear” the disclaimer. The logic of what you’re saying is entirely correct but conversation follows other, implicit, conventions.
Sorry for missing the French posters and thanks for correcting me. I’ve been hearing and reading Americans pontificate about this topic with no knowledge since the attacks happened, and it’s gotten under my skin.
My point stands for Americans. Whatever nuance there might be in these cartoons in France is irrelevant when you’re broadcasting them on social media.
I was having a conversation on Facebook a few days before the attack in which I noted that there’s a tendency to fall into the Galileo thing with comedy. Lenny Bruce, I have recently come to realize, is overrated as a comedian — he wasn’t bad, but he was somewhat uneven. That gets overlooked, however, because he was arrested.
So it is with Charlie Hebdo: it’s very easy to think “they were killed for this, that must have been some really biting satire.” And maybe it was, but if you’d asked me about CH a month ago, I’d have racked my brain for a minute and said “oh, yeah, that racist magazine in France.” I will defer to the French commenters who were familiar with it between times it’s been in the news, but looked at English-language news coverage on Google from earlier than the previous attack — a firebombing a few years ago — and I think that bears me out.
Moreover, it’s actually quite easy to offend people. It’s no great moral victory, or any other kind, however deserving they are of being offended.
(I would also point out that according to the likes of the attackers, or at least those whose mantle they claimed, a drawing of Mohammed is inherently offensive. Standing, feeding the poor, being sodomized by a donkey, whatever. So since the specific content doesn’t really matter, one is hardly giving aid and comfort to the terrorists by objecting to it.)
But I think there’s a strawman being argued against here; I admit I have a fairly narrow band of opinion represented on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but I didn’t see anyone assert that the murders were justified. I saw, first, an outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo, then, a day or so later, a counter-outpouring of condemnation of the attacks but an unwillingness to say or do anything that could be taken as support for the magazine considering its content. But the mythical decent-seeming people who say ““? If that’s a common sentiment, I clearly have the wrong friends. Or the right ones, I suppose.
string @ 33:
The blandest political satirists are those like Mark Russell and The Capitol Steps and John Stewart on his off weeks, who try to get the satire itself to carry the humor, rather than the viewpoint.
Further, I like the line from, I think, Cracked: “‘I’m an equal-opportunity offender’ is like saying ‘I punch everybody in the face.'”
Luis Correia: Thank you for that link. That’s exactly what I’ve been struggling to articulate.
@57 The answer to that would be; these are a political group using terror on a specific target in order to silence criticism of that group. There is also a good reason to believe that they would engage in such acts in order to provoke the victim’s society into harsh, retaliatory actions in order to gain more recruits, and secure their control over their own society.
They should be condemned without equivocation, and treated like the criminals they are.
If you found Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons racist, and awful, fine. That’s your right. But there seems to be the same kind of hand wringing around these terrorists acts, that I see with faux-Poe articles. A disbelief that they’re awful shits, and weird rationalizations for their behaviour. Somehow, in this narrative, the terrorist’s actions seem a little less awful, because Charlie Hebdo were racists.
This is not what we should be focusing on. Someone got criticised, and they responded with a hail of bullets. This is not the work of civilised people. This is the work of criminals, and they should be treated as such.
I agree with AMM at #58. We should come to Charlie Hebdo’s defense full-throatedly and respond to these attacks as what they are: an attack on free speech. That does not mean that we should express the sort of solidarity and lionization that has been common since the attack any more than we should show it with the KKK if they were hit by some theoretical African-American terrorist group. US Congresspeople who don’t speak French shouldn’t be advocating buying subscriptions, Google shouldn’t be funding them, and unless they do so for all terror targets neither should the French government. It’s been left implicit in too many pieces, but I’ve asked a couple authors of similar pieces and some people who have shared them and they’ve all said that this is the argument they were making.
Jesus, the cliche “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” comes from a Frenchman and a Muslim police officer did literally that when he was gunned down by the terrorists.
(It also bothers me that Saudi Arabia et al. are condemning the attack and it’s going virtually unremarked that the only difference between the terrorists and their government is that they like to dress up their murders with show-trials for blasphemy and apostasy, but that’s neither here nor there.)
More than half of Ophelia Benson’s prolific Butterflies and Wheels posts in the last few days deal with Charlie Hebdo in context – such as pointing out how many of the cartoons now labelled “racist” were actually slams at racism in its own visual vocabulary. Salty Current’s guest post brings out a lot of nuances invisible to those of us habituated to Anglophone corporate media.
I suggest it would improve the quality of the dialog in this thread considerably if commenters here – and our esteemed host – would take some time out to go read the posts, and the better comments, there.
Thank you so much for saying these simple words. I wish other pundits had the same decency.
Joe Sacco is awesome. But it’s pretty obvious that he’s operating from a totally different ethical perspective as you, or Charlie (or me): quite evidently, he doesn’t ascribe any positive value to mocking religion, in and by itself. Like most people in the Anglosphere, and unlike French liberals, he seems to see religion as something rather benign, except for the aberrations of fanatics.
So when he sees the pictures of Muhammad, he doesn’t see French leftists upholding a proud, ancient and (IMO) vital tradition of French anti-clericalism. All he sees is gratuitous “nose-twinkling”. He cannot possibly see any other motivation for it than just deliberately hurting people.
Once you realize this, the whole cartoon makes a lot of sense. Why, yes, from this viewpoint pictures of Naked Muhammad are indeed similar to racism, or pictures of hostages, or of Abu Ghraib. It’s just hurting people for shock value. Why would anyone defend that?
garlic @ 76, would the panel in Sacco’s cartoon depicting “a Jew counting his money” be considered “mocking religion” (i.e., if it were a stand-alone cartoon in a context in which it was not as clear that it is not meant as an expression of antisemitism)? Is there, perhaps, a commandment to count money in the entrails of Christians in the Torah?
Or would you say that panel is a poor parallel to the content of CH? And if so, why?
Or, as a third possibility, is it a good parallel because both are on the “mention” side of the line? I can see that in the Sacco strip, but it seems rather less clear-cut in the case of the CH cartoons (certainly, CH was attacked, not the Islamophobes I am assured they were mocking).
@75 What makes you think we haven’t? I for one read them all, and found them entirely unconvincing. In fact the one thing I’ve taken away from all the handwaving about the “cultural context” of these (simple, one panel) cartoons is that the french left is pretty fucking racist. I guess maybe it’s down to the fact that they never had anything like the American civil rights movement to make them deal with this shit.
I don’t know, but it’s disappointing as hell to see otherwise sensible people rushing to lionize what is at best a questionable publication.
Especially after multiple people on this very thread have said as readers of the magazine that the charges of racism are fair. But hey, it’s all in the name of “satire,” so fuck you if you’re offended right?
Fred “Slacktivist” Clark nails it as he often does:
@51 – Je suis Francaise
Pierce R. Butler,
I’ve read most of Ophelia’s posts about this topic and related comment sections. SC’s guest post was one of those I read.
I did not find them convincing.
To make just one example, from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-and-freedom-of-speech.html
Which context exactly makes this
not sexist?
Which context exactly makes this
not homophobic?
(and no, don’t tell me the word has been appropriated back by french lesbians, because I far as I know the cartoon wasn’t drawn by french lesbians)
sff9,
I saw your comments on B&W. Thanks for that.
Luis Correia @68, thank you for that link. The impression I’m getting of this is that CH is as much about punching down as punching up, and I loathe that sort of satire. Paper Bird’s observations about satire’s history were enlightening and disturbing.
Good morning, everybody!
Yes, night happens in Europe, too
Anne Fenwick
Just for the record, with the limits on incitement (and I don’t think that the CH Cartoons cross that line), I want everybody to be able to say (using the broader definition of saying and text) what they want. I’m also aware that some people get many more platforms than others. The idea is simple: Choose your words carefully, because they have power.
As for Saccos last picture, I saw it with unease, too. But I also thought it was clear from the context that that’s the simplistic-leave-out-all-context way. I also thought that he did a very good job at drawing terrorist without delving into stereotypes: menacing figure whose features are completely obscured.
Jeff
You know, when people suck at reading, it’s not my problem. Especially since most people are perfectly able to read version one. Kind of seems to me like the people who read version two bring their own ideas with them. Because usually when I ask them to quote where I’d written what they claim I had they usually repeat what they say I’d written…
gijoel
Where
Who
Seriously, I’m not inclined to believe any of this anymore.
What I see people, including me saying is “let us look at why those young men became terrorists? Let us make sure that this doesn’t lead to MORE stereotyping and marginalisation of the immigrant population
Pierce R. Butler
Goodness, because we haven’t heard it before. And because nobody has brought it to our attention before. And because none of us speak French. And because none of us has actually a background in culture studies and stuff that enables us to discuss the effect separated from the intent.
Let me finish with my own personal homage to some French who really helped us with that task:
(to be read in a rythmical voice)
Derrida, Derrida
Barthes
Barthes
Derrida, Derrida
Franz Fanon, Franz Fanon
Althusser – Bourdieu
Althusser – Bourdieu
Franz Fanon
Barthes, Barthes
Aprospos of stereotyping the immigrant population
One of the heroes of the attack on the supermarket is a black muslim man from Malawi. He hid customers, made sure they could escape.
Guess what happened after the siege was ended?
Yep, he was arrested by the police as a suspected terrorist
Now you can guess why he of all the people there was treated like that and how stereotyping people has nothing to do with it.
@82 Beatrice and others finding CH’s cartoons x-phobic, based on Libby Anne’s analysis.
In my view, Libby Anne doesn’t get it. Many of the examples she cites use misogynistic, homophobic, racist slurs, but CH puts those slurs into the mouths of the cartoons’ targets. I.e. the point of those cartoons is that people like Hollande, DSK and the anti-LGBT protesters think like that. The cartoonist doesn’t.
Perhaps this type of humour is peculiar to CH, or to France. In any case, context is not only important, it’s essential to understanding the drawings. Not having lived in France for many years, the context is sometimes lost on me, so that I can’t address your first example. The LGBT cartoon also features the line “let’s protect our children” and obviously doesn’t mock lesbians, but the organisers of anti-LGBT protests. Perhaps it also implies that the two women depicted are really lesbians, but again here the context is lost on me.
As to Sacco’s opinion, I am not sure either whether he gets it. CH doesn’t distinguish between any of the main religions in France and insults them all. Why should followers of Islam get special treatment? Or rather, those followers of Islam who burn down embassies whenever their prophet appears in a cartoon.
Disclaimer: I have never read an issue of Charlie Hebdo. A long time ago I leafed through a copy of its predecessor, “Harakiri”, and found it mostly disgusting and pointless. But then, I am not French.
@84
Merci, Gilliel. (And thus I’ve exhausted my French.)
Seriously, you’ve been writing some of the best comments I’ve ever seen lately, and not just on this topic. Whatever you’ve been smoking it’s got you typing some incisive and pithy shit. Please keep it up.
tororosoba,
Using homophobic names for homophobic people doesn’t magically make them alright.
The women are leaders of an organization that supposedly protects “family values” and supposedly cares for children’s wellfare. They target gay people, they organized huge marches against recognition of gay marriage.
So authors called them lesbians. Gee, such a great bit of satire… Not
Every troll everywhere ever* has at some point called some homophobic bigot gay (probably using a more insulting name). That’s really not an achievement or something that should be praised.
*this might be a slight exaggeration
Daniel Tosh doesn’t distinguish discriminate! He makes fun of black people, white people, fat people, rape victims, and queers!
A man escapes from a hostage situation, what were the police supposed to do? Ask him if he was one of the terrorists and just let him walk off if he said he wasn’t?
procrastinatorordinaire
Hmm, tell me, why should of all hostages that escaped the black guy be the one who gets arrested?
@procrastinatorordinaire:
You’ve never heard of witnesses being detained? Arrest is a formal legal status. There was no need to put him in arrest to keep him around. A description of the general arrest and detention powers provided by French law can be found here:
I don’t have easy access to an english-language source describing these same legal details from a more recent perspective, but the basic frame described here is still intact. Again, it was not necessary to arrest Lassana Bathily to verify ID, to check a story, to question him for details that could help the police break the siege, or any other closely related purpose.
If in fact he was arrested – and the Guardian is reporting that he was – this should indeed disturb you, procrastinatorordinaire.
@Giliell, #84:
Correction: Lassana Bathily is from Mali, in the extreme northwest of Africa, west of Algeria, in a highly arid region.
Malawi is an unrelated country in the extreme south of Africa (bordered both east and west by Mozambique, though in the northwest it is bordered by the Zambia and northeast by Lake Malawi, the southernmost of the Great Rift’s Great Lakes), with one tenth the land area, but 110% of the population.
Oh, and you can check my source on French arrest and detention powers here.
CD
Thanks for the correction
I promise not to laugh at people who mix up Austria with Australia again
Also, isn’t it funny how quickly people jump to rationalising the police arresting a black man with anything but racism
A thoughtful response, PZ. But I think that Sacco makes it clear that the murders were a tragedy, and he is not justifying them based on his perception of racism in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Given that these cartoons are now flying around all over the web, Sacco is justified in criticizing them if he feels they are racist or harmful (and I agree with him that some of them are). Regarding those who claim that it is in poor taste to criticize the drawings of the cartoonists who have just been murdered (and I have heard this quite a few times), I don’t think the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have wanted to be turned into saints. They relished creating provocative discussions, which is exactly what we have been engaged in over the past few days. I personally can’t bring myself to post their Islam-mocking cartoons, not because they are depicting the prophet (which I approve of), but because they remind me a little too much of those anti-Semitic cartoons which were all the rage in Germany a century ago. Instead I posted a couple of their animal rights cartoons.
Glenn Greenwald as usual has a brilliant piece on this, making the point that you are absolutely not obligated to defend the content of free speech even when you are vigorously defending the right of the speakers to make it: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons/
I have read a number of accounts in French. He was put in handcuffs for an hour and a half because the police did not believe his story initially. He was detained until a colleague verified his identity. I see no evidence that he was formally arrested.
@procrastinatorordinaire, #97:
If there was no arrest, then some reports are wrong. But if (you believe) there was no arrest, it would have been helpful for you to include that in your #89. Read in the only context available at the time, your #89 reads as being unconcerned about arrest, not as challenging that an arrest took place, and thus being unconcerned about keeping-a-close-watch.
I’m starting to wonder about the routine characterization that Muslims supporting terrorism are a small minority. Googling the polls doesn’t really support that idea.
Anne Fenwick@81, sorry, I forgot to include you in my #64. I remember now that you said you were French on B&W.
Beatrice@82, glad you appreciated them. It seems I somehow rang a bell with Ophelia.
@PZ: I think the main concern is that Charlie Hebdo is now being hailed as a bastion of justice and freedom worth spreading all over the world, and many, while obviously condemning the attacks, are uncomfortable with this.
I’m conflicted here. I personally know very good Muslims and I don’t think religion has much to do with whether a person is good or bad, and many, many Muslims in Western countries condemned the attacks unreservedly.
At the same time, many Muslim in Muslim countries are happy about the attacks and agree that freedom of speech should be limited (this is what an Egyptian friend of mine is reporting me about Arab language fora).
Is it religion that we have to fight? Is it Islam? The human tendency to violence? All of them?
Charlie Hebdo published some truly ugly stuff which in no way justifies the attack.
And that wasn’t the real reason for the attack; it just made them a convenient target…
http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
Are they? I’m sure some are, but how many compared to the number that are unhappy about the attacks? I can’t find the link at the moment, but there are papers in predominantly Islamic countries that are publishing cartoons and editorials supporting Charlie Hebdo and free speech in general. Again, I don’t know what percentage, but I think a blanket statement that Muslims in Muslim countries are happy about the attacks is incomplete.
Procrastinatorordinaire
And why would that be? What might be reasons why the police thought that it was necessary to handcuff this man for 90 minutes?
duanetiemann
Well, they make the majority of it’s victims. Talked to some Nigerians lately?
Giliel # 1 is full of nonsense. Oh, they have it so bad in France. They are much better off than in the countries their grand-parents came from! Sure there is discrimination, but it is not as extreme as he makes it.
Sacco is an asshole. He at the very least supports some censorship. ” Some ” means simply censorship. France has bad anti-free speech laws on holocaust denial, Armenian holocaust denial, slavery apologism, and so on. Free speech is indivisible. Christopher Hitchens expressed this very well in a debate on free speech in Toronto. Even Charlie Hebdo practiced censorship when coming to Jews. It was condemned had to pay damages by a court for the illegal firing of cartoonist Siné because of a column he wrote.
“Le directeur de la publication, Philippe Val, justifiait alors la fin de la collaboration en arguant que les propos de Siné “pouvaient être interprétés comme faisant le lien entre la conversion au judaïsme et la réussite sociale, et ce n’était ni acceptable ni défendable devant un tribunal”.” — Le Monde.
My translation, his words “could be interpreted as making a link between converting to Judaism and social success”. So even CH didn’t live up to its principles.
I stopped reading CH because of that asshole Philippe Val.
Cartoonist Steve Bell was much stronger on free speech in an interview on the BBC.
randay
You forgot to mention who made those countries a shitty place to be in. You sound like the people who say that blacks in the USA should be glad their ancestors were brought over as slaves because now life in the USA is better. Sure, there’s discrimination…
Apparently there’s citoyens and there’s, well, those swarthy people…
What is it with you people…?
Is it? The US has a whole series of laws restricting what a person can and can not say or write, despite having “free speech” written right into its source document. While these laws may or may not be wise or just, since the first of them appeared within a decade of the founding of the country and there is still a general expectation of free speech, I don’t think one can claim that any exception leads instantly to the downfall of all free speech. Maybe free speech is not only divisible but inevitably divided.
I haven’t read every post in this thread, so I may be repeating something. But Giliell at #1, this is a bit of a generalisation. There is not pan-hatred of non-muslims by french muslims, Paris is not a uniform bed of muslim activism, etc. I also know many muslims – some of my students (gives you a clue as to what I do), some of my collegues, my neighbours, just people I meet in the market. They are not all feeling beaten down by french racism (but since you always seem to react to my statements, this doesn’t mean that such racism doesn’t exist, of course it does). Just to say it is just as mixed a community with good guys, bad guys, apathetic guys, stupid guys, brilliant guys and gals, as any other population. I talk a lot with all these people (and again I admit it is probably not representative of the uneducated masses in the banlieu, but then again I don’t know the poor white french in the same places), they have different views just like everyone. Some have pretty stupid ideas, sending me to youtube links purporting to see Allah in cloud shapes and texts from the Qu’ran magically appearing on childrens’ arms, but I just switch off, I cannot convince them they are mistaken (I have tried). The french treatment of the maghrebin peoples, and their children and grandchildren who are stuck between two cultures, was and is bad, many of them are hurting from discrimination. But not all, you are painting an overly grim picture of life in France.
photoreceptor
I used black in the USA as my analogy. Unless you believe that all black people in the USA live in complete marginalitsation, none thrive, go to college or feel accepted, nothing you say is in contradiction with what I say.
The contradiction comes from your blanket statements that muslims feel threatened and demeaned by the rest of society. It is not true.
Hey, #killallMuslims has been trending on Twitter.
At a time when #killallMuslims has been trending on Twitter, exactly who are you really in solidarity with when you post anti-Muslim cartoons that are full of blatantly racist imagery and dehumanizing messages?
That’s the point. Whether CH before the attacks was justified in printing those images is a separate issue to me. And not an especially pressing one since the answer seems to be: obviously, yes, in the narrow legal sense, and maybe, with regards to the morality. To strip those images of context and re-post them in English language media doesn’t just show solidarity with the murdered cartoonists (and editors and shoppers and police officers), it is also inevitably going to be read by actual bigots and racists as confirmation and support for their views, who, as we have seen, are already mounting violent attacks against ordinary Muslims (or people who are read as Muslims by the bigots).
And, again, why are we not all from Baga, Nigera this week?? Is it because the ~2,000 people killed there by Islamist terrorists didn’t make racist cartoons that could be used as a handy flag to raise? What?
I could also talk about Germany, of course.
81% of muslims*love Germany and are very happy here. In contrast, about 50% of non-muslim Germans feel threatened by them, which shows that our immigrant population thinks much nicer of us than we deserve. Young muslims learn professions, go to university, etc.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t discrimination, or that those who are happy here aren’t discriminated against. That doesn’t mean there aren’t places where hopelesness roams and that yes, breed extremism. Mostly fascism among the non-muslim population, islamism among the muslim population.
