According to PuffHo and numerous other venues, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau has come out attacking Charlie Hebdo for “hate speech.” It’s unfortunate that in the article, whose text I copied yesterday (below), they misspell the cartoonist’s first name:
Famed Doonesbury cartoonist Gary [sic] Trudeau slammed his counterparts at Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical newspaper that was attacked by terrorists in January — at the George Polk journalism awards on Friday, saying their work “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” The attack on the publication, which has mocked Islam and other faiths in its pages, ignited a fierce international debate over free speech and racism.
“Free speech … becomes its own kind of fanaticism,” Trudeau said as he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the organization, adding that cartoonists’ role is to “punch up” rather than down.
According to The Daily Beast, Trudeau is the first cartoonist ever to receive a prestigious Polk Award for journalism. (It was also the first strip cartoon to nab a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning). And if any cartoonist deserves it, he does. His scathing political satire, especially directed at American wars abroad and especially conservative politicians, made his strip a must-read for those of us with a liberal bent. But he not only punched up, but also punched down, making fun of hippies and college students. And is it really “punching up” to make fun of the much-derided Dan Quayle by representing him as a feather?
Maybe so, but I reject the putative moral difference between “punching up” and “punching down,” which I take to mean making fun of the powerful versus the relatively powerless, respectively. In the Social Justice Warrior Code, the former is okay and the latter is not. I reject that distinction. While it’s important to satirize those with power, bad ideas are not the monopoly of the majority. Yes, you shouldn’t gratuitiously impugn society’s disposssessed, but there are times when minorities have bad ideas and should be criticized or satirized. I, for one, would have no problem criticizing—or satirizing, if I were any good at that—the college students who need puppy and kitten videos to find respite from the “hate speech” of having to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali or, G*d forbid, a defender of Israel. For those people, though they’re still in the minority, threaten the rights of the rest of us, and if we don’t call them out early and often, we’ll all be threatened.
As for Trudeau’s misguided criticism of Charlie Hebdo, I’m immensely disappointed. Did he not understand what those cartoons were about, or that Charlie Hebdo was in fact punching up when defending the rights of the Muslim minority? He should have asked some French speaker to tell him what the cartoons were all about, which is what I did. And what, exactly, is the “hate speech” to what Trudeau refers? Is it the making fun of the doctrine of Islam? Does he know that even after the savage slaughter of its writers and artists, Charlie Hebdo refused to lash out against Muslims?
Finally, I’m not sure what he means by “free speech. . . becomes its own kind of fanaticism.” Really, what is the difference between drawing Mohamed in a way that makes fun of the tenets of Islam (as did the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoonists) and depicting Dan Quayle as a feather to make fun of his dimwittedness?
I’ve been a huge admirer of Trudeau (I have an autographed copy of his famous “creationist strip” in my office), but this time he’s gone badly wrong. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has no idea what Charlie Hebdo was all about, but Trudeau is savvy and, I’d think, would try to find out more about the magazine before he slams it. By characterizing Charlie Hebdo as an organ of “hate speech” he implicitly justifies those who try to silence it.
Most unfortunate.
And now you know Trudeau is about HIS satire and free speech and not about free speech.
Sad.
Absolutely. To me, he is a mean person who is simply jealous that other people have the limelights now – even though they have paid for this with their lives.
Oh, come on, have you even read his work?
Is today April 1st?
Especially when it’s those bad ideas that are keeping them dispossessed!
Often the reason a group is a minority is because they have bad ideas. White supremacists? I’m not about to stop criticizing that minority, for example.
Precisely.
Lampooning the bad ideas of minorities is not about “punching down”. It’s an attempt to get people to recognize how crazy and harmful those ideas are, and that therefore those ideas should be abandoned. It’s an attempt to enlighten and empower.
(Hmm. I should’ve avoided the absolute language. I realize there are plenty of bigots out there who *are* about punching down. But taking aim at the bad ideas of minorities doesn’t automatically qualify as punching down.)
…and this would be why it’s not a good idea to have heroes. Gets depressing watching one after another hoist themselves on their own petards.
<sigh />
b&
There’s a lot of good sense in that.
