Oh god.

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A think tank of thought leaders.

It actually says that. They actually call themselves that.

A think tank of thought leaders.

Thought leaders.

They accept the title “thought leaders.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A blogger called David Paxton wrote a very long post as an open letter to Laurie Penny on the subject of a tweet of hers saying she wasn’t Charlie Hebdo because Charlie Hebdo is racist. (I’m not sure I think an open letter is supposed to be hugely long. I think if it’s hugely long it’s not an open letter but some other genre…like for instance a blog post.)

I agree with him overall but the post makes me feel…uneasy. It’s too elephant gun. It’s a long essay and it’s in response to a single tweet – that’s overkill, and in the current climate it’s not really all that cool for a man to use overkill on a woman, especially when she’s one who has been a target of a lot of harassment. But it’s not really all that cool in any case – plus it’s absurd. It’s one tweet. The response should be more proportional.

But on the substance I agree with him. Penny bought into the “CH is racist” canard, and that’s annoying, especially when a bunch of them including the editor had just been murdered.

The tweet:

Murder is vile and unconscionable. Freedom of the press must be protected. But racist trolling is not heroism. Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.

She was wrong.

But…

Paxton goes on –

This single tweet is all this is about. You didn’t say much else about the attack as far as I could find. And I looked.

I was appalled by many responses to the attacks and wrote a piece highlighting my problems with them. Your tweet is featured in it under the section ‘Reflexive Smearing’. Reading it back I was still struck by what you had written and think it valid to revisit. I believe there is a disparity between what you profess to believe in, how you usually conduct yourself and the content of your statement. Something doesn’t add up and I would be much obliged if at the very least you could help clarify it and end my confusion.

My objections to your message are as follows:

Oh gawd. He’s already written about the tweet, and now, six weeks later, he’s writing about it again, at great length, because he thinks it “valid to revisit” and that “there is a disparity between” blah blah blah…it’s way too much; it’s overkill squared. And also why does he write that way? Without contractions? As if his blog were an academic journal? That kind of pointless formality gets up my nose.

I want to like his piece, I do think that kind of bullshit needs abundant criticism, but I’m sick to death of overkill and bullying.

Then there’s the conclusion:

Now this time has passed and you are able to reflect upon what you wrote, have you altered your opinion any?

I would like you to do one of the following:

1: Justify your opinion. For although you have the right to make it, such a strong opinion, especially about those unable to reply, requires justification.

Or:

2: Repudiate your previous statement. Do so publicly and set straight those whom you influence and may have taken your ignorant and precipitant declaration as somehow based on thought and knowledge. Of course, with this should also come an apology and an explanation. What serious person could provide less?

I don’t think I need to spell out the problem here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An amusing piece by Luke McKinney on the familiar-I-mean-stale things every anti-feminist says whenever feminism [quick make a sign of the cross] is mentioned.

You could list them in your sleep. “Prove there even is sexism.” Disputing every single word for hours on end because they have all the time in the world and they want to waste yours.

# 6 is Saint or GTFO.

This imperfection attack is digging through someone’s Internet history to see if they’ve ever said anything less than perfect. Because the only allowed options are immaculate saint or total asshole, and the antifeminists have the asshole side locked down. They’re the Asshole Emperors, defending their rule by defecating over everything and everyone who’s made the mistake of facing them.

They’ll extract something sort of stupid said several years ago, usually by ripping it more dangerously out of context than the core of an atomic warhead, and wave it around as if it was exactly that powerful.

That’s so familiar. I’ve got people – people I don’t know from a hole in the ground, people with no connection to me other than their demented obsessive hatred – examining every word I’ve ever uttered on line through a microscope and then writing million word indictments of me based on translating something into Albanian and then using the Google translation of that back into English.

It’s such an odd way to manage hatred. It’s as if they don’t even know that avoidance is a possibility. My awfulness has caused them to waste their lives in talking about my awfulness. How sad is that?

