5 ms·

This article is in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and it really irks me. > And again, is a culture that takes mortal offense when an image it holds sa

by chroma 10y ago

This article is in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and it really irks me. > And again, is a culture that takes mortal offense when an image it holds sacred is mocked a second-rate culture that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, my twenty-first-century that is? Do I have the moral authority to decide this? If fundamentalist Christians were responsible for these atrocities, I am certain the author would have no problem answering "Yes" to both of these questions. > However grotesque and provocative its comedy, its aim is to produce an enlightened perspective on events, not to start riots. If people hate a cartoon enough to riot, then condemn the hateful people, not the cartoon. > Is it likely this approach will help to isolate violent extremists from mainstream Muslim sentiment? Yes! We satirize fundamentalist Christians all the time, and it actually does help isolate them from mainstream Christians. Why should Islam be any different? The most annoying thing about this piece wasn't any particular quote. It was the author's frequent fallback to describing the cartoons, as if their offensiveness was in any way responsible for the massacre. It doesn't matter whether the satire was racist or bigoted. In the words of Sam Harris: "People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis."

yequalsx 10y ago
It quite disgusting that some people think Islam is above criticism, satire, and derision. People who over mockery are not worthy of respect and ought to be mocked and shunned. We have the moral authority to mock Mohammed, Jesus, and any other figure people have killed for. No one should be willing to kill over satire.
- Noos 10y ago
  The point is more that the message of the satire is lost in the means of the satire. The satirists shows Mohammed weeping over deaths committed in his name without realizing that depicting him such is a blasphemous thing in the eyes of the very Muslims he wants to convince. If the point is just mockery and blasphemy, it should not be considered satire as it is useless. Mockery and blasphemy are tools to be used sparingly for satire's real purpose, which is to illuminate problems of the human condition and point out flaws or ways humans should change. What's worse now is originally satire was designed as an attack on prevailing and oppressive systems of the majority, but in this case is attacking a minority, and often one with little power in the actual society they exist in. The rich are very effective at taking the weapons aimed at them and making them ways to attack others.
  - yequalsx 10y ago
    Sure, don't consider mockery and blasphemy satire. But consider that me thinking the Prophet Mohammed was a child raping asshole does not merit my death. That people get so offended by mocking something means it needs to be mocked more often.
  - chroma 10y ago
    > The satirists shows Mohammed weeping over deaths committed in his name without realizing that depicting him such is a blasphemous thing in the eyes of the very Muslims he wants to convince. I'm sorry, but you missed the point. The surviving Charlie Hebdo staff knew that any depiction of Muhammad (even a favorable one) would provoke jihadists and Islamists. The cartoon was a message to those extremists: "We won't be cowed by your violence." If Charlie Hebdo had stopped cartooning the prophet after the attack, it would have sent a different message: Violent tactics work. > The rich are very effective at taking the weapons aimed at them and making them ways to attack others. I am compelled to call out this cheap rhetorical trick. The people who made these cartoons had actual weapons aimed at them. They were actually attacked, and most of them actually died.
    - Noos 10y ago
      Is the point saying "we wont be cowed" or is it to actually make muslims think about violence? Because "we won't be cowed" really does nothing to change anything, and might make things worse if they say this in a way that offends people that might otherwise be neutral or receptive to the message. The second part was no rhetorical trick. Satire has shifted from skewering the people in power to reinforcing them, and going after unpopular minorities. In the west, there's virtually no effective response for said minority if they go after the correct ones. If anything a Streisand effect can happen where even legitimately challenging the offense makes you look even worse and brings more popularity to the offending side. The Hebdo case was a statistical outlier if anything. In general, the west's idea that we no longer kill each other over blasphemy and speech has created a culture where the ones satired grin and bear it mostly, because we do not kill. Hebdo was a grim reminder that extremists do not play by that implicit code. The thing we should be thankful for in the west is that so few people break it.
rdiddly 10y ago
How clear-cut and simple everything is in your world! Good thing the real world is just like that - morally unambiguous and without complication or subtle nuance!
- lsh 10y ago
  "People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis."
- chroma 10y ago
  Is this your reply to all straightforward moral arguments, or just the ones you disagree with? It's not my fault that answers can sometimes be simple. If you trawl through my comment history, you'll see I've discussed ethics on topics such as torture[1], corporal punishment[2], whether possession of certain information should be illegal[3], the Dallas PD's use of a robot to kill the shooter[4], smart guns[5], and even whether we should make natural predators extinct[6]. Sometimes, my answers to these moral questions are simple. Sometimes, they're not. In this case, it's the former. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441708 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059148 5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494398 6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
> "People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis" I don't understand the significance of this. People have been killed for all sorts of silly reasons, religious differences provide lots of examples but there's plenty more outside that, wearing the wrong color or the wrong team's shirt in the wrong part of town, dating someone from a different social group, trying to vote, I could go on for a while. So what's his point?
- chroma 10y ago
  Harris's point is that moral accountability lies solely with the murderers, not the cartoonists. The same goes for your examples. You don't blame the person trying to vote. Yes, there are practical expectations (this is why I use a pseudonym when criticizing certain ideas), but saying, "What did you expect?" is an indictment of the group doing the harm, not the provocateur.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    So his point is that murder is bad? That seems a bit self-evident to me. Am I missing something? Why is he focussing on the cartoons?
    - michaelbuddy 10y ago
      Maybe it's the fact that the quote is contextual, and you're not privy to the discussion around it. Basically there are people that say "Well they shouldn't have provoked it by drawing Muhammad, the cartoonists had it coming" Yes I've actually seen people write that too. Sam Harris is saying, that actually the cartoonists are blameless and there is no moral justification any one, muslim or not can use to blame the cartoonists for their own deaths.
mcguire 10y ago
And yet, weirdly, Charlie Hebdo fired an artist for anti-Semitism (http://csglobe.com/charlie-hebdo-fired-anti-semitic-cartoonist-ridiculing-judaism-2009/ http://csglobe.com/charlie-hebdo-fired-anti-semitic-cartooni...). And again, weirdly, are the cartoons in question attempting to satirize fundamentalist Muslims and isolate them from mainstream Islam, or are they just attacking Muslims? Along with the author of this (rather poorly written) article, I'll ask: Is it really satire, or is it just another version of the big-nosed Jewish banker from the '30s? Further, I don't know about where you're from, but in the west here, we used to have the semi-legal principle of "fighting words". If I said that you were a dirty rat bastard and your mother wrote simulated annealing code, you would (everything else being equal) be justified in socking me, even though I neither physically attacked you nor threatened you.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago
  >Further, I don't know about where you're from, but in the west here, we used to have the semi-legal principle of "fighting words". Really? What law is that?
  - mcguire 10y ago
    See "provocation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_%28legal%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_%28legal%29?wprov=...