Though Germany has one big advantage over France or the UK : there is no past history of colonialism between Germany and Turkey.
*for a given value of “muslim”
duanetiemann,
…and white atheists and Christians hastaging killallmuslims aren’t? Seriously? You don’t think invading Iraq over false pretenses was terrorism or that terrorism does not happen through hate crimes throughout western history and at present?
…and PZ, I’m deeply disappointed that you would pretend that anyone here has said racism is a good excuse for murder. Christ on a rubber crutch man, how many people need to clearly state that is not the case before you stop thrashing that strawman?
I’m an anti-theist. I’d love to see all religions slowly disappear into history. I do not support terrorism or murder.
Does that mean I also have to think racism is OK? Do you really think those are my only choices? Am I really a terror apologist for thinking a cartoon is racist?
photoreceptor
#notallmuslims
You’Re nitpicking. When talking about a group the plural is often used to indicate a common characteristic. If you said “Germans love beer” and I jumped into the discussion declaring that no, I don’t love beer, and I know some more people who don’t love beer, you’d be annoyed with me, right? Because if you’re talking about a country with the 3rd highest consumption in the world, it’s hardly unfair stereotyping, right?
A smidgen of general CH background (this may be verging on being OT, for which I apologise):
http://www.amazon.fr/Dis-maman-pas-dames-dans-lhistoire/dp/2704702977 (roughly translates as: “Hey Mum, doesn’t history have any ladies in it?”) – book aimed at kids on the erasure of women from history , drawn by Georges Wolinski, written by Maryse Wolinski.
@Randay, #105
Quote some of the nonsense, will you?
Umm. That’s not a quote. It doesn’t even qualify as a paraphrase. Let’s try an actual “Shorter Giliell”, shall we?
Gee. That wasn’t so hard. And, suspiciously, doesn’t sound like nonsense. You wouldn’t be deliberately misrepresenting someone’s words in order to demean that person and dismiss that person’s argument, would you, Randay?
Ah! “I like France better than Algeria.” = “If someone is in France and anyone in their family ever lived in Algeria, by definition they should not complain about anything.”
Such a cogent argument, Randay! Such wisdom! Such insight!
Permit *me* to paraphrase:
:vomit:
What the fuck is wrong with identifying discrimination? How is one even supposed to know if it crosses the “Randay says this is bad enough to care about” test if one doesn’t identify it and talk about it, say in articles others can link to on the internet?
Your argument is repellent.
Would you like fries and a shake? I can see you really love your sexism, why not really make a meal out of it?
I’m sure Giliell won’t mind. Just don’t type without your brain full.
In all this time I’ve been on Pharyngula I got misgendered exactly twice. Both times this week. After having strong opinions on a non-sexism related topic.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
+++
And since it’s so much irony this week already, Netanyahu, whose attack on Gaza killed 17 journalists, some of them for being journalists, was in the front row in Paris today.
I think that satire is really dead now because how are you ever going to portray “a bunch of people who will happily commit serious crimes march for freedom and liberty” again? I mean, there’s fotos and everything…
Oh hell no. Of course it’s not a coincidence.
I don’t know about the “for being journalists”. I believe it’s possible, I just don’t have the evidence.
The CPJ is a good source for most of this kind of information, but it tends to be conservative about actually assigning motives and/or (in some cases) blame. But especially motive.
I consider what Israel’s doing from military- and public-policy perspectives to be plenty bad enough that it’s reasonably conceivable that Israel’s decision makers might target a journalist for having asked the wrong questions/access to the wrong information.
That fact alone makes any action of Netanyahu for CH/against the attackers self-parodying.
Though I admit that it’s not an unbiased source either and it looks like some of them might simply have been killed for the same crime of existence as the rest of the victims
Bit more mainstream
But yeah, that march front row looks a bit like some medieval pilgrimage where you got redemption for all your sins at the end
John Scalzi with a thoughtful post about this:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/01/11/disorganized-thoughts-on-free-speech-charlie-hebdo-religion-and-death/
Crip dyke, photoreceptor #108 has it mostly right. Giliell(how from the name and picture am I supposed to recognize sex?)just digs a deeper hole, “You sound like the people who say that blacks in the USA should be glad their ancestors were brought over as slaves because now life in the USA is better.” Talk about a nonsensical false comparison.
I likely know more Muslims and people of Muslim background than you two together. Most of them are apostates and the others profess, but don’t follow the rules.
Neither of you apparently looked the Hitchens reference I made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM
Just on Real Time with Bill Maher, Salmon Rushdie said that already in 48 hours “the kind of But Brigade is out in force. Free Speech “but”. Free speech “but” maybe you shouldn’t have done that…” Rushdie also said, “What would a respectful political cartoon look like?”
Even Paul Begala of CNN said on the show, “What we can do is not give a fucking inch.”
You go off subject too. “a regime of legal discrimination which enforces poverty”. If you mean France, you don’t know shit from shinola. Maybe you should watch France 24 on cable sometimes. It openly discusses problems and debates in France. I suppose you don’t speak French so you can’t read the papers.
Your comments are both ignorant and repellent.
I do speak, hear, and read French (though I admit I’m much better with the written word, being long without daily practice hearing spoken French in the States). I do read French-language news sources.
Also,
Just as the tiniest little taste of France and race laws.
So France never had
?
You’re really standing by
?
Well, I know that’s not shinola you’re covering **yourself** in.
Someone too uninformed to know that France has a history of race laws that enforced, among other things, poverty might not want to be throwing the “ignorant” term around so quickly. Psychological priming is a thing, y’know?
@Randay
As an entirely separate comment:
And if you weren’t so wedded to your sexism you would realize that’s not a defense: that’s exactly the fucking point.
Repellent? Look in the mirror.
While I found some of the condemnation of CH in discussions about their murder to be in poor taste and a bit shitty. Some of the comments certainly read to me as “people shouldn’t murder people to shut them up, but those CH guys were pretty shitty and they really should have shut up”. In the context of them being murdered to shut them up I find that more than a little problematic. I do, however, think PZs characterization of those comments goes a bit too far.
I’ve reading various sources and listening to a few good pieces on NPR. From what I have read and heard CH in France, in the context of the time each comic was printed generally pushed at boundaries, but were clearly understood by the people reading them to be anti-bigot of whatever stripe. All in all from what I have read, I think CH might have been in that limited context a marginal good. As a whole prior to the murders possibly a marginal bad. The contention by some that CH contributed to the rise in popularity of right wing parties in France, however, is complete and utter rubbish. The right wing in France that is now saying je suis Charlie despised them a week ago and will go back to despising them very soon.
All of that said, many of these cartoons robbed of their original context are inarguably bigoted. I wish that more news outlets had handled this story like NPR or the NYT, covering the facts without feeling the need to reprint the cartoons in an entirely new and different context. I understand the desire to stand in solidarity with people who have been killed over a free speech issue, but that can be done without posting the problematic images in a new and very different context. In the context of recent violence committed in the name of islam and ‘reprisal’ violence against unrelated muslims publishing some of the cartoons appears to support the latter. Bigots in certain quarters also seem to think that this attack gives them free reign to use these images out of their original context for their own aims while claiming je suis Charlie. All of that deserves a strong response and the bigots appropriating these images deserve any of the shit that flows their way.
randay
Hmm, how about “when in doubt use gender neutral pronouns?” Oh, wait, too much for you, right, you just assumed.
Like, apart from the muslim members of my family and all those people?
But right, talk about assumptions…
1. There’s something missing here. No, I don’t look references, I don’t know how you do that.
2. talk about religion and idols and stuff
This is a Salman
This is a salmon
You suppose and assume lots of things. It might explain why you valiantly defeat lots of straw.
It reminds me so much of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day – a cartoonist’s protest that quickly became a platform for open racism.
Also, Scalzi, fucking brilliant as always.
That’s so fucking daft I don’t even have words. Being aware of the impact your speech has is not “censorship”. Deciding to refrain from adding to a choir of bigoted voices is not “censorship”. He fills half of his comic with deliberately offensive images just to reaffirm that he believes you are, indeed, allowed to be offensive, but it seems he wasn’t heavy-handed enough.
“Some of my best friends are black.”
#1299 dianne. Another moronic false equivalence. You learn a meme and think you know something. But in fact, some of my best friends are black and have been so for decades. Why do you assume I’m white? I was criticized for using the wrong gender for an idiot.
Cheney and His cohorts deserve a fair trial.
#128 viayt “Deciding to refrain from adding to a choir of bigoted voices is not “censorship”. Of course it is. At the very least it is self-censorship. But it is also bending to fear and the politically correct.
@randay:
HA! My irony meter just explodified! Something tells me if we were talking about cookie recipes or child-rearing you would have gotten the gender right…
Because only real people deserve basic human decency…
One person’s self-censorship is another’s not-being-an-asshole…
I am listening here, and trying to take in all of the perspectives. Several French friends have tried to convince me that some of the apparently racist cartoons of Charlie Hebdo were not really racist, but were mocking racism. This article also tries to make that point, perhaps persuasively. I.e. the crude drawing of the Boko Haram sex-slaves demanding their ‘allocs’ was actually trying to mock the depths to which French right wingers a la Le Pen would stoop to deny the legitimacy of aid to the poor. Maybe. The Onion often does similar things. Even if this is the case, however, I am not sure that this cartoon, posted to millions outside of the original context, is going to do anything but the opposite of the original intent: i.e. it will inflame racial hatred and reinforce racist stereotypes. Therefore I am still doubting whether the posting of some of these cartoons, devoid of the context in which they were published, is going to help anything other than fuel an ‘us against them’ mentality: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/…/charlie-hebdos-c…/
That’s an oxymoron. The government can censor you, by stopping publication. That is what censorship means.
A person using their good judgement to limit offense is not self-censoring, but rather looking at the results of what they are saying, and make sure the words/pictures match up with what they want to say, and how much they want to offend. After all, free speech means they can be criticized for their views.
Politically correct is a dog whistle of the far right. Who beliefs in freeze peach, (nobody can criticize them), rather than free speech where what they say can come under severe criticism from many sources.
Your tells are telling.
@Diane,
To further your point, one cannot make generalizations about muslim countries by looking at press or popular accounts in one muslim country. Press and popular accounts in Sunni and Shia counties are going to be very different. Press and popular accounts are going to be even more different in near theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran than they are in more secularized countries like Turkey. Judging all muslims or muslim nations by accounts of what is happening in Egypt makes as much sense as judging all christian nations based on popular and press accounts in Columbia.
#125 Giliell. I wasn’t talking to you, but to that arrogant know-nothing Crip Dyke.
So, should I just use the pronoun “it” when gender isn’t clear. That’s fine with me. What makes you think I am male?
So you don’t look at references. Stupid. Most often people ask me for them if I don’t give them. Some times other people express the idea better than me. Apparently you prefer to remain ignorant of ideas that might not correspond to your preconceived ones.
@Dianne
That is a bit of an exaggeration. There are certainly some restrictions involving incitement and public safety (shouting fire in a crowded theater to use the cliche), but the number of those restrictions is small particularly compared to other nations.
randay
They.
It was good enough for Shakespeare, you know?
1. My irony-metre just exploded
2. What makes you think I do? I think you’re an asshole.
So it was AT. I’d been wondering
I think I have a Bingo
randay,
No, “it” is dehumanising. “They” and “zie” are both perfectly serviceable, widely recognised gender-neutral pronouns. And where has anyone assumed your gender? I can’t see where anyone has used male pronouns for you – the only thing I can assume is that you think (incorrectly) that only men can be sexist.
@Grewgills: I was responding to a statement that “free speech is indivisible”. If this is true then rules against shouting fire in a crowded theater are no different from rules against criticizing the president. I would claim that the two are distinctly different and that therefore free speech is not absolutely indivisible.
#122 Crip Dyke. I thought you were referring to France TODAY. Now you want to go through all history. I can play that game too. Which was the first European country to make Jews citizens? Why in 1871 did France make Algerian Jews citizens, but not Muslims in the law or proclamation Crémieux? Why has France had Jewish heads of state but not the U.S.?
Have you ever read Jean-Pierre Proudhon? Or Eugène Sue? How about even Balzac or Zola? I can go on and on. But what’s the use with a dimwit like you? One more, do you know of the Baron D’Holbach?
No one including you has bothered to mention that I even criticized Charlie Hebdo.
jefrir
I think that randay was fully aware of that while at the same timw trying to find a clever way of not being accused of doing so.
I know the Scalzi piece has been linked to above by CatieCat, but I had to repost this excerpt because it’s brilliant
We need to hold all religions to the same standard of accountability. If we demand moderate muslims denounce the bad actions of their extremists, we need to do the same of christians, jews, hindus, buddhists, etc etc
@Randay,
How about you just use someone’s name if you don’t know their gender. It should be obvious to anyone that names and pictures of pseudonymous posters on the internet don’t necessarily reflect their real life characteristics. Of course mine does. I am the most articulate green moray that has ever found its way to a keyboard.
Your posts have been long winded enough that the typing saved by using any pronoun is inconsequential. Suggesting it as an alternative is just being an asshole.
Some light relief for those who need it: Metro is carrying an amusing “exchange between LBC radio presenter James O’Brien and a caller to his show” who thinks Muslims need to apologise for the Paris attacks.
#137 Nerd of Redhead; “That’s an oxymoron. The government can censor you, by stopping publication. That is what censorship means.” No it isn’t. A recent article was about writers admitting that they were self-censoring because of NSA spying.
In the U.S. the government cannot stop one from publication. That is known as prior restraint which the courts have prohibited. Don’t they teach anything in schools today?
Randay sez:
It’s hard to look at a reference to something made without a link or citation.
Also, youtube videos are really shitty sources and citations. Try the written word. You can skim it, use CTRL-F, figure out the main point quickly, quote it. And you don’t have to shit like Flash Player and don’t need to slow yourself down if you already running other programs or if you are on an older computer. Videos, not so much.
Also, for the love of God, if you are going to actually cite something, try to use CREDIBLE sources. I don’t know what is so fucking hard about that, but it seems every fucking time….
I like how that is framing it as all about Free Speech, instead of the right to not get murdered for things you say. Free Speech has limits. Free Speech doesn’t make someone immune to criticism. You can be using Free Speech and still be racist. You can be using Free Speech and still be an awful human being. You can be using Free Speech, be an awful human being, and not deserve to be murdered.
So what exactly is the issue here? Are people really whining about vague, nebulous claims of potential censorship? Are they suggesting that people are blaming the victims? Or are people suggesting that the people bringing up charges of possible racism are excusing or even supporting murder?
What is the actual issue? Please, nail that particular jello to the wall for us please.
Eau de Courtier’s Reply.
(I suppose you have yet to find a random youtube video to back you up on this one, so you are just blustering for now?)
dianne mocks randay with “Some of my best friends are black” for using their knowing many Muslims as an excuse for Islamophobia.
Randay sez:
Face. Palm.
randay:
Ah yes. “Politically Correct” needed to pop at some point, of course.
Also: “Self-censorship” is setting off my bullshit alarms.
Has randay ever made a comment that isn’t borderline to blatant trolling? Ze has been around for a few years, but always plays the part of asshole.
exhibit A.) Randay has been here long enough to know damn well that Giliell is female. No grown adult needs to be told that you don’t refer to people as “it” unless you are being an asshole. Doing so repeatedly is usually (not always, but usually) a tell that you are chock full of male privilege, and therefore probably male. (not to mention that Randay is a male name)
Your sentence was grammatically incorrect. The way you label Giliell ignorant due to your own mistake lends more weight to the idea that you are both male, and an asshole. Hitchens position on this is immaterial since he is deceased, and known to have held racist opinions on Islam. It adds yet more weight to the idea that you are male. That you would tell anyone that they should discount their own opinion in favor of some dead atheist dudes opinion is mansplaining.
randay:
Definitely Courtier’s Reply.
(Randay’s argument is basically that there is no discrimination and no policies that perpetuate poverty in France, because French Revolution. Classic Randay Logic)
I find American critics second to none but they could start by reading Rabelais. I can only feel that those who claim Charlie racist don’t, or can’t, understand the cartoons they drew. As to down- trodden Maghrebiens(sic). The central murdered figure-shot like a dog-was married to one-an ex minister in the Government.
As PJ holds a little linguistic ability in French could alter perspectives as also could a lack of deafness or blindness to a culture.
Nope, they weren’t be censored. They were showing judgement, unlike you.
Actually, yes they can. If they know you are about to publish something, they can get a judgment to stop you. You are a fool if you think otherwise. And you are that fool
Here’s a perspective.
I’m watching German TV, Jauch, and on the program is a muslim woman, a journalist, and she told that when she was in the USA, doing a book tour, and talking in Synagoges, Holocaust survivors were asking her how long she was planning to stay in Europe?
When she was confused and asked why they were asking, they said that the climate in Europe and all those carricatures reminded them of the 1930’s in Germany.
That’s kinda frightening
Giliell, I keep seeing the PEDIGA thing and thinking much the same thing: Germany’s been there before and it didn’t work out well. Why the unwillingness to see the parallels?
Dianne
I’ll tell tomorrow how the counter-protest went. I’m toying with the idea of bringing a sign saying “Je suis Baga”. That should confuse people…
#151 Thethys. No matter how long I have been here, this is the first I have remarked this name. “Ze” or “Zie” have not been around for a long time. I checked and found out that they have been proposed. Of course I wouldn’t mind using “they” as a singular as that is well accepted in many cases.
My grammar is not incorrect. As for stupid, “Hitchens position on this is immaterial since he is deceased”, this takes the case. For you we should not read or listen to what dead people wrote or said. Ok, but I also referred to Salmon Rushdie who is still alive. So how do you dismiss him? BTW, Hitchens was not a racist. He studied and explained the origins of Islam and wrote what bullshit Islam is. That applies to all other religions as well.
Yes. Yes. Yes and Yes.
Nope. Got me there. Google tells me things though, so at least now I’m aware of his historical context and the focus of his writings, if not the content. But then, I’m a lesbian-feminist and I’ve never read George Sand or Acton Bell. Nor the epistolary memoir of Stein & Toklas.
However, despite the grievous absence from my library of French-German Enlightenment atheists, I have actually read some women who composed in French. Really. There are women who’ve done that.
Got my IQ all dialed in there, Randay? Good. I wanted you to have your chance to make your judgements.
Now:
Let’s see, when Giliell wrote, and you contested:
using clever code words like “history”, that, admittedly, does connote the ongoing present, for sure, if, y’know, you’re talking bizarro-world language.
The next word, although it did include a typo that might have confused you, was “continued”:
which, y’know, clearly communicates that the previous “history” was all taking place in the present, right?
Now, I said you “contested” this, but I won’t go so far as to say you contested it with anything like coherence or actual analysis.
In defense of Giliell, I attempted to point out where your words were a tad (shall we say?) off the mark.
Only there, paraphrasing did I say:
The paraphrase is a mix of you & Giliell. The content from Giliell, the dismissal of its importance from you.
It was this section that you thought was so unrepresentative of France “TODAY” (your caps), it was vitally important for you to say of me:
All a terribly simple misunderstanding of course. It merely originated with your misreading of comment #1 by Giliell… I understand how few cues there were that we were comparing a history of discrimination with a history of discrimination. Anyone might have taken a gross of comments to figure that out.
Why really look at one I wrote:
Why, if only there were some indicators of passage of time! Authors fault, obviously.
But, y’know, looking again:
Yeah.
I have some writers I’m now wondering if **you’ve** read:
Giliell.
Crip Dyke.
randay, your grammar was incorrect, and Giliell was tweaking you about it. You wrote “…look the reference”; she said she didn’t know how to do that and even quoted you doing it.
Read your own comment, before you insist you can’t have made an error. It just makes you look stupid and lazy, instead of just stupid.
For reference, that’s @121, randay. “Neither of you looked the reference…”
randay:
Congratulations, you have increased your “Not Incorrect” Score! Your Total is now: 1
Your Total is now: 1
Another good post, this one from digby, about keeping perspective:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-you-can-keep-your-head-when-all.html
There is also a post next to that about voting patterns and identifications/labels among USan “nones”, the religiously unaffiliated. I don’t have the link, but it’s from today.
#159 Crip Dyke. I have read enough nonsense today from too many writers, including those two. Now, I am stopping as I simply don’t have the time to continue. Though I did want to respond to the idiots who don’t understand prior restraint which a court decided against in an internet case in 2014 and who didn’t think my references to Salmon Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens were serious enough. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss.