H/t Carrie Chapman

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Bah. Oliver Sacks. Running out of road. Multiple metastases in the liver; terminal. He’s taking his inspiration from Hume.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

What a fabulous sentence.

Hume continued, “I am … a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

Ha! Same here.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I don’t much want to do without him, I must say. One of the best.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Wow – Ensaf Haidar posted something amazing an hour ago.

Today from Pakistan! ‪#‎FreeRaif‬

Pakistan! That takes guts. That picture makes me tear up.

Beautiful beautiful people.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Here’s a bit of weirdness. Tara McKelvey at the BBC reports on something labeled an “extremism summit” at the White House yesterday…without ever explaining what it was actually about. Well it was about “violent extremism”…but what is meant by that? She never says. You can tell what it’s about if you already know some things, but it’s utterly bizarre that the BBC is so exceedingly coy about it. I’m tempted to convene a summit on Extremist Evasiveness.

A summit at the White House to counter violent extremism has been criticised for being poorly organised and hasty. Will it be able to achieve anything, whether substantial or superficial?

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, spoke in halting English at the White House summit on Wednesday – though her message was forthright.

“When we are together, we are most strong,” she told police officers, FBI agents, European mayors and others gathered in a windowless auditorium for a conference on countering violent extremism, a three-day event held this week in Washington.

Oooh, violent extremism, what’s that, a naïve reader might wonder. Well a naïve reader will never find out by reading the article, no matter how closely or repeatedly. It’s just more of the same.

Extremists killed 17 people in attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and at a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January.

Ms Hidalgo joined a unity march on the streets of Paris a few days later. She walked with UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – and more than a million others.

There’s the tipoff. Oh that “violent extremism.” But then since it is in fact a particular kind of “violent extremism” with particular hates and particular goals and a particular ideology, what the HELL is the point of concealing all that? What is the point of giving it a generic and fundamentally empty label when an informative one exists? Imagine a White House summit on Nazism convened in 1938 (if only they had…) that was reported as being about “violent extremism” without mentioning Nazism. What would have been the use of that?

Obama wasn’t at the Paris march against “violent extremism” and the administration is worried about the criticisms of his failure to appear.

US officials seemed sensitive about the criticism. On the day of the march, Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about their plans to host a summit.

The forum, according to White House officials, was designed to help “prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalising, recruiting or inspiring individuals”.

Radicalizing into what? Recruiting to what? Inspiring to what? These violent extremists and their supporters don’t just go up to people and urge them to join the movement for “violent extremism” do they? Of course they fucking don’t.

Even those who are passionate about the goals of the summit – combating violent extremism – wonder about the optics – a term the Washington political class use to describe how an event is perceived.

One participant, a former State Department official, says there isn’t enough time to coordinate ministers for public appearances – one of the main goals for this kind of event.

Officials from France, Belgium, the UK, and other countries are attending. Mr Obama is expected to address them at the State Department on Thursday.

Whether hastily pulled together or carefully orchestrated, the summit to counter violent extremism is timely.

Timely! But mysterious. What oh what could all this violent extremism be in aid of? What’s its platform? What does it want? What vision of a better world is its goal? Won’t someone please tell us?

Speaking at the White House summit, a Belgian mayor, Hans Bonte, describes people from his city, Vilvoorde, who have joined extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.

“They are seen in awful video movies,” he says.

He believes dozens more people are now preparing to leave Belgium to join the extremist groups.

“We are facing a global problem,” Mr Bonte says. “But we have to act locally.”

Regardless of the politics – and the optics – of the summit, he and the others are facing the difficult task of trying to stop acts of violence. However flawed, the summit is better than nothing.

But is the reporting?

Not this reporting, that’s for sure. This reporting might as well be nothing. Godalmighty McKelvey even spells it out about the “extremist groups in Iraq and Syria” and the “awful videos” and people leaving Belgium to join “the extremist groups” but still doesn’t say the word. The word is never said throughout the article. Not once.

Islamist. The “violent extremist” groups are Islamist groups. “Violent extremist” is code for Islamist. But why does the BBC think it’s required to talk in code?

