WelcomeMy (BMcC) contribution to the freedom of expression issue in France (2020)
Call me any offensive racist or other obnoxious words you want as long as I can call you whatever I want. But be careful about insulting my parents and school teachers, because then I might agree with you!
"Idle Ayatollahs' hands are the devil's worshop." (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
∀ uns: Gott_mit(uns) == true alternatively: (uns) Gott_mit(uns) == true
The above cartoon is not a depiction of the Prophet Munammad(PBUH), nor is it intended to be such. It is an image (05 March 2006) of an entirely mortal Fundamentalist Islamist Mullah who is intent on causing trouble to innocent persons who believe differently than himself, by blowing things and said persons up with explosives. He is a very self-righteous and indignant person who cannot accept that a public school should teach children to know there are are any ideas in the whole world other than his interpretation du jour of his current True Faith (because he is afraid that such exposure might vitiate their belief: ¿How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree? They simply must never see Paris even if they live there.). He is a totalitarian bigot.
It is my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) impression that their Prophet(PBUH) said that muslims should simply walk away from persons who offend their religion, because those persons are not amenable to reason. The Prophet(PBUH), as I understand, did not instruct believers to blow up non-believers with explosives or to behead them. But this fellow does think such things, and he is intent on acting out his ideations (esp.: to get other persons to do it for him...), including beheading school teacher Samuel Paty in The City of Light (Paris, France), October, 2020. He is a very dangerous person (irrespective of his gender or religious alignment). He is a wolf in cleric's robes.
He is only secondarily a muslim. He could just as well be a fanatic of any other religion or secular (e.g.: political) ideology, for instance, a Christian missionary who believes that persons who do not convert to his True Faith should be burned alive at the stake to save their immortal souls from eternal damnation. Maybe his name is: Tómas de Torquemada, or whatever that would be in Arabic?[2]
I am Samuel Paty. Are you, too, my reader? Heads up, everyone! (As an aside, if I was a woman, Mr. Paty looks like a guy I might want to invite into my bed.)
Something that needs to be condemned and put a stop to
The most horrifying sound human beings can make may be a hoard of North African (e.g.: Algerian) chadors ululating ~ A high-pitched wailing noise more piercing than an air raid siren, arising from (infibulated?) women cocooned inside chadors ~ A resonating howling that sounds like it would shatter concrete and steel, that grows ever louder and more penetrating ~ as if plague of the progeny of matings of men and carrion birds were coming up from Hell to rip you to pieces with their talons and their beaks to avenge their own riven existence.
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) do not know if it has anything to do with Islam. At a minimum, I believe it occurs in countries where the Muslim religion is practiced, and muslims should extirpate it to its root, and so also should everyone else whenever they have a chance to do so. Anyone in the 20th Century who knows about ululation and does not condemn it absolutely is, as Adolf Loos said of those in the 20th Century who engage in decoration: either a criminal or a degenerate. Samuel Paty is at least dead; they cannot harm him any more. These living specters yet tread upon the earth and can contniue do do harm to those whom they have not yet murdered.
Is the horror of ululation worse than the screams of a heretic being burned alive "at the stake"? I do not know; it is certainly no more constructive or necessary.
I am opposed to all unhinged emotions, incuding lower class white screaming soccer fans and upper-middle class parents of all races screaming for their kids at college graduations. Little girls fleeing their homes to avoid having their external genitalia ripped out need to be given asylum; adults who want to rip out little girls' external genitalia but also want indoor plumbing need to be kept out.
More rubbish
It must be realized that what makes Western civilization valuable is that is is not parochially anything but rather universal, so it's the same as any other universalizing culture: all of them are above the fray of all particular cultures, just like persons who think should all be internationalized and not subject to military conscription or censorship or in any other way intruded upon by any potentially warring party. Let the ethnics cleanse each other if that's what turns them on – just don't let them waste any persons other than themselves or any natural resources in doing so.
Western civilization becomes more western by becoming less western and absorbing all human doings and not doings, thinkings and not thinkings, feelings and not feelings and everything else (especially: including "its own") as semiotic raw material to culture in humanist researchers' petri dishes and see what toxi-cities they may reproduce into. Their Believers need to be neutralized so that their beliefs do not hurt any bodies or souls except their own. If they want to burn infidels, let them light a fire under their own feet.
Aren't the Angela Davises of this world parasites on the civilization they eat to feed their lifestyle? We need some strong anti-fungal medication. All such people should be given a choice: Assimilate or don't touch anybody or any thing. You are most welcome to being your ethnic social customs and beliefs along with you: Indeed our ethnographers are eager to receive them: as lab specimens of superceded forms of human life. If you cannot rise up yourself, don't tear anybody above you down. "Each life matters". N eaches do not make 1 all, but 1 all must becoagulated from the dissolution of many who/what could otherwise be eaches. If you cannot extend an open hand, keep your fist to yourself and hit your own head with it. Go fight Muhammad Ali in a boxing ring or William F. Buckley, Jr. in a civil debate, and see who wins; loser lose all (Yalies are eponymously bulldogs; maybe Ali was self-educated?)