@Randay, #149:
First, it’s Tethys, not Thethys.
You would know that if you knew anything about mythology, or astronomy, or even earth’s geological past. That last one might even come to you indirectly if you were interested in, say, evolution where the Tethys is a key feature in the evolutionary development of cetaceans in the water and of many animals whose history was affected by the water barrier between Asia and the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Madagascar, and Australia.
But I suppose it would be weird for you to know anything about biology and evolution if you’re reading this blog.
On to matters weightier than oceans…
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
Congratulations on being vaguely aware that something like NYT v US exists in US jurisprudence. But “cannot”?
Nope. Not true.
The circumstances in which the government can prohibit publication of something are incredibly narrowly prescribed. But approaching zero is not equal to zero. Even the case upon which your statement was (probably unknowingly) founded involved a legitimate restraining order during the procedural history of the case:
In other words, **in the very case upon which you, wittingly or not, rely to assert that prior restraint is impossible** prior restraint was exercised.
I am wondering…
Yep, you must be blissful.
Giliell,
You’ll cause Wikipedia to crash.
I still want to know who “Salmon Rushdi” is and if maybe it’s a recipe I could use?
As for Hitchens, we read him when he was still alive. Personally, I concluded that he was, as many people, a mixture of sensible stuff and complete and utter bullshit. His views on Islam, muslims and the Middle East belong to the latter category.
Randay, #164:
Oh, you’re relying on Kinney v Barnes?
First, that’s not a US case. That’s a Texas case. It’s decided based on the Texas constitution, not the federal constitution of the USA. Texas free speech protections are also frequently nudged open wider by federal courts – Texas v Johnson, anyone? [Unlike, say, Oregon which has a constitution **more** protective of free expression than the federal first amendment.]
And yet, what does the Texas supreme court say when setting out at the beginning of its decision to frame its inquiry?
Of course, that sets out its inquiry. Maybe by the end, they’ve decided that in the future there need be no two-part inquiry? That once something is established to be prior restraint that there is no need to look to whether that restraint is constitutionally justifiable?
let’s look down the decision where they are wrapping up:
Jeez, prior restraint isn’t entirely forbidden? What’s the world coming to when Randay is still wrong????
I’m sure that Randay’s really correct that all prior restraint has been forbidden throughout the US by the Texas supreme court in a decision that affirms the need for a 2 part inquiry where the second part after the nature of the order sought is determined to be prior restraint, is to go on and decide whether the court will allow the prior restraint anyway.
I can’t see how Randay’s correct, but anything Randay says **must** be true.
I’m probably just too ignorant and arrogant to see it.
Randay cannot be bothered to spell anyone’s name properly, but has no problem calling others ignorant. I actually do wonder if Hitchens views on islam would have changed, but there is no way to know if he ever would have repudiated his previous racist opinions on the matter.
Salmon Rushdie
CD
You’Re even nastier than I am.
That’s a compliment
+++
Dear Britons, I’m sorry to inform you, but your country has kind of stopped existing It’s more like a caliphate with Birmingham as its capitol.
@Giliell, 171:
Returning compliments,
is completely awesome. Go you.
Giliell 171
Fox is prone to making the same kind of claims about Dearborn, Michigan, due to the large (~40%) percentage of Arab Americans who live there. Demonstrating as well as anything does that anti-Muslim bigotry is principally racial in nature, the majority of Arab residents are Maronite Christians of Lebanese extraction.
Now a German tabloid has been firebombed for reprinting the CH cartoon.
http://news.yahoo.com/arson-attack-german-paper-ran-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-065348454.html
@ #143
” If this is true then rules against shouting fire in a crowded theater are no different from rules against criticizing the president.”
What rules are there against criticizing the president?
Well, if you threaten to kill the President, the Secret Service may investigate you….
tomh@175:
I think you glossed over the “If” part of what you quoted.
This is a big dialogue to unpack, but I couldn’t agree with Sacco’s line that “tweaking the noses of Muslims” is “vapid.” Sure, making fun of people for wearing a kufi would be pretty vapid, but is arguing against sharia law? Is condemning the burka? At what point does fair satire become vapid tweaking? It’s hard to answer — and to be fair to Sacco, he can’t really mount an entire ethical argument with footnotes in his cartoon.But it’s the same argument we hear from religious privilege all the time. Again, it’s not Sacco’s fault that religious conservatives abuse liberal arguments to protect themselves from criticism, but I still think he could have expressed that line better.
Dogma, whether religious or not, is always dangerous. The whole drive behind humanism has been that, regardless of your dogma, you don’t get to step on the rights of others. The people involved in Charlie Hebdo attack are no different the the Oklahoma City Bomber, the terrorists at the World Trade Center, the Unibomber, or the people who fought in the Crusades. They want to force their opinion on everyone else and will stop at nothing to do so. There is NEVER a time when someone using words against one person should translate into ANY kind of response other than words be it physical violence, doxxing, stalking, or harassment. There is nothing civil or brave or important about what these people did. They are just a$$holes, plain and simple.
Man. I got absolutely raked over the coals over at B&W for saying exactly the same thing as the majority opinion in this thread: CH was racist and problematic.
Obviously that doesn’t justify murdering them. That’s obvious, right? I thought so. Apparently even criticizing them is not permitted some places. Mine were the posts Salty Current excoriated.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism of CH at Butterflies & Wheels. Why would you say it’s not permitted? Were you banned? I think you’re wrong that CH is racist – opinions differ, but I have yet to see any place on FTB where differing opinions are not permitted.
@tomh:
I don’t read Ophelia with any great regularity anymore. Too much of her stuff is simply uninformative to me. The stuff about events in the UK and Ireland is almost always new to me, and I pay attention to that, but the other stuff is often
a) about stories with which I’ve already become familiar
and
b) employs analysis that is no deeper or insightful that I’ve already come up with on my own.
She’s more snark than analysis – which, great, that’s her thing and she should run with it – and I really prefer my snark in the midst of content-added writing.
So, I can’t guarantee that my impression is a reasonable summary, but I thought I saw quite a lot of criticism of people who would criticize CH before friday or so, when things began to change and she made statements that I thought were in substance identical to others she critiqued.
So I really don’t know where the hell she stands. Neither satire nor even snark is the problem: her arguments really have the facial appearance of being contradictory, or worse, special pleading (when I criticize CH, that’s reasonable, but others are criticizing CH at the wrong time/in the wrong place/in the wrong manner and thus are by necessity excusing the terrorists.
Then there was the gem where she read a news report about a pro-CH rally and noted that signs included “Je Suis Charlie” AND “Against Racism” [in substance, I don’t remember the exact wording of the “against racism” sign].
THEN she announced that obviously CH wasn’t racist, because it doesn’t “work” to be pro-CH and anti-racism if CH is racist.
Of course that ignores the facts that:
1) the holders of the 2 signs were almost certainly different
2) even if one person held both signs, people hold contradictory and non-sensical beliefs (or combos of beliefs) all the time
and
3) The opinion of some random person in a street march is not an objective judgement that settles the question.
It was just weird. Even though she doesn’t do that much analysis in many of her blog posts, she’s a smart person and I expect better thinking than THAT.
Charlie was much less racist than seems obvious from their covers — they were skewering the anti-immigrant, racist right, using said racist imagery. And they skewered the relevant organized religions (mainly islam and catholicism, to a much lesser extent judaism). For every disgusting cover that I’ve known the backstory, it’s been clear to me who the intended target is, and that target is punching up.
The problem I think Giliell is pointing out (when not being trolled by randay) is that on their way to punching up, they produced some of what the US military would call collateral damage.
Generally, I find France — and to an only slightly lesser extent Quebec — shockingly racist to my university-reared American eyes, particularly directed at arabs (with the assumption that all arabs are muslim).
@numerobis
Yet university-reared French and Quebecois eyes generally find the US incredibly racist…
@nuberobis 183
I found much the same in the Netherlands. Otherwise reasonable and sensitive people would talk about how Moroccans all slaughtered goats on their balcony and other such nonsense. Those same people that had strong opinions about American racism while holding those ideas and celebrating svarte Pete. I was more than a little shocked when I had my first Christmas in the Netherlands and saw it preceded by what looked to my American eyes like a minstrel show. Every culture has its blind spots.
@maudell 184
Yep, it’s always easier to see the fault away than at home. That is among the many reasons that it is great to live away for a while. I grew up in the bible belt and did notice the racism and homophobia growing up, but coming back after living away for a few years really brought it into sharp relief. It was partly about being sheltered from shitting things as a child, but also about seeing that things could be different.
@Grewgills 186
As frustrating this conversation can be, I think that’s a good demonstration of no one getting the full picture. While I think there have been some interesting critics over the years that made me question aspects of the culture I grew up in (in a way I wouldn’t have at home), there is obvious cultural blindness coming from people outside of said culture.
In a different context, it’s not as if French people have a super nuanced understanding of the American bible belt. I bet you’ve been through this before.
Anyway, it’s a good reminder that I can be blind too.
numerobis/Grewgills/maudell
Yes, it’s always much easier to see the faults of the others and not of the own. Which means that in turn we should probably pause and think when somebody calls out our shit from an outside perspective instead of the knee-jerk reaction “you don’t understand, you’re not French!” we’ve seen over the last days. In German we have the term “betriebsblind” (process blind), which refers to the fact that you’re often unable to see obvious problems with something because you’re heavily involded in it.
And now that I’ve translated it I suddenly became aware that it is horribly ableist as it equates having a disability with being unable to spot problems.
Sometimes all the outside perspective you need is a translation….
BTW, all defenses I’ve seen so far of “that’s just our tradition, they were mocking racists” seem to come from people who think they’re allies to the immigrant population, not from the immigrant population. Really, since when do we let white people define what’s racist and pro-immigrants?
Here’s a very sensible piece by a French woman who grew up in the banlieus for a start
+++
I have a question for all the “they weren’t racist, they were mocking racism, you don’t know the context” people
Please explain how they’re mocking racism here.
Who’s the butt of the joke?
What is the joke?
How is that actually somehow about Marine LePen?
What’s the stereotype?
And in general: How does using racist imagery negate stereotype threat, especially when due to the nature of the medium about 99% of people will only see the stereotyped drawing on accounts that CH was actually vanishing since it looks like French people were getting tired of this, too.
@188 Giliell: that mediadiversified link was excellent, thanks.
Caitie
That whole blog is amazing. Really living up to its name, diverse and totally talented writers. I’m learning so much there.
+++
And since I asked for some criticla analysis above, let me continue myself.
First I’m amazed how many experts there are on the history and tradition of French satire, but apparently none on the history and tradition of French philosophy.
If you use Barthe’s myth, what new meanings are created by using those images?
If you use the most simple question of discourse analysis: Who is talking about what how?
And so on, and so on.
So let’s take a look at the Boko Haram welfare queens issue.
Let’s accept for the moment that this was indeed not intended to be racist but anti right wingers who want to cut welfare.
The attrocities of Boko Haram are getting pretty little attention, both in Nigeria and in the world.
So CH, a magazine run predominantly by white men (and if you want to argue that there were people there who were not white men: look at how they portrayed themselves in the cartoon PZ posted as the image for the Lounge) draws the victims of Boko Haram.
BUT, they don’t draw them to raise awareness about the attrocities going on in Nigeria, no, they draw them to make fun of French right wingers.
Lets repeat: predominantly white French men use the fate of black girls to poke fun at other predominantly white French men. This is what I mean by discourse. They are NOT giving a voice to the voiceless, to some of the most powerless people alive. They’re using them to get their own message out.
That should at least strike you as shitty behaviour.
But thinking about it, you could even make that angle work (though I personally think it would be still shitty to appropriate their suffering).
It would be easy to draw a group of cowering Nigerian schoolgirls and a frothing at the mouth rightwinger who yells at them “Why are you expecting hard working people to pay for your kids???!!!”
Which gets to another point and that is the visual depiction of the Nigerian women: They literally copied one drawing and just changed the colour of the clothing. PoC do not get individuality. They are stereotypically portrayed as a uniformous mass, interchangable. Only thing that’s different about them is the colour of their clothes.
White people get individuality. They get variety, they get diversity. Usually they are mocked as individuals, not as a group as such. Maybe they should have read some Franz Fanon (‘nuther French philosopher)
Maybe with that kind of imagery being predominant, even when people are supposedly trying to be anti-racist, we shouldn’t wonder why we end up caring so much about 17 people killed in France (we know the names and faces of the carricaturists, though not of the jaintor) but so little about 2000 people killed in Baga.
Noam Chomsky is a sly bastard
And I mean it as a compliment.
@Giliell #191
Giliell, the point is over there ——->
…and again we see that pointing out sexism and racism is considered “censorship” and attacks of freeze peach.
Anything to move the conversation away from “Are the cartoons racist?”
That’s it. Not “Should people be silenced by their government?” or “Should people who create racist cartoons be murdered?”
We also see that racism and sexism often go together and people defending both cannot be expected to argue honestly.
procrastinatorordinaire,
Not agreeing with your premise is not the same as misunderstanding it.
procrastinatorordinaire
I see you have no argument to offer? No answers to my questions?
For days people have been shouting “It’s not racist! It’s not sexist!” I give an example and and questions. I use another example and do an analysis myself.
That’s the best you can do.
Jackie
Why are you a terrorist?
;)
@195, Giliell
It would appear that procrastinatorordinaire is referencing this incident.
Brianpansky
Thanks for reminding me. That was back when we thought people should be careful when they talk about minorities, right?
Giliell, do people who complain about welfare recipients talk of them as individuals or as a uniform mass? If you accept that the comic is a criticism of right-wing attitudes to welfare claimants, isn’t it a more accurate depiction to draw them all the same?
@randay
I find it interesting that you see no problem with people who don’t want to publish offensive messages being criticized as “bending to fear”, while wanting people who do offend to be completely immune to criticism and social reprovation.
As much as it may surprise you, some people manage to be decent human beings without needing to be coerced into it.
To clarify: the right to say something is also the right not to say something.
@brianpansky #196
Touché.
procarastinatorordinaire
1. Look up what a stereotype is
2. Look up what dehumanisation is
3. Look up the specific stereotype of how “black people look all the same” and how that leads to dehumanisation.
4. Welfare recipients are actually individuals, really, irrespective of their ethnic origin.
5. I want to offer an apology. I was thinking I was talking to people who are able to do a 101 level media critique. My bad.
Small linkdump:
New Yorker: unmournable bodies
Guardien: Am I a bad person if je ne suis pa Charlie?
@ Gilliel 188
I’m not sure why you’re responding to me, I think CH is full of racism, sexism, homophobia and other types of bigotry and haven’t said otherwise. I do think a lot of people have a really uninformed argument about said racism though, that seems to me to stem from ignorance. As I wrote, I also think many others have good arguments that I might not have considered otherwise. But I am bothered by how many have an imperialist approach to cultural criticism (usually American centric). I am also bothered by the seemingly growing problems of bigotry in France. It’s heavy.
maudell
I simply included you because it was a conversation in which you took part, i.e. that we easily see the racism in other places.
++++
And one more from the Guardian
@PZ
If you don’t know either Charlie Hebdo or French, here is a quite good explanation, in English of some of the most controversial cartoons. (Note that this is only about a few of those cartoons that actually were about Muhammad – this is a small part of a newspaper that mainly deals with French politics and caricatures, and included both as a running joke and as a point being made about freedom of speech).
We have a few crypto-racists and even not-so-crypto-racists in France (Zemmour, Dieudonné, Hortefeux, Le Pen), but Charlie Hebdo is definitely not on their side. It has no firm editorial line (each author is free) but is mostly left-wing and anti-establishment, anti-religions. In particular, in the case of the sensitive Muhammad cartoons, the authors and cartoonists took great care to make them as inoffensive as possible to normal Muslim people and as caustic as possible towards the cartoonists.
And being an occasional reader of Charlie myself, I can testify that this explanation is faithful to the newspaper – while recalling that it is definitely not racist, it is also not always in the best taste!
Why is Jesus a white guy, whereas Muslims are so often hook-nosed Semites in CH cartoons?
@giliell, #202:
I think that procrastinatorordinaire meant that since the cartoon is supposed to portray the ignorant, malicious stereotyping of the FN, wouldn’t a faceless mass more accurately represent FN’s ignorant, malicious stereotyping?
I haven’t ever “lived” in france, though I spent quite a while there. And the time I spent there was many years ago. I’m ridiculously ignorant of the daily lives of the French. Maybe 99.99% of the French would look at that cover of Charlie Hebdo and **assume** that this was an unrealistic depiction of immigrants but an accurate depiction of FN’s racism. (I guess for the FN, they would assume that CH saw it that way, even if they disagreed that that was accurate.)
I doubt it’s really like that, but I don’t know. But in context, where you know everyone’s on a certain page, and you’re operating with certain background info, playing with stereotypes can work. Damn, if a large crowd of passersby would have heard my good friend X and me joking about government cheese, lactose intolerance rates by race, casinos and genocide (yes, all at once, interrelated, including riffs on the theme: are you one of the “lucky” starving that this cheese won’t try to kill?), that shit would have been terribly harmful. And yet it was useful. Even in the humor, we actually exchanged useful information and analysis with each other. And it let us vent steam at some of the horror of everyday racism.
All this is to say, I think the covers hanging in public on kiosks would have been harmful (though I’m not “asserting” that with any certainty, given my ignorance of day-to-day life in France), asking the question, “Could CH have been using facelessness on purpose to more accurately parody FN’s horrible racism” isn’t a question that necessarily indicates procrastinatorordinaire isn’t up to 101 level in analyzing racism.
@Crip Dyke #208
Thank you.
English makes this rather difficult to do it right.
Before now, I cannot recall ever seeing “zie”. I dispute the claim of “widely recognized”. Perhaps it’s widely recognized in certain subcultures of English speaking cultures, but not in the English speaking culture at large.
I know that “they” has an long and old history of being used as a singular pronoun, but I also know that some parts of modern academia strongly dislike that usage. I do like “they” as a singular pronoun, and I use it in that way regularly.
CD
So, you expect people who walk past a kiosk to do a double turn understanding that leads them to “oh, look, they made them all look alike, but we know they’re individuals”?
Sorry, not buying it.
Here’s a more likely explenation: They didn’t think about the implication of the copy-paste at all. They copied the drawing and then added different colours to fake individuality cause that was much less work than actually drawing 4 different people.
Also, again, intent really, really isn’t magic.
And of course this does not negate my other points or answer the questions I raised about the other comic or the point that they used those girls in the first place.4
EnlightenmentLiberal
This isn’t about you in particular, but in general I find people who complain about singular “they” cause it’s so confusing while they do not stick to thou, thee and thine ridiculous.
Some folks need to be reminded: intent is not magic. If I slam your fingers in the door, it’s very unlikely I intended that or any other harm to you, but the fact is, your fingers got slammed in the door, they hurt, and they need some care. If I’m rushing to do an errand that has to be done by a specific time that’s almost here, I park and forget to set my parking brake, and my car subsequently rolls down a hill and crushes a child, that child is just as dead as if I took aim and ran them over.
Satire is, really, a very difficult art to do well. It’s got what my friends into computer games call a high skill floor, as well as a high skill ceiling. Do it right, and you can join the company of Swift and Twain. Do it wrong, and you’ve got no more satire than Lee Atwater explaining the evolution of Republican dog-whistling, just the repetition of slurs. Wanting to be good doesn’t make you good, not all by itself – not “good” either morally or artistically. So I’m a lot less interested in what Charlie Hebdo contributors think they’re doing than I am in how they fit into the overall scheme of things, the stories they end up reinforcing or undermining, the attitudes they cultivate with and without trying, and like that.
You would once cross-read something like this
“Murdering PZMyers was an horrible crime and could not be justified in any way, but that guy was racist, homophobic and sexist…”
I guess you wouldn’t believe your eyes. If you read people insisting that PZ was a racist homophobic sexist white dude, that would just sadden you. This is the kind of irony that you wouldn’t enjoy. People that never heard about the Minnesotan Professor before, yet judging by gross ludicrous mischaracterization.
Now just replace PZ by CH and you’ll get a sense of what this means. All the murdered people have gone through decades of antiracist antisexist antimilitarist antibigot activism. Mocking extreme right, mocking antisemites, mocking religions, mocking politicians, mocking themselves. You could see them demonstrating for many progressive rights, protesting immigrant alienation, asking for abortion rights, diverse struggles for freedom.
There’s one thing for sure, appreciation for second degree varies from one culture to the other.
