Serendipitous altruism

This drawings say ‘The Coran/Charlie Hebdo is crap: it doesn’t stop bullets !’ – a 16 year old in Nantes has been arrested for publishing the one on the left with the comment ‘ironic’. The drawing on the right is the actual Charlie Hebdo cover it satirizes. I also find that the caricature is indeed ironic – I even laughed when it was published hours after the massacre. So here it is, published on my account – now arrest me: those twin pictures are a wonderful opportunity to explain that freedom of speech must apply equally to all. Streisand me !

Of course, the righteous nations of the west would never assassinate journalists, except of course when they do – but, you know, it is different because they support an evil regime. In a statement of 8 April 1999, NATO indicated that the Radio Television of Serbia studios in Belgrad would be targeted unless they broadcast 6 hours per day of Western media reports: “If President Milosevic would provide equal time for Western news broadcasts in its programmes without censorship 3 hours a day between noon and 1800 and 3 hours a day between 1800 and midnight, then his TV could be an acceptable instrument of public information“. The RTS station was bombed on 23/4/99 – sixteen employees died. Nobody was held accountable for the attack.

Yes, Milosevic was busy with war crimes. Yes, RTS was instrumental to propaganda supporting them.

So, to recapitulate: journalists who support a government that is criminal according to your laws are fair game – especially if your laws are universal laws that obviously apply to all humanity (such as the Universal Declaration of Human rights or the rulings of your favourite religious leaders). Oh noes you say – human rights are natural rights and supporting them is entirely different to any religious creed. Are you sure ? At the very least it makes for an interesting philosophical debate.

Wading among this blog’s moderation queue, I found that someone’s spam comment generator malfunctioned – instead of the intended randomized comment it posted the template… So here is the template for the curious – rather primitive… I expected proper spammers to use some Markov chains generator and I got this. I’m offended to receive comment spam from such unsophisticated people.

Full text of the template below…

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Yes, Charlie would probably have loathed today’s gathering, but he isn’t why I’m going – I don’t really care about him, I never bought its paper and probably never will. However I do care about freedom of speech – I have been annoying people about it for the last twenty years and will keep doing it for at least twice that. I care even more that this is it about the practical exercise of freedom of speech in the country where I chose to live. Hypocritical politicians be damned, see you in Paris this afternoon so that we can count ourselves ! I’ll be silent, especially if someone attempts singing the Marseillaise – now is not the time for warlikeness and our interior minister is an idiot for calling ’war on terror’ : even the British government announced publicly eight years ago that it was abandoning the use of that phrase as they found it to be less than helpful… Anyway, let’s celebrate freedom of speech with Benjamin Netanyahu, Sergueï Lavrov, Ahmet Davutoglu, Ali Bongo and Viktor Orban to remind ourselves that it was all really about satire…