Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. What is your opinion on the freedom of satire in general and the satire of religion in particular?
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. What is your opinion on the freedom of satire in general and the satire of religion in particular?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
This is a sensitive topic for some people, so please do your best to have civil discussions. Let's do better than the average social media.
If your group can't take a joke, your group is a joke. Especially if it is abusive imaginary parent who according to you does everything that is wrong with the world in order to "build character" and overall rules through fear only.
Satire is a necessary way to call out impropriety in Democratic society. The humor softens the blow of the reality of horrible acts and makes less horrible but still bad acts easier to understand. As long as it's not saying things that are just totally without merit or using it purely to spread hate, it should be staunchly defended regardless of who is offended by it.
Example of bad satire is something like a cartoon of an LGBTQ+ person going to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist saying it's a mental illness and their head explodes. This is pushing the narrative that being gay is something to be cured and that gay people just can't accept it. This can be considered satire, but like any type of speech it's stating something designed to harm others. Satire is meant to over-exaggerate a problem, not make up a problem that doesn't actually exist for the express purpose of hate.
I think most people would agree with the following: even if you feel the cartoon was in poor taste or was âpunching down,â the shooting was a terrorist act that just served to reinforce the worst stereotypes about Muslims andâironicallyâthe offending cartoon itself.
Opinions can vary about the cartoon, but thatâs the point of defending satire and free speech; whatâs completely indefensible is violence that clearly isn't in the service of self-defense. People who quibble about the definition of self-defense and even skirt the idea that the terrorists in this incident had a right to do what they did, in my opinion, are likely either sophomoric contrarians or bad faith actors intentionally trying to muddy the waters, akin to some far-right militia members on conservative subreddits.
It says a lot that there's only one religion that I'm scared to criticize.
12 people were killed for publishing a cartoon of Muhammad.
A teacher was beheaded for showing a drawing of Muhammad.
Cartoonist drew Muhammad, leading to Danish embassies being attacked and riots broke out and people died. Later, people broke into his house to try to kill him.
Cartoonist had to live under police protection because of threats.
Creators of South Park were threatened for including Muhammad in an episode of the show.
These were just a few from the FIRST PAGE of a search engine, AND outside of Muslim majority countries.
This is before even considering every other 'provocation', leading to incidences like:
Salman Rushdie being stabbed on stage
A teacher forced into hiding for showing a picture of mahammad
Reality keeps sliding into absurdity rendering satire mute.
I'm all for satire, but I also think this was kind of bullying in that they did something that was offensive specifically to a particular marginalized minority group.
So it's not something that should be illegal or warrant a shooting, but I'm not exactly surprised. Just as if they published a story like "Fuck this one guy's mother" showing a drawing of some random guy's mother being fucked.* That guy doesn't then have a right to shoot them and should go straight to prison if he does - but I wouldn't be surprised and I don't think we all need to identify with the paper or anything because they were being total pricks.
*And I know the response will be along the lines of "You can't compare that drawing with a mere drawing of mohammed". But that betrays a failure to take another perspective. Who's to say that in a society even more liberal than our own, "fuck your mother" might be seen as not particularly insulting? After all, take away expectations of women being pure and you basically have "fuck your dad" which really doesn't seem too insulting, it's like sure if that's what you're into weirdo, but let me check with my dad first.
A week ago I was in line to check out and there was a young woman in a hijab. When she turned to help me I saw her entire face and hands (all I could see really) had acid burns all over.
The paradox of tolerance will never be something I struggle with once The Fall happens. Regardless for whichever religion seeks to lynch me.
Doesn't make sense to me that religious people get violent because of something you say or draw.
If it would be wrong god will punish people who do it. If god doesn't it is not wrong. And if god doesn't but religious people do, that is them acting against god and thinking they know better then god. That is blasphemy and will make their god hate them.
According to collectivistic ideology, anything can be a provocation and you are always a victim.
If so, anything anyone did is justifiable to make you angry or have any other negative emotional response, because as a victim, you are powerless.
Not only that, you, as a person, are indistinguishable from an animal as, like them, you are utterly incapable of controlling your thoughts, feelings and impulses. In essence, you have no control over your life.