Aside: Tough problems
What about the Roma in Europe? The cliché is that they make their living stealing from tourists' back pockets. They don't have ayatollahs to send them to decapitate high school history teachers, but, as a group, they lead wretched lives even if a few may not. Don't they make the Palestinians look like little leaguers?
What to do about the Hassids, who seem to me like jewish Islamist fundamentalists, who want to keep their children (they multiply like rabbits, on welfare, and don't do military service in Israel) from knowing anything about the Copernican world? [I ask: Why shouldn't Yahveh be tried for Crimes Against Humanity at the International Court of Justice in the Hague?].
And, in Western Europe, why shouldn't the fundamentalist Islamist immigrants either assimilate or leave? All ethnicities are bad on principle because they are just naively believed in from the vicissitudes of Brownian movement of socio-physical particles, not critically reconstructed in the light of rational assessment of all possible forms of human life, to be better for each person than anything else that they could each otherwise have in their life? Ethnicity, thy name is the crimes of FGM and medically unnecessary male circumcision too![3] Why are babies born? If male: To be food for fodder. If female: To be the next iteration of baby factories. Ethno-reproduction without end, forever.
Aside: If I had freehand drawing ability, I'd be screwed
If I had freehand drawing ability, I do not think I would make cartoons of Deities, Who, at least since Aaron's Golden Calf, have generally been thought to be immaterial. I would make cartoons of clerics, politicians, pedagogues, businesspersons and other entirely material creatures, often the ones that are not nice persons (I call these persons: "creeps"). For many of them, I would make caricatures with their alimentary canals inverted (albeit: some already look a bit like that in reality, such as: Kim Kardashian West), to show what they are. Adult male lions do not punish their cubs for attacking their [the adult male lion's] tail; Lése-majesté is a crime wherever the criminals can get away with it. For those persons who have been nice and not naughty to me, I would draw nice cartoons of them being nice.
![Americans moved into Levittowns! Levels were split! Lawns were mowed! Mary Hartman saw the waxy yellow buidup on her kitschen floor! Big Macs were eaten! SUVs flourished! Americans got in their cars, and commuted (not death sentences)! We were: "Runnin' on empty, runnin' around!" (ref.: Jackson Browne song) ~ America's greatest contribution to the history of world architecture: The single family split level [or raised ranch...] suburban tract development house on 1/4 acre or more of grass lawn so why not just make it astroturf?](w/images/a/ab/SplitLevel.jpg)
Especially for architect Robert Venturi
, who said a dreck building with decoration ("decorated shed") is a good thing, I would
make for him both a cartoon and also a real life split-level house, with human feces stuccoed all over its facade, to make it
better. I would award Mr. Venturi an honorary Ph.D. ("Piled Higher and Deeper" degree) ~ ¿Why waste time and energy making
sacrilegious cartoons of religious Prophets when there are bigger fish to fry?[4]
Aside: As often, things are messier than they are presented to "normalcy"
+2020.12.17. I have just now listened to a lecture by Yale history Professor Alan Mikhail about Christopher Columbus. The net is that Europe in the 15th Century was so obsessed with extirpating Muslims, that what Columbus saw himself as encountering in The New World were more Muslim infidels to convert or kill.
Christopher Columbus's real objective in sailing West from Europe, besides booty, was to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, by closing the circle of Christian Crusaders around the Holy City from the East! Not suicide bombing, but, I think, pretty loony. So maybe the beheading of Samuel Paty is History's revenge on the Christian Crusaders.
Of course all this has about as much to do with Samuel Paty or Charlie Hebdo, etc., as my uncle Isadore Znamirowski's invention of the "star and bars" has to do with me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), or as slavery has to do with a black Harvard Ph.D. graduate from an upper-middle class black professional family, etc. But I do find it interesting.
Another very serious point to be made should be obvious: In repressive regimes, and The United States of America is not without sin here, if a person wants to express unpo[o]pular thoughts and not become a martyr, this can often be accomplished by expressing the thoughts in code,i.e., by using obscure polysyllabic words, and addressing only obscure audiences, such a university graduate school faculties and publishing only via peer reviewed journals and university presses. The defenders of morals (pudes, prigs...) are often gullible.
A bumper sticker I once saw, on a car parked near the Washington, D.C. Mall (1975), read:
What prophets teach
People misunderstand prophets, and the prophets for whatever reason don't generally help, perhaps because they do not understand what they are really doing, or, god help us, they are being hucksters?
To repeat Marshall McLuhan's guiding thought: "The medium is the message". The statements prophets make are the focal object, but what is the context? What is the medium? The medium is that the prophet creatively shaped – we might even say: invented – his life. He did not follow anybody or anybody's beliefs. He picked and choosed his life for himself. He may even have scripted his life as a tragedy to end up being martyred, for examples: Jesus Christ and Socrates.