@Okidemia
In your example sentence, IMHO the problematic reading comes largely from the word “but”. Replace that with “and”:
“Murdering X was an horrible crime and could not be justified in any way, and that guy was racist, homophobic and sexist…”
Sounds fine to me. I don’t see an undertone of “it’s ok to kill X because he was racist, homophobic, and sexist”.
I think you’re injecting “but” yourself where the original commenters had no “but”. They had an “and”. If someone did write something like that with a “but”, then I would have a problem with what they wrote.
Sorry, there’s been a lot of flames around this issue, some pieces in the medias at large were including “but”, some “and”, some where reacting to buts (I don’t want to track back, I take the charge for that but it’s sort of late here). I’m not aiming here to any specific commenter, I just want to express sadness before the arguments. None of the cartoonists were racist nor homophobic nor anything alike. At all. When you knew them at least a little bit, so the shock is as big as it would to any reader that would read in some world where the same would have happened to PZM and people would keep insisting that he was what he was not.
@Giliell
They must find you perplexing. Is the you singular or plural? I could take context into account, but that is complicated.
By you I mean the word, not you. Though I guess they may find you perplexing as well. ;-)
Okidemia @213, you’re sad because you happen to be pretty sure the cartoonists were not bigots. I can understand that. But regardless of whether they were bigots, anti-bigots, or kinda both, it is a fact that the cartoons do contain racist/sexist/bigoted content. That they were done ironically does not change the fact that they shouldn’t be published thoughtlessly. So the question has to be asked, hence all the “buts” and “ands”.
I’m not so sure. It varies a lot with the level of privilege though.
Okidemia
Let me try this one more time:
Saying that something is racist/sexist/homophobic is not saying that somebody is A racist/sexist/homophobe in the conventional sense of actively having negative opinions about the group.
But that does not mean that in return somebody who is NOT a racist/sexist/homophobe cannot in return say something racist/sexist/homophobic.
We are all racist/sexist/homophobic because we live in a racist/sexist/homophobic society. We know no name for this like fish know no word for water. We have to consciously fight to make ourselves better. If you believe that you are not A r/s/h and that therefore your actions cannot be r/s/h, then you’ve made yourself immune from criticism.
I have been very careful about criticising cartoons, not people. I did not know them, and I’m pretty sure that all those who say “if you had known them” didn’t know them either.
One last thought: I’ve heard it time after time again that they were traditional leftist, good old 68ers and so on, and so on. Funny enough, that’s the milleu I’ve been raised in. And yes, those people hold many good positions on race, sex, immigration, everything. But if youR’e trying to tell me that those people cannot say/do stupidly r/s/h things and then deflect criticism because they’re convinced of exactly the phenomenon I described above, you’re going to have a hard time.
@ #217
” it is a fact that the cartoons do contain racist/sexist/bigoted content”
Perhaps. But it is also a fact that that is not why the cartoonists were murdered. They were murdered for the sin of blasphemy. Racism, sexism, bigotry, may evoke strong reactions, but it seems that only blasphemy provokes murder.
Trayvon Martin would beg to differ…
Not to mention the United States from about 1861-1865….
nich
It’s that magical thinking that only non-state force agents with cartoon like villainy count while the mundane, the structural violence, the state killing is somehow different.
Rwanda too. Rwanda would beg to differ…
The Ecole Polytechnic would also beg to differ…
Max Fischer on Vox
And no, I did not read that before.
If I understand Giliell’s point correctly, people (including PZ) are confusing two different aspects of the memorialization of the dead.
On the one hand, the deaths were tragic, and the fact that they (may) have been killed for the ideas they expressed deserves to be condemned.
However, people are doing more than that–they are holding up these cartoons as somehow “sanctified”, as worthy examples to be emulated. THAT is what needs to be criticized, because frankly, the cartoons were crude, racist, sexist tripe. Not worthy of a death sentence, no, but not worthy of being praised to the skies either.
My question to those arguing with Giliell (including, apparently, PZ) is this: Is this really a hill you want to fight for? Do you really want to try to argue that a cartoon that regularly used some of the vilest racial and sexist stereotypes is worthy of being memorialized?
Mourn the dead, condemn the killers, and hope that the publishers of CH learn a little dignity and respect for others.
@Giliell, #211:
I’m not saying procrastinatorordinaire’s analysis is accepted by me, just that it’s not evidence of less than 101 thinking.
In fact, I think that question is the classic opportunity to discuss “intent is not magic” that, unfortunately in the US, is decidedly 102+ where 101 is “Stop your fucking profiling of people based on race and stop applauding whites and cops who kill Blacks.”
Ugh.
tomh @219, I was trying to explain to Okidemia that the “buts” and “ands” they’re talking about are not attacks on the cartoonists themselves (at least not here), and that they are incompatible with sadness. Your point was?…
… that they are not incompatible with sadness, of course…
Je dois avouer, mes amis francais, que je suis à côté de la plaque sur quelques uns des ces dessins humoristiques de Charlie Hebdo, comme vous m’avez dites. Je suis toujours opposé a la dissemination ignorante de quelques uns de ces dessins au-dehors de leurs contextes originelles seulemente pour provoquer les musulmans, MAIS, mes oreilles (mes yeux?) sont ouvertes. Le dessin partagé ici n’est pas racist, mais clairement contre le racisme, une moquerie du racisme du Front National. http://67-tardis-street.tumblr.com/post/107589955860/dear-us-followers
TRANSLATION:OK, my French friends, I will admit I have missed the point on some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, as you pointed out. Which doesn’t mean I support ignorant people flooding the cartoons around the web outside of their original context (particularly if their only intention is to wound Muslims)… My only point is, my ears (eyes?) are open. The cartoon below was clearly not racist, but mocking the Front National.
I’ve been lurking through these threads, but I just wanted to say that Giliell has been doing an amazing job. As for this:
For an Indo-European language, English makes it remarkably easy to be gender neutral (the only other IE language I’m familiar with that is more gender neutral is Farsi). All you need to do is take care with your third person singular pronouns and a few bits of vocabulary, and you’re safe. As opposed to languages like Spanish or German, where every adjective and noun you utter is marked for gender.
And yet people still can’t get it right in English.
We should all give it up and learn to speak Farsi.
I want to second that. I’ve been reading most of the threads on this topic here and on other Ftb locales but haven’t weighed in too often because Giliell usually nailed it within the first few comments. So far the only counter I’ve seen has been unending variations of “you don’t get satire/context/know-French-history” etc., which I’ve found unconvincing.
So, Jesper, are you going to stop using comptentible, sexist expressions and behave like an adult?
Or are you on the fence?
contemptible*…fuck…..
Thanks for the heads up, folks!
+++
Now, this is so bad it’s funny again.
Ignoring the fact that there already is one of the comics up, it shows the mindset of the Warrior 2015: When looking at silly pictures made you an anti-terrorist fighter.
Now there’s two possibilities:
1. Posting the cartoons is indeed an act that requires courage and indeed, male genitalia. It requires courage because it seriously puts the person into danger of being attacked by terrorists. In this case, Jesper Both Pedersen just asked a man to take a risk that they themself don’t have to take. That’s bravery, my ass. I’m just surprised there wasn’t a white feather attached.
2. Posting the cartoons is now meaningless when it comes to bravery. Terrorists would have a busy time even just writing nasty emails. In that case, it’s all about us vs. them, as indicated by the fence metaphor.
+++
Talking about needing balls:
Haredi Newspapers edit out women
I don’t know what’s sadder: That the Haredi paper did this or that they just had to remove a total of 3 people…
Giliell. You almost got it right the first time.
Congratulations, not all people do.
Pseudonymous, pseudonymous.
People never get that difference.
Why? PZ will do what he wants. With or without your input.
What? People should not know the difference in meaning between two words? Who are you, some anti-dictionary extremist?
It’s their responsibility not to be sexist and simply assume that somebody is male until they proudly declare they’re female.
He does not share his schedule with us.
Wait, it’s not about islamistic jihadists, it’s about us?
Will PZ post something to piss us off for the sake of, IDK, pissing us off? Just to show that he can? What do you think would be the result of this and what would be daring about this?
You’re making less sense by the minute…
Before answering some specifics, two links that aim to clarify why some media/people have just been jumping fast to conclusions without actually doing any homework nor fact checking and ended up wrong (and showing up clueless):
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1357057/-The-Charlie-Hebdo-cartoons-no-one-is-showing-you#
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1356945/-On-not-understanding-Charlie-Why-many-smart-people-are-getting-it-wrong#
To Clevehicks (comment # 230): hard move, you didn’t need to apologise. Many French people have been irritated or shocked by the level of misinformation from American media these days. I fully agree with your point about keeping posting these without context, and I’ll add that some cartoons have also been deliberately distorted to convey a meaning different from the full original. There are people now willing to promote hate, but I’m not sure they are as successful as they intended.
But it is your responsibility to not assume the gender when it is unknown to you.
Also, nobody was talking about gender, at all, Giliell was talking about getting the pseudonym right…which highlights your bad intentions and dishonesty coming here….
Don’t hold your breath. PZ often doesn’t answer people who are arrogant enough to think they deserve something from him.
I’ll third What a Maroon@231, and second Uncle Ebenezer’s last sentence @232: most if not all of the defences of the cartoons (note: the cartoons, not the cartoonists) have been stuff that you learn doesn’t fly in “How to be less racist/sexist/homophobic 102”: they weren’t intended to be racist, some of those involved in producing them were members of the minorities concerned, the magazine is leftist and atheist, they attacked everybody, aimed to offend everybody, were “true anarchists”, it was a game they played with their readers, blah, blah, blah. The use now being made of the cartoons by racists should surely give those pushing this line pause: it’s the starkest possible illustration that intent isn’t magic: if your article/proposal/cartoon/joke can be exploited by bigots, it very likely will be, and it’s your responsibility to think about that (which doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t put it out there, and certainly doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to or, ffs, that you should be murdered for doing so). The cartoonist of the “Boko Haram sex slaves” cartoon might also have thought “What if one of these girls, or their parents, see the cartoon?” My hunch is that that never even occurred to him: as Giliell says, these kidnap and rape victims were used to make a point about French politics. I don’t think one has to have a nuanced understanding of French satirical culture to see that as disgusting; in fact, if having such a nuanced understanding stops you seeing this, in my view you’d be a better person without it.
A lot of people are. In the OP, you said:
The difference is not rendered irrelevant by the terrorist murders. It’s irrelevant to whether these were vile and contemptible terrorist murders by vile and contemptible terrorist murderers; it’s not irrelevant to whether the cartoons should be republished (outside the context which their defenders insist make them non-racist etc.), or whether we want to hold up “Je suis Charlie” signs. If it was irrelevant to that, then the same question would be irrelevant if Charlie Hebdo had been the modern-day equivalent of Der Sturmer – which, of course, it was not.
@247 Jesper
Idiot…
Giliell@171,
Steve Emerson’s idiotic lie was featured yesterday on BBC Radio 4, and he was interviewed. The useless interviewer let him get away with repeating his second lie, about Muslim religious police enforcing “religious Muslim attire” in parts of London, without contradiction. In the only such case I know of, the “Muslim vigilantes” responsible were charged with assault and affray, convicted and imprisoned.
<q cite="
I’m not so sure.
How do you define “level of privilege”? Do you mean that appreciation of second degree is mostly found in privileged people?
If that’s the “old white dude bro” privilege thing that’s under current/recent discussion in the American society, then I can tell you appreciation for second degree is omnipresent in woman and people of colour that I know, some of them are also social privilege deprived.
Nick
There was one attempt at a Sharia police in Germany. They got lots of outraged reactions, clever satire thrown at them (the Sharia Ordnungsamt* was hilarious) and a very quick and loud reminder from the actual police that no, nobody in Germany has police powers except the police and that acting as if is indeed a crime. So much for ceding authority…
*regulatory agency. A very German thing. Stuff like parking violations and public littering and stuff are dealt with by the Ordnungsamt, not by the police who deal with potentially criminal stuff
I can’t help myself. Bless my heart, I just ain’t right.
OK, for those who cannot see the difference between victim blaming and stating that a dead person was racist in life I will explain:
Rape is wrong but she shouldn’t have been there/worn that/maybe she led him on is saying that the victim is culpable for the violence committed against them.
Saying that it is an atrocity that terrorists murdered a man over a cartoon but the cartoons are racist and should not be widely lauded as awesome in no way puts any blame on the murdered man. It instead addresses the responsibility of people spreading and promoting those cartoons as if they are not racist but instead excellent examples of progressive values.
The first says that certain people are expected to prevent rapists from raping them and the second is saying that images can be racist and maybe its not such a good idea to promote racism while Muslim women are having the fetuses kicked out of them and mosques are being burned.
Is that clear enough or are you going to keep knocking around that straw man? “I’m not racist but…” is an excuse to say something racist. Charlie Hebo was wrongfully and tragically murdered AND his satire was racist regardless of intent is not an excuse to support terrorism. Saying that promoting racist caricatures is not moral or responsible is in no way condoning censorship. Deciding to be moral is not self cencorship. Me not kicking puppies isn’t my rights being violated.
Are we on the same page yet?
Are we on the same page yet?
No.
Okidemia
Something went wrong with your post at 252 and I have no clue what you were saying
Jackie
*pssst*
CH wasn’t a person who could have been murdered ;)
Balls = courage?
Again we see the “That’s not racism” folks being sexist while making entitled demands of others.
Can we see the privilege at work in disregarding racism yet? Can we not recognize the same outrage at the suggestion that a white guy did something bigoted? How often have we heard that expecting people to not support bigotry is censorship? This is the exact same thing we see EVERY DAMN TIME we try to point out the problematic aspects of things like games and comments about lady brains. Its different this time why?
Okidemia,
Why and what do you need clarified?
I don’t get the joke. Maybe I require some coffee before I can engage my sense of humor. I’ll get on that right away.
…and somewhat off topic, but wasn’t Salty Current (who is defending the cartoons over at B&W) also the feminist that originally defended Ellen Beth’s victim blaming in the “Donglegate” thread that is blamed for her come apart and continued bile spewing? I seem to remember her being very apologetic toward EB when that went down. No idea if she still blames us for being meanies, but I seem to recall that she did at the time.
Does anyone else have a better memory? I may have the wrong person in mind.
I know I’ve stayed out of the comments here for a while because blinding (literally) tension headaches that make me barf and last for days at a time are not a blast. But how many of these brave heroes hollering about freeze peach, misgendering people and being sexist are just now turning up in threads?
Jackie
This reads like Charlie Hebdo was a person.
As for Salty Current, don’t ask me, I’m really not the person to tell you because I really don’t trust myself to give a fair account.
Rape apology is saying that the victim should have worked harder not to be raped.
Saying a cartoon is racist is not saying that the cartoonist should have done more not to be murdered. It is not saying that any action he took or did not take was remotely responsible for his murder.
The two are not remotely equivalent.
Racism is not widely presented as an excuse to murder people. It is not claimed that when faced with racism people sometimes get confused and murder racists. Murder culture is not a thing. It is not widely suggested that maybe the murdered man was “asking for it” or is only lying about being murdered to get attention. CH was not murdered for racism anyway. He was murdered for a completely imaginary thing called blasphemy. No one here is claiming that he was blasphemous or that blasphemy even exists.
We are not engaging in murder apology.
Oh. Sorry. That makes sense. That is a significant fuck up.
Please excuse my confusion.
*consumes mass quantities of coffee*
“Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? “Are there any niggers here tonight?” I know there’s one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let’s see, there’s two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kyke. And there’s another kyke— that’s two kykes and three niggers. And there’s a spic. Right? Hmm? There’s another spic. Ooh, there’s a wop; there’s a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there’s three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there’s one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kykes here, do I hear five kykes? I got five kykes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kykes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet,” and if he’d just say “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” to every nigger he saw, “boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie,” “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” ’til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”
–>
“OMG! This is shocking racist. Lenny Bruce said something racist!”
This is the best parallel to make. Of course, if you want to argue that Lenny’s quote was plain racist, then good for you, but it seems then that you’re missing the point.
And hellfuck yeah, everybody is racist and Lenny first because we live in a society that has normative racist internalisations. But you’d still better aim for the pigs than the allies, no matter the odds that they once said something that might have been misinterpreted by the fast shooting brainless. And to be fair enough, yes, Charlie Hebdo also craved for obscenity as once did Mr Bruce, and many people found it offending like fuck.
Seems like the comment did not pass a reasonnable filter here. Second try.
“Are there any n-word here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? “Are there any n-word here tonight?” I know there’s one n-word, because I see him back there working. Let’s see, there’s two n-word. And between those two n-word sits a k-word. And there’s another k-word— that’s two k-word and three n-word. And there’s a spic. Right? Hmm? There’s another spic. Ooh, there’s a wop; there’s a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there’s three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there’s one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three k-word here, do I hear five k-word? I got five k-word, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven n-word? I got seven n-word. Sold American. I pass with seven n-word, six spics, five micks, four k-word, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the n-word in my cabinet,” and if he’d just say “n-word n-word n-word n-word n-word” to every n-word he saw, “boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie,” “n-word n-word n-word n-word n-word” ’til n-word didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a n-word at school.”
“OMG! This is shocking racist. Lenny Bruce said something racist!”
This is the best parallel to make. Of course, if you want to argue that Lenny’s quote was plain racist, then good for you. And hellf-word yeah, everybody is racist and Lenny first, because we live in a society that has normative racist internalisations.
But you’d still better aim for the pigs than the allies, no matter the odds that they once said something that might have been misinterpreted by the fast shooting brainless. And to be fair enough, yes, Charlie Hebdo also craved for obscenity as once did Mr Bruce, and many people found it offending like f-word.
Giliell (#257)
Yeah, I forgot we are on wordpress now and not SB as some time ago, and the plattform does not handle unproper html tags or experimental tries. All my previous comments have had “information” content erased.
This was an attempt to answer comment #217:
“I’m not so sure. It varies a lot with the level of privilege though.”
Okidemia
You know, throwing the name of another white guy who tries to tell minorities what is and isn’t racism really does not help your argument.
1. No, I’m sick and tired of “allies” demanding to get a pass for their bullshit.
2. Actually, nobody was “aiming” at CH. People said “please, don’t let us make them the icon of what satire and free speech should look like ’cause lots of those thinsg are really fucked up”
Actually, most people weren’t really keen on discussing CH’s content after the attack. But when those things and the whole magazine became icons, we had to do it. No idols, please.
For anyone curious about the EllenBeth Wachs incident, there are two threads. The original with multiple pages of comments. Adria Richards did everything right And there was a follow up thread: EllenBeth Wachs recounts her experiences She said some very problematic things about the way the incident was reported, and got stomped on pretty hard. AFAICT, in her world harassment only counts if you report it through approved channels, but not if you tweet about it first. (if anyone could tell me why my paragraph breaks aren’t working I would be most appreciative)
If a bunch of redditors who hated Anita Sarkeesian were violently murdered, would we be speculating about whether the caricatures were good reasons to kill them?
Probably not — but we’d be VERY hesitant to treat them as the sainted martyrs the French public have made of Charlie Hebdo.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Charlie Hebdo other than the scattering of cover images I’ve seen…
If you don’t feel inclined to criticize CH, that’s fine. But does supporting a free press mean we can never criticize the content of this or that publication, or even listen respectfully to the words of those who are more affected by CH than you are? If anyone who criticizes CH, or anyone else, is automatically labeled a terrorist or an apologist for terrorism, how does that make anyone freer?
Several people have expressed a legitimate concern that this recent terrorist attack has given anti-Muslim bigotry all the shiny new justification a bigot could possibly dream of. We can blame the terrorists for that, of course, but that doesn’t mean we get to ignore those legitimate concerns, or refuse to take any responsibility for our response.
Jesper Both Pedersen
If you are tired of waiting and sincerely want a reply from PZ, just send him an email.
Yes, but not for the reasons you think.
Okidemia,
Lenny Bruce is not a saint and yes, he was being racist. Even Richard Prior regretted his use of the racial slur you so eagerly reprinted her without trigger warnings. Dave Chapelle left comedy over white guys hearing his jokes and thinking it was OK to yell slurs at him in jest. Chris Rock regretted his use of the word too. Currently Donald Glover has a show out that addresses the use of the word as both problematic and common vernacular in black American culture. I think he mostly got it right, but that is not for me to decide. However, he does a “women are so complicated and men aren’t” joke that is both tired and sexist and I feel just fine saying so.
