Friday, February 10, 2006
A cartoonish debate.
Matt Yglesias is right when he says that this furor about the Danish cartoons involves "no hard thinking whatsoever." I well and truly don't understand why so many people are so drawn into this one. Government censorship, violence, killing, and needlessly offending people are all bad things. Condemning some of them does not necessarily entail supporting others.
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It just hits us squarely in the mushy sweet spot of our minds. So much of politics is not about how the words literally parse. (Her mouth says "free speech," but her eyes say "fuck you, mussalman.") I think we slosh between mental modes. Notice we talk about nations and corporations in the same words we use for individuals? And we talk about individuals we know in the same way we talk about a guy we only know from the newspapers TV speeches written by somebody else? No wonder we get confused.
Seriously? I'm so morally relativistic I can read your remark two ways, and I don't know which is right.
Sorry -- my last comment was not serious at all.
I don't think we're confused as much as overly polarized. Of course, maybe the latter makes us the former.
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I don't think we're confused as much as overly polarized. Of course, maybe the latter makes us the former.
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