But, the nice thing about being a rationalist, skeptic, etc. is that we can separate people as individuals from their ideas, and take the good whilst discarding the bad.
Bill Maher would be my personal example – generally excellent on religion and modern liberalism, generally awful on health and medicine.
Absolutely. Heroes don’t have to be paragons.
Nor, even, paramourous polygons.
b&
Nor should they be polygamous polymaths.
Polymeric parachutes?
b&
Periodontal parvenus.
lol – not only bad gums, but parvenuity to boot:-(
I’ve known a few peripatetic polyglots that I might consider heroes.
Perversely parabolic popinjays?
Yep. There are a lot of people I admire for their talent or for some of the things they have said & done, but that doesn’t mean I agreee with everything they ever said or did or might say or do in the future if they’re still alive! One of my best friends, who is 61 and earned a PhD just a couple of years ago (in Communications, from the University of Reading) and mostly has very progressive views, but has a few blind spots. When we were talking about the Charlie Hebdo murders, he surprised me by expressing the opinion that the cartoonists were racist — this is a guy with a PhD in communications, who time and time again has told me how he loves France (and loathes the U.S., although he was born and raised here), and he was expressing an opinion without having studied the actual facts of the matter! And when I tried to explain otherwise, he was utterly unwilling to listen or concede that he might be wrong. He is also convinced that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the U.S. government and that a majority of construction experts have determined that there is absolutely no way that jumbo jets crashing into the WTC Twin Towers could possibly have caused them to collapse no matter what other experts say (they’re all government stooges, after all). He doesn’t even like Muslims but seems to look upon them as underdogs being made to look bad by the U.S. and other western governments rather than admit that the extremists among them don’t need any outside help to make themselves look atrocious. We’ve been good friends for over 10 years now, since we met as members of the First Coast Freethought Society in Jax, FL, but we certainly don’t see eye to eye on everything.
Yuck! Drunk on the PC/SJW Kool-aid. But what accounts for the conspiracy crap? He maybe a free-thinker, but he fails critical-thinking.
It is weird how a pretty rational person can go off the rails over a conspiracy theory, or alternative medicine, or vaccinations.
The sometimes very funny online cartoonist who does The Far Left Side stays pretty current on events and politics, and these serve as a source for his cartoons, but he too is convinced that 9/11 was a conspiracy.
Weird.
Criticism of Islam often is punching up anyway. Try criticizing Islam when you’re an atheist blogger in Bangladesh – you’re risking being hacked to death by machetes in the streets of that secular country that nevertheless panders to extremists.
Or try being a Muslim Egyptian woman who doesn’t want her genitals mutilated – chances are you’re out of luck because a fatwa issued by the top university there says it honours the prophet.
Or try being a rape victim in Saudi Arabia – even cell phone video evidence isn’t enough to get your multiple rapists convicted, but you’re likely to go to jail for being out without a male relative.
Or depict Buddha with earphones on Facebook to advertise your bar, and you get two years hard labour for blasphemy in Burma, while hardline monks wait outside the court ready to protest if the maximum sentence isn’t imposed.
Anyone who speaks against the dominant religion in a non-secular country, or speaks against Islam anywhere, is putting their life at risk, especially if they’re female or LGBT.
Excellent point. And you don’t have to be someone actually oppressed by that religion to see it oppressing others and to criticize it accordingly.
Speak truth to power. It cannot be said enough. And mock them.
I am not sure, but perhaps Trudeau has a soft spot for religion. That might explain his blind spot here.
Could be. Could not find out anything about his religious leanings from a quick search. It turns out this isn’t a new position for him, though:
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/10/09/garry-trudeau-slams-mohammed-cartoons/
Yes, great point.
Those who insist criticism of Islam is “punching down” are engaging in the bigoted, condescending colonialism they decry. They ignore the criticism coming from oppressed individuals living in Muslim dominated countries and prefer to concentrate on what the Westerners are saying or writing.
Yes yes yes. It always seemed ridiculous in the aftermath of Charlie to hear the ‘Muslims are powerless’ argument. These killers, wherever they strike, consider themselves unconstrained by any form of secular law, have significant overseas funding and look on all non-Muslims, and plenty of Muslims, as worthless. They wear bullet-proof vests and march into malls, halls, offices, etc. with assault rifles, before killing unarmed individuals. And I’m not meant to criticise Islam because it’s powerless?