Maybe white folks shouldn’t be using that word to be ironically racist. Maybe what is and is not racist shouldn’t be up to white men.
If telling you Lenny Bruce was not perfect bothers you, you’re going to hate this:
TRIGGER WARNING / slurs
George Carlin said some nasty, sexist shit. The “personhole covers” joke was fucking stupid and sexist. I saw him live and he made jokes about threatening to rape little girls. His “call a feminist a cumcatcher” bit was seriously misogynist and fucked up.
You know who else told a fucking horrible rape joke? Robin Williams.
You know who else was sexist as fuck and continues to body shame and be a sexist fuckwad? Eddy Murphy.
Okidemia quoting lenny bruce
Suppressing racism gives power to racism? What a silly thing to say! The driving force behind giving minorities names that are slurs is racism. If you want to give power to racism, acting like calling people ethnic slurs is just fine and dandy and doesn’t constitute racism actually has the effect of normalizing racism, and encouraging violence.
If you think that I think all of those men deserve or deserved to be murdered, you are incorrect. In fact I grew up idolizing a few of them and still find most of their comedy hilarious.
Let’s place a bet. I dare ya.
If you aren’t a white, staight, cis, man, I’ll leave this thread right now and never come back. If you are, you’ll leave. I’ll take your word without hesitation even though I have no reason to.
Deal?
#267:
I’m not sure Lenny Bruce tried to tell minorities what is or what isn’t racism.
1. You’re right about this point, but nobody’s asking a pass. When something’s wrong, simply say it.
2. You’re also right about idolatry, but this is also quite different from all the bullshit that’s been said about those cartoons by lazzy first degree know-it-all simpletons.
I’d add:
3. If you don’t like what “white dude bro” has to say about racism, then why don’t you care about what I say, because I’m not exactly from the Fraternity(TM). And frankly I love what some white dudes tell me on this issue and I don’t care if they are white and privileged. I’m happy that they care about the issue as much as I do. White are entitled to opinions about racism too, and many have sensible things to say.
4. The levels of political correctedness expected toward others is culturally much higher in the USA than in other places. That demand “not to offend at any cost” is leading the current discussion. This might correct or not, we disagree on where the threshold stands. Charlie Hebdo cartoons are exactly as “racist” as Lenny Bruce quote is. In my opinion, this is parallel to the situation where breast-feeding is called pornographic, but I understand anybody could think differently. I still disagree.
The fuck…?
The levels of political correctedness expected toward others is culturally much higher in the USA than in other places.
That depends ENTIRELY on how you define “political correctness.” And, like nearly everyone else who uses that phrase so freely and lazily, you don’t even begin to offer anything remotely like a definition; so your argument fails due to its sheer lack of substance.
Charlie Hebdo cartoons are exactly as “racist” as Lenny Bruce quote is.
WHICH cartoons are you referring to? Again, your argument fails for lack of definition.
Then you’re a complete fuckwit – as your use of “politically correct”, and absurd claim that ‘demand “not to offend at any cost” is leading the current discussion.’ already indicated.
Okidemia,
So not think white people are the final authority on racism is a reason not to care about racism?
Politically correct? You know who uses that term and whines that it is oppressive?
Bigots.
You mean concerns you. You feel entitled to his response. Get over it.
Translation: WHERE ARE MY COOKIES!!!!!
Jusper Bath Pudorsyn
I’m not at all concerned.
It doesn’t concern me, and you are a fuckwitted idjit to think it does. Your concerns are not everybody else’s concern. Get over yourself.
Saying something is racist is totes just like treating women like sexual objects, creating legal double standards concerning their bodies and preventing them from feeding their infants because some man might glimpse a tit and get all flustered, y’all.
Fucking power differentials, how do they work?
Okidemia ,
Gonna take me up on that bet or not?
Okidemia
Complains about “political correctness”? I’m totally surprised
You know, that’s a really extraordinary claim. How about at least some evidence.
Well, I was under the impression that we were actually having a discussion. I’m sorry if I was mistaken.
Yep, white person here. Totally got opinions.
Yep, think so, too. You know what I don’t have? Experience of what it must feel like to be a PoC in a white world. So when PoC tell me that some shit is racist, and that they don’t appreciate certain things, I don’t start huffing and puffing and tell them that they’re wrooooong and that something white people said or did totally isn’t racist.
Also, je ne suis pas americaine
Also 2: Leran how to blockquote
PS: Have you had a go with answering my questions about that cartoon @188?
If I had an irony metre left it would be broken now.
Because that’s what we did, to which you said we shouldn’t aim at allies but at the “pigs” (nice bit of dehumanisation there)
ANd another Je ne suis pas Charlie
http://wearecitizenradio.com/ has had two shows now that explain why they do not support Je suis Charlie.
There are tensions within France and racist violence does occur, but you are referring to a single incident which occurred in June 2013. The Boko Haram cover was published in October 2014. How many pregnant Muslim women have been attacked in France since then?
Nick Gotts at 249:
Genuine question: could you please give an example?
procrastinatorordinaire,
Are you denying hate crimes against french Muslims are happening now? Are you really claiming that Islamaphobic hate crimes are only a series of isolated incidents?
Forelle,
Look up #killallmuslims
To counter my last post, however, there is this, written by an ex-CH cartoonist, who thinks ‘satire’ is a pretty lame excuse for some racist imagery: http://posthypnotic.randomstatic.net/charliehebdo/Charlie_Hebdo_article%2011.htm
Thanks clevehicks. That’s a translation of one of the articles I linked to earlier.
Okidemia @252
It was bad wording on my part, sorry. I’m not saying people with less privilege cannot understand second degree. I meant that it’s easy to laugh and not be offended by over-the-top second degree jokes when you’re just not concerned. Dismissing the offense of the lesser-privileged by saying that they just cannot appreciate second degree is a douchey move.
I agree that publishing many of the CH cartoons out of their original context is more than a little problematic and can have the effect of promoting bigotry regardless of intent.* Criticizing people and outlets for reposting them out of that context was reasonable then and is reasonable now. However, saying that CH “contributed and fostered a climate in which FN gets 25% of votes and mosques are burning.” one day after their murder was both inaccurate and in poor taste. Nobody had to do that, they chose to do that and it certainly didn’t demonstrate the reluctance to criticize CH early that has been claimed now.
@okidemia
The Lenny Bruce quote is very much a parallel to the CH cartoons, but that is true in both ways you do and do not intend. He was aiming up, but he didn’t care about collateral damage.
The breast feeding analogy is just idiotic. That sexists are offended by a mother feeding her infant is in no way like (for lack of a better phrase) bigotry sensitive people (BSPs?) being offended by perceived bigotry. While some may feel that BSPs have too much of a hair trigger, there is at least potentially some underlying wrong that is being addressed. That is categorically untrue of a woman feeding her hungry child. The comparison is also problematic in that men are allowed to casually show their breasts in public while women are not simply because of puritanical sensibilities. The more you talk the weaker your case gets.
@Jackie 287
In an indirect way he did in comment #276 when he said
I don’t think you should leave over that, but you were answered.
* NPR, the NYT, the CBC and others like them have had good coverage without reprinting the covers or lionizing the cartoonists. NPR had a great interview on the other day explaining the cartoons in a very evenhanded way.
@Okidemia, #264:
A long time ago I had a cis*-girlfriend who was 6’6″ tall, no hips, looking like nothing so much as a 2″x8″. She had a motorcycle. I had to hang on tight. Yay!
We weren’t dating too long. From late October till maybe January, maybe late december. The weather was often dreadful that year, so I’d be wearing a heavy coat and she her leathers. Parking the bike for a movie, some teens sent some vicious language our way, including calling us, “Fags!”
Polycistic girlfriend yells back:
In that spirit, and re your #264:
It’s K-I-K-E, get it right!
Just found out that Daphne Lawless has translated other French pieces about Charlie. The newly translated ones have been written after the attacks.
How so? The first claim requires evidence, and the second is just tone trolling.
@Grewgills #298
That statement by Giliell really annoyed me and I don’t care what her intentions were in making it, because as she often says herself, intent is not magic.
procrastinatorordinaire@302:
At the risk of speaking for others, I don’t think her intent was to make you happy. I know it wouldn’t be mine. I’d actually be kinda glad you were annoyed.
I am totally and completely anti-rape in all its forms. I’d campaign actively against any groups which took up pro-rape stances. However, if I also repeated “hilarious” rape jokes, and posted “funny” rape cartoons around my office and shared them via social media, often doing a better job of it than the pro-rape folks themselves, I think I could be said to be contributing to an environment in which rape continues to happen and pro-rape organizations continue to thrive.
Forelle
Pegida, for one, are very much using the cartoons and the whole attack.
procrastinatorordinaire
Since the attack on CH 16(!) attacks on mosques and muslim owned institutions have taken place, from just hate-filled obnoxious (hanging boars heads at the door of a mosque) to simply terrorsit (bombing, shooting).
Muslim women who wear any kind of religious garb have long reported increased hostility, from verbal attacks to assault. Women in burkas get attacked (So much for arguments that banning the burka is in the interest of the poor oppressed women). Yes, hatred against muslims qua mulims is happening.
+++
How the kebap has become a stand in for muslims in general.
That last link is particularly interesting since France has made some dishes of its colonial past part of the national cuisine. There’s no supermarket where you cannot get merguez (spicy sausages with beef and lamb) and taboulé, couscous salad sold in many varieties (and if you ever wonder what to make for dinner in France, the two of them make a delicious one)
Lenny Bruce quoted thusly @264:
Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet,” and if he’d just say “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” to every nigger he saw, “boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie,” “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” ’til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”
“Dig” these two points instead: first, the word clearly lost none of its power to hurt in all the time it was used routinely, so Lenny Bruce’s prediction is utter ignorant crap; and second, even if one epithet could be de-fanged, the bigots would just find another epithet to use in its place. That’s what haters do, and Lenny Bruce’s failure to understand this kinda puts a dent in his “perceptive truth-telling comic genius” image. And it makes the people who quote him look even less intelligent.
So Lenny Bruce may not have been a racist, but in this quoted instance at least, he was dumb enough and insensitive enough to pass for one. Saying stupid things about people of other races is one of the things racists do; and this was a pretty stupid thing to say about black people and their response to name-calling.
Forelle@292,
See here, and here and here for example. All these are from far-right sources that would deny being racist, but if you look around the sites, the reality should be clear enough.
And from twitter, one using the image from the post-attack cover.
clevehicks@295,
But, but, but this French ex-cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo clearly doesn’t understand France’s fearless secularist satirical culture!
Thank you for your answers, Jackie at 294, Giliell at 305, Nick Gotts at 307.
I went to check #killallmuslims with some trepidation. Fortunately, the hashtag seems full of people who attack the existence of the hashtag itself. There are some horrid people there though. In what I have skimmed, I couldn’t see any Charlie Hebdo drawing, except for the one that Nick Gotts quotes later.
Then I looked at a lot of pictures of Pegida and at their Facebook page and I didn’t find any drawings either. I did find a page where French satirists express their disgust at Pegida wanting to instrumentalise the murders, but they didn’t say anything about the drawings.
Finally, I looked at the pages that Nick Gotts links to. They reproduce a couple of portraits of Muhammad, as was to be expected. (One of them belongs to #killallmuslims.)
But I haven’t found far right-wing people who are using those drawings that are decried here; no Taubira, no Boko Haram girls… I would have been rather surprised to see the Front National using them, because I would assume that they know full well the drawings are directed against them, but I thought, well, somewhere else somebody may be using them to attack Muslims.
I can’t say, of course, that absolutely no far right, racist people haven’t used those images for foul purposes. But for the moment I have to conclude that it’s mostly leftwing people who are horrified at them, and that far rightwing people don’t mention them too much, if at all; what I’ve heard from the last ones in my own country are attacks against the anti-Catholicism of the magazine. Nick Gotts, I can’t really see a reason for that statement of yours that I extracted at my 292:
The Muhammad cartoons are an exception. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists undoubtedly knew that they would be used in this way. You may of course disagree with their publication then; and if you find them racist, that’s your prerogative; but maybe you shouldn’t amalgamate (to quote a much-used word these days) them with the rest. At least from what I’ve seen, the non-Muhammad cartoons seem to be a worry on the left.
Forelle
I saw some of the cartoons carried when the news reported on the Pegida marches last night.
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
1. If they knew anti-immigrant right wingers would use those cartoons, why did they still go and do them if those people are my greatest opponents. Why would anybody think: well, racists will love this, I hate racists, therefore I’m going to draw something the left will hate and the right will love?”
2. Huh, we shouldn’t judge the thing as a whole? Those cartoons don’t stand alone. I cannot say “well, the Mohamed cover pages were really distasteful, racist and not helpful at all in the political context, but look, there was something sensible on page 12!”
3. Personally I’m using those non-Mohamed drawings because they make discussing the whole issue easier since it removes the “couragous blasphemy” angle from the picture. Because it takes away the “they’re making fun of religious leaders” excuse and shows quite obviously that they’re making fun of a marginalised group of people who also happen to share an ethnicity and a religion.
The call out by Cyran was outstanding, thank you whoever posted it.
The problem with Lenny Bruce deciding for Black people that they should be forced to be exposed to slurs is a) he hasn’t lived with them being a sign of danger all his life, and 2) at the same time, they have.
Why anyone thinks that “marginalised people just need to be dehumanised more often so those particular slurs will be eventually maybe defanged somewhat” is a serious anti-racist argument is beyond me, but it definitely says something about the person making the assertion. As counter-evidence, consider please the current use of the word “thug”: defang or make off-limits one slur, the bigots will find a new way to dehumanise. Because for bigots, the dehumanising is the point. They don’t give a rat’s diarrhoeal arse whether they use the word “buck” or “boy” or “n*gg*r” or “thug” or whatever comes next to do it.
Bigots gonna bigot, yo. Helping them out, you would think, would be the better anti-bigotry stand, n’est-ce-pas?
Forelle@309,
Where did I specify that it was the “non-Muhammed” cartoons that were being used? And why shouldn’t the fact that those cartoons featuring Mohammed are readily used by the far right not give pause to those who claim there’s nothing racist about them? Of course these are the ones that are popular among the right, as they now systematically mask their racism behind a hostility to Islam. If, as you say (and I think you’re right), the Charlie Hebdo staff knew the far right would latch on to the Mohammed cartoons and use them to promote their hostility to Muslims in general (which, supposedly, Charlie Hebdo disagreed with), should that not have made them reconsider their approach? In fact, though, some of those visible on the “Liberty GB” site (in a part of the page I linked to that changes periodically) do not feature Mohammed himself, but stereotyped Arabs/Muslims (all Muslims appear to be Arabs in Charlie Hebdo). trying to stop bullets with the Quran, or objecting to the film The Innocence of Muslims.
I searched for historic examples of political cartoons and found this amazing collection of racist propaganda entitled Visualizing Otherness I think it is interesting that although many of these are in languages I do not understand, and I do not know much about the various political context’s when they were originally published, the racist stereotypes and slurs against Jewish people are easy to discern, It’s also interesting how they change over time. 1890’s Imperial Germany I think the germans are supposed to be the protagonists? 1918 Russia Everyone who isn’t Russian is Jewish in this example. Quite the collection of people in the basket. 1944 Nazi Germany I guess Imperial germany has turned into the bad guy ?
argh I previewed and still missed the typo…that should be 1916 Russia, not 1918. stupid aging eyeballs
@ nich 301
No evidence was given by the person who made the initial claim. Given that 1) the French understand the context of the cartoons and 2) the FLN and every other far right group in France despised CH prior to this terrorist attack. If CH was promoting an environment that fostered the growth of those parties that wouldn’t likely be the case. In any case the original claim was baseless.
When you say something that is shitty and in poor taste crying tone troll isn’t a get out of jail free card.
The ex-CH cartoonist whose translated article is linked to by clevehicks@295 appears to be one of “the French”, and understands the context as one of growing racism at CH since 2001. Where is the evidence for your claim of a general French understanding of the context as one of anti-racism?
Tone troll is a tone troll.
No it is NOT baseless. Jesus Christ, check the link referenced by Nick Gotts@316. And claiming that we’re in poor taste for criticizing the fucking magazine that thinks Burqa Up Her Ass Girl is totes hilarious is pretty fucking rich.
In Grewgills defense, there might be a general understanding of it, but just given the link in clevehicks’s comment alone, I have to doubt that every French person everywhere is in total accordance with that, especially those of Maghrebi origin. I have to think that at LEAST those French of Algerian origin aren’t too fucking tickled by it given the shitty history. It reminds me of how people here in the States claim that EVERYBODY totally takes the logo of the American Football team in DC as totes not insulting to Native Americans, even as many, many people continue to decry it.
[sarcasm]YOU JUST DON’T GET AMERICAN FOOTBALL! HERE IN THE UNITED STATES! YOU DON’T GET HOW OUR FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE JUST HONORING THE WARRIOR SPIRIT OF THE INDIAN!!! EVERYBODY IN THE USA GETS THAT CONTEXT!!! WHERE YOU SEE REDSKIN AS AN INSULT, AMERICANS ONLY SEE…….FREEEEEEEEDDDDDDDOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!![/sarcasm]
I could be wrong though. Where I see shitty caricatures of hook nosed Moozlims and African welfare queens, the French see prescient social commentary in the form of hilarious cartoons. In that case, perhaps the stereotype about French humor is the one that is true. #jerrylewislol
Nick Gotts @ 312
One possibility, which I think is likely, is that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists took the position that you’re not supposed to take into account what other people (particularly your opponents) might do, in making your own decisions about what to say or publish. The reactions of others, particularly those of your opponents, are ruled out as a consideration—you don’t want your opponents exerting a “veto” over your ability to express your views. (That possibility does not exclude others—e.g., the view that whatever the far-right would latch on to was their problem, etc.—of course.)
[There are two Jeffs on this thread and I’m the one at #69, not at #74.)
Projection alert: aisle 322.
When did you stop beating your significant other? Touche….
Try changing your attitude, as it reeks of sylme….
@Bed Herpes Jet Person …or was that Sheep-Bed Jester Porn?
Either way, you’re so far over the line I marvel you reached that high without hitting escape velocity.
But no, you’re quite obviously headed for a fall. I won’t miss you any more than the ground.
…said Mr. Sealion, politely.
Jesper Both Pedersen is a previously banned troll from a couple years back, whom I have reported to the monitors. I recommend ignoring any further drivelings, as they will be going away soon.
Why would you ask that question? Have you? And how is it on topic?
@Ariaflame, #330:
Jesper only rapes people with satirical intent and is tired of people treating those rapes like the regular rapes of actual rapists.
fFs people: the whole point of Jesper raping someone is to show people how stupid and immoral and abhorrent actual rapists are when they actually rape!
jbp, nothing but slyme all the way down.
“I’m going to have to ask you to back off, Nerd.”
Finally, some humor on this thread.
I must have missed that as PZ cleaned up. Typical of the hypocrisy of the slymers. They can’t take what they give.
@nich 317
In other words you’ve got nothing.
Oh, wait, Jesper is a banned troll? Makes his demands all the funnier…
Grewgills
My enemy’s enemies are not my friends. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to have the intention to support them. What counts is the effect. The effect is that there’s a decidedly anti-muslim sentiment all over France, from the left to the far right, where under the guise of secularism people target muslims. As the former CH person put it, people obsess over a few square inches of fabric and where suddenly it’s seen as just and pro-woman to tell women what they have to wear or they can be legally discriminated against. That’s an overall climate. That’s an overall climate in which right-wing sentiment grows.
To use a very different example: Pro-choice people have long criticised the “I’m pro choice but” brigade and how the discourse has moved from “fuck you that’s none of your business” to “abortion makes me saaad, but”. In the USA, the overton window has shifted markedly in favour of the anti-choice position and we recognise that the framing of abortion as a necessary evil has unintentionally supported that shift.
Jeff
If you don’t care about the effect of your publication, why publish? Just as a means as self-expression, in a vacuum devoid of social context? Does not seem likely, especially for a publication that understood itself as deeply political.
+++
Hmmm, I was trying to find some statistics as to how many muslim women in France wear some kind of head-covering*, couldn’t find any, but found this article in the Guardian about how many muslim women in France are leaving the public workforce in order to do e-business or something like that. How anybody can claim that rules that make it hard to impossible for some women to have a normal, public life is pro-women is beyond me. When governments impose laws that request women to wear headscarves everybody is able to understand how this is discriminating and violates freedom of religion.
