The recent events regarding Charlie Hebdo have forced me to say something again.
Opening thoughts: Great, you’re with us or you’re against us for the hashtag age. I didn’t like it the first time around, why would I like it the second time around?
This affiliation with satire is something that people of my subculture freakout about, along with the Colbert Report, Jon Stewart and The Interview. It makes them feel like they are political, have strong opinions and are valuable people. Politics has nothing to do with these things. The role of government in a capitalist society is to ensure the society is well saturated by the flows of money and then appear to be fair or responsive to things like your shitty opinion. The Charlie Hebdo attack resounds very strongly among people whose self worth derives from their hobby of making nuanced opinions about popular events. Someone kills you for your right to make an opinion? What are we, in Nazi Germany? Fight back! What could be anything more straightforward?
Nothing is ever straightforward. If these mostly white, well educated, Democrat moderate Reddit fucks want learn something worthwhile, they’d do best to remember that, and I want no fucking part in any country, atmosphere, or conversation where someone says to me you’re with me or you’re against me. Right off the fucking bat, I refuse to be in one camp or the other. They’re so quick to raise the specter of censorship by violence and so eager to be in the in-group and conform to a cheap Facebook or Twitter salute. This is what I hate most of all, how quickly the internet and social media have become platforms of conformity. They may as well be re-marketed as a factory that turns people into one-dimensional, constantly performing and conforming servants for other people’s approval. Hell, you even pay them to do this to you.
Why did those men attack the newspaper and kill the cartoonists? I don’t know. I’m an American, and as such I know nothing about what goes on outside my country, and what I do know about what goes on outside my country is slathered with such red white and blue concerns that I will not even be able to see it straight. I would call on everyone to stand back from their fucking computers, don’t participate in the latest witch hunt, and while you’re at it, grow a fucking pair of your preferred gendered sexual organs and realize that politics and wars have always been about money first and ideas second.
Here are two very good links of people who I agree with. One, and two.
misanthropic anthropologist 