Islam has something like a billion and a half adherents, many of whom effectively police criticism of their religion by either carrying out or explicitly supporting violent reprisals on anyone who breathes a syllable that they consider offensive.
They’re not a ‘tiny minority’, certainly not if you include those believers who support the Paris killers(and plenty did). Muslims in the west essentially have the support of one half of the plitical divide and together they stamp down on criticism of Islam with great rhetorical force. Even some ‘moderate’ Muslims aren’t afraid of shedding their apparent commitment to western values as soon as their delicate temperament is disturbed – eg. the ubiquitous British Muslim Mo Shafiq, who was responsible for the odious ‘defamer of the prophet’ tweet after Maajid Nawaz posted the Jesus & Mo image.
It is stunningly fatuous to simply declare the beliefs of over a billion and a half people out of bounds, and it’s even worse to do so on the basis of the childishly simplistic idea that Muslims are powerless(BTW, it shouldn’t need saying that there are plenty of similarly ‘powerless’ people in society who aren’t religious conservatives with abhorrent views and a sense-of-humour failure, and who don’t react to their powerlessness with petulant temper tantrums and occasional splurges of violence).
Tell that to the secular countries and their inhabitants who are rightly obliged to follow all the laws on equality and anti-discrimination, freedom of speech and religion, whilst a large chunk of western Islamic society ignores secular laws, holds sharia courts, reacts with a kind of blind, joyous fury to any perceived slight and implicitly defends the actions of priapically pious young men who gun down unarmed civilians.
Exactly how powerless are they? The left are in their pocket, the right’s views can be easily dismissed as racist and summarily ignored, very few people dare breathe a word of criticism against their religion and potential reformists and progressives are viciously ostracised by the community and chucked under the bus by people like Trudeau. And this is not even to ask Heather’s question of ‘how powerless are the minority within the minority?’, which pretty much makes a nonsense of the whole black and white, punching up, punching down argument.
This is the one issue which seems to just turn the liberal-left into moral lunatics – I’d very much like to reclaim liberalism from these people, maybe come up with some differentiating term that clearly separates genuine liberals from liberals who are prepared to junk 90% of liberal values simply because the people opposed to those values are from an ethnic minority.
Brilliantly said!
Everyone who thinks they understand why Islam is exceptionally dangerous and maladaptive should read Hirsi Ali’s Heretic for an even greater (and scarier) understanding of its threat. Her chapters on the love of death over life, the requirement to “command right and forbid wrong,” and the demand for jihad, full of both personal and world-wide examples, is invaluable.
I am astounded at this, and can’t imagine how he, as an often-controversial cartoonist, could possibly try to justify clipping the wings of other cartoonists this way.
Many of those who claim that such and such is hate speech never bring up the fact that both the Bible and the Quran are full of hate speech.
very disappointing
I can see this easily happening if he slipped and let his peer group (incl. his spouse) do his thinking for him. We tend to implicitly trust the opinions of those nearest to us. I bet he’s in a particularly cushy NYC echo chamber, at this point.
Indeed. There is also just the knee-jerk reaction that our tribalistic instincts sometimes lead us to. As a member of the left wing tribe, one can often unthinkingly oppose anything coming out of the right wing tribe, and the right wing tribe is pretty unapologetically anti-Islam, to the point of war mongering in some cases. As a result, it takes an effort of will to be clear thinking enough to agree, or even to be seen to seem to agree, with one’s ideological foes.
Tribal group-think replaces most individual thinking most of the time, it seems to me, unless someone makes a special effort to break out of it.
I’m putting money on not actually reading much of their work. Spent a lot of my youth in France and the style of Charlie Hebdo cartoons are common enough in France from postcards to graffiti. Seeing one or two cartoons could give a skewed view of the overall content.
And indeed there’s an entire website devoted to explaining the context of Charlie Hebdo cartoons to English-speakers:
http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/
Also this article:
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/12/7518349/charlie-hebdo-racist
Not the Vox article I meant to link to. I meant the one that gives a short overview of the Understanding Charle Hebdo site:
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7546903/understanding-charlie-hebdo
Nonetheless–one disappointment will hardly deem my respect and love for his body of work.