*My question was twofold:
1. Is there an increase since the public hostility? Do muslim women now wear religious garb as a sign of defiance the same way punks died their hair? Some articles that describe the change in the banlieus seem to indicate that.
2. Is there a difference between France and countries like Germany where there are few restrictions and where the common sentiment towards girls wearing a headscarf is more of condescending pity, which at least leads to people rather insisting that those girls get a good education so they can become economically independent and make choices for themselves and also some room to breathe, because it’s commonly seen as indecent to give somebody a hard time over something you think they have no control over.
I would also like to draw attention to the fact that it’s again women’s bodies that are battled about, by islamists men and secular men alike. Move on, no patriarchy to be seen here…
Well, A young asylum seeker has been found dead in the street in Dresden, home of Pegida. He went out to buy some grocery in the evening, didn’t come home and was found dead and bloodsoaked in the morning.
At first the police said “there was no sign of Fremdeinwirkung*”
*Fremdeinwirkung: untranslatable German term that means “done by a person who was not the victim”. It basically means you know somebody else killed this person but you don’t know the nature of the killing leaving open the possibilities of murder, manslaughter, self-defense or assisted suicide.
Charming as always: the Israelian embassy in Ireland
Remember what I said about women’s bodies being the battlefiled, again?
@339 Giliell
There is certainly anti-muslim sentiment in France and anti-north African sentiment in general (whether the people are muslim or not). The ghettos they crowd their immigrant populations into are shameful as is the way the people there are treated. You have done nothing to show that the cartoons in question have had one iota of effect on that. If CH didn’t exist, do you really think any of that would be different. The only way that CH has had a strong anti-muslim in France is by being the victim of extremist violence and you can’t really blame that on them.
Re: women’s autonomy over their own bodies in the US, the differences are decidedly regional and have next to nothing to do with “I’m pro choice but”. Visit Texas or any of the other SE or MW states that have placed onerous restriction on women’s health and try to argue that point again. These states and the national representatives from these states are the source of virtually all of the restrictions on women’s rights. On the coasts the same arguments are made as in the middle and the SE yet the results are markedly different. In short, it isn’t so much about the arguments as it is about the populations the arguments are made to.
Grewgills
I’ve demonstrated how the CH negatively stereotype the immigrant population. Did you even bother to read the article from the former CH person?
Also, I don’t think that this discussion makes any sense since you seem to think that society works with a direct 1:1 cause and effect system.
“If there would be less bigotry, would there be less bigotry?”
Ehm, yes. But I don’t have an alternative universe at hand to make a controlled experiment.
Nono, there cannot be any relationship between pro-choice people framing abortion as a necessary evil and anti-choice people swinging their rethoric from “what about the fetus” to “we care about women and want to save them from the horrible effect of abortion.”
+++
That Israeliembassy tweet…
There is a certain irony to this:
Israeli embassy photoshops headscarf onto Mona Lisa
Israeli newspaper photoshops Mona Lisa out of painting…
Jeff@324,
What Giliell said@339. Also, if your cartoon is so readily recruited to a use directly opposed to the one you (supposedly) intended – in this case, to marginalization rather than inclusion of the Muslim/North African population, it should lead you to ask whether it’s likely to be effective in the role you intended, and maybe even to question whether you’re fooling yourself about your own motivation.
I guess everybody will now jump up and prostest for the freedom of speech of this asshole, too
They will also think that the correct response is to take taht slogan and spread it as far as possible to tell the French government that they don’t support arresting people over stupid facebook posts.*
*No, I don’t support arresting people over stupid FB posts. Nothing hints to him inciting violence or anaything like that. It’s just that he’s a big insensitive asshole and quite likely an anti-semite. But hey, freedom of speech, right?
@Giliell 343
You’ve demonstrated that out of context they certainly are and spreading them out of their original context is problematic at best. I already knew that and didn’t support republishing them. Within their original context from all I have read and heard they were harsh attacks on rightwing bigots. Some of the images in those attacks were bigoted, but taken as a whole you cannot show CH had a net effect of helping the right wing bigots you claim they fostered and you certainly can’t show that it made the society more likely to burn mosques. Like most satire their effect was mixed, some hit the intended targets and some hit unintended targets. You are discounting entirely the negative effects some of their biting satire had on the FLN types while focusing entirely on the potential negative effects of the stereotypes used in some of that satire and acting as if that that is the only effect that matters. I have a problem with some of those images, but you have in no way shown that the net effect of CH was to foster an environment where FLN gets more votes and mosques are burning.
I can play that game too. If there were less criticism of FLN types would people be less critical of FLN types? You are the one making the simplistic 1:1 cause effect argument, not me. You are the one that has decided to assign only one potential value to the entirety of the publication, not me.
Re: abortion in America
How much time have you spent in America, particularly in the SouthEastern US and the MidWest? What do you know about those particular populations vs the coastal populations? If you really think that change of framing of the debate changed or will change the opinions or voting behavior of evangelicals in Alabama, Kansas, or Texas I have a bridge to sell you.
Er, what? So why are legislators in the south and midwest succeeding in passing restrictions now when they weren’t 20 years ago? Why does anyone ever bother to make any arguments at all, if their role in forming opinion is so nugatory? In any such case, it is simple common sense that you have to consider both the arguments being made (and any changes in them), and the populations. Just as in a flu epidemic, you have to consider the novel features of the virus and population susceptibility. Going back to Charlie Hebdo, why do they bother to publish at all if it’s not going to make any difference?
Further to #347, I see in Grewgills a common approach of the Freeze Peach crew. Whenever some putative bad effect of some kind of speech, writing, video etc. is in question, they take the view that it couldn’t possibly have had any effect on anything, no-one could possibly be pushed in the direction of violence/harassment/racism/etc. by a mere speech/cartoon/film… But this in fact undermines much of the case for freedom of expression, which depends on the very notion that people are influenced by what they hear, read and see. The trouble is, the Freeze Peach crew want (rightly) freedom of expression, without being willing to assign moral responsibility for the reasonably predictable effects of what one says, writes, draws, etc.
@Nick
If you notice, there was a “so” in that sentence. It’s not so much the message as the population. If it helps you understand, it’s not as much the message as the population. Both matter, but in this context the populations matter more.
As to what happened or finished happening over the past 20 years, the Southern strategy finished paying off for the GOP. The movement of the Southeast and rural areas from bastions of Democratic politics to solidly Republican finished. In 1964 prior to passage of the CRA the former Confederate states were solidly Democratic. 90% of their delegation to DC was Democratic. 20 years after that the Dem majority had shrunk to the low 60s. Now the former Confederate states send twice as many Republicans to DC as Democrats and the Democrats come almost exclusively from urban centers and majority minority districts. When legacy Democrats were still holding on in the South, their votes were moderated by the national party. Now that Republicans dominate the South on local, state, and national level, that moderating influence is gone. That is what happened in the last 20 years.
Nick
Also note the “cosmic balance” argument. How many puppies do I get to kick if I donate 100 bucks to the animal shelter?
Also, I just saw parts of the new CH. Same style. They do mention Baga…and make it all about themselves. Really, you can’t make that shit up.
@Nick 348
I guess freeze peach now means making any argument about free speech that you don’t like.
Grewgills@349,
It’s not clear it even makes sense to say it’s more about one factor than another, when it’s the interaction between the two that matters – at least, without specifying more precisely what spatio-temporal range you’re talking about, and what you are measuring, which you have not done.
Grewgills@351,
No, it means making the kind of spurious arguments and claims I have specifically referred to. Retruning ot Charlie Hebdo, can you provide any evidence whatsoever that single person has been turned away from supporting the FN (why “FLN” by the way – I’ve never seen that acronym used except for Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle) by CH? Many more people will have seen the racist caricatures on the cover without any further context than will have read the magazine, as has already been pointed out. And according to at least one former cartoonists for them, reading it would have been unlikely to undermine racist beliefs.
Giliell @ #339
As a journalist (or someone else expressing a viewpoint) you want your publication to have an effect but you’re not supposed to shape your viewpoint or not express it based on what you think some people who hear it might do. Journalists are not supposed to say, for example, “My readers or my opponents won’t like/might react negatively what I say and therefore I won’t say it.” Someone like Lenny Bruce is not supposed to say “Some people will find what I say too controversial and therefore I’ll change it” or “People who disagree with me might use my words against me so I won’t say it.” The reaction of your audience (or your opponents) as a consideration in shaping your own editorial stance or determining whether to speak or not is, ideally, off-limits. (Obviously, there are other considerations but I think that principle is pretty basic.)
I think that the staff knew, as Nick says, (or considered) that the far-right would use whatever it could against Charlie Hebdo—and we can think that they could have been more strategic in what they published—but I think it’s pretty reasonable to surmise that, as journalists, they thought they could not—and maybe should not—take that into consideration. Whatever people’s views are about their cartoons, I think it’s pretty clear that they were going to express themselves, as matter of principle, in the way they wanted without worrying what anyone—including their opponents, or, perhaps, especially their opponents—might do.
Jeff@354,
That’s just bizarre. Sure, journalists should not conceal or distort facts because of consideration of the reaction of audience or opponents, but those journalists with a point of view – campaigning journalists – want to have an effect on the opinions of those who will read their work, and it would be utterly perverse of them not to shape their work so as to have the effects they want, and avoid the effects they don’t. The same is true of political cartoonists and comedians – except that they are far less constrained by the requirement to respect facts.
French muslims don’t feel particularly Charlie (WP)
I don’t see there’s much of a difference between saying “the attack on Charlie Hebo was horrendous BUT it is a racist publication” and “the attack on Charlie Hebo was horrendous AND it is a racist publication” in the same breath or as your principal line of argument. Here the Ricochet’s Leigh Phillips sums this up.
I think many progressive US and UK people who think Charlie is racist misunderstand Charlie Hebdo because they don’t understand the French socio-cultural-political context and so miss the in-jokes, the references and clues that provide the meaning behind the caricatures (and if they do understand then they appear to be dismissing them and projecting their own socio-cultural values onto French society which would be ironic). I know “intent isn’t magical” but “context matters”. Many such commentators are obviously having a knee jerk reaction to depictions of the culture minister as a monkey and the girls kidnapped by boko haram demanding welfare but these images were both attacks on the Front National. But in order to understand that you would have to understand that the first was in reference to the Front National’s leaked emails with the face of the minister photoshopped on a chimpanzee and the latter was a comment on the anti-immigration right’s heartless and racist belief that all asylum seekers are merely seeking refuge in France for welfare benefits.
If USians don’t believe me, pick up a copy of the UK’s satirical magazine Private Eye. You can read every word but I bet you won’t understand half the content because you don’t live in Britain, you won’t get the in-jokes (some of them years, maybe even decades old), the inside references, you may not know enough British history, you won’t know all the politicians or know what happened in the last three issues of the magazine you need to understand what is happening in the issue you picked up.
Here is a good primer on Charlie Hebdo: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1356945/-On-not-understanding-Charlie-Why-many-smart-people-are-getting-it-wrong
And here’s something a French “Muslim” who not only feels Charlie but actually is a Charlie (i.e. on the mag’s staff) has to say:
chimera@356,
Don’t. Be. So. Silly. It is not “automatic presumption of racism” when it’s based on numerous cartoons which are, on the face of it, racist; and on the opinion of a former cartoonist for the magazine.
Q.E.D@357,
Jesus wept. Why not read the fucking thread. That point has been discussed at enormous length. So have the justifications for the specific cartoons you mention – cartoons which far more people in France will have seen without context on the news stands than ever read the magazine. Oh, and I’ll take more notice of a former cartoonist on the magazine, and the French Muslims quoted in Giliell’s link, than yet another reiteration of the same bullshit about how the cartoons can’t be racist because… – in this case, because the editor had a black girlfriend. Srsly?
This is from the article Q.E.D. linked to@357:
How the fuck is a cartoon of a black person as a monkey a “parody” of a photoshopped image of that same person as a monkey? Who the fuck needs to be told the FN is racist? That’s its whole fucking appeal! And if you want to “parody” the photoshopped image, why not a cartoon/photoshop of Marine Le Pen as a monkey? IOW, I call bullshit on that justification.
A muslim cartoonist’s response
More “Muslim” responses to Charlie hebdo
@chimera:
Charlie Hebdo could use a lesson from the cartoonists in your link. Also, what’s with the scarequotes around Muslim?
I mean, it’s almost like you can effectively satirize Islam and extremism without relying on shitty racist tropes. Whodathunk?
“BUT WHERE’S THE ANARCHY!!!!!! EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDERS!!!! NO SACRED COWS!!!!”
THHHPPPPT!
Well, folks, you’ve found me out. I’m really an American guy who doesn’t speak a word of French. And so is he (Just in case somebody still hasn’t read that article)
Thousands of PoC around the world say “that shit’s racist (and sexist, mind you) and the constant response is “you don’t understand white people’s humour”.
And they’re saying satire is dead.
As quoted by chimera in 356:
Something can be racist without it having come from a place of racism. Dismissing that analysis as ‘automatic presumptions’ implies an innate bias in favor of the proceeding clause, which essentially states that if it isn’t explicit, then anyone who speaks up is contorting themselves into knots to be on the right side. What a lovely bit of mind-reading and a catch-22.
I hope a lot of the folk here claiming that one cannot critique a culture that one does not understand apply that same standard to other countries in the world. The next time an Iranian politician remarks that the Holocaust is just a myth, I’m [sarcasm]sure[/sarcasm] the enlightened commentariat will just chalk it up to cultural differences. WE DON’T SPEAK PERSIAN!!!! WE DON’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT IRANIAN POLITICS TO JUDGE!!! WHY DO WE AUTOMATICALLY ASSUME ANTI-SEMITISM!! THAT’S THE COWARD’S WAY!!
However, I have a feeling THAT will be one of those cases of “obvious bigotry”. We’re just too dumb to understand the complexities of white cultures, but the cultures of people of color? Totally fair game, amiright?
France has arrested 54 people for “defending or glorifying” terrorism in the past week.
What was that about free speech again?
Have we also talked about the criminal prosecutions of various French rappers?
Mmm hmm.
I think chimera needs to take into account that in today’s world, racism is the null hypothesis. You don’t need extraordinary evidence to show it’s there, you need extraordinary evidence to show that it’s not there. When you’re discussing representations of actual racist stereotypes, the bar for proving that there’s no racism involved gets even higher.
I lived in francophone Belgium for a year and bigoted anti-Muslim remarks were par for the course. During my time as an exchange student, I learned that Muslims were dirty thieves and liars who were destined to outbreed Europeans and take over the continent due to their policy of taking multiple wives and sucking the welfare system dry. And it’s not like I went out of my way to ask people their opinions about Muslims.
That was nearly two decades ago. From what I hear, anti-Muslim sentiment has only increased since then.
@Nick 352
1) Giliell specifically characterized the arguments, or rather change in arguments, and I clearly characterized the time (now and the past 20 years) and the places, so I’m not sure what you’re on about.
All of the arguments and more that she’s talking about were pushed to varying degrees from before Roe v Wade. She sees a shift from one set of arguments to another, rather than a slight shift in emphasis. She further says that this is why abortion rights in the US are waning. They are waning in specific locales and not others. Her choice of arguments works great on the coasts. No argument is going to get significant traction now in the SE and much of the MW. If you think switching to her preferred arguments is going to win support for a woman’s right to choose in AL, KS, or TX I have a unicorn ranch to sell you.
2) So specific evidence of individuals being turned away from FN is required to call her argument specious. Simply pointing out their biting criticism isn’t near enough for you. However, her original claim that CH fostered an environment where FN gained power and mosques are burning requires no such proof and simply showing that some of their cartoons appear racist and sexist, particularly to foreign eyes, is plenty of proof of her point. Made btw the day after they were murdered. It’s nice to see you hold a consistent standard of proof.
@Sally 368
That is disturbing, but unfortunately not surprising. We should be standing against that ridiculous overreaction in any case that there was not incitement. I am not charlie and I am not them, but I am even less the people that would silence them.
nich, #363
I get the feeling that I’d rather not find out.
To add to my comment @349 Re:what happened in the last 20 (really 30) years
The move of the South to the GOP initiated by Nixon’s Southern strategy of appealing to Southern bigots that was subsequently embraced by Reagan and both Bushes has led to not only a loss in Democratic legislative power, but a loss in executive power over that time. That loss has led to more socially conservative judges at the circuit and district levels and a supreme court that is 2/3s catholic. Restrictions on abortion that wouldn’t have withstood court scrutiny 30 years ago are passing unrestricted or with limited restrictions through the courts today because of that. So, yes, it is beyond simplistic to claim that it was a change in messaging by the left that led to a loss of abortion rights across the US and it is also wrong. It was a change in the political and judicial landscape that has allowed increasing restrictions on abortion in some parts of the US.
@Sally 370
I lived in the Netherlands for several years and heard much the same about North African (mostly Moroccan) and Turkish immigrants. They were also rather down on the Polish and had a big hate on for the Germans (bike thieves). The same people that would say those things would regularly harangue me about American race relations. I also found myself explaining American electoral politics to a lot of people that couldn’t understand how we elected W. Yes, I was one of the few who actually did leave the country when he was reelected. It was to go to grad school, but I say it counts.
Grewgills@371,
1) I said you need to specify more precisely what spatio-temporal range you’re talking about and what you’re measuring, not that you had not done so at all: precisely enough to measure and partition the variance in the dependent variable. Otherwise, a claim that one of the interacting factors is more important than the other is vacuous. I also expressed no opinion whatever on whether Giliell was right about the effect of the rhetoric used by pro-choices, because it’s an issue I haven’t thought about or investigated to any extent.
2) You have given a flat zero of evidence for your claim, and it’s evident from your response to being ased for some that you have none whatever. Giliell, OTOH, has linked to French Muslims making clear that they view Charlie Hebdo as hostile to them, and a link has also been given to an ex-cartoonist from the magazine who considers it part of the rise in racist rhetoric in France since 2001. It’s also been noted that far more people will see the crude caricatures of Arabs and Africans the magazine puts on its covers than will have read it. So there’s a very clear disparity in the evidence.
@Grewills
You seem to have this idiotic fucking idea that when somebody says that something, like say a cartoon that skews bigoted or a joke that uses rape as a punchline, contributes to an environment that leads to bigotry and rape, that it is equivalent to saying the something itself is causing rape and mosques to burn. We get that a SIMPLE change in rhetoric won’t magically win the fucking day, but it might at least CONTRIBUTE TO AN ENVIRONMENT in which that might be possible.
You remind me of people who whine that “If ya think chargin’ me 5 cents for a plastic shoppin’ bag is gonna save the environment I GOTTA UNICORN BRIDGE TA SELL YA!!!!!” Talk about simplistic for fuck sake.
Grewgills@374,
You may well be right, at least in part – but that explanation is very different from your original one, which focused on the populations – which have not changed much in the past 20 years. Another factor may be the use of abortion as an issue around which conservative Catholics and Protestants could rally – 30 years ago, most evangelical Protestants were willing to countenance abortion in many circumstances.
Sorry, Grewgills. Not Grewills.
@Nick 376
Several others have brought in French commentary that indicates that most French people would understand who the intended targets of the cartoons. That is at least as much evidence that they harmed FN as anyone has provided that they helped FN. I am in no way saying they were saints. I do think it isn’t all that helpful to look at only one aspect of a publication when saying it has contributed a NET harm. To expand on the strained puppy analogy: while it is accurate to say that someone who contributed enough money to an animal shelter to save 10 puppies and kicked 5 puppies is a puppy kicker, it is not accurate to say that person made the NET life of all puppies worse.
@Nick 378
I thought I had made it clear in my original comment that I was talking about regional populations. I think I specifically mentioned the SE and MW in the first comment and had further talked about the shift in electoral politics towards the GOP in the South.
I’m just wondering why the specific French context to the cartoons is so important if most of the world seeing those cartoons at all aren’t French and don’t have that context. Because the cartoons may have a context within France, but I’m pretty sure that France has a context within the entire world… No?
@ Nich 377
No change in rhetoric will win the day in certain parts of the US. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you spend some time in the bible belt and talk to me after. The rhetoric in any given region needs to be tailored to that region. The type of rhetoric Giliell referred to works fine on the coasts. The switch in rhetoric which she perceives has not been even a minor driver in the loss of reproductive choice for women in the SE and MW. Read my longer winded why above.
@Nich 379
It doesn’t much bother me if someone typos my name. It seems to really get under the skin of some ppl here. Is their some history of deliberate misspellings that I am unaware of?
