Sunday, January 18, 2015

I AM NOT CHARLIE

I am NOT Charlie. Charlie is an asshole. Charlie got into a hyper-masculine rhetorical pissing match over what people think ought to be offensive, and feels it's just fine to deeply offend millions and millions of people all to make the point that it can make a point. Charlie's also cool with the notion of ridiculing what is an oppressed minority in his own country. Because free speech is great.

Well, free speech is great. And murdering someone for something he said is beyond the pale. I condemn the attack on Charlie Hebdo unequivocally. It was an act of evil.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to publicly identify myself with ethnocentric bullying asshole practitioners of bad and mean spirited art in order to express my absolute disapproval of the way they died.

I'm not Charlie. I'm Ron, and I hate violence and murder. I also hate people picking on dispossessed minorities out of a sense of cultural arrogance. There is no contradiction in those two positions. I will not glorify Charlie Hebdo, and my refusal to do so is in no way an endorsement of terrorism.

ALSO, if you really do believe that the freedom of speech means celebrating assholes who bully others, then you ought to have no problem at all with what I'm saying here, no matter how offensive you might think it is. If Charlie Hebdo is your model, then I can say what I'm saying in this post, and you have to love it.

Because free speech.

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