by chroma 10y ago

yequalsx 10y ago

It quite disgusting that some people think Islam is above criticism, satire, and derision. People who over mockery are not worthy of respect and ought to be mocked and shunned. We have the moral authority to mock Mohammed, Jesus, and any other figure people have killed for. No one should be willing to kill over satire.

Noos 10y ago
The point is more that the message of the satire is lost in the means of the satire. The satirists shows Mohammed weeping over deaths committed in his name without realizing that depicting him such is a blasphemous thing in the eyes of the very Muslims he wants to convince. If the point is just mockery and blasphemy, it should not be considered satire as it is useless. Mockery and blasphemy are tools to be used sparingly for satire's real purpose, which is to illuminate problems of the human condition and point out flaws or ways humans should change. What's worse now is originally satire was designed as an attack on prevailing and oppressive systems of the majority, but in this case is attacking a minority, and often one with little power in the actual society they exist in. The rich are very effective at taking the weapons aimed at them and making them ways to attack others.
- yequalsx 10y ago
  Sure, don't consider mockery and blasphemy satire. But consider that me thinking the Prophet Mohammed was a child raping asshole does not merit my death. That people get so offended by mocking something means it needs to be mocked more often.
- chroma 10y ago
  > The satirists shows Mohammed weeping over deaths committed in his name without realizing that depicting him such is a blasphemous thing in the eyes of the very Muslims he wants to convince. I'm sorry, but you missed the point. The surviving Charlie Hebdo staff knew that any depiction of Muhammad (even a favorable one) would provoke jihadists and Islamists. The cartoon was a message to those extremists: "We won't be cowed by your violence." If Charlie Hebdo had stopped cartooning the prophet after the attack, it would have sent a different message: Violent tactics work. > The rich are very effective at taking the weapons aimed at them and making them ways to attack others. I am compelled to call out this cheap rhetorical trick. The people who made these cartoons had actual weapons aimed at them. They were actually attacked, and most of them actually died.
  - Noos 10y ago
    Is the point saying "we wont be cowed" or is it to actually make muslims think about violence? Because "we won't be cowed" really does nothing to change anything, and might make things worse if they say this in a way that offends people that might otherwise be neutral or receptive to the message. The second part was no rhetorical trick. Satire has shifted from skewering the people in power to reinforcing them, and going after unpopular minorities. In the west, there's virtually no effective response for said minority if they go after the correct ones. If anything a Streisand effect can happen where even legitimately challenging the offense makes you look even worse and brings more popularity to the offending side. The Hebdo case was a statistical outlier if anything. In general, the west's idea that we no longer kill each other over blasphemy and speech has created a culture where the ones satired grin and bear it mostly, because we do not kill. Hebdo was a grim reminder that extremists do not play by that implicit code. The thing we should be thankful for in the west is that so few people break it.

