Rights are coupled with responsibilities.
Who didn’t know that?
The article does not distinguish between government censorship and a corporate firing of an offending cartoonist. The company can fire whoever they want for insensitive speech/media. But that is far different than such speech being against the law.
We have the truth--which is verifiable in ways that Islam's lies are not. We have abundant natural and human resources, that in an all-out war, should the other side choose to make it an all-out war, would be undefeatable.
The only question is whether or not we have the courage of our convictions. I think we don't now, but we could if we wanted it enough.
Is the author hoping to plant seeds of freedom of speech suppression? Probably but we see though the ruse once again despite the fancy garnisments of eloquent verbiage and mood setting images handpicked to appeal to his target audience. Just another deceiver doing the Socialist tap dance once again
Hold the bus here Buckwheat. If you are arguing the the government is responsible for protectiing Christianity, then we have a problem here.
Wow, he has “discovered” something my parents taught me (more years ago than I care to confirm).
Oh well, my folks were only Cajuns with an 11th grade education (thankfully, it was through Catholic schools, which placed them in the Harvard 1940s-level compared to the jokes attending our universities now).
“That revolting excuse of a rag has been a procession of covers offending Christianity, at a moment when like never before we need something to believe in and to rally around.
“It’s because of people like CH and De Andre’ and their successful propagation of desecrations of what had kept us together and strong for centuries, that we have been left with absolutely nothing to fight Islam with.
By disarming us, the CH journalists victims of the recent attacks have indeed invited their own death - in a deeper sense than is commonly thought.”
What a bunch of revolting, sheep fodder! To intimate that Christianity, which has survived hundreds of years of every kind of attack that Satan himself could devise; could be defeated and Christians “disarmed” because of mortal words of any kind! I am almost at a loss to describe how stupid this is but then I realize that there are many people who will buy into it.
Absolute free speech may be uncomfortable at times but it surely beats the dumbed down, socialist drivel that is becoming our government. This moron has made the act of expressing an opinion grounds for execution! Amazing!
Christians disarmed? Hardly!
The obvious fallacy in the above discussion was the assumption of an equivalency between formalized debate and all other sorts of civil discourse.
Whereas a debate may need rules, that doesn’t prove that all speech needs rules, since not all speech is debate.
That's how you know you've reached the limit, genius.
The obvious criminal cases are it. Everything else is allowed by definition. Its a freedom thing.
P.S. Let me make this really clear, because my Spidey-sense tells me you're trying to creep through the back door here: YES, it IS appropriate free speech to mock Muslims for their murderous barbarity, their enslaving of women and non-Muslims, and their efforts to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with Sharia. Got that?
Even if it enrages them to violence. In fact, ESPECIALLY if it enrages them to violence, so that we can use their violence as justification to go to global war with their damned murder cult and wipe them off of the face of the Earth once and for all.
I hope I've made myself clear.
Yeah, you can't scheme to defraud anyone. I suppose you have to actually use “speech” when you are conning someone from their money. This is all getting a little ridiculous. Yelling fire in a theater hardly has anything to do with free speech. It is a crime of causing a public disturbance.
These authors damn well know what we mean by “Free Speech” but are playing ridiculous games of grammar.
A better argument would be around the lines of incitement to violence. That is where it gets a little blurry at times.
"This is one of the fallacies often propounded by the so-called "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins: question everything."
Huh? Whatever you might thing of what Dawkins does say, this is not something that comes from him.
You are confused about what "free speech" means. An employer firing an employee because it disapproved of a work product is not a free speech issue. The employee had no free speech right to work for the employer or have his work published in the magazine.
In the legal sense, "free speech" is about the government not restricting speech. It doesn't require private individuals to sponsor speech they don't like.
In the moral sense, which is what is at issue in the Charlie Hebdo incident, "free speech" is about not killing someone for speech you don't like. It isn't about offense, or approval. Go ahead. Take offense. That's your right too. But you don't get to kill people for publishing things that offend you. This isn't hard and it isn't a grey area. You just need to think about it more clearly.
By framing it as “absolute” free speech i throw everything away that is said. Everyone agrees that absolute free speech is stupid, so why not instead highlight the argument differently? The way the question is put out there disqualifies the whole following discussion