This is just plan bad reporting, reporting so bad that it borders on mendacious. The BBC ought to be better than this. It’s one of the chief sources of global news, and millions of people around the globe – most of them Muslims – are terrorized and victimized by Islamist groups. The BBC should be reporting honestly on the subject.

[Note: I’m pretty sure this is a BBC matter, not an individual reporter matter. I don’t think McKelvey decided for herself to report the story this way; I think it’s a house rule.]

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by thephilosophicalprimate on The demarcation problem.

I think the difference between “waspish” criticism and just being “mean shits” is easier to articulate than you suggest, Ophelia. What you’re talking about is rooted in this commonly recognized tension: Thoughtful people believe and say, for good reasons, that hostility and contempt aimed at PEOPLE is bad. However, some IDEAS are clearly deserving of hostility and contempt, and nothing but. The difficulty arises because it’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to keep the hostility and contempt for the bad ideas entirely separate from the people, because it’s the people who embrace the contemptible ideas.

But which comes first, and why, does matter. Criticizing people for having bad ideas is perfectly reasonable and respects their fundamental humanity; in effect, such criticism asks others to be better people by chiding them for ideas which are bad but *which they can change*. Recognizing someone’s humanity means, ultimately, recognizing their autonomy and consequently their responsibility: You have this belief, advocate this position, and take these actions — and I argue that they are horrible beliefs and positions and actions, and that such beliefs and behaviors make you a bad person. My criticism respects your humanity by holding you accountable for your choices, and is consistent with encouraging you to make better choices and thereby become a better person.

Criticizing people for who they are — attacking their character and identity rather than their beliefs and actions, especially when the attack is on a part of their identity that is not chosen or subject to change (gender identity, able-bodiedness, race, etc.) — does not show the same respect for humanity. Generally speaking, such criticism places ideas in a secondary role: Instead of saying that you are bad because and only to the extent that you have bad ideas and engage in bad behavior, such criticism declares that only a person who is fundamentally bad would embrace such a bad idea or behave in such a way. Such criticism bears no element of encouraging or recognizing the possibility of change in it, and shows no respect for the humanity of the one criticized.

Thus, what separates a sharp and witty critic like Jon Stewart from some asshole who thinks he’s witty but is actually just a mean shit — Rush Limbaugh is a paradigm case — is the recognition of a fellow human’s humanity even when one thinks that fellow human is being a complete shit and has horrible beliefs that motivate horrible behavior. For example, Stewart will criticize Faux News broadcasters by eviscerating their bad ideas and actions — their hypocrisy, self-contradiction, blatant denial of reality, systematic deceit of the public, lack of journalistic integrity, and so on. But his criticism consistently puts the priority on the ideas: you are bad people because you have and promote bad ideas, and by implication you would be better people if you had and promoted better ideas. For the perfect counter example, Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of Sandra Fluke for testifying about the mandate for insurance to fund birth control under the Affordable Care Act was to label her a slut and generally belittle her with every misogynist insult he could spit into his microphone: He offered no real criticism of the ideas Fluke advocated, and he dismissed the idea of birth control subsidies as so obviously wrong-headed that they are something only a bad person would ever argue for in the first place — a filthy slut like Fluke.

Now, those are extreme opposite ends of a spectrum for illustrative purposes, but I think the underlying distinction is basically right: We can and should criticize people for bad ideas and bad behavior, and that can and should be uncompromising and even cutting when necessary, but such criticism is ultimately respectful of the humanity of others because it implies that they can become better people through embracing better ideas and behaviors. But attacking people for their identity rather than their ideas — especially for elements of their identity that they cannot change or choose — or suggesting in any way that their ideas spring from or should be judged according to their identity rather than the other way around, is fundamentally dehumanizing because it denies the very possibility of choice and improvement.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The New York Times has a feature by Stephanie Sinclair on child marriage in Guatemala.

In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere. They parade endlessly through Petén’s hospital in San Benito, seeking medical care. Most have traveled from the villages along the mud-soaked roads that flow out in all directions.

