Terrorist attack at French satirical magazine, 12 dead

[Watser?]

Twelve people killed, ten wounded after two gunmen open fire in satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo HQ in Paris - Independent.ie

[Hermit]

Oh, what to do now? Let's see.

The World Trade Towers were brought down by a team consisting almost exclusively by men from Saudi Arabia. After exhaustive enquiries and research by its intelligence bodies the US decided the best way to react to that was to invade Iraq, and what a smashing success that turned out to be. For all intents and purposes the Taliban was wiped out, and with it terrorism by Islamic fundamentalists.

Now that Islamic fundamentalism has unfortunately respawned for totally unknown reasons we must repeat what has worked before: Invade a country whose oil resources are not controlled by western multinational corporations.

The answer is immediately obvious: Clobber Venezuela. A hundred thousand of its 30 million inhabitants are Muslims and the second largest mosque in Latin America stands in Caracas. What more evidence is needed to prove that Venezuela is the right target for ensuring that freedom once more prevails over tyranny?

[Hermit]

And in defence of the Muslim fundie terrorists

[Watser?]

[Watser?]

Because no matter who did this, the end result will be more hatemongering on all sides...

[The Man]

Some useful background here, and the always eloquent Charlie Pierce here. Seriously, read Pierce. He's amazing.

[davidm]

Richard Dawkins disgraces himself … again!

No, Dickhead, us "useful idiots" don't think such attacks have nothing to do with religion (though they have to do with much else besides); what we do say is such barbarities are not representative of an entire religion. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. How many of them do shit like this? Why is this so point so hard for dirtbags like Dawkins and Sam Harris to get?

[Watser?]

They aren't very bright?

[davidm]

Not only has it become completely obvious that Dawkins is not very bright on a number of fronts, I've even beginning to wonder whether he actually knows much about evolutionary biology, his supposed field of expertise. To paraphrase John Foster Dulles, one must undertake an "agonizing reappraisal" of evolutionary biology, if Dawkins is one of its proponents. For anything Dawkins writes or says must be taken with a metric ton of salt. What a fuck face.

[Watser?]

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment

[BrotherMan]

Originally Posted by Watser?

They aren't very bright?

[davidm]

I don't much care for P.Z. Myers, either, but this is, mostly, a good post by him.

It is interesting how decisively Myers has broken with Dawkins.

[Dingfod]

One suspect dead, two captured. They are French citizens that have links to Yemeni terrorist network.

[The Man]

There's been a second attack and a female officer is dead. Additionally, several targets across Paris were attacked overnight in an apparent anti-Islamic backlash.

[Watser?]

I think we are pretty close to anti-Islamic pogroms in Europe by now.

Anyway, not everyone is buying into the whole 'Je suis Charlie' thing that is now all over the interfacebooknet:

When faced with a terrorist attack against a satirical newspaper, the appropriate response seems obvious. Don’t let the victims be silenced. Spread their work as far as it can possibly go. Laugh in the face of those savage murderers who don’t understand satire.

In this case, it is the wrong response.

Here’s what’s difficult to parse in the face of tragedy: yes, Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical newspaper. Its staff is white. Its cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia. While they generously claim to ‘attack everyone equally,’ the cartoons they publish are intentionally anti-Islam, and frequently sexist and homophobic.

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/201...iticism/#.dpuf

[JoeP]

Yes, there seems to be too much of a tendency to go from
"It's wrong to shoot people for what they say/draw/print"
to
"It's completely fine to say/draw/print anything and no one should be offended"

- instead of "Publishing cartoons of Mohammed is offensive to many Muslims" to "Don't publish cartoons of Mohammed unless you want to be offensive" with the provisos that being offensive isn't totally wrong (only motherfucking dickheads could claim that), it's just offensive; and valid criticism can be done in other ways (which, with the greatest respect, may be offensive as well); and this sentence has gone on for too long now.


Why is this misunderstanding of free speech (and sense of entitlement) so prevalent? across religion, politics, gender and sexuality and everything.

[Dingfod]

You do not have the right to never be offended in France or in the USA.

[Watser?]

