Outrage

Today's quick pick of various random blogs found some in foreign tongues, and some equally incomprehensible even though in English. The only one I stumbled into that made sense to me was this one I guess called Our Vortex or something like that.

Okay, sorry about that--something just killed my browser and I lost most of the rest of this post. It's discouraging to try to repeat myself, but I'll give it a stab. "Somebody, somewhere, will use these cartoons as a pretext for violence," this author wrote. "But don't expect me to have any sympathy or understanding for their cause. All they're doing is proving the cartoonist's point."

This is the thing that gets me. These maniac Muslims make it perfectly clear that the newspaper in question was right--their attitudes are indeed a menace to freedom of the press. You can try to spin that in any direction you like, blasphemy, politeness, whatever--and it still comes down to that. These guys have the same attitude toward the press that Stalin, Mao, and George III did--the press is free to print anything it likes, so long as they agree with it. That way lies--well, I don't remember what I wrote before, but something slimy and probably spineless is what it looks like.

The thing is, as this guy wrote, "I have the right to outrage you just as much as you have the right to outrage me. Put down the Kalishnikov, grow up, and join the Goddamn world community." It's high time. And by the by, if you've got to boycott something, take a lesson from our own Dixichristians--boycott somebody who can make a difference. Don't pick targets at random or call for government apologies--it just makes you look like loons. What you want to do is go after the pocketbook of the publisher. That will get their attention.