Where “deem” = “dim”
Really just another one to throw in the bucket of liberal elite apologist. May have to get another bucket.
Last night on Bill Maher’s show I thought Fareed Zakaria was going to pass out trying to defend all those fine Muslims and give Bill hell every time he said anything negative and true.
I’ll cut Zakira some slack on this. He was not so much pulling a Ben Affleck routine, being outraged that Harris and Maher dare say those things, as questioning Maher’s effectiveness in winning Muslim hearts and minds. Of course, the latter really isn’t Maher’s job.
Unbelievable!
Trudeau punched up and down for decades with scathing political satire and now he has punched himself in the face.
‘Fanatical free speech?’ What the hell is that? Why is it so hard for smart people to understand the idea that punishing hate speech is (and has been for centuries) a pretext for censorship and the abrogation of free speech?
I’ve never been a huge fan of Trudeau, but I do agree with a variation on what he said about punching down not being particularly funny.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2015/03/dm.html
But, as has been said here many times, bad ideas deserve no quarter regardless of the source. Just because you feel dispossessed doesn’t excuse bad thinking.
And the supposedly dispossessed Muslims in France or other non-Muslim nations are only there because they or their ancestors apparently didn’t have sufficient opportunity in their home countries and can’t seem to figure out that a large part of the problem may actually be the idiotic religion they adhere to.
Good point! 😀
Well, that’s actually a good point – punching down may be just as legitimate as punching up, just as reasonable, just as deserving of protection, even just as valuable (and I believe it is indeed all of these things). But you’re right: it isn’t just as funny. And if that’s what Trudeau meant, he had a good point.
But then, this principle of humour is no more than that, a general principle. It’s not as though the level of authority of a butt of a joke is the only thing that determines whether or not a joke is funny. I can think of genuinely funny jokes about low-status people, and so can you.
Trudeau might have a point if he’s criticising the magazine for not being funny, and offering his analysis of why it’s not funny. In which cas I think the crucial questions are: Does he speak French? If he doesn’t, how does he know the magazine isn’t funny? I look at the material online and I don’t get it – but the conclusion I draw is, “Well, that’s what comes from not speaking French.” I hope we anglophones have moved beyond thinking that foreigners must lack a sense of humour, because we don’t understand their jokes.
Ugh. Sorry for spelling and grammar errors there. They’re worse than I thought. Accidentally pushed “post” too soon.
Don’t be so hard on yourself! I had to reread it to find any problems, and then it was just one typo.
Trudeau is way out of line with this. Even if we were to accept his charge that Charlie Hebdo was guilty of “hate speech”, the only reasonable response is “So what?”. It doesn’t matter how hateful a piece of speech is – it can’t justify or excuse cold-blooded murder. By making this charge, Trudeau is effectively saying that the Charlie Hebdo journalists deserved what they got – an utterly despicable position for a fellow scribbler to take.
I’m also not fond of the “Punching up / Punching down” dichotomy. Satire is just about punching – punching what are perceived to be moral shortcomings (preferably in others). But this can target the rulers as well as the oppressed. The reasons don’t even have to be laudable: There’s anti-Semitic and racist satire. Satire, like science, is only a method.
I think the only reason satire is seen as a progressive force is because there is a strong negative correlation between humour and dogmatism, so satirists tend to be liberals.
Well, the more I learn about the battle between Islam (or ‘Islamism’, depending on whom you’re talking to), the more I have come to understand how massivly politically complicated the situation is.
Basically, at this point, I don’t really believe that the Greenwalds of the world actually believe what they say they believe: namely that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Greenwald et al, which apparently includes Trudeau, know perfectly well what causes terrorism, and they realize whats going on. Rather, they have made a conscious choice to lie to their readership, in the vain hopes of staving off the conflict.
I wouldn’t say that Trudeau has gone as far as Greenwald, who is in an open alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood’s US branch CAIR. But his strategic stance appears to be the same.
Satirical cartoonists tend to be blind to their own prejudices. I have some old Bloomsbury books, but I never liked Doonesbury as much as Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes.