…the physically immature and psychologically unready young mothers were prone to complications during childbirth, which often took place at home. For girls in Petén villages, the journey to competent care could take hours and the consequences dire. According to the International Health Alliance, Petén has the highest rate of maternal mortality in Guatemala at 172 deaths for every 100,000 births. The infant mortality is also high at 40 deaths for every 1,000 births.

There are photos, and a short film. It’s sad, depressing, hopeless. Therefore you should look at the pictures, and read the article, and watch the film.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

She knows what’s best for the health of her family, and it’s magical thinking. Reductress:

I’m a mom, a wife, a doula, an urban chicken farmer, a life coach, an extended breast-feeder, a weaver, a kombucha brewer, a yogini, and a Therapeutic Healing Touch practitioner. But most importantly, I’m a mom. And as a mom, I know what’s best for the health of my family: magical thinking.

I have a question. What are her shoes made of? I feel that this is decisive.

She’s not stupid. She’s had tertiary education. She understand how science works.

Science is great. It’s done a lot of good for the world, to be sure. It’s just not right for me or my family.

We have opted for a more controversial but totally natural method called “Please No Bad.”

I like it. I think I’ll adopt it.

She understand how vaccines work, too.

I understand that vaccines bolster vulnerable immune systems by stimulating your body’s natural defenses against disease without actually giving you the disease. I understand that vaccines are safe and effective, and that herd immunity is the best way we have to ensure that young or immunocompromised children don’t get sick and die from terrible infectious diseases that, until relatively recently, were commonplace. I get it. And if you want to live and die by the wholly effective, risk-free, and affordable breakthroughs that Western medicine has produced, that’s fine. That’s your right.

But don’t expect me to come along on that joyride of lies.

What’s her plan? Toxins. It’s all about toxins.

I believe that toxins are in everything, and even though I can’t exactly articulate what these toxins are or where they come from or where they live in my body or what they’re doing that’s apparently threatening my life, I know they’re there. And as a mother, you can be damned sure I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that these imaginary toxins don’t get into the pure white light embodiment of the physical plane occupied by my nine beautiful children. My husband and I practiced magical thinking as a form of birth control, and we have had sex way more than nine times. How’s that for proof?

Read on.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I don’t see the logic.

Raw Story shares a plan to fix the rape problem by MRA Roosh Vörek.

Anything to do with not raping, you ask brightly? No, not at all; don’t be silly.

Here’s the thing. He saw women get drunk and then have sex with someone, and then when sober, go all angsty and get the guy thrown in jail or out of school. It’s that easy; who knew? But he says he saw it, so it must be true.

“By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions.”

“I thought about this problem and am sure I have the solution: make rape legal if done on private property,” he continued. “I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.”

Vörek predicted that after rape was legalized, a woman would learn to “protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone.”

That’s the logic I don’t get. So if murder were legalized, would we all learn to protect our bodies the way we protect our phones, so that murder stopped? Except wait, phones still get stolen, and so do purses. Also stealing them hasn’t been legalized, yet they still get stolen. Why would legalizing rape cause it to stop happening?

Especially since it’s already mostly legalized in practice, given the tiny percentage of rapes that ever get successfully prosecuted. So, no, I can’t begin to see how that could possibly work.

“Such a change will provide a mature jolt to American women who have been babied for too long, who are protected and coddled as if they have no agency or intellect of their own,” he asserted. “Let’s make rape legal. Less women will be raped because they won’t voluntarily drug themselves with booze and follow a strange man into a bedroom, and less men will be unfairly jailed for what was anything but a maniacal alley rape.”

Also? When are we going to see babies on the menu at five star restaurants? When will we finally realize it’s time to start setting fire to people when the local polo club wins a game?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Indignation continues about some atheists wondering about possible connections between the more combative style of atheism and the reason[s] Craig Hicks lost his temper. (I don’t know he lost his temper, but I’m assuming he did since he turned himself in to the police so quickly. That seems incompatible with murdering in cold blood, because why would you do that? If he’d done it in cold blood, planning it in advance, he would have known the next step was turning himself in – so he would have cold-bloodedly decided not to do it at all. Turning himself in implies regret, in other words, which implies bad impulse control, i.e. loss of temper.)