rdiddly 10y ago

How clear-cut and simple everything is in your world! Good thing the real world is just like that - morally unambiguous and without complication or subtle nuance!

lsh 10y ago
"People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis."
chroma 10y ago
Is this your reply to all straightforward moral arguments, or just the ones you disagree with? It's not my fault that answers can sometimes be simple. If you trawl through my comment history, you'll see I've discussed ethics on topics such as torture[1], corporal punishment[2], whether possession of certain information should be illegal[3], the Dallas PD's use of a robot to kill the shooter[4], smart guns[5], and even whether we should make natural predators extinct[6]. Sometimes, my answers to these moral questions are simple. Sometimes, they're not. In this case, it's the former. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441708 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059148 5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494398 6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

> "People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis" I don't understand the significance of this. People have been killed for all sorts of silly reasons, religious differences provide lots of examples but there's plenty more outside that, wearing the wrong color or the wrong team's shirt in the wrong part of town, dating someone from a different social group, trying to vote, I could go on for a while. So what's his point?

chroma 10y ago
Harris's point is that moral accountability lies solely with the murderers, not the cartoonists. The same goes for your examples. You don't blame the person trying to vote. Yes, there are practical expectations (this is why I use a pseudonym when criticizing certain ideas), but saying, "What did you expect?" is an indictment of the group doing the harm, not the provocateur.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  So his point is that murder is bad? That seems a bit self-evident to me. Am I missing something? Why is he focussing on the cartoons?
  - michaelbuddy 10y ago
    Maybe it's the fact that the quote is contextual, and you're not privy to the discussion around it. Basically there are people that say "Well they shouldn't have provoked it by drawing Muhammad, the cartoonists had it coming" Yes I've actually seen people write that too. Sam Harris is saying, that actually the cartoonists are blameless and there is no moral justification any one, muslim or not can use to blame the cartoonists for their own deaths.

mcguire 10y ago

And yet, weirdly, Charlie Hebdo fired an artist for anti-Semitism (http://csglobe.com/charlie-hebdo-fired-anti-semitic-cartoonist-ridiculing-judaism-2009/ http://csglobe.com/charlie-hebdo-fired-anti-semitic-cartooni...). And again, weirdly, are the cartoons in question attempting to satirize fundamentalist Muslims and isolate them from mainstream Islam, or are they just attacking Muslims? Along with the author of this (rather poorly written) article, I'll ask: Is it really satire, or is it just another version of the big-nosed Jewish banker from the '30s? Further, I don't know about where you're from, but in the west here, we used to have the semi-legal principle of "fighting words". If I said that you were a dirty rat bastard and your mother wrote simulated annealing code, you would (everything else being equal) be justified in socking me, even though I neither physically attacked you nor threatened you.

DefaultUserHN 10y ago
>Further, I don't know about where you're from, but in the west here, we used to have the semi-legal principle of "fighting words". Really? What law is that?
- mcguire 10y ago
  See "provocation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_%28legal%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_%28legal%29?wprov=...