Draw Muhammad Day II
So I have watched with amusement, disgust, and pity many of the shenanigans that have gone on associated with the Draw the Prophet day event; no place moreso than on RPG.net's Tangency.
Of course, all the Tangency Fashionable Liberals came out, and rather than say anything intelligent or truly insightful about the situation, they just jumped in with faked indignation at the idea that anyone would dare to be so politically incorrect as to draw Mohammad, and how it is certainly all our fault that the poor misunderstood Hezbollah freedom fighters want to brutally murder cartoonists on the street.
Clearly, to this group, the only possible motive for doing this had nothing to do with death threats or dead film-makers and the sense of encroaching enforced censorship, and it was purely just christian fundamentalists hating on brown people. They engaged in the oldest and most usual Tangency nonsense tactic: "If you disagree with me, you MUST be racist". How boring.
On the other hand, you had a group of the Tangency Fashionable Atheists jumping in to say that like any blasphemy, drawing Mohammad was great and that the whole point of the entire event was not about freedom of expression or defending core values of our civilization, but about showing off how edgy they personally were for not believing in God, as if that was still something dangerous or radical or intellectually innovative, as if they were fucking Nietzsche or something, and not just some fucking masturbator who read Dawkin's trite book and has a beef with how daddy made him go to church.
Finally, you had some people there trying to defend the unpopular (on Tangency) position of "belief in free speech", while struggling not to get banned (for believing in free speech). Unfortunately, the people who still bother to hang around on Tangency and express views contrary to the Fashionable Tangenistas clique have clearly been cowed not only into submissiveness but a total inability to effectively defend a position; they let the asshole PC-police college-liberal fake-hippy-outrage crowd control all of the terms of the debate right from the beginning, and let the Fashionable Atheists co-opt their side of the discussion, until there was practically no point anymore.
What they should have done is re-framed the entire debate by force-feeding the point of "Do YOU think that drawing cartoons of Mohammad should be illegal in the west? YES or NO?".
Because its really that simple. If you think they should be legal, you can talk about how some might be in bad taste or not, and wax on endlessly about the motives of the people doing it, but you cannot fundamentally put yourself in opposition to an event designed to defend one's right to that freedom in our society.
If you think they should be illegal, then you have to account for yourself as to why, and exactly in what way are you actually a believer in freedom of speech, and not letting yourself be manipulated by a group of fanatical extremists that you yourself admit are outliers in the faith of Islam; as well as explaining the fundamental point that Parker & Stone were jokingly trying to put across in their South Park Episode: why it is that we can make a picture of the Buddha snorting coke or Moses as a weird animated video-game icon, or Jesus in a gay threesome, but we can't draw a picture of Mohammad, even just standing there, doing nothing particularly offensive?
So that's the issue: should it be censored: yes or no? That's the only question that's relevant, and what would have shut up all the RPG.net idiots, if only there was a fair playing field to engage in that debate there in the first place.
RPGPundit
(originally posted May 23, 2010)