I sort of get the indignation, because atheists are a demonized group anyway (as are Muslims, oh the ironies), and because the mainstream media are all too ready to bash us without our help.

But, at the same time, I have learned way more thoroughly than I ever wanted to, over the past 3.5 years, that movement atheism has lots of room for mean shits, and mean shits flourish there. And then, I like to write waspishly myself, and if you put a heavy hand on my shoulder and demanded that I explain to you where the boundary is between “waspish” and “mean shits” I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Or, I don’t know, I guess I would, but it would take a lot of hemming and hawing and we’d both be bored to death before I succeeded in really explaining.

Maybe the real point is that this isn’t an atheist problem but a mean shit problem – much like the proudly racist “football fans” on the Paris metro, perhaps – and that atheism gives mean shits an exciting new base from which to share their mean shit skills.

The mean shittery is prior, and the atheism is a medium for expressing it, perhaps.

I don’t have a conclusion. It’s not as if I want waspishness to cease; I absolutely don’t. But…there’s Jon Stewart and Kate Smurthwaite and the like on the one hand, and there’s everyone else on the other. There’s talent, and there’s the absence of talent. People who are waspish or mean shits without talent…well they’re just mean shits, aren’t they.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How appropriate, how timely, how right in every way – Jesus and Mo the Book is now available in Danish.

Jesus and og Mo

Jesus og Mo på dansk

De bedste striber udkommer på dansk fredag den 20. februar.

Overskuddet går til at støtte kampen for ytringsfrihed.

Hver uge i 10 år har den anonyme tegner bag ”Jesus and Mo” lagt en ny stribe ud på sin hjemmeside, og i den tid er tegneserien blevet kult i brede kredse i Storbritannien. Nu kommer de bedste på dansk.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Good god. Chelsea fans (fans of the football club of that name) are caught on video on the Paris Métro pushing a black man off the train and chanting “we are racist and that’s the way we like it.”

The jaw drops. The eyes bug out. What are they thinking? What is wrong with them? What is it about being a Chelsea fan that requires or enables this? Football is hardly a lily-white sport, happily, so…what??

Police are looking at the video in hopes of identifying the perps.

The footage was obtained by the Guardian, which reported that the incident had happened at Richelieu-Drouot station in the centre of the French capital on Tuesday evening.

British expatriate Paul Nolan, who filmed the incident on his phone, told the BBC it had been an “ugly scene” and “very aggressive”.

In a statement, Chelsea condemned the behaviour as “abhorrent” and said the fans’ actions had “no place in football or society”.

…

English football’s governing body, the Football Association, said it “fully supports Chelsea’s position in seeking to ban any of the club’s season-ticket holders or members who face criminal action in relation to these abhorrent scenes”.

Sepp Blatter, president of world football’s governing body Fifa, tweetedthat there was “no place for racism in football”.

Lord Ouseley, chairman of Kick It Out, which campaigns against racism in football, said the fact the incident involved an assault on the man was “even more shocking”.

The Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) said the overwhelming majority of Chelsea fans would be “disgusted” by the incident.

Perhaps it’s just the aggression of football fandom, channeled into an irrelevant form of aggression outside the stadium.

Paul Canoville – the first black footballer to play for Chelsea – told the BBC he was saddened by what had happened.

“For me as a black player, and other black players, it would hurt, most definitely.

“It is haunting. It wasn’t nice seeing it, hearing it, at all,” he said.

Frank Sinclair, a black footballer who played for Chelsea more than 150 times, said the men in the video had nothing to do with his former club.

“They tend to move from club to club, they drift and they look at an opportunity where they might have got tickets on the black market, decided to go to this game to cause problems,” he said.

“Certainly, they’re not represented by Chelsea Football Club.”

