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January 14, 2015 at 12:44 pm
Armm-hmm, David Brooks squared. Here…
http://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/jan/13/sorry-i-am-not-charlie/
Don’t take this as cynical. But if something like CHebdo had occurred here we’d be flattening Yemen and another couple small very failed countries in the Middle East again. France, on the other hand, does not have 50 billion to spend on on its intelligence agencies and a trillion on its military annually. And because of that and, well, they’re not us, it won’t be like us. Which is better for the world.
January 14, 2015 at 11:56 pm
I have looked at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. I am not impressed.
The ones about Muslims are by and large racist filth. They are also lousy drawings not worthy of a 12-year-old (the ones about the Roman Catholic Church may have something to say, aside from the breath-takingly awful artwork that even Hustler–does Hustler still exist? It made Penthouse look erudite–would refuse to print). As Driftglass pointed out in his latest podcast, they are not satire. Satire punches up; Charlie Hebdo punches down.
Nevertheless–free speech and all that–derision, not execution, is the proper response to racist filth.
I’m much more Clarence Page than David Brooks, if only because Page is coherent and Brooks is a right-wing hack whose job is to rationalize wingnuttery. He is but a tinkling cymbal, a sounding brass, a word-salad, signifying nothing. He’s not quite as craven as Charles Krauthammer and Cal Thomas, but he’s trying.
Harry Shearer’s comments in the beginning of this week’s episode of Le Show were, IMO, quite on the mark.
BTW, if you are not a regular listener of Le Show or The Professional Left, you should be.