Which I found to address universal human foibles rather than pushing a partisan agenda. Doonesbury could do that on occasion, but then spoil it.
A word to all writers. Do not assume your political adversaries are evil.
Good, I strongly dislike Doonnesbury anyway. Unfunny garbage.
This seems to be the year of the “punching up” meme. I’d never heard this before this year, and now it seems everywhere. This seems like a completely vacuous prescription to me. Deciding who is “up” and who is “down” is the whole game, isn’t it? There is no objective measure of this.
One person’s unfortunate and trodden on homeless person is another person’s lazy bum leaching off of society. Satire can be made of both situations, one mocking heartless people who won’t lend a hand to their fellow humans, another mocking lazy people who want others to work for them. Who is right? Who is “punching up”? Both are aiming their satire at a moral failing. It is a difficult empirical question to say who is closer to right in any given circumstance. You are young indeed if you’ve never met any genuinely lazy people, and young also if you’ve never met anyone who has been shafted by forces out of their control. It’s a matter of some complexity to sort out whether, in general, for some population, it is more of one or more of another. Both kinds of moral failings, lack of compassion and lack of responsibility, can happen at the same time too, so that both kinds of satire can simultaneously have valid targets.
Wait for the punching out. I guess that meme has been around for sometime.
Agree–“up” or “down” is hardly black and white.
(However, I wouldn’t mind telling Repugs to quit punching down when they cry “class warfare” at every objection to their plutocrat pandering.)
I think targeting religion is always “punching up” because of the nature of spiritual Truths. We’re not only dealing with a proposed top-down supernatural phenomenon which outranks everything and rules over the universe, but the believers dogmatically refuse to hold their claims open to rational scrutiny on the common ground. They’re special and untouchable– and they make the believers special and untouchable.
What’s more elevated than the ultimate pinnacle of reality? What’s more pompous than ‘faith’ and its passive aggressive ability to hide meekly behind the Divine? Religion itself, as a phenomenon, is arrogant, self-important, grandiose, and puffed up with its own consequence. Kick it in the butt and knock it down.
Very true. The religious are so blinded by their own importance no criticism is possible.
It compares to some of the extreme right wing republicans and the Constitution. They have matched it up with the bible as if their Moses wrote the thing.
The religious are also often so blinded by their own insignificance that no criticism is possible.
Instead of a common ground between believer and nonbeliever the supernatural’s importance takes center stage and overwhelms the entire inquiry. They’ve made themselves powerful by ‘surrendering their power’ to Something Higher. The upshot is that you’re no longer arguing with them: you’re rebelling against God.
I suspect a lot of theists don’t realize this, focused as they are on their smallness in comparison to God. They convince themselves they’re avoiding conflict.
Or, just point and laugh as the little willy on the official portrait of the invisibly-clad emperor and ask why nobody’s actually seen him around for so long….
b&
It’s no surprise to me. To someone like Trudeau, even criticizing groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab is “gross and racist”.
Has he said that??
I agree with Diane’s point. I don’t care for Trudeau much but I’d want to see some evidence that Trudeau had supported Islamic extremists before giving that statement any credence.
I loathe the distinction between “punching up” and “punching down” – and perhaps I’ve led a sheltered life, but I’ve never actually seen either expression used unironically, by someone who subscribes to the distinction.
Something I witnessed years ago – when I was a child myself: I saw a smaller child hit a larger one (not seriously hard), and the larger one hit back (again, not seriously hard). A third child, observing, said to the larger child that he shouldn’t have done this. The larger child said: “But he hit me.” The response he got was: “That just shows he’s got guts.” What I thought the larger child should have said was: “Not if he’s relying on me not hitting back.”
Obviously, no one should feel licensed to hit anyone, but we should feel licensed to criticse. The incident I described shows the perverse incentive structures we would create by institutionalising a punching-up/punching-down distinction.
In this game of punching up or down I believe we can say that Atheists are always punching up so Trudeau should be proud of us. In fact, he should change his ways and join us. I’m afraid the word for him is hypocrite if I can punch up one more time.
