Did you, folks, hear about the terror acts in France? What a horrible tragedy.
My deepest sympathies to my readers from France.
Terror in France
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Did you, folks, hear about the terror acts in France? What a horrible tragedy.
My deepest sympathies to my readers from France.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes just heard about this. According to available info on BBC radio 4, ten journalists and two cops murdered by barbarians armed with Kalashnikovs – or does this give a bad name to Barbarians?
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Barbarians were originally just people who did not speak Greek so yes this would be giving a bad name to them.
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My apologies to the barbarians, in that case. No apologies to the un-nameables who will slaughter people who believe in free speech, because the people believe in free speech.
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Yes, just heard about it an hour ago. What an despicable attack. I feel for the victims and their families. No one deserves to fall prey to such an abominable act of terrorism. I hope the perpetrators are found and brought to justice swiftly.
I fear the response to this attack. Politically speaking, this could not have a worse timing, with xenophobic sentiments rising everywhere in the EU right now.
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It’s not ‘worse timing’ or rotten luck. It is the continued assault on western cultures that creates those xenophobic sentiments. If newspapers weren’t being shot up, if increasing sections of European cities weren’t no-go zones for Europeans, if rapes weren’t skyrocketing in areas with a suspiciously strong correlation with Muslim immigration, if citizens weren’t being beheaded in their own towns, if Sweden wasn’t having one school burned down a day… there would be no ‘xenophobia’.
It’s like complaining that there’s an unfair interest in lifeboats, and the explosions aren’t helping!
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“It is the continued assault on western cultures that creates those xenophobic sentiments.”
Not really. The French is an incredibly xenophobic nation. They despise everyone who didn’t happen to be born as a French. The other week I talked to a Belgian woman who used to live in southern France, and she said her family had to move because the locals were so hateful towards them that she didn’t want her little daughter to grow up in such an environment. And she went there from an adjacent country, not from the Middle East or Northern Africa.
The French wanted a lot of little Arabs to do the shit work for them throughout the past few decades. Yes, the Islam is spreading, this is a consequence which was easy to predict. The deed of some criminals doesn’t mean that the whole Islamic community is guilty. When Christians commit mass murders like Breivik in Norway, or the school shooters in the United States nobody condemns the whole Christian community. These murders are horrible, I feel terribly sorry for the victims, but they’re only the responsibility of the murderers not the other Muslims.
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LOL. Just like Israel, right? And America. And Denmark. And Belgium. And the Swiss. And the Germans. And England…funny, isn’t it…how all these multiculti advocates all of a sudden are bigots, racists, and xenophobes just like the rest of us? Pull my other finger, fart knoker… it has bells on it!
These sub humans were radicalized in local mosques, trained, and supplied. This is not a couple misguided “youths” acting out – it was a surgical hit against the French and the freedom of speech – something you liberals are also playing fast and loose with these days.
This is a case of gun control and multiculturalism working as expected. There’s only one way to deal with these mongrels too – crucify the perps (literally, nail them to a cross and hoist them aloft) as a warning to the others – or death march the entire lot out of Europe and be done with it.
Sorry liberals, but your little multicultural social experiment failed, just as expected.
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I’m not a liberal and I don’t agree with multiculturalism. But there are consequences of previous decisions which needs to be dealt with in a human way not with a “death march”. So basically you are right, these liberals turning into xenophobes are hypocrites who are liberal only until the moment they 100% hold the power. But open your ears wide for a moment, Glenfilthie. I’m not your doormat. Wash out your filthy mouth next time before you start to talk. And only the perpetrator is responsible for a crime not other people who come from a similar background.
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Man, there is something so irreparably damaged in you if your first reaction to murder is LOL.
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I hate fundie Christian terrorists just as much as I hate fundie Muslim terrorists. People who don’t understand that nobody is required to give a piss about their old books are barbarians and deserve nothing but public repudiation in civilized societies. My position is: keep your religion out of my field of vision and I will return the courtesy.
I’m already editing myself in class because people can’t keep their tender religious sensibilities outside of the classroom.
I’m deeply religious but I’m somehow managing not to inflict it on anybody else.
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Yes, but what determined that the value of ‘keep religion to yourself’ is the right one? Who decides if we’ll do that, or if we won’t.
In Paris, those in favor of ‘share’ have made their point. And unless we are willing to be equally willing to respond – or at the very least, not tear down those that do, then they are going to win.
I know damn well that ‘not every Muslim’ is going to go and shoot up a newspaper. But I also know – judging from New York, London, Sydney, Madrid, Malmo, Rotherham et.al…. that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not going to do anything to hinder those that do. First and foremost, they are going to support their tribe.
Ukraine for the Ukrainians, right? Nothing wrong with the French deciding they want that standard for themselves as well.
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What do you mean, “Ukraine for Ukrainians”??? This is SO not an accepted idea or policy in Ukraine. The president of Ukraine made his New Year’s address last week in 3 languages: Ukrainian, Russian and Tatar.
The Jews of Ukraine are actually passionately pro-Ukrainian. And the Crimean Tatars are actually dying today for Ukraine ‘ s sovereignty.
Please don’t tell me that you of all people has bought into the vicious Putinoid propaganda that there is a “Ukraine for Ukrainians ” ideology in Ukraine.
The leader of Ukraine ‘s most nationalistic party doesn’t even speak Ukrainian! The president is a Russian speaker!
Forget the president, everybody is a Russian speaker.
Sorry for the rant but this is very important to me! ! !