Ah – if that’s right it’s the aggression that comes first, and the match is just a place to put it to work. Like real-life trolls.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Here’s a piece of good news for a change – Malawi has said no to child marriage.

Malawi has passed a law banning child marriage, raising the minimum age to 18 in a country where half of girls end up as child brides.

Women rights campaigners hailed the move as “a great day for Malawian girls” and said the law would help boost development in one of the world’s poorest countries.

But they warned Malawi would not end child marriage without concerted efforts to tackle poverty and end harmful traditional practices like early sexual initiations.

The law is an important part though.

Malawi has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage. Half of girls wed before their 18th birthday and nearly one in eight is married by 15.

Early marriage not only deprives girls of education and opportunities, but also increases the risk of death or serious childbirth injuries if they have babies before their bodies are ready. Child brides are also at greater risk of domestic and sexual violence.

And they’re less able to protect their children, and to teach them, and generally to be a parent to them.

Child marriage is deeply entrenched in Malawi’s society partly because of a belief that a girl should marry as early as possible to maximize her fertility.

Because that’s all women are: machines for making babies.

Brussels Mughogho, Malawi country director of development charity EveryChild, said poverty pushed some families to marry off young daughters in exchange for a dowry payment or so that they had one less mouth to feed.

Mughogho said it was also vital to work with traditional leaders to end early sexual initiations which fuel child marriage.

In parts of Malawi, when a girl reaches puberty she may receive a night-time visit from an older man – known as “a hyena” – who has sex with girls to prepare them for marriage.

“There are so many driving factors behind child marriage,” Mughogho said. “This is a very important step that we’ve taken, but child marriage will never end with legal instruments alone.”

Good luck, Malawi. You’ve taken a crucial first step; well done.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

But David Futrelle didn’t mess around with just one stupid meme. David Futrelle got together a whole bunch of stupid memes to admire.

Ian Ironwood, as he calls himself, is the proprietor of the blog The Red Pill Room. He’s also a big fan of retro art.  Alas, he has attempted to combine these two interests, producing a series of baffling “memes” in which he pastes little manosophere lessons on top of artwork borrowed from postwar American magazines and paperbacks.

It’s hard to pick a favorite but I’ll go with this one, partly because it’s so wordy, which is kind of not the point of memes.

By…tinkering with their sodas?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Lucky me, I just saw a meme on Facebook, with an approving comment.

How lucky for people who hate feminism that ISIS and Boko Haram exist.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Lars Vilks has indeed gone into hiding now, which is tragic. I’m relieved, though, that he says it’s probably temporary.

Lars Vilks, the controversial cartoonist who escaped unhurt from the café hosting the debate, told Channel 4 News he is now in hiding.

“I am at a secret place, totally unknown. I can’t give you countries or one place. I can only just say that I will remain here until we have a more clear picture of how things are looking and hopefully I will go back into a bit more normal routines within a few days or a week or so.”

By the way Channel 4 News? He’s not really “controversial” – not to reasonable people he’s not.

“I have become some sort of symbol because I’m pointed out as a kind of target and that target is then attacked. But there is this kind of symbol that is chosen for this purpose and the idea about freedom of speech or the attack on it.”

Exactly. It’s not that he is himself especially “controversial”; it’s that a small number of people have singled him out for the label and all that goes with it. We can’t let them set the terms of the discussion. They’re the wrong people to do it. They don’t think well, and they don’t have the interests of human beings in mind.

The Swedish artist produced a series of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2007, but says he feels no guilt after one man was killed in the attack on Saturday.

“We have a murder who was [in] cold blood sinking another person. And that’s the deed. That is his reason.

“It would be like saying that when he attacked the Jews: if they were not in Copenhagen then we wouldn’t have the problem. It’s a kind of stupid logic.”

It is indeed. He did nothing wrong. Nothing. No, not a little tiny bit wrong; not wrong at all. Jews did nothing wrong by living in Copenhagen and going to a synagogue, and Lars did nothing wrong by drawing cartoons.

I hope he can get back to mostly-normal life very soon.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)