Comments on In Other Tick, Tick, Ticks

This has got to be the most boring Slog day of all time.

Are you bored? Check out this photo essay from Dan Savage's glorious war on the people of Iraq.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/12/unembedded-17.html

Emocracy? Now that's something everyone can get behind! (Except for Mexico.)

You know, it's sad that something like this is pretty much always expected to result in death threats, mob riots, and attempted murder. As Leonard Pitts put it so well, Lord, save us all from the irony-impaired.

I predict a lot of people on both sides will stereotype each other a lot, yell things, and get angry at non-existent threats to their ways of life, while accomplishing nothing.

And the news media will report it all, gleefully.

What is sad and ironic, is that this is such a real threat, and there are many even here, who would rather minimize the message, than take a moment to wake up and smell the reality.

What is sad is people adding fuel to the fire of fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is dangerous. Whether it's christian, muslim, hindu, it really has nothing to do with promoting religion and everything to do with promoting the power of the individual. The moderates of the religion really need to reign in these abuses in the name of their religion.

I opened the article mostly to see whether the NYT was mischaracterizing a critique of fundamentalism as 'anti-Islam', but I'm not convinced that they were.

Remember, it's not just Sakuracon that practices Emocracy, it's a Way of Elif.

hmmm. i don't get all the comments here. but the livelink video was pulled for the safety of their workers.

I don't give a fuck about Islam or the Danes. Neither culture has done anything for me lately. Of course I don't believe in this amorphous concept of the West either. Am I supposed to get behind Denmark because they're white and live under the same political/econonomic system I do? Maybe our two cultures are simply incompatible and nothing is going to change that. Who the fuck am I (or you) to impose my value system one everything? If the Danes want to test the limits of their civil society, let them, and let them deal with the repercussions. Because short of Western Europe deporting or killing all their Muslims, or imposting strict immigration quotas (of course, their economies would putter to a crawl) the situation is not going to change.

In other words, this post is just more blind hysteria from people without solutions. All you can do is impotently rage against a situation in which you are too weak and liberal to anything about. Your blood is a little too thin to get beyond "Islam bad! West good!"

And yes, that goes for the Dutch too.

The thing about the United States and the West in general is this belief that art has a real political impact. This film isn't going to actually do anything other than piss people off- you're not committing to a political act because you want to see it. The film can be nothing more than an empty provocation, because saying "Islam is this way" isn't going to change the nature of Muslim immigrants or Muslims overseas. All it's really doing is putting wood on the fire, inflaming anger on both sides. In other words, it's an impotent sign of weakness that will only serve to deepen hostilities. But people actually naively believe it means something or is doing something, and oh no, the backward Muslims don't understand Western irony, whatever will we do!? I don't know, until you lay out an immigration policy or a working secular policy that will enable Europe to take advantage of Muslim immigration while effectively neutralizing their religion, you got nothing but "freedom of speech man!"

This film is exactly the kind of political impotence I mentioned above. You think you're saying something by standing behind it, but all you're really doing is being an art fag/snob holding up the banner of art and freedom without considering real world political implications.

Shit or get off the pot.