@rq 382
Until very recently the French context was the only one that mattered because almost no one outside of France had heard of them or seen anything from them. I think that is why people are pointing out the French context. After the murders it, or at least some of its covers, have been high profile internationally and that has radically changed the context.
Grewgills
So why is it so important to defend the French context alone, by denying the world context? (Which is what seems to happen so often.)
@rq, 382
Because Courtier’s Reply, that’s why.
chimera, #356
Oy, really?
People have made specific comments about specific images. That wouldn’t even be necessary if there was an “automatic presumption”.
People who believe that they have enough evidence to call these things racist are not presuming, they are making judgements based on the evidence. Even Giliell who specifically embraces the null-hypothesis in a (nominally) unlimited context is using it as a null hypothesis because there is lots and lots of background information about society that is difficult to import as evidence without using the concept of the null hypothesis. And so, as with any appropriate use of the null hypothesis, she’s making judgements about the state of the evidence, **then gathering more evidence and performing a test**, and then seeing what the most reasonable answer to a question might be, given the background evidence incorporated into a body of study and its theories (in this case the sociology of racism) supplemented by specific investigations into a specific question.
“Automatic presumption” might as well be a slur considering all the obvious work on racism people have been doing in and out of this thread – a slur to Giliell in particular.
@Grewgills, #383:
Fucking duh.
But some rhetoric will be more successful than other rhetoric.
And certain changes in rhetoric make interracial trust easier and quicker to (re? really? You thought this deserved the prefix re?)build. That trust will make more effective work easier, and thus happen sooner.
The rhetoric changes don’t end racism. The rhetoric changes don’t convince the people who don’t care if they spew casual racism. The rhetoric changes certainly don’t convince the people who want to spread racism.
The rhetoric changes make anti-racist whites visible to anti-racist PoC. The resulting inter-community dialogues are a necessary step towards eventual change.
And so we take the step that is necessary but far from sufficient.
Arguing that we shouldn’t bother because it is not a sufficient cause for ending racism is a bullshit, no-accountability, do-nothing mindset.
I was going to get to my actual keyboard and make a long comment, but then CripDyke the Itoninja crept in and said it all, with fewer lengthy anecdotes and words.
In fact, it reminds me of this time in 1985, when…
*wanders away, talking to no one*
*is named a prophet or something*
CD
Hmm, i think your basic mistake here is assuming that people actually read anything…
+++
I’m wondering, if it’s all just about France and the French context, what the fuck were they doing all the time with the Islam-themed comics. Because, you know, in that case all they did was mocking and ridiculing a disenfranchised minority with exactly zero political or economic power…
Yeah, but it’s not racism when the French do it, it’s just haute-culture.
@rq 385
That isn’t what I’ve been doing.
@ CD 387
I was talking specifically about abortion rights when talking about regional differences in the US. Those areas do tend to have I very high overlap with areas of more explicit racism.
Re: was just short for regarding. The comments were late at night and early in the morning for me, so I was not at my transition making best.
Different regions will of course respond to rhetoric differently. The regions I was speaking of, the SE and MW, will get less traction with the rhetorical changes I was responding to. I grew up in the bible belt and still have a fair bit of family there. I know how these people respond. The ‘no true ally’ type responses are big losers in those areas. On the coasts you can have better luck shaming people into doing the right thing with those responses. The only way to get rapid changes in the SE and MW is by judicial fiat, so we need to elect more Democrats to get more progressive judges in place.
Grewgills
I didn’t say you were – I was actually wondering if you had any thoughts on that, because other people (and not just here) have been doing so.
Sorry for that implication.
@rq 393
I’m not sure, but I would guess some of it is people being defensive of their original positions and feeling that if they give an inch they lose the argument. That seems an all too common thing in internet debates. People will cling to positions because they care more about winning than learning. I try not to fall into that trap, but I’m sure I do it too sometimes.
More dissent from French Muslims about how harmless and not-racist CH’s work has been:
http://themarooncolony.com/2015/01/08/jenesuispascharlie/
And a followup:
http://themarooncolony.com/2015/01/13/a-confederacy-of-colorblinds-charlie-hebdo-and-french-racism/
Me, I’m a lot more inclined to believe the lived experience of French Muslims than the defensive denials of privileged old white guys. That is, if it comes down to Charlie said/Ahmed said, I’m with Ahmed.
Et une autre:
https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/charlie-hebdo-this-attack-was-nothing-to-do-with-free-speech-it-was-about-war-26aff1c3e998
Caitie
Pfff, PoC, what do they know about racism? You see, they are too emotional, too involved in this to debate it rationally and objectively. Honestly, it’s impossible to have some sensible discussion about racism with all those hysterical knee-jerk reactions.
How am I doing?
Well, Giliell, you’ve made me nauseous, so I’d say bullseye, no?
Caitie
Uhm, sorry.
But it’s amazing, isn’t it?
But I guess when men say it about women it’s just false, but white people get a pass…
Giliell
It’s just logic at work, innit.
Several other people have asserted that. I’ve seen zero evidence that it’s the case; the only way you could know it is (or is not) the case would be by polling significant numbers of people; if that’s been done, no-one has linked to any results. On the other side, statements by French Muslims that they perceived CH as hostile had already been linked to, and Caitie Cat has now linked to more.
Hmm. Are Muslims and immigrants included in this class “most French people”? I daresay non-Muslim non-immigrants are a majority of the country and thus you could neatly exclude Muslims and immigrants and yield a number that is in fact “most French people.”
Of course, if “French” is defined (as some do) in a way that excludes immigrants and Muslims it’s easier.
@Nick 401
So anecdote is evidence for one side, but not the other. Got it. Are there any other double standards you want to pull in so I know the ground rules?
@Esteleth 402
If they are familiar with French culture and French politics, then they should see who the intended target is. That doesn’t mean it will be the only thing they see, but they should see that.
Grewgills@403:
They should see, huh? So intent really is magic apparently…
Grewgills, please define “French culture.” Kindly avoid such truisms as “the culture of the people who live in France.”
Grewgills #403
Are you really incapable of understanding the difference between ‘most people in this country agree with me’ and ‘all the people I know and talk to agree with me’? See, on one side we have people claiming that most/all French people understand the cartoons to be non/anti-racist. This claim calls for things like surveys, etc. On the other, we have people saying ‘I, as a French person (in many cases a French person of color), perceive these cartoons to be racist. Furthermore, so do lots of people I know.’ This is not a claim about anything the author does not have personal experience of, and thus does not require further evidence. On top of that, the fact that there are large numbers of people out there (as evidenced by all the voices saying, ‘hey, that shit’s racist (and misogynistic, and homophobic, but I digress)) who aren’t seeing the irony, just the racism, is, in and of itself, proof that even if the majority of French people do consider the cartoons non/anti-racist, they are incorrect.
It’s becoming very hard to believe you are arguing in good faith. On one side, we have mere assertions that French people in general will understand that it is the FN, not French Muslims or black people, who are the targets of cartoons caricaturing Mohammed, Muslims and black people. On the other, we have specific examples of French Muslims quoted as finding Charlie Hebdo hostile to them. Are you capable of understanding that general assertions unsupported by any evidence, and specific instances that contradict those assertions, are different things?
If they are familiar with French culture and French politics, they will be aware of the widespread and deep-seated racism within it, by no means confined to the far right.
@Esteleth 405 and others
Nick @ 354 (Sorry for the delayed response.)
Yes, absolutely.
I am saying something different:
Those journalists don’t (ideally) choose or adjust their viewpoints because those viewpoints will please their audience. (We might view that as pandering.) They don’t (ideally) withhold their viewpoints because their opponents might do x. (We might view that as folding or capitulating.)
You asked why, if the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists knew that their right-wing opponents would latch on to the Mohammed cartoons, wouldn’t the cartoonists reconsider? Not publishing the cartoons would be taking the reaction of their opponents into account in a way that, to them (I’m suggesting), was barred by their principles. Their exercise of free expression was more important to them than the fact that they’d be giving their opponents some means to use in ways counter to what the journalists wanted.
One analogy that comes to mind is the situation where right-wing opponents of gay rights use images from Pride events in ways that run counter to the interests of those participating in or organizing those events. The participants and organizers obviously know that’s going to happen. We could ask, similarly, why they don’t reconsider what they are doing. Obviously, the situations are different but the principle of not considering what your opponents might or likely will do in exercising those rights and responsibilities is essentially the same.
This is why Nick Gotts and others like myself keep asking your to shut up your opinion, and show us evidence from third parties that what you claim is the case. Your failure to do so, screams at us you know you are wrong.
And if you are wrong, why should anybody pay any attention to your drivel.
#408
Grewgills
Uh, if you aren’t saying the former, what’s the point of saying the latter?
You don’t even have to be French anymore to understand the intended targets, so many people are clamoring about how it’s aimed at the right wing so punching up by aiming down is totes cool. But that doesn’t change the racist tropes and how French people are calling out Charlie for being problematic (at best). And still, people from other cultures can still critique it, otherwise everyone might as well take their ball and go the fuck home. Obviously culture isn’t that big a barrier either since plenty French (usually the oppressed that no one listens to) are saying the same damn things. Of course, it’s the whining tone-troll whites up in arms about their feel-good-yet-still-racist satire gaining so much attention, giving the negative perspectives more traction as well, ironically holding free speech signs in one hand while trying to silence “SJWs” with the other. That is the context in which you’re saying “But the French get who’s REALLY harmed by this” and why people are giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming you actually have a point.
So instead of just saying we got it wrong, what is your point? Or is it just No-Shit Sherlock day for you?
————————————-
Jeff
Except the reason Charlie works so well for the right-wing is because it continues harm against their oppressed targets. If Charlie did it in a way that didn’t cause splash damage, you’d have a point. The problem isn’t that right-wingers can make it work for them, it’s that even without right-wingers trying to Charlie cartoons further their racist, sexist (etc) agenda. It’s not at all like Gay Pride, which doesn’t harm the community and actually does some good. It takes effort to twist that into something negative. It’s more like playing for one team so badly people are making jokes that you’re really batting for the other side. Though that fails in one way: no ones denied Charlie cartoonist claims of being liberal, just that they’re trying to help their cause in ways that are backfiring.
——————————————–
Ah yes, when liberals have the morals of South Park. Personally, I love this suggestion from a submitter to Yo, Is This Racist?:
Meanwhile people will say this is bad taste while spreading shit around that smears the Other (Muslims and POC that “look Muslim”) without a wif of realization because their noses are compartmentalized from their brains. (Alternatively, if the broken science in that metaphor makes you itch, substitute…”stuffed with privileged snot”.)
@Nerd 410
There were multiple links in the thread where this argument began to French people saying exactly that. Do I need to post those other people’s links in every comment to satisfy you? Given comments you directed at me earlier, I presume you read that thread and so should have seen those links.
@JAL 411
My argument was in counter to the contention (made the day after the murders) that CH fostered an environment that increased support for the far right in France (FN) and the burning of mosques. My point* was/is that CH was much more complicated than that. Its intended targets were far right and religious. That was understood in France and so any (IMO small) effect CH had was mixed. Given the targets of the cartoons and the editorial content it isn’t so likely that they moved people towards the right wing in general and FN in particular. No evidence whatsoever has been given to support the contention that CH fostered an environment that moved people to support FN or to burn mosques. Evidence has been given that people in France found some of the cartoons bigoted. People keep acting as ifs showing that some (even many) people in France found the images bigoted proves that CH moved people towards right wing extremism or burning mosques. The thing is those are not the same things.
Some are acting as though arguing that the cartoons are complicated and send multiple messages is tantamount to claiming that the images had no racist or sexist elements. Some of those same people claim I am the one making simplistic 1:1 comparisons. The irony seems to be lost on them.
I have repeatedly stated that robbed of their original context they serve no good purpose and indeed do harm and I in no way support republishing them in some misguided effort to support free speech. My point is indeed considerably more limited than the point made in the original post by PZ and in my original post in this thread I said I felt he went too far.
* considerably smaller than what people are acting like it is
@JAL 411
Complicated? What’s complicated about punching down by liberal whites? Are you in the prep course for Social Justice 101 or something?
Stop bleating about intented targets, that’s not the problem and doesn’t matter.
(“Fun fact”: in America if you really intended to bolster the right, just keep using the term welfare queen depicted as a white woman, that’ll really drive up the racism if you don’t want to get your hands dirty drawing/showing black women in a racist way.)
It had a mixed effect? Only if you think punching down is mixed, I suppose. It makes white liberals feel better would be the positive effect I can think of, which given the “colorblind” nonsense is actually a bad thing. It’s not like the world really needs more blacks=monkeys artwork nor yuppie racism.
It’s not hard to understand how people say those cartoons fostered a racist environment, it’s like people cracking rape jokes supports rape culture. Sure, I have no “proof” that someone heard that joke and went and raped someone else. However, it does perpetuate rape myths and the “moderate middle” (not the anti-rape feminist nor the “legitimate rape” right-wing but the “rape is wrong but look at that woman’s shirt!” majority) do lend cover and support to rapist in rape culture like “haha look at that barbarian Muhammed” does in anti-Muslim bigotry.
You don’t really get social justice and it’s critiques do you?
Because you’re claiming it’s complicated yet clamoring for a study to prove people went “I saw the cartoon and burned a mosque” and playing stupid, like we haven’t had these 101 discussions before. You’re the one pretending like “But the intended target!!” makes a difference. We get where they were aiming and how it’s anti-religious but it changes nothing. Just because we’re anti-religion doesn’t mean it’s all gravy and it doesn’t matter how it’s done.
And for someone who claims “I’m not saying it isn’t racist” you seem very concerned over repeating the cartoonist intent and saying the cartoons are not all bad in France.
Now are you going to continue to play stupid or are you going to say The New Yorker’s Obamas as terrorists is “mixed and complicated because Americans get the intent?
Or are you still hung up on your parenthecial “made the day after the murders” like that fucking matters.
Damn, for someone who complains about taste so much you’re spending a lot of time defending racist cartoons. And yes, placing white liberals joy at racist depictions aimed at the right-wing more important than the harm perpetuating the status quo is defending racist cartoons.
Because what other good does it do? “See how racist they are?” by creating something also racist just makes more racism and lends the effect that it’s okay when liberals do it. FFS, the inspiration for the cartoon was racist personal emails being leaked. Of course, they’re racist. That’s proof enough. Drawing it out has no positive effect. And if you wanted to show the right-wingers see Muslim women as welfare queens, you could’ve done a million different things like showing one panel the truth and the other what the right-wing sees or making glasses or something part of the cartoon instead of say “this is how they see Muslim women”.
Is it the numbers that throw you off like saying rape jokes contribue to an environment where 1 in 6 American women are raped in their lifetime, or or that the Obama as Muslim Terrorist cover contributes to an environment where the FBI reported 105 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2008 (which the FBI is notoriously understated in such stats) or do you also have a problem with the general statements as well?
If the former, that’s just plain stupid and a personal hang up to work on. If the latter, you’re going to have a lot of problems with Pharyngula’s commentariat to where I suggest lurking moar or fucking off.
Yeah, we fucking know already. Do you want a fucking cookie? That doesn’t change what I said above in any way and I never said otherwise. Are you going to start tone trolling now since you’re an ally and really on our side, that’s what this paragraph feels like.
Further to JAL’s excellent points: if you are not part of a given marginalised group, but you find yourself saying, “Well, it’s racist in a way, but it’s okay because Reasons!” – congratulations! You’ve just experienced privilege!
Because the ability to argue over the fine gradations of whether a given cartoon is racist, and what isotropes of bigotry went into the cartoon? That’s pure privilege. You will never be the one paying the price if you’re wrong. You’re gambling with someone else’s dignity, or sometimes their life, while risking nothing of your own. Maybe you’re right, this time. But morally, how do you justify taking that risk and still sleep at night?
How, in fact, are you better than a Wall Street grand thief at that point?
Fine, nothing ever has more than one message or more than one potential effect and any depiction that is at all racist or sexist erases every other possible effect. It can only push opinions in one direction. No one could see it differently than you or react in a different way than you. Because that’s how the world works.
As for not risking anything of their own, 12 dead beg to differ.
I will obviously never change your mind, nor will you change mine on this count, so I’m done.
bye-bye, Grewgills
I am sad that you learned nothing.
CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice
Thank you and you have an excellent point of your own there that’s too true.
—————–
Grewgills
That’s what you took away? I smell white male privilege in the air. But if you don’t even want to attempt to answer my questions or do some research of your own into social justice, so be it. Your loss.
Except we were talking about racism and they were targeted over blasphemy by terrorists. It’s POC that will pay the price for their racism. The depictions of Muhammad didn’t have to be racist and falling back on such tropes, especially to be provocative, speaks of being lazy creatively and yeah, possibly racist. Their work definitely was at any rate.
This response in particular smacks of lionizing people and their work after tragedy reflexively. Perhaps you should come back and look at my examples later.
Well, then yay! Bye-bye.
I really only skimmed the last 50 or so comments, but I want to make explicit two things that I’m not sure everyone is getting:
1. “Left wing” and “right wing” in the U.S. may not exactly correspond to what those things mean in France (and the same holds, to a greater or lesser degree, for any other two countries); not just in the sense of “the American left is center-right in Enlightened places” but even the actual left in the U.S. is likely only in the same general area as the left in another country, not necessarily agreeing on all the same points.
2. Even within the U.S., I would say right-wing-ness and bigotry are merely comorbid; neither really requires the other (e.g., the Republicans have long been the party of big business, but only in the last few generations have they attempted to appeal to racists).
#411 JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness
I missed your response till right now:
I’m giving my take on what I think their (the Charlie Hebdo journalists’) perspective was—from our perspective, of course, their actions are mystifying, which is why the question was raised. (Obviously, I don’t know what they thought but I’m just giving one plausible [I think] interpretation and I’m not saying that their perspective, if it was like that, was right.)
From their perspective, either they didn’t perceive splash damage or (I think) more likely, they didn’t construe their mission as (primarily) helping liberal causes—in which case they wouldn’t have cared that much about splash damage. (I realize you were making a separate analogy but I think they would have scoffed at the thought of being on any liberal “team.”)
My take is that their right to speak was more important than any individual liberal cause—or, put differently, maybe their liberal cause was their right to speak—and to speak in ways that they weren’t supposed to. Their official motto, after all, was Bête et Méchant (“Dumb and Nasty”). I think, for these journalists, the freedom of expression was more of an end than we might usually think of it.
Right, hence my South Park reference.
And it makes the people who quote him look even less intelligent.
Don’t worry, I have a long experience of being seen as less intelligent or less able for the wrong reasons.
The point was whether it is possible to be interpreted as racist while clearly aiming to be otherwise. The Lenny Bruce quote has a good fit for this point.
I was not necessarily arguing that it was the best approach to fight racism.
The discussion was really about the importance of context, and it also seems to me that Lenny Bruce context has evolved a lot since these times.
Going back to the benefit of having contextual knowledge, I’ll comment on that too:
first, the word clearly lost none of its power to hurt in all the time it was used routinely, so Lenny Bruce’s prediction is utter ignorant crap; and second, even if one epithet could be de-fanged, the bigots would just find another epithet to use in its place. That’s what haters do, and Lenny Bruce’s failure to understand this kinda puts a dent in his “perceptive truth-telling comic genius” image.
My current home place must not exist then. The strict literal equivalent of the n-word, while not of common use (but still used somewhat frequently) in the local language (Kréyol, a slave born mixed language people speak in addition to French), has mostly lost the potential harm it was originally bearing. You can use it even as a non-Black people. Only the tone will make it offensive or not. If I say “Ou sé on bel négrès menm menm menm!” (literally translating as “you are a very beautiful n-word [woman]”, this will be interpreted as very flirtatious and courteous). Another example: last christmas a long-time Brasilian immigrant at our table said something along the lines “Manjé Nèg sé bon onlo bon menm” (i.e., “n-word food is always very good”) and it was a compliment to the cook (a Haitian woman who smiled at the guy and translated in French for a third people who did not understand –but in French the word is as loaded as it is in English). This is because the word evolved through its use toward a positive self reference and concept of identity.
So can words be defanged? Actually, yes.
Are bigots just going to find another epithet to use in its place? Depends. Guess they might also run out of words.
Want another story about context, languages and racism? I like stories, and I’m in a sharing mood today.