Of course not. But there was a terrorist attack at Larry Flint too because some assholes were offended. This falls in the same category, no more no less. Should everyone have been posting porn after the attack on him?

[Stormlight]

[The Lone Ranger]

In defense of Dawkins ... sort of ... The Selfish Gene (though poorly-titled) and perhaps especially The Extended Phenotype were revolutionary works, though neither was truly original. The Selfish Gene built and expanded upon the work of George Williams and W. D. Hamilton, in particular, and provided a then-revolutionary way of looking at the logic of natural selection. Much of what Dawkins was arguing at the time has been so thoroughly incorporated into modern biological thought that even many biologists probably don't realize that what he was saying was controversial and non-intuitive at the time.

On the other hand, no modern work on evolutionary biology has been so thoroughly (and often, alas, deliberately) mis-understood as The Selfish Gene has. It doesn't help that -- as Dawkins himself has admitted -- the title is somewhat misleading. In my opinion, most of the criticism of TSG and its supposed "message" comes from people who haven't read it.

That having been said, TSG introduced the idea of the "meme," which I'm not entirely certain has been a useful concept. Though Dawkins was careful (at the time) to point out that this was a hypothetical idea, and he wasn't sure if it was truly a useful or apt comparison to genetic selection. Others took the idea and ran with it, though.


In my view, The Extended Phenotype is perhaps even more important, because it stresses the point that if we want to understand how and why natural selection occurs, we have to look at the effects of genes, and not look at them merely as protein-making machines.

***

Dawkins is ... or at least was ... a really good thinker when it came to the logic of natural selection and how it drives biological evolution. His understanding -- and his ability to explain it -- was much clearer than that of Stephen Jay Gould [the other modern evolutionary biologist that most Americans have heard of], at least in my opinion. It's not so much that he came up with totally new ideas as he was able to take the work of others (notably Hamilton, Trivers, and Williams) and present it in a way that made sense to non-specialists.

And back in the '70s and '80s and into the '90s, when he was still just a biologist who liked to do a bit of writing, he was admirably humble (at least in his writings), willing to listen to criticism and to admit his fallibility. (He didn't claim that the idea of "memes" would prove to be revolutionary or even useful, for instance -- just something that might be worth thinking about.)


But a mentor of mine once told me something profound, which I've always tried to keep in mind. "There's something that seems to happen to a lot of elder scientists, if they become famous; they start to think that they're infallible. And then, inevitably, they start writing about things they don't understand. The result is never good."

He was speaking of Donald Griffin, but his point could just as easily apply to Dawkins, or to James Watson.

[Watser?]

This was posted on Facebook by Dyab Abou Jahjah

I am not Charlie... I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie disrespected me and ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. ‪#‎JesuisAhmed‬

https://www.facebook.com/dyababoujah...57325207709510

One of the victims was a French Muslim policeman who was shot point blank by the terrorists.

[Watser?]

Also:

Charlie Hebdo was not in reality a model of freedom of speech. It has ended up, like so much of the “human rights left”, defending U.S.-led wars against “dictators”.

In 2002, Philippe Val, who was editor in chief at the time, denounced Noam Chomsky for anti-Americanism and excessive criticism of Israel and of mainstream media. In 2008, another of Charlie Hebdo’s famous cartoonists, Siné, wrote a short note citing a news item that President Sarkozy’s son Jean was going to convert to Judaism to marry the heiress of a prosperous appliance chain. Siné added the comment, “He’ll go far, this lad.” For that, Siné was fired by Philippe Val on grounds of “anti-Semitism”. Siné promptly founded a rival paper which stole a number of Charlie Hebdo readers, revolted by CH’s double standards.

What to Say When You Have Nothing to Say? » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Watser?

You keel me.

[specious_reasons]

Charlie Hebdo was not in reality a model of freedom of speech. It has ended up, like so much of the “human rights left”, defending U.S.-led wars against “dictators”.

The fact that they were total shit stains means that they were a model of free speech.

I don't care how awful their opinions were, they don't deserve to be shot for expressing them.

[Watser?]

Charlie Hebdo Massacre: a Tragic, Universal Failure Tikun-Olam Tikun Olam-תיקון עול