You believe it, but my Christian friends feel (I think wrongly) oppressed by the rising tide of atheism. To my Christian friends, punching atheists IS punching up. But therein lay the problem with the punching up prescription: up is not an agreed upon direction. So the prescription to only punch up really says little more than: Don’t attack me, or people I support, attack those other guys! It’s a deepity. You can only use this prescription by begging the question at hand.
If we want to discuss whether or not Hedbo makes valid points or is merely abusive, or Christians are being put upon by atheists, or any other thing, we’ll have to wade in and address the actual points at hand, individually. Appeal to a universal sense of “up” and “down” is a non-starter, because if such a universal sense existed none of these political or social or religious debates would even exist.
very sad.
How do you define the difference between “up” and “down”? It often depends where you’re standing.
For example US Xtians like to think they’re under attack by the forces of ungodliness, while US atheists think _they’re_ the ones under attack.
Another example, the pro-muslim anti-jewish slant in the media (as seen by this website) vs. the islamophobic bias of the very same media (as seen by muslims).
So who’s the oppressed minority there?
My point is, “punching up” or “down” is meaningless until those two examples above have been settled by popular agreement.
You are ‘punching down’ against people with AK-47s?
Ex-sodding-zackly.
If your weapon of choice is a Minigun, then yeah, you are. 😉
But of course when your Minigun isn’t around, then they are ‘punching down’ at everyone else.
Really, the whole metaphor is a bit stupid.
Incompatibilists have been arguing that choice is an illusion; so what choice did Garry Trudeau have, in making the comments as he did?
Jerry says: “…Yes, you shouldn’t gratuitiously impugn society’s dispossessed… – By saying one “shouldn’t gratuitously impugn …” Jerry is in fact stating one can opt not to… Again, incompatibilists have been insistent that opting or not opting is an illusion, vis-à-vis determinism.
There is no question of Trudeaui being misguided, in the context of determinism; he had no choice, he did what he did, based on environmental stimulation on his brain circuits.
Incompatibilists are contradicting themselves, for making criticism against Gary Trudeau.
I’ll assume based on it’s silliness that that isn’t a serious comment, but on the outside chance you’re truly that ignorant (no offense intended). The fact he had no choice does not prevent him, if he were to read these comments, or others from acquiring new data from the criticisms, that would cause him to change his opinion.
You evidently missed the point of the argument.
Why should an incompatibilist say things like: you should or shouldn’t? Trudeau said something didn’t he; and he could not have done otherwise, right?
Yes, it does not stop Trudeau from changing his opinion, after reading the comments here.
You want to have your cake and eat it, too?
But, first, think logically.
It goes back to the phrase, “All else being equal.”
The fallacy of free will is that all else is equal; in reality, all else is never equal.
However, it’s still a very useful analytical technique to ignore the other factors and analyze the situation as if all else really is equal, even though it’s not.
Once you’ve got that fundamental misunderstanding out of the way, it’s easy to get on with the rest of your life.
b&
Again, the point I mentioned implies that X who did Y had a choice; if X had no choice, why say, after the fact: X should or shouldn’t have done that?
If you understand what has been presented, then the issue of all else being unequal falls away or is irrelevant.
When it comes right down to it, incompatibilists make the point that, no, there really isn’t any choice to be made. We are deterministic computational engines that, given a particular initial state and set of inputs, will inevitably process that into a particular terminal state.
At the same time, it’s very often useful to ignore that fact in certain limited domains — just as you might ignore aerodynamic effects when designing a go-kart racing course (even though you couldn’t do so if you wanted to know your car’s maximum speed) or you might ignore the spherical shape of the Earth when using a map to make your way to the drugstore (even though you couldn’t do so if you wanted to fly across the ocean) and so on.
Ignoring many factors — if all else were equal — then the X who did Y had a choice. In everyday life, the incompatibilist temporarily ignores those factors for the moment for the sake of analysis — even whilst acknowledging that ignoring those factors creates a limited and ultimately incomplete view of reality. In all settings, the compatibilist insists that those factors don’t really exist or otherwise somehow don’t count. Such is the essence of the “free will” debate.
b&
The logical conclusion from that is that incompatibilists are NOT PERMITTED to criticise anybody for anything, since they had no choice but to do it.