This is another French oversea territory. French Polynesia. In the local culture, “Black” colour (ere’ere) is entirely synonymous for something completely idiotic and dumb, and shameful. Any time you refer to something as black, this will result in frank and long laughs. (A note passing by, as I happened to wear black clothes regularly, I was first seen as friendly to dumbness –please refer to the opening sentences of this comment, –it changed somewhat later as I was nicknamed “the guy who comes down the mountain” and for some reason gained instant sympathy for that characteristic). When I realised the inner cultural correlate for my beloved colour, I wondered how Polynesian were dealing with Black people. The answer is that they don’t see them as Black, they quite reverentially refer to Black people as “Siki” (from an apparently famous boxer at the time they first saw someone of African origin, thanks for TV!). If you are not aware of this (and it might take some times to get at the fun derived from Blackness) but manage to discuss it in maohi, you will have people laughing any time you refer to “Black people” (i.e., the idiots). You could interpret this as racism as long as you don’t understand that you are not speaking about the same things. At all.
Want another story about context, languages and racism? I like stories, and I’m in a sharing mood today.
I once walked in a small Amazonian town from Paranà with a friend’s dog (that kind of dog that thought he was human, or that humans were just dogs like him –very friendly but wildly disobedient –Yeah! an anarchist dog!). Understandably, usually people in the street assumed it was my dog (though he just decided to follow me, I couldn’t do anything against his will), and they were often calling me to get him staying at distance –once again it makes sense that you don’t trust a dog you don’t know, for it might have had an aggressive owner or be naturally dangerous. So I was frequently calling him back on my side when he was with me. This dog was Black (you would have guessed, an anarchist dog!), and the owner’s friends soon called it “Negão”. I’m no Brasilian Portuguese linguist expert, but as I understand it that translates into “Blackey”, though of course one of the meaning is also n-word in some circumstances (yeah, context!). Back to the story, one day I called him to my side, and a guy next to me turned back with wide open eyes. Of course, he was a “people of colour”, and I immediately understood what was happening (guess about that shame I was feeling about this event). Then the guy realised I was calling the dog and suddenly it completely lost the drama and he went back on his way. There are other words in Brasilian to convey the idea that something is Black, like “preto”, and all the words can be understood as vehicules for racism in one way, or be completely innocuous, depending on what? Context.
So are bigots just going to find another epithet to use in its place? Depends. Guess they might also run out of words. Think Brasil… This is a country which probably has the lowest intrinsic rate of racism (it certainly exists there, but there are also reasons why this is so uncommon).
Want another story about context, languages and racism? I like stories, and I’m in a sharing mood today .
Poland. Shortly after the fall of communism. (yeah, I’m that old!). My host ‘father’ and I had no common language so we could barely speak together once I foamed my sparse Russian in pain, and he was frustated, even if his kids would translate to him. He always had pretended to speak French and his family mocked him that day the lie was spotted. At some point, my friends were doing whatever whatever. He came to sit next to me. He looked straight into my eyes, pointed to my bare arm and exclaimed “Negro!”. (Do you really need a translation?). Yeah, I definitely was the closest thing to an African he had seen in his life. (Please refer to the opening sentences of this comment). But he was not willing to hurt and having experienced this situation since decades, I’ve grown a thick skin (a collateral consequence of this story is please you should believe it when people of colour speak about white privilege, even if it seems difficult to grasp this is an experience that is going very far and every single day of your life you know it will happen). He was just willing to declare victory over his language skills, which he did.
I am not going to declare anything myself. The whole issue about the CH cartoons is based on miscontextualisation. But is it the Poli-sh version or is it the Poly-nesian one? Seems like the answer may not be clear cut and somewhat depends on the cultural context. (I also like this argument because it is sort of a strike against the core of civilization clash theory: Western cultural variations are in my experience sometimes greater than other Western-Non Western gaps).
Some comments in this thread suggest that some people are satisfied with single data points arguments, like the previous contributor that is arguing for racism at CH (have you considered this answer to the allegation? Here: http://toohotforjacobin.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-charlie-is-racist-then-i-am-by-zineb.html). I wish single-data-point-satisfied people will consider my humble lone one. Yes, some people of colour read Charlie Hebdo. Yes questioning everything is not only fair but mandatory to healthy approaches (note that plural?) to difficult questions. But please also keep in mind that creationists are questioning actual scientists and tell me how they look? The media involved on this cartoon issue have not been particularly wise or working hard to get the facts straight.
I’m pretty sure that all those who say “if you had known them” didn’t know them either.
Cabu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabu) worked as a cartoonist for the single Youth TV program during the 80’s in France. I admit that I was bored at that time because I was most interested by the cooking lesson that was following his live cartoons streaming. He’s been part of my kid life though. Later, I’ve seen his cartoons in the journals I was reading (CH of course, but also Le canard enchaîné, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9). That’s just decades of enjoying his work.
I’ve met him IRL three times.
First at a convergence meeting between the Greens and various Alternative Left groups. I opened him the door (at the Green Party office building –please note that I am not affiliated to any of the political groups mentionned, but UP) he was arriving at the same time than Dominique Voynet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Voynet).
The second time was at a demonstation against the war against Iraq in 2002. I was selling the outlet of the Pacifist Union (UP, no available wiki page in English, but it was founded by Sébastien Faure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Faure). Cabu had been a member of the Pacifist Union in the beginning of his carreer, so he went to talk to his former colleagues and I was next to them. I shaked a hand and had the classical weird discussion of shy admirative people. Amazingly, I came to pacifism and UP because of a famous naturalist, Théodore Monod (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_Monod), which I also happened to meet, in Paris, near the Natural History Museum in 1998.
I met Cabu another time during a demonstration in favor of “irregular” immigrants (mouvement des sans papiers).
I also happened to listen to Cabu’s son songs, Mano Solo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_Solo), which I met once in Paris when he was walking on the Seine borders. Some of Mano Solo’s songs strongly express his love for Paris as a multicultural city (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy8jb5fsejc or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPng4wFHfrM). He was also very involved in fights for equal rights to immigrants.
So no, I did not know them in the sense that I had dinner at their home, but our ways crossed again and again, and they were definitely parts of my own lifelong identity construct. So yeah, the murders at Charlie Hebdo were a huge strike on people that have been part of who I am. The kind of event that pushes you on the irreversible way toward loneliness, when the last touch of childhood is gone forever.
What I got wrong, what I will try to reformulate better but might still be wrong about, and apologies. (With regard to last paragraph in comment #276).
As a foreword, I must admit that I have been deeply affected by the murders (see a previous comment), so please understand I could only have been oversensitive because of the mourning process, and have let emotional processes take over rational behavior and discussion.
Secondly, I was born and grew up in France, so please take this terrible handicap into account. The collateral consequence of that is that I suck at speaking and further writing or reading of foreign languages (in that context, English). I might be able to deceive enough that you would not notice, but I’m still grossly uncolloquially able to get subtle and get subtleties. Not to speak of grammar.
In the following answer to comments, please let me approach the former issue acronymically and with enough grace so as not to be hammered straight out of my innate clumsiness and inner clamsiness. IMNSIUC will indicate simply that “I’m not sure I understand correctly”, IMNSIUAA will stand for Stanfordian “I’m not sure I understand at all” and ITOOUICBMTINM to mean that I tried first to consider myself guilty but the hypothesis didn’t help much so maybe the confusion arised at some other level (which I won’t take as granted neither because I may also be even more confused than I think I am).
Granted, I’ll now give it a try.
#281 Jackie
IMNSIUC. I never claimed I did not care about racism (that would be rather masochistic since I’m on the receiving end). I can spot hate racism from clumsy bias, and they are not exactly hurting the same. You can still grow out of diffuse normative ignorance, but it’s much harder to face deliberate hatred.
Hum… Like always and nobody else? You did just use it right now. I certainly must have misused the term. I’m giving my thought a second try at the end, so as to answer the reactants at large.
#283 Jackie
IMNSIUAA. Is it a meme or something like that? Note that I wouldn’t necessarily refuse one. But sorry, I do not have enough context to understand. Please educate me.
#286 Jackie
Sorry, that’s not what I meant. Let me reformulate:
Case 1: one should not publish a cartoon mocking the ridicule of far right extremists thinking because of the risk that people of colour might be hurted if they don’t understand it is about extreme right cluelessness.
(Please note that it might be a bit off the wall to grant immigrants with the complete inability to understand the cartoon –provided they assessed it and not only vaguely heard of it. My own experience, from which I derive the opinion that they perfectly have the skills to get it straight in context, is that many immigrants/people of colour understand it and even enjoy it occasionally. My sample might well be biased as they were mostly friends and acquaintances, but I think that fraction that didn’t get it are mostly those who never had a close look).
Case 2: one should not publish a picture of a breast-feeding woman because of the risk that people of hypocritical prude might feign disgust because it’s best than expressing their actual and ludicrous lust and confusion about simple and natural things of life. Cluelessness is here the end-receptacle instead of the prime target.
In both case one should not publish something by fear of hypothetical collateral damages, none of them equating in severity, intensity, and potential harm. That’s why I used the word “parallel”, for which I meant that the processes at stake were similar (preventive action detrimental to end-targets). Sure, the mathematical homology holds that these would equate, or “totes just like”, if the lines are confounded, but that special case is not the most interesting, both mathematically and analogically speaking. If I were thinking the two things were equal, I wouldn’t have written “parallel”.
#287 Jackie
ITOOUICBMTINM. What are you talking about? I’m terribly confused. The only way I find something that makes sense is under the typo hypothesis (“bet”=”bed”), but frankly I’m not sure if that’s what you mean. Even if that’s your intent, I’d be expecting a longer flirt before the invite, so that I could manage an answer that would still secure the possibility of friendship.
#288 Giliell
No complaint. I must have screwed up my writing because several people got this impression. Honest mistake. I reformulate at the end of the comment.
IMNSIUC. Irony? My turn to be “totally surprised”.
I tried to understand a comment by ssf9, who reformulated the thought and we then agree completely on this (I wasn’t sure what was the point at first, but my own misunderstanding is fixed now).
Unless you really think that women and pocs can’t understand second degree, and that’s why they would necessarily think cartoons were racist (I’m sorry if 90% of my friends do and don’t, respectively).
IMNSIUAA. Aren’t we having a discussion?
I apologise if my answers come out so slowly. Actually, it’s because I’m used to pharyngulate during work-breaks (and that’s an institutional connection), because on evenings I have housekeeping duties and kids charming. But when I made that quote of Lenny Bruce, this resulted in denied access and I therefore “self-banned” from that thread. (French laws on racism and anti-Semitism are very strict and prevail over freedom of speech –it might strike Americans as a curious constraint, but on the other hand Europe experienced genocide not that far ago so that the issue is strongly enforced). (This at least point out to the fact that the cartoons are at least not “legally” racist in France).
I don’t think we disagree here (or less wordily, I think we agree). Their opinions sometimes happen to be quite accurate, even on things they don’t experience, like privilege of not experiencing it.
IMNSIUC. When I write “I’m not exactly from the Fraternity(TM)”, this means I don’t identify as white. So if I tell you that some shit isn’t racist, what do you do?
I’m afraid that French muslims telling that CH was racist might either have not really looked up the journal (and might be getting their opinion from other sources), or are saying this because of their religion, not because of poc-ness.
I wouldn’t be too confident that their assessment is really not rooted in their hurted religious feelings. Some French people of Arab descent enjoy reading Charlie Hebdo. One thing for sure is that they are not only secular but also strongly atheistic. The fact that they are only a few stems from CH readership being ridiculously small.
This also doesn’t mean that not 100% people will not find it racist. Some will, some won’t, just as some CH readers can actually be racist even if the vast majority isn’t.
According to you, how many American Catholics have been offended at crackergate?
And I’ve never assumed you were. I’m definitely not anti-American anyway (in which I strongly depart from my average compatriot).
Just as I answered comments but was mostly commenting on things external to Pharyngulation (more precisely, I’ve specifically expressed feeling before the way American media have done a poor work on the issue).
If anybody felt like I commented on people here, my guilt. Apologies.
Better now?
Not yet. Later, if you’re patient. Do you mind if I make digressions on other cartoons whenever I’ll comment upon?
Well, I said you were right. Do you mind if I change my mind during the course of our discussion? Or if I realise your argument is actually quite convincing? Or my initial wording clueless?
Yes, I happen to be wrong. Happens all the time.
Let me reformulate here, because, yes, I wasn’t in the best possible circumstance. You have a very good point on avoiding idolatry. You have a very good point on not letting anything or anyone immune from critics.
On the other hand, it was easier for you to be right on this than for me. Because, I am personally affected by the event under discussion. Because what got me upset is that in my cultural context, you don’t shit on somebody who’s just been murdered, especially if that’s completely wrong (that is, at least you try to have the decency of having the facts straight beyond any reasonable doubt before you spit on the dead). YOU, didn’t do that, but some media did. In an awful way.
Sorry about offending you with the pigs narrative. I was very emotional and it dropped out spontaenously. In my own underground referential and punk context, pigs are anything fascist. This originally refers to Nazis (I perfectly know that racism and fascism are different concepts, but they are also so strongly correlated, intertwined and comorbid…), and the tagline incorporate any kind of supporters of oppressive philosophies, including radical religious bigots of any strand to the worse, and even sexist… pigs.
It’s very kind of you and very gracious to be able to resist from dehumanizing… well… pigs. I cannot. I am able to accept that one can always find excuses to what people are, but my inner self has a very unflexible threshold where people that intentionally kill someone lose any respect from my side. It doesn’t mean that lose their human statut, even if I cannot see them other way.
As a consequence, I’m telling you one further thing where I feel French people just suck today. It’s that I haven’t seen anyone yet making the point that the three murderers should not have been killed. Total silence on that, as if everybody was agreeing or was satisfied with this outcome. As shitty as is what they did, the only thing that would have made me ready to forgive was if they had the opportunity to realise the horror of their act. And that can only be done if they had lived longer.
You see, I still expect pigs to be human beings.
# ssf9
Well, don’t apologise, this is misunderstanding on my part as well. As I said, it’s not as if I could understand as if I were an English speaking native.
We are completely on the same page here. And CH readers were not laughing because they were not concerned. If there’s anything one can say, it is that CH readers are very concerned about racism. They are radical anti-racist and anti-fascist at the very core.
#299 Crip Dyke
Yeah, very nice story! I’m sorry I’m not that versed in English slang. I hadn’t taken the time to translate all these words and the meaning was over my… Thanks, I learned something!
#390 rq
That pun is so well framed that I’m still laughing about it. That’s excellent! Also, thanks for punching up. I’m near K.O. with a single sentence… :-)
I had less grace and much lower smart in one of my previous comments, but I still hope you realise that your point about “worldwide” context is not as neat as seems at first. There’s no such thing as a special French context within a uniform worldwide context. Which does not mean you’re wrong neither.
#279 Raging Bee
You’re completely right. Yep, I’m sometimes lazy, especially on short time frames.
Let me reformulate (and please note I might still be completely wrong about the point. Also, it’s not something I would obviously stand for in the arena. I’m really soft on this).
I tried to express intuites as to why the debate arised first.
My first hypothesis was about second degree, and I was completely wrong about it. Sure, CH hebdo humour is complete second degree and completely racist under first degree analysis (I concede it might also retain potential for collateral damage even with a complete second degree approach, which is what people here at Phary have been arguing –I understand but don’t necessarily agree 100% but let’s keep it for later or never).
I still let it open that diverse cultural backgrounds may vary in appreciation for second degree. The very fact that one does not investigate the possibility of second degree but is satisfied with and only rely on first impression is indicative that second degree is almost never an option at use. Please note that being appreciative is also different from being able to understand. But that might just be the curse of current journalism state that wonks on sensationalist approach of information, with the aim to sell at the cost of actually being correct.
My second hypothesis was that even second degree appreciation might not explain the gap. Why not political correctness then? This might still be wrong, I don’t know. Since I was making the point as to how media dealt with the issue, I was specifically aiming the argument as to whether this reflects general/average tendencies under cultural influence. Maybe. Maybe not. Opinion doesn’t imply unflexibility (ok, clear enough?). The way the media dealt with the CH cover following the murders seems indicative that the hypothesis is at least partly at play.
Please let me claim that PC is completely neutral. It is good or bad in consequences, relative to one’s goal. PC levels differ between levels of use, i.e. between personal interactions to populations. Defined as the deliberate choice of the least potentially hurting alternative, PC theoretically range from 1 (never hurt at any cost) to 0 (always maximize damage as a side effect of prime consideration). The general way I first made this hypothesis was at an imprecise and general population level, which means intuiting on sample average (and a very low and informal sample btw, therefore I won’t cut my hand to prove the point), and please I’m perfectly aware that individuals are often outside the average expectation of such a theoretical construct (see above the allusion to anti-Americanism).
I think average PC differs between French and American people on that scale. I’m not going to scratch for details or make up numbers, I think the argument can be made (even if it proves wrong a posteriori) without assuming the gap is large or not-so, and whether populations overlap is important or not.
That it differs is probable. Which is best is up to you. I’d say that individually PC is a good thing, for it allows greater tolerance space and possibilities of dialogue. The very fact that French people are perceived as rude by American may be the result of indeed a lower gross niceness of French. Whether PC is the best strategy at greater levels is left to your inclination. Tendency to think of CH cartoons as going too far and causing hurt is leaning to more PC in this case. At this point I’d lean the other way, that I’ll maybe develop in a further comment (if the discussion restarts, seems down these days). That may well be cultural, at different levels of cultural layers: specifically French, specifically far left, specifically interaction between the too.
Well, that’s probably better now, but I knew it would take some time to come with. And I’m lazzy, aren’t I?
#280 Nick Gotts
“Demand not to offend at any cost” was my failed definition of PC, my bad.
As to your culinary comment on me, yes, I like to cook with wok and find it fits. Maybe “complete” is a bit too much, since I also cook with other ustensils.
When your idea of politically correct bigotry is pointed out to you, you still criticize those who are trying, unlike you, to solve the problem. Which requires the concept of inclusiveness. Your meanderings (tl;dr) appear upon scanning to not be inclusive, but rather defending being purposely offensive.
So, what is your real point in one concise paragraph?
#424
Sorry, who did I criticise?
(I think I didn’t criticise anyone other than media that portayed CH outlet as racist based on a quicked impression which was unfortunately wrong).
I must be really poor at writing, this is not what I mean.
Where did I defend being purposely offensive?
(other than making the case that CH was purposely aiming at criticising Far Right on a regular basis, despite the potential collateral damage. I defend their right to be offensive to far right, yes, but so what? I don’t have any bias toward PC, I’m often PC myself on many occasions –when I estimate some risk for something is greater)
How many words or sentences do you prefer?
Because I obviously failed with the short version, and maybe failed with the longer version. So I’m not sure any intermediate attempt would resolve anything.
#424
On the afterthought, please apply Hanlon’s razor to my comments:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Please consider taking on the opportunity to help me fix that.
You can call me a bigot, I hope that’s not the case. I sincerely don’t always understand (and I have to deal with it). I clearly don’t understand your comment (sorry). Your help is welcome.
I owe everybody an apology.
Thinking about reactions to my confuse comments, I have been really trying to get to the source of the obvious misunderstanding (that’s an understatement). Answers were confusingly weird to me.
This eventually led me back to Raging Bee comment #279, which I sincerely wish to thank heartfully to have pointed this out to me. I’m fortunate enough that I came to understand what was wrong (and so wrong!). Once again, many thanks Raging Bee, for understanding something was wrong (and illogical in some way), and for a formulation that was not too judgemental to me.
The expression PC in its current use (since the 80’s btw, I should have known…) is the poorest I could have chosen in thrying to formulate my initial thought. But now that I learned about it, I can only feel shame about it. Clearly nobody could understand what I was trying to say, and I completely realise how dissonant it might have been.
To my defense, its use in France is not always exactly the same as the original and commonest use that is found in the English world. and especially in the USA. In France, it is historically not especially targeting minorities, because “we” have our own relation to dealing with minorities, as Gilliel so rightfully put it (colourblind racism, see #1).
Amazingly, “PC” as an expression may originate from early French marxists in a completely different meaning as the one it eventually got through use. Maybe Gilliel know more about this, because she seems highly knowledgeable about French philosophers (the French wiki mentions Foucault and Derrida). For those who can, I encourage to read both French and English entries for PC in wikipedia (while the French page is messy, disorganised and not so good quality, it is interesting to see the meaning drift which led to numerous different understandings going sometimes in opposing directions).
So ok. I made a fool of myself.
I apologise to everybody.