Free speech for all. Are you familiar with what happened to Doug Mackey? The Biden DOJ sentenced him to prison last year for memes he made in 2016. Corporate media will always bend to the whims of its owners, who until recently were fine with censoring conservatives. Ann is not being silenced, she will now make solid income on Substack. Her situation nowhere near as bad as Charlie Hebdo (death) and Mackey (jail).
As I explicitly said in the footnotes, I realize it seems shrill to compare what happened to Ann to what happened to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists; my point is that these incidents operate on a spectrum of suppression. It happens on the right and the left.
I am familiar with Doug Mackey (I think through you, actually) and I read about that incident while chewing my fingernails down to nubs.
The footnotes are below the paywall, so for the sake of clarity, here is one of them:
You may think I’m being shrill by comparing the murder of cartoonists over anti-religious cartoons to the censoring of a cartoonist for offending the fragile egos of tech billionaires. But this is one topic on which I’ve never wavered, despite the moral outrage over the cartoons that were drawn by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, allegedly goading the terrorists into a confrontation.
Sam Harris articulated it very clearly a decade ago:
“People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis,”
You can’t respond to offensive speech or satire with murder. The specific content of the cartoons is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating the justification for such violence. The act itself—murdering people for expressing themselves through art or speech—represents a profound moral failing that cannot be excused or contextualized by the perceived offensiveness of the material. Yet, people tried—a lot of people.
Freedom of speech is a non-negotiable value in a working democracy. It is fundamental to a free and open society. Allowing violent or otherwise punitive reactions to dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech erodes this freedom and sets a dangerous precedent.
Free speech for all. Are you familiar with what happened to Doug Mackey? The Biden DOJ sentenced him to prison last year for memes he made in 2016. Corporate media will always bend to the whims of its owners, who until recently were fine with censoring conservatives. Ann is not being silenced, she will now make solid income on Substack. Her situation nowhere near as bad as Charlie Hebdo (death) and Mackey (jail).
As I explicitly said in the footnotes, I realize it seems shrill to compare what happened to Ann to what happened to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists; my point is that these incidents operate on a spectrum of suppression. It happens on the right and the left.
I am familiar with Doug Mackey (I think through you, actually) and I read about that incident while chewing my fingernails down to nubs.
The footnotes are below the paywall, so for the sake of clarity, here is one of them:
You may think I’m being shrill by comparing the murder of cartoonists over anti-religious cartoons to the censoring of a cartoonist for offending the fragile egos of tech billionaires. But this is one topic on which I’ve never wavered, despite the moral outrage over the cartoons that were drawn by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, allegedly goading the terrorists into a confrontation.
Sam Harris articulated it very clearly a decade ago:
“People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis,”
You can’t respond to offensive speech or satire with murder. The specific content of the cartoons is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating the justification for such violence. The act itself—murdering people for expressing themselves through art or speech—represents a profound moral failing that cannot be excused or contextualized by the perceived offensiveness of the material. Yet, people tried—a lot of people.
Freedom of speech is a non-negotiable value in a working democracy. It is fundamental to a free and open society. Allowing violent or otherwise punitive reactions to dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech erodes this freedom and sets a dangerous precedent.
This is an important and impassioned essay for free speech. Nothing speaks truth to power more effectively or louder than a great cartoon.
Editorial cartoonists condense complex issues into easily understood images.
Fewer people have time to read editorials.
Editorial cartoonists who report impartially are becoming rarer.
Images can be manipulated.