But whatever his form of life and the statements he makes, the medium is that the person wilfully and self-accountably chose it. He did not just follow orders, he did not just do what people do, and he did not just believe what people believe, who may not be consciously aware of what they are doing but just be doing it (like the man who realized he had been speaking prose all his life).
Therefore, if you would follow a prophet, don't follow his words or even his acts: Follow his example of scripting your life however you may judge best. Don't believe him. Don't believe in him. Learn from the example of how he shaped the life he lived, and decide how to shape your own life, which may be very different from his. That is how you authentically follow any prophet, and it doesn't matter which one. The medium is the message.
Roots
Human beings are not vegetables. They do not sink roots into the soil. Other than in terms of genetics, ancestry is a sociological construct. An adult cat or dog does not whine about its ancestors, but gets on with living it own life. Why cannot human beings do the same? Because they have been childreared to ideate this is a good way to spend their time and energy, and they don't know anything more forward looking to do with themselves than gawk in their rear view mirror (antisexual childrearing does not help here).
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) am apparently half Christian Polish ("Polack") peasant and half despicable Irish or Scottish biological ancestry. So what? I am very relieved that I do not look iike my ancestors. My father was in the 180+ pound at 6 feet tall class: a thick male body I would not want one of those. My mother did not really look human to me but maybe like a figure in Mme Tussauds Wax Museum – her body gave me the creeps. I have no ideas where my physiognomy came from: I can eat almost anything and apparently not gain weight, or I can skip meals and I don't usually care. I like being very thin boned, and I don't see any precedent of that in my biological ancestors. My maternal grandfather, from what little I recall, looked somewhat like the old sterotype of a Neanderthal, with his toad-like hide – God save me from looking anything like him. And my maternal grandmother's body was kind of "squishy", not hard like an Olympic swimmer or fashion model. I don't want to look like any of my biological ancestors. Do you, my reader?
My ancestry is in books. And I very much wish I had had a single, stable home for all my life. But not to put down "roots" (of which I have not yet grown any, thank you, Lord, for that!), but to have a safe place to store and enjoy everything I ever encountered in my life that I liked and could possess. In other words: library, museum and archive. I desperately need an archive! And I do crave more ancestry: Books by Hermann Broch, Edmund Husserl, Robert Musil and others worthy to be my sources of living! Take me home – to a place I have never had the good fortune to be and my biological ancestors never knew of. How about the family compound in the film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with it fine private library?
My adopted from China (PRC) daughter, now age 20 years wants to go back to visit China and the orphanage she came from. Why? She cannot speak Chinese and has no interest in Chinese history. So what? If it was me, and I could find my birth mother, maybe I would bow to her and thank her for having given me up for adoption to persons who provided me with a richer life than she ever could have done. Love is not selfish.
Footnotes
- ↑ "If there is any honour left in this country, never open a door to dialogue with the cancer that is Islamism," [a French victim of a Paris Islamist bombing attack] said. "When you are ill you don't have a conversation with your cancer. You fight it and you kill it."
- ↑ "United States Senator Josh Hawley... has explained that the blame for society's ills traces all the way back to Pelagius – a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at... a small conservative Christian college devoted to 'a biblical worldview,' Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines." (NYT OpEd, 11Jan21)
- ↑ Your Comment on A Book Has Women in Africa Talking About Sex
The New York Times <comments@nytimes.com>
9:58 AM (29 minutes ago) [+2022.06.17; I beat the crowd to be one of the first replies to this item]
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community.
Bradford McCormick | New York
African women, she said, are often seen as people who are "passive, miserable, constantly pregnant, suffering from H.I.V. and AIDS, and who have been mutilated," she said, referring to female genital mutilation. "It just felt so narrow to me because you never got the fuller story." Now 3 decades ago, I somehow found and read the definitive book on Female Genital Mutilation in Africa: Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's "Prisoners of Ritural". It reconfirmed my disgust in how all traditional cultures are good for persons only by good luck. The jewish rite of ritual Male Genital Mutilation ("bris") is only significantly less worse. All "cultures", including America's "middle class" as well as savages indoctrinate their people in social customs which are not freely chosen by the indvidual in the litght of comparative ethnography, medical science and other post-Enlightenment scholarship. Not only was Iinvoluntarily circumcised – child abuse! – as a male infant which daily I resent ever more, but I also had to help keep America beautiful by getting haircutted which traumatized me every time I had to passum sub iugum to enter a Barbarian shop. Shouldn't each person learn all possible alernatives for livng and, after serious study, take what they like and leave the rest? Hanny Lightfoot-Klein "Prisoners of Ritural" (1989). Used copies readily available on Amazon and other places. Tolle, lege! - ↑ For the theme of another possible cartoon, please recall General Douglas MacArthur's statement: "Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well."
