The Cartoon Response
Bayle
Pods
Bayle wrote:
> Via Andrew Sullivan
>
> http://www.cagle.com/news/Muhammad/main.asp
Great link, but i'd rather talk about the weather.
Pods
Pods
fundamental importance, before it has started, surely betrays mind
boggling confusion. You're an Orwell fan, you must know that all voices
must be heard and especially those that wish to ignore the reality of
the situation. If i'm being generous, I can only suppose your
reluctance to debate is due to you're physical distance from Europe,
where radical Islam is knocking on the door ( come to think of it 9/11
was a big knock knock) and those who have drawn and published those
cartoon are now under police protection, in fear of their lives..
Where, also under police protection, people walk around with banners
which directly incite murder. Martha, it's beyond satire. You really
need to look at yourself and decide what you believe in.
Pods
Martha Bridegam
Pods, I gather you're talking about what I said in the
comments at
http://horizon.bloghouse.net/archives/000760.html . Maybe
you want to read it again: you assume I'm refusing to accept
the seriousness of the conflict and/or denying the validity
of the various parties' indignation. Actually, no, you're
quite right that the conflict is serious, and the various
parties have reason to be indignant, and there wouldn't be a
conflict over the cartoons if they had not brought
preexisting repressed political tensions into the open.
HOWEVER, this whole cartoon conflict is nevertheless a
distraction, a luxury -- something that leaders *on all
sides* are conveniently finding important in order to evade
the greater difficulty of genuinely unavoidable problems
such as hunger and sickness.
If you ever spend extended time with a person who cannot
walk, or if, God forbid, such a disability ever happens to
you yourself, you will understand how foolish religious
indignation can seem from the perspective of a person who
cannot get to a faucet for a drink of water.
/M
Bayle
Martha Bridegam wrote:
> If you ever spend extended time with a person who cannot
> walk, or if, God forbid, such a disability ever happens to
> you yourself, you will understand how foolish religious
> indignation can seem from the perspective of a person who
> cannot get to a faucet for a drink of water.
>
> /M
Breathtaking.
ROBBIE
"Martha Bridegam" <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:Lj3Jf.33455$H71....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...
LAUGH OUT FUCKING LOUD!! OH GOD, OH CHRIST, OH ALLAH, OH BUDDAH! OH CRIKEY
LEAVE OFF, YOU FUCKING ROTTER YOU'RE KILLING ME! oh god rot me I'm seeing
things! NO! I really am! It's just *us* left with the spitwater beer at the
party, the last the people on thorazine in the day room, with the last three
Napoleon hats on! MARTHA *A* BRIDEGAM HAS TURNED INTO THE SINGING FUCKING
*NUN*!! ALL OF A SUDDEN NOTHING MATTERS! THE BIG STUFF DON'T MATTER
ANYMORE!! LET'S GET MACRO*BIOTIC*!! NOTHING MATTERS BUT THE SUFFERING BEFORE
MY EYES!! I *AM* MOTHER MILLETT OF CALCUTTA!!!
Oh fuck off fer chrise sake, willya? Or I'll become a Muggletonian.
ROBBIE - gotta love those *brown* fascists, maaaaaaaaaaaaaan
ROBBIE
"Bayle" <pete_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1140128570....@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
'Laugh? I nearly shat. I have not laugh so much since aunty mabel caught her
left tit in the mangle...*'
*Cook and Moore, 70s
Martha Bridegam
Unequal physical suffering *is* "the big stuff." It's the
central injustice that egalitarian political principles
oppose. Volunteer nurse-work in the absence of a decent
health care system is a slow, literal, inefficient way to
oppose injustice, but it's one way. Campaigning politically
for greater fairness -- e.g. for the aforementioned decent
health care system -- is another way to oppose injustice.
They're on a continuum.
Whereas a politics of religious indignation (or indignation
against religious indignation, for that matter) doesn't help
anyone except a few leaders.
/M
ROBBIE
>
> Unequal physical suffering *is* "the big stuff." It's the
> central injustice that egalitarian political principles
> oppose. Volunteer nurse-work in the absence of a decent
> health care system is a slow, literal, inefficient way to
> oppose injustice, but it's one way. Campaigning politically
> for greater fairness -- e.g. for the aforementioned decent
> health care system -- is another way to oppose injustice.
> They're on a continuum.
>
> Whereas a politics of religious indignation (or indignation
> against religious indignation, for that matter) doesn't help
> anyone except a few leaders.