I assume this means we should be able to look forward to a complete silence from Prof CC on all social topics from now on. However, this probably won’t work since Prof CC may have no choice but to comment on such matters, whether logically permitted to or not.
😉
Pro CC may think he has no choice but he has also said [to the effect] that freedom of speech gives one the right to criticize. So Pro CC thinks he has freedom of speech, and what, exactly, does freedom of speech mean if one has no choice to comment, whether logically permitted or not?
So, is it your position that Prof CC should or should not have criticised Garry Trudeau? Because from your first post it looks very much like the latter.
My position is not one about criticizing or not criticizing. The thrust of my comments is whether X who did Y had a choice, that is, whether X could have done otherwise. And the incompatibilist’s position, from the arguments we have heard so far, is that choice is an illusion; there is no question of anyone being free to make a choice between two or more options, in the context of determinism.
Notwithstanding determinism, we have freedom of speech and this freedom allows us to criticize or not to criticize. If X in the example cited has no choice for doing Y, why say X should or shouldn’t, after the fact? “Shouldn’t” implies there was a choice. And that would make any criticism by the incompatibilist, couched in this manner, self-contradictory.
I guess I have to criticize Gerry for insanity, Oh well.
By “Gerry” [sic], did you mean Garry (Trudeau) or Jerry (Coyne)?
I haven’t read all of the comments so I don’t know if anyone has already hit on this point.
Trudeau has always worked in a kind of narrow political liberalism with his comedy, which is more than fine. In that realm he shines like few others. But not that long ago he decided to explain to the world what comedy was. His explanation was that comedy was necessarily political and necessarily liberal. A certain narrow range of liberalism, as a matter of fact. At this point the problem became obvious. Garry Trudeau’s problem is extreme narcissism.
As appalling as this is, I’m a bit cautious about this story, because if you follow the links in the various stories, the HuffPo and other stories I’ve seen on this are sourced to about three live tweets of Trudeau’s acceptance speech of the Polk Awards, all of which summarize in the Twitter author’s words, not necessarily Trudeau’s.
https://twitter.com/PeterBale/status/586594390048636928
https://twitter.com/PeterBale/status/586594643019726848
https://twitter.com/lpolgreen/status/586594695175897088
In fact, the “punching up” language appears in a summary by Center for Public Integrity head Peter Bale, and very well might not have been Trudeau’s words.
Insofar is the tweets were an accurate reflection of what Trudeau said, it’s really appalling that yet another major liberal voice has fallen into this illiberal mentality. But I’d really like to see a direct statement from Trudeau or audio/video of the speech before taking him to task over what was summarized via third parties.
Trudeau’s remarks were indeed his, and they’ve just been published in the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-abuse-of-satire/390312/
His words:
Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.
Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.
By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks.
What an incredibly irritating, sanctimonious, morally lazy quote. I really thought the victim-blaming had died down but no, apparently France and Charlie Hebdi incited the widespread, worldwide violence that followed the ‘I Forgive You'(?) cover.
‘Those foreigners – they just can’t control themselves after all. Who are we to come along with our western values and simply assume that they won’t behave like deranged arsonist children?’
Does he think he’s showing Muslims respect by assuming they have absolutely no self-control at all? It’s precisely because I think they are capable of looking at Charlie Hebdo without turning into the Hulk that I find Muslim over-reaction to the cartoons so repellent.
Then again perhaps you have to believe they’re capable of better in order to be repelled by their behaviour. Perhaps the illiberal left ought to take a look at what it says about their prejudices that they treat grown-up Muslims like five year olds with behavioural problems.
OK, I spoke too soon – Trudeau wrote a piece the next day in The Atlantic, and indeed does invoke the whole “punching up, punching down” meme:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-abuse-of-satire/390312/
More perniciously, he also suggests that Charlie Hebdo should be prosecuted under French law.
How exactly are the, mostly atheists, at CH punching down when they satirize the 1.6b strong religion of Islam, and the 2.0b strong Christian religion?
He needs to start self-censoring right away: He’s offending gun-toting teabaggers who might become violent.
And they are simply FORCED to read his comic and be offended by it.