Friday, January 9, 2015

Je Suis Charlie!

Charlie Hebdo was an equal opportunity satirical journal in that they attacked pretty much everybody.  In fact, they had more run ins with Christians than Muslims, but that has gotten lost because they were attacked by "mooslims".  Some people are willing to distance themselves from Charlie Hebdo because of its outspokeness in its satire.
free-speech-meaningUnfortunately, I have to say that I can side with Charlie Hebdo for wanting to be deliberately offensive in order to try and make a point. 

I know that some people would like to imply that I am racist for my Dred Scott post, but that misses the point. I would have liked to have it so that "Dixie" played badly on an out of tune banjo played when one landed on this post. It was meant to point out the attitude toward blacks when Dred Scott was posted. Alas, I didn't know about Somersett's case when I wrote originally wrote that post or it would have been a different post.  However, one has to point out that slavery was accepted in the US and some still defend that institution.

Then, there are also the posts on Meleanie Hain, who was the pro-gun pinup who managed to get herself killed by a gun, even though she had a gun for protection.  Alas, Meleanie is one of far too many people who have died from pro-gun bullshit.

In fact, there is a serious problem with trying to satirise the pro-gun (and many other of the reality challenged right's positions) in that without some clue that it is satire, it's hard to tell the satire from the real thing.  This is something called Poe's Law.  Thus, someone who may be deadly serious in their blogging actually comes off as a sick parody of their positions.

It's a scary world when it is hard to satirise the crazies around us.

And harder to have a serious debate on the issues.

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