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As for who determined the Western values, the answer is obvious : the Enlightenment era . Everything we see, do and have today is the product of the Enlightenment. The Western civilization arrived at the greatest, most profound, most crucial ideas of humankind in the XVIII century. And the French Enlightened thinkers were at the forefront of that incredibly important revolution. The Enlightenment era is when humanity started to beat back barbarity. And the US is actually the culmination of the great Enlightened dream.
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“As for who determined the Western values, the answer is obvious : the Enlightenment era . Everything we see, do and have today is the product of the Enlightenment.”
Only if one stretches the definition of “Enlightenment era” to include the Iroquois. I believe the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights derives at least as much from their values as from the European centered Enlightenment. There is a book on this subject called Forgotten Founders. I do not remember the author just now.
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Sure. But there’s no reason those will stay the western values, insofar as they will be the dominant values of ruling cultures in Europe and America.
People are willing to fight and die to change those values: it’s not yet clear how many are willing to fight and die to protect them.
I have tried to respond to your element about Ukraine, and every time I do I end up writing in legalese which I despise. Let me simply say I did not mean “Ukraine” as a set of Slavs to the exclusion of Tartar and Jew. I was using it as a catch-all for people who have legitimate claims to Ukraine, and those who do not. Clearly, an American trying to do so leads to muddy waters!
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Ok, sorry, I tend to react very emotionally to the subject of Ukraine. 🙂
But I agree that we need to take ownership of and pride in our great civilization and be willing to defend it from barbarity. This is why Obama ‘s “universal values” sound so weak to me. The freedom of speech is not something humanity always had. It was very hard to come by and it will be very hard to preserve. And it’s the same for all of these great advsnces: freedom of conscience, rights of women, respect for science and education, etc.
I have no idea why Western Europeans and Americans are incapable of speaking of these advances with the same love and pride Andrés Ukrainians do. Why are you, folks, so boringly and tiresomely apologetic for your culture? ? ? If I were from a culture that achieved half as much, I’d be celebrating it from the rooftops.
As an outsider, I can say that I find this reluctance to be proud of your truly remarkable civilization to be quite bizarre.
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Agreed, Tim. The only people this will help, politically speaking, is Marine Le Pen and her ilk.
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Thank you Clarissa. I usually never comment and will go back to that right after. I live in France (not in Paris, but another big city) and am completely shell-shocked about what happened, and angry, and afraid of what it means for the future…
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Meme: words can’t describe how sad I feel as I watch the reports from France today. Vive la France!
I’m so shocked that my French came back to me after years of oblivion and I’m now addressing everybody in French here in Montréal.
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I’m most concerned for the victims and their families. Secondly I’m very concerned about what this will do to press freedom in Europe (already on shaky ground). A lot of newspapers are blurring the image that incited these savages to kill (or rather that served as an excuse for their unfocused rage, I don’t much care which).
This is a very big line in the sand for me. You’re either on the side of a satirical magazine to offend people on or you’re on the side of the killers.
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I agree with Cliff: we need to stand united in our support for freedom of speech. This is one of our greatest civilizational advances. We can’t forsake it to serve any body’s need to get offended.
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“This is a very big line in the sand for me. You’re either on the side of a satirical magazine to offend people on or you’re on the side of the killers.”
Yes, this is a serious concern of mine, too.
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What I most hate about the modern sensibility is the drab utterance that both parties are to blame, whenever something hateful happens. Those who acan sit comfortably can afford to be complacent and complacent, for now, but eventually the tides of hate will also reach them.
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I agree completely! ! !
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I’m glad you do. I suspect many people think they are being so enlightened when they adopt this posture, but it is supremely passive — and nothing I have contempt for more than someone who is passive on my behalf.
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I also detest this mumbly passivity. Just hate it!
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People speak with such profound conviction, but then they do not back you up in a time of trouble when it would take very, very little effort. I have said it before that the less involvement you have with these false speakers the better off you will be. I know that my own responses can SEEM like mumbly passivity at times, because I am trying to maximise the impact of negative and passive forces so that they will eat themselves out and die. The way I see it, people are mumbly and passive on my behalf because I am and have been lower on the social strata than they. What I want to do is to make them eat and be consumed by the passivity they have so gleefully imposed on me.
Now, I can be VERY active on my own behalf, and I always have a few hidden stores of munition, but I am only one person and I do not want to expend it all at once. Therefore my strategy is to extend the mumbly passivity to further reaches at times, so that surrounds and drowns those who feel they are safe from it because they feel their social status elevates them above it. Let them die from their own passivity. I will actively help them to learn what this means, by exposing them to higher and higher levels of their own mumbliness.
This is, at any rate, my strategy.
When they start to succumb, though, I will blow them up with heavy fire.
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I don’t associate you with either mumbliness or passivity at all.
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Well then you have rare insight.
I used to be much more openly aggressive, but I found that in a narcissistic age, this only sets you up for a narcissistic take-down.
The key is to use Yin energy (yielding) to draw your opponents in. You oppose their aggression (Yang) with Yin. Then, when they get overconfident and passive, you attack with Yang.
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don’t let extremists who want you to hate drive your opinions, it shows how desperate they have become. They allowed children to die in droves in their home places, what does their opinion matter, amen
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“don’t let extremists who want you to hate drive your opinions, it shows how desperate they have become.”
Au contraire mon amis. Sometimes hate is exactly the emotion called for. I hate the fuckers who did this and if you’re on their side (by wanting me to ‘understand’ them) then I hate you.
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