>
> /M
One of the great tricks of Cultural Marxism (Political Correctness as it
used to be called) is what I call Abstract Emotionalism. To explain this I
would like you to imagine the pair of us out on the campaign trail. I make a
perfectly reasonable speech - based in reason, saying something like: the
implications of the cartoon furore, Islamic terrorism, murder (theo van
gogh) and the vandalism of Jewish cemetaries are alarming; Islam + the
Left's obstinate belief in multiculturalism will lead to sectarianism in the
cities and, where the authorities are committed to multiculturalism, a
creeping in of de facto sharia law. In short, free speech and liberty are
under threat.'
Then you make your speech: 'I saw a man dying in the street this morning.
Nothing much matters when you've seen that. You need a health care system
and don't sweat the racism of my colleague here.'
And you would get whoops and screeching applause and I would be called a
'fascist, man'. And that's why Latte Marxism has taken off so big: reason
out, emotion in. And in the USA you have the luxury of that outlook. I
laughed out loud sardonically at your religious indignation comments:
specious evasion, as usual.
ROBBIE
Pods
Martha, as I said, I can only assume you choose not to debate the
cartoons is because you're in the USA. Here, today, now, in Europe,
radical Islam is knocking on the door. And we euro weenies dont like it
one bit. I've tried to keep up to date on all the arguments pro/anti
publication of the cartoons and I conclude that it's a storm in a
Muslim teapot. Martha, everything you hold dear is shit. I reckon you
wont threaten to behead me because of my opinion. You're a nice person.
Pods
Bayle
Congrats. Perfect. A more succinct refutation I don't believe I've
seen. It should be required reading.
But I'd like to take another tack. The very idea of these spoiled
elites, these spoiled children of the American Ivy League - Harvard and
Penn - lecturing us common folk on misery makes me laugh. Seeing it
makes me puke. By what right or realm of reason have they the life
experience to even attempt to make such an argument. What have they
done other than write children's books? She sounds like a school girl.
I remember when Selene, after using her nursing experience to help
local Kurds, considered using her nursing skills in an attempt to help
them in Iraq. She was mocked by one of the anti-war zealots here on
ABGO. All the while our schoolmarm was lecturing an Orwell reading
mercenary, ok consultant, trying to help the Iraqis on his diet and of
course as always on morality.
And ironically, all but one of my mythical scientific papers were
written in an attempt to help victims of brain injury. I wonder if
Martha has ever seen someone with the top quarter of his skull and
brain removed, cut out like a piece of pie. From the middle top of his
head draw a straight line down to the middle of his forehead and then
make a right angle to his ear. All gone, the rest of the brain covered
with blue plastic. I spent 15 years doing this. After having helped
older illiterate people, most of whom were black and who couldn't read
"this" or "that", attempt to become literate, mere minutes from the Ivy
towers.
And I can only imagine your own life experience. I wouldn't even
attempt to critique it. But I do know that for me your writing has the
ring of truth, an authenticity far more valuable than any of the scores
of anal retentive words of a MAB or an AA. There are millions of them.
You are unique.
What I find so incredible is that people devoted to Orwell can have
this attitude. As if Orwell was some judgmental elitist, slumming in
order to lecture his lessers, enlightening them with pearls of wisdom
he brought back from vacation. As if Orwell couldn't distinguish the
bric-a-brac of his own personal existence, and the timeless misery of
the human condition, from the massive historical forces that threatened
his whole world. As if reading Orwell was some literary exercise
undertaken with tea and crumpets, the collected works open on the
table, the errata close by. Dare I eat a peach.
What we have here is the Players versus the Gentleman. The game has
been run so long by the dons and their protégés that they don't like
it when the outsiders question their expertise, especially on matters
of breeding. It's not that manners and politeness and good breeding are
not noble values. It's that in the guise of equality some of our newly
minted citizens are not expected to aspire to those same values. And
others, who criticize this condescending exclusion, are lectured by the
same dons on good manners. It's not good manners to point out that
there is a real moral difference between a cartoon and a real murder,
between showing Mohammad and threatening to kill someone. That
religious freedom does not extend to a fatwa calling for the murder of
a writer, that no religion has the right to tell an individual what he
can or can not depict in a visual image. It's not negotiable.
But it's more than manners. It's who decides. Of course the Gentlemen
believe they get to decide, those wearing the Harlequin caps, members
of the club. Martha's evasion is transparent. Changing the subject from
current historical dilemmas to timeless verities of the human condition
is an attempt to save the argument, in fact to save the whole corrupt
system. The conjunction of cartoons and murder would be laughable were
it not so deadly. Merely stating it indicates the savagery of our
enemies. Showing it proves it.
To undertake the verbal and written defense of freedom by going on the
attack a la Voltaire or Thomas Paine or even Orwell would be to lose
the game. Sorry George, depicting them as pigs violates the Holy Book.
