February 07, 2006

it's outrageous!

I've been cruising a lot of blogs today, sampling the different reactions to Muslim Mania over those "offensive" cartoons picturing He Who Must Not Be Cartooned. I saw a lot of firey rhetoric: "Fuck 'em, the camel-humping, splodey-dope sand monkeys. They want outrage? Let's shove a few nukes up their unwiped asses and tell 'em to outrage THAT!" The Usual Suspects weighed in with their typical hand-wringing: "I feel their pain. We should expect that kind of outrage when we deliberately insult their religious beliefs."

I thought that this was a pretty good post, reflecting a lot of what I believe. We may be slightly more civilized about it, but we regularly display, right here in this "free" country, the same mindset as the Muslim mobs.

One regret I have is that this battle should have been fought and won in favor of intentionalism and individualism inside our own western universities years ago; instead, the victory went to our progressive academic collectivists, whose fidelity to PC culture, identity politics, free-speech zones, tolerance training courses, et al manifested themselves in a “tolerance” culture that now has the goverment looking inside individuals’ heads (hate speech, hate crime) and effectively chilling all speech by defining tolerance in an Orwellian sense of tolerating only that speech which is so bland and banal that it is unlikely to offend anyone. (Emphasis mine.)

Face it: The sad fact is that most people cannot handle freedom. They don't realize that their own personal liberty depends on somebody else having the right to offend them. Freedom is not for the faint of heart or the easily wounded. It takes a cast iron ass to live free. That's a quality sorely lacking in this country today.

Americans may not take to the streets to cry for jihad or fatwah when they get pissed off, but they damn surely flock to the government to whine and sue when they get hurt feelings. We're even rewriting our own got-dam LANGUAGE to make it more politically-correct inoffensive to the delicate ear. We've gone brain-dead with tolerance.

...the Union isn’t in trouble for excluding people. They’re in trouble for not rewriting their constitution to “explicitly mention” some noisy people who, one suspects, are less interested in access to this particular group than enforcing the use of a wide bland smear of magic words that somehow insulates them from exclusion. --- James Lileks

The Union's crime: failure to mention explicitly "people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered." Yes, we actually take such neurotic, puling crap seriously today. And here's where it leads us:

If Chinese radicals were ransacking Western embassies because of a cartoon, and were backed by the Chinese government, we would be outraged, demanding apologies, severing relations, and so on. But when Muslims do it, backed by Islamist governments, we are supposed to take it on the chin, to "respect" their religious traditions, issue mealy-mouthed statements, etc. In many ways, this is the real offense: treating Muslims as if their violation of global norms, and thralldom to medieval conceptions of politics and religion, were somehow acceptable. --- here.)

To do otherwise would be judgmental and that's a horrible attitude-crime today. We can't think of these people as lunatic, fanatic, ignorant, blustering, seventh-century savages, even if that's the way they behave. We must "respect" their grievances, real or imagined. If we reached out and tried to understand them better, we would feel their pain. We need to modify OUR behavior to suit THEIR requirements lest we offend them.

Sometimes I think we're just as fucked-up as the Muslims, just in a different way.