Ergo it follows you are absolutely allowed to do anything in your power to stop the thing that makes you have a negative emotional response to stop existing.
You are, erm, justified.
But just you, not the others, those are assholes
Satire should be staunchly defended. Some people may find it offensive and they can go fuck themselves.
Satirical publications are often the last free press able to publish in authoritarian governments and have often played a critical role in communication to weaken oppressive regimes.
We can all occasionally suffer jokes in bad taste in exchange for freedom of the press.
As in everything in life, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
If you don't like the satire of Charlie Hebdo, your right is to not read it. If you don't like a comedian who makes pedo jokes, your right is to not buy their tickets. If you don't like a TV show that shows drug use, your right is to not watch it.
That's it. That's the end of your personal rights on that issue. You do NOT have the right to tell other people what they personally view, watch, read, etc...
If enough people share your view, that publication/comedian/show will either change or go out of business naturally because of lack of subscribers. That's how it works.
I personally find Charlie Hebdo to be racist twits. But that doesn't give me any right to kill them. I have the right to just ignore them.
Everything is and should be allowed in comedy. Religion is no exception.
Obviously it's horrible to kill people over speech. Cartoons do not justify violence or terrorism.
But we also shouldn't pretend like speech is necessary or valuable just because it's offensive or that offending people to the point of violence is noble.
If someone was killed for saying the n word that would be a tragedy and should be condemned. But we shouldn't all go around yelling the n word just to assert our free speech or pretend like the guy saying the n word was a hero for doing it.
I think the people's presumption that they have some right to be free from offense has done way more damage than anything.
I think Charlie Hebdo comics are often in bad taste and more shock value than critic, but that's no legitimate reason to massacre people.
More than the attack on Charlie Hebdo itself, which I can "understand" in the twisted sense of a religious fanatic, it was the overall ruthlessness of the attackers that shocked me. I remember vividly seeing a video of one of the attackers walking up to a wounded police officer and executing him at point-blank range.
I don't have any issue or opinion or dog in the race with the prophet Muhammed, but those idiots made it important to say "muhammed the prophet is a giant cunt who should be laughed at and get a pie in the face" every now and then just to remind everybody how getting to talk works.
I'm religious, and I think that people should be absolutely free to satirize religion if they want to. What someone else believes isn't my affair, I definitely think my faith has lots of room for improvement from an organizational perspective, and there are plenty of religious ideas I think are toxic and wrong. Why shouldn't we have nuance and differing opinions? Why should anyone have the right to hurt others through their religious practices? We should be criticizing those things and calling them out and trying to make them stop, whether we practice religion or not. I think the treatment of women and queer people by a great deal of religious groups is wrong and should be criticized. I don't think government and religion should be intertwined at all. Just because I practice in a faith doesn't mean my faith is the authority on anything, but universally we should not be hurting others.
Honestly? That I would rather have Meta (and a bunch of Western countries, while we're at it) lift restrictions on that front first before they go against LGBT people.
I'm not on board with the idea that edgy or offensive humor is valuable in itself, but I absolutely abhor the scenario where offended conservative and traditionalist views are treated in their own terms while marginalized groups are considered needy or nagging if they ask for the same treatment.
Also not on board with comedians assuming that noting their ignorance or bigotry is the same as not having a sense of humor, incidentally. Everybody sucks, is my point.
The shooting wasn't merely about the freedom of satire. Not really. Let's complicate the story.
The Kouachi brothers were Algerian and you can't ignore the history of French colonialism in Algeria as the antecedent to this attack. This isn't just about secularism and blasphemy, that's only the surface. It's about racism and colonialism and imperialism. Don't think of this only as religious fanatics angry because infidels insulted the Prophet Mohammad, think of this as an oppressed racial group lashing out at a racist society and it being channeled through Islam. There's a deeper tension here than just the religious surface.
Now, as for my opinion?
Racist satire should be illegal and that racists should be put into reeducation camps to be rehabilitated.
Also! Adventurism is bad and people should get organized into a Party, not do vigilante attacks on racists.