Sorry Martha. Even you realize it's time to take a stand. Evasion is no
longer an option. It's time to bowl the bodyline.
Martha Bridegam
You don't think greater economic fairness would reduce the
popularity of religious excess?
/M
Martha Bridegam
I came in here for an argument. This is abuse.
/M
Ben Brumfield
Looks more to me like you're saying "let's play a game I can win,"
rather than arguing irrespective of the abuse. (Whether to bother is a
different issue altogether.)
>From a more charitable interpretation of this exchange:
We've all had personal experience make politics seem irrelevant and
insignificant. For example, it was years before I realized that a 27th
amendment had been added to the constitution while I wasn't paying
attention. We drop out for a while and then try to catch up when life
settles down.
But it's certainly unfair to demand the debate be halted in our
absence.
-Ben
Ben Brumfield
> popularity of religious excess?
Is there any evidence that it has? Outside the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict, haven't the most murderous religious fanatics been far
wealthier than the median?
Certainly the extremism in Europe doesn't correlate to a lack of
socialized medicine. You might even draw the opposite conclusion if
you were to compare the cartoon protests in the U.S. to those in the
U.K. Analyzed exclusively on that variable, the marchers carrying
"behead those who insult Islam" in the UK were really there because of
the NIH.
-Ben
-Ben
Martha Bridegam
I did what? I demanded what?
/M, genuinely not understanding.
ROBBIE
> >
>
> You don't think greater economic fairness would reduce the
> popularity of religious excess?
Not in the slightest. Some points:
1 Osama Bin Laden and his upper echelon colleagues are all upper-middle
class playboys who decided to become intensely conservative.
2 The Muslims who will kill the next batch of Londoners will be second
generation people who have never been poverty struck and who have been the
beneficiaries of greater economic fairness - much greater - simply by their
parents wanting to escape the serfdom of the Islamic world and make it big
here. Their children, rather like certian choleric Boston Irishmen, get
certain romantic ideas and - via the koran - a furious desire to punish the
debaucheries of the West. (I'm often tempted to ask the many Muslim
tobacconists I encounter their views about paying for their Mercedez-Benzes
with money made from selling alcohol and pornography - my old man maintains
that porn did not arrive in suburban tobacconists until the Indians and
Pakistanis cornered the market in them. AND BEFORE YOU think ill of my old
man I might add that he was - like most Englishmen - a natural
multiculturalist until the Left made it compulsory and declared its
intention of dismantling his country and culture - even the Germans couldn't
do that, not even with the V2 rocket that blew his house to pieces in
Peckham in 1944 (while he and his mother crouched in a Morrison shelter
*inside*) but sure enough, the Left got stuck in, and are slowly and surely
finishing the job off.
3) The 7th July terrorists were not from poverty. One of them left an
enormous sum in his will.
Marx sneered at Christianity, but Islam would have given him the night
sweats.
ROBBIE
ROBBIE
"ROBBIE" <word_c...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:dt72j1$7sp$1...@nwrdmz02.dmz.ncs.ea.ibs-infra.bt.com...
I'll also add that my old man was glad for Indian and Pakistani tobacconists
because their white forerunners were mostly rude and their shops rarely
open.
ROBBIE
Ben Brumfield
existence of a "decent
health care system" (by which she means a system more akin to that of
Northern Europe than to the U.S.A.) would "reduce the popularity of
religious excess." Looking at the religious excess in question and
the healthcare systems in the countries involved quite obviously does
not support that correlation.
-Ben
Ben Brumfield
Near as I can tell, your comments about healthcare both here and on
Horizon are either:
1) a crie de coeur from someone whose recent experience of suffering
has made debates about freedom of expression seem insignificant --and
which are impossible to disagree with civilly without looking like a
heartless jerk,
2) a serious political assertion that the religious extremism embodied
in the reaction to the cartoons is correlated to and caused by economic
inequality as exemplified by the U.S. healthcare system, or
3) a cynical attempt to shut down the discussion by mimicing #1,
trotting out an emotionally charged story unrelated to the argument in
the knowledge that anyone who continues to debate the point will look
like a heartless jerk.
I prefer to think that your inital comments were #1, and only the
response of ROBBIE and Bayle led you to #2, which is -- though this is
debatable -- obviously untenable.
Perhaps there's a fourth interpretation of this whole exchange you'd
like to offer? Or -- getting my hopes up here -- perhaps you'd like to
address your political assertion in the branch thread?
-Ben
Martha Bridegam
OK:
The cri de coeur becomes genuine following each visit to the
neighbor with the painful medical condition. In the lulls
between the visits, I start arguing here on more abstract
grounds, trying to present a consistent perspective but
looking at the issues a little more coldly. Then I go over
there again and she's howling in pain just trying to sit up,
and abstract arguments about free speech begin to seem
beside the point. So I come home and post something intense
again. Yes, I can see where it's getting difficult to follow.
Ironically, the person in question gets her mind off the
pain by listening to the radio a lot, especially political
arguments on talk shows.
So I'm not sure what this all goes to show but maybe it
helps to explain where I've been coming from.
Maybe sometimes the personal shouldn't be the political.
/M
Martha Bridegam
P.S. I never did claim free speech issues didn't matter.
Some of you read my comments that way, but I didn't say
that. I said there are more useful things to do in this
world than yelling and shoving about a bunch of cartoons.
That's a different statement./M
Martha Bridegam
>
>> Certainly the extremism in Europe doesn't correlate to a lack of
>> socialized medicine. You might even draw the opposite conclusion if
>> you were to compare the cartoon protests in the U.S. to those in the
>> U.K. Analyzed exclusively on that variable, the marchers carrying
>> "behead those who insult Islam" in the UK were really there because of
>> the NIH.
>
> BECAUSE OF [emphasis added] the" National Institutes of Health, which is
> not even a 'health care system' at all but a medical research facility
> -- and an agency of the _United States_ government?
>
> Are you saying that medical research in the US is somehow _causing_
> marchers in the UK to protest about Danish cartoons???
>
> cheers,
>
> Henry
I don't think that's what Ben was saying, but maybe you want
to wait for him to explain. Far as I know, however, he was
just reacting to what I said first.
What I started off saying, anyhow, was that the need for a
better U.S. health system was *one example* of a problem
that would not be solved by spending a lot of time yelling
about cartoons. The example of inadequate U.S. health care
was just a subject on which I happened to feel indignant at
the time. I might just as well have picked the need for a
better public transit system in central Wales, i.e.
dysfunctional Welsh bus schedules are not improved by
yelling about cartoons either.
Somewhere along the way I backed into an argument that
people in a more egalitarian society would be less likely to
give themselves over to religious zealotry. I do happen to
think that's true but I can't prove it. Better health care
was, again, my arbitrarily chosen example of a more
practical goal than the publication or non-publication of
cartoons. I don't really know if better U.S. health care, or
more logical Welsh bus schedules, would cause people to riot
less about cartoons. Possibly not.
At this point, while We As A Society do of course have a
Moral Duty to protect Free Speech against excessive Yelling
About Cartoons, I can't see that the few of us in this
increasingly odd conversation have any moral duty to keep
arguing here about the virtues of arguing or not arguing
about yelling about cartoons. But it's fine by me if y'all
want to go ahead and keep arguing about arguing if you feel
like it.
Anyhow, as Fafblog says, "God doesn't read the funnies."
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/god-doesnt-read-funnies-what-if-its.html
/M
ROBBIE
>
> What I started off saying, anyhow, was that the need for a
> better U.S. health system was *one example* of a problem
> that would not be solved by spending a lot of time yelling
> about cartoons.
Your rhetorical trick here is - GUESS WHAT? - sarcastic reduction. 'Yelling
about cartoons' completely hides the ramifications and implications of the
furore. Congratulations, you are well on the way to becoming that which you
surely did not want to become: an apologist for fascism.
ROBBIE
Pods
people in a more egalitarian society would be less likely to
give themselves over to religious zealotry. I do happen to
think that's true but I can't prove it.
Is I understand it, radical Islamism and consequently its hangers on,
have absolutely no interest whatsoever in egalitarianism - "Freedom go
to Hell" etc. Yes, they're a minority, but they managed to get the
British Home Secretary to condemn the cartoons.
Pods
Pods
>British Home Secretary to condemn the cartoons.
Sorry, that should be Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw.
Pods
ROBBIE
"Pods" <vane...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140347740.6...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Yes, but Martha's idea is you *make* them interested though show and tell -
like taking clockwork mice into the Brazilian jungle.
ROBBIE
Pods
http://www.ivillage.co.uk/beauty/bodybasics/remove/articles/0,,548157_643583,00.html
Pods
ROBBIE
Do NOT use mocking humour here - Martha will invalidate you. Martha is
allowed to use patronizing and mocking humour however - she is sure she has
the general moral superiority to wield it.
ROBBIE
ROBBIE
As the article says, Brazilian women are obsessed with depilation. Because
they are hairy.
A lefty woman drinks from a bottle of beer (the co-option, along with
camouflage trousers, of bummery and 'authenticity' by the Middle Class) and
says 'racist' in a nasty voice.
ROBBIE
Ben Brumfield
-Ben
Ben Brumfield
left out the bit where I chose a confusing acronym for my reductio ad
absurdam, rendering the thing largely incoherent.
-Ben