Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, February 6, 2006 at about 11pm CST - Segment 1
Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, February 6, 2006 at about 11pm CST
Segment 1
I spent all day yesterday uploading the scripts for the last nine shows. The tenth show was already out there. I invite you to go out and look at them and make comments. If you do go out to my blog, you have to reset the number of message displayed to some number greater than 100. It was a hard task and I had put it off because it seems like I am all alone here talking to myself. If I am alone, then why worry about it?
However I had one guy say that he actually listened to the show, so I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it, like it mattered.
Eileen and her friend will be gone in a bit. MacKenzie is vegging out here next to me, so she is no help with the Board.
Doing this show alone at night is kind of interesting, because it reminds me of working at the Teague building's computer center late at night back in the late 1970's. There were days when I would go in and not come out for 12 hours or more. The weather sometimes was very different by the time I went home.
I like the smell of the air at 2am in the morning. The spell of wood seems to linger there at that time. The cars have stopped running, mostly. The stop lights are flashing instead of making their regular rounds from green to yellow to red. Mostly it's just me and the night people.
As I said, there is just you and me right now. I am calling to you from the velvet black across the gulf of our mutual incomprehension. I wonder at times whether you exist. I wonder at times whether I exist. We shall see shall we not.
To work...
A symbol has a name, it has a definition and it has substance. I have been making that point for the last two weeks. Most of you, assuming you exist, have thought I was crazy. How in the world can symbols be such important things? How can the misinterpretations of symbols be so important?
Overview of Cartoon controversy
This last week the entire world found out what happens when you mess with someone else's symbols. The Jutland Post in Denmark heard in the autumn of last year that Kare Bluitgen, an author of children's books, could not get an illustrator for a project Mohammed. Bluitgen wanted to explain to Danish children who this guy was that seemed to take up so much of the time of their Muslim friends. It was going to be a standard children’s book with pictures. All of the illustrators the author contacted were worried that Muslims would come and kill them, if they did the illustration.
Denmark, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, has been having problems with their Muslim minority. Because all of the countries in Scandinavian are socialist states, they cannot provide employment for their native born citizens much less the Muslim immigrants. The Muslims have been involved too much in crime in Denmark. No one in that part of the world wants to admit that.
The Jutland Post decided to finally and completely face the problem of having an unassimilated minority using... political cartoons. Yeah, kind of a strange thing to do. They did this by soliciting entries in cartoons depicting Mohammed, the founder of Islam. They wanted to make the point that the Muslims should NOT use violence to make their displeasure known.
Much to their horror, that's EXACTLY what happened. The Danish government has refused to apologize for the cartoons, making the point that the cartoons are in a private newspaper. The government of Denmark HAS issued apologies that say that they are sorry that the cartoons hurt someone's feelings. The Jutland Post HAS apologized for hurting the feelings of Muslims.
Here's where it gets kind of strange. Radical Islam has made the point that ANY depiction of Mohammed is wrong. Why? Well, Mohammed had a problem with idols when he was alive. He figured that if he allowed his followers to make idols of him, they would worship Mohammed instead of worshiping God. He had seen what happened with Jesus and the cross and did not want that to happen. How the message of "worship God, not idols" got translated into "don't make depictions of Mohammed or I will kill you" is kind of weird to me.
Voltimand over at the Bellmont Club said...
What is radical Islam doing with this tempest in a teapot? Basically they are making the case that the Danes set out to insult Islam... Period. They missed the point that the Danes were attempting to say that violence in the name of religion is a bad idea. The original project was supposed to promote interfaith understanding. The Jutland Post started this series of events because they were upset that freedom of speech was imperiled by self-censorship. They were attempting to get the Muslims in their country to accept that they were under new rules.
Most of this seems silly to any thinking human being, but to Muslims it is not. The symbol called Mohammed is equivalent to Islam. By depicting Mohammed in a bad light, the Danes appear to be saying that Islam deserves no respect. Could be. The funniest thing I have seen so far is that one of the 12 cartoon has elicited the strongest response. It shows Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. In essence, the cartoon is saying that Islam is violent. How do the members of Islam react to being called violent? They become violent. That's almost self parody.
If this really does turn into a global jihad, they should call it The War of the 12 Cartoons. Is it just me or is that a stupid reason to kill someone?
Freedom of Speech is a symbol. The substance behind the symbol called Freedom of Speech is a means of avoiding violence. Most people will not fight if they can have their say and sit down. We in this country have fought some massive battles and spent a huge amount of money to establish that the press can say pretty much anything. If we back down on this one, I do not know what will happen. I know that Radical Islam will take any backing down by the West as a sign of weakness. The leaders of radical Islam will then demand MORE concessions. Even as we speak, radical Islam is demanding that all countries pass anti-blasphemy laws... except the press in Arab countries would still be able to depict Jews and Christians as pigs and monkeys and murderers.
Did you know that the Washington Post ran a cartoon that defamed the United States military and Donald Rumsfeld? Yes, indeed. It shows this soldier in bed. All four of his limbs are bandaged to indicate that he has lost both arms and legs. A Donald Rumsfeld figure is standing over him saying in essence that he does not care about men and women in the military. How did the military handle it? All six of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a letter to the editor of the Washington Post saying that the cartoon by Tom Toles was over the top. They asked for an apology by the newspaper and Tom Toles. That was pretty much the end of it. That is the civilized way of handling the problem. There was no hint that the military was thinking of using violence against either the newspaper of the cartoonist.
Radical Islam appears to have found an issue where a good portion of their constituents can agree that something needs to be done to violently punish the Danes for presuming to criticize them. The whole problem is that the West and radical Islam are talking past each other. Just as the Left and the Right in this country have a tendency to misunderstand mutual symbols, so does radical Islam not understand the symbols of the West. Or rather, the leaders of radical Islam know that the West is just attempting to stake out the position that violence should not be used in debating a newspaper article. They're just using it as a method of getting one step closer to a global uprising of all Muslims against the West. When you get right down to it, the Arab Street is willing to believe anything.
Most people did not listen to Osama bin Lauden when he talked about the destruction of the World Trade Center. The idea behind doing 9/11 was to rally all the members of Islam to the side of Osama for a holy war. The symbol fell flat because we destroyed the Taliban and Saddam. That does not mean that radical Islam gave up their goal of rallying all the members of Islam to their side. They just started searching for another symbol.
Somewhere in the last hundred years, the West has gotten to the point where we said that we would give up the right of personal vengeance in order to live a quiet life. The thinking went that, if you as a citizen of a Western country could kill your neighbor for a real or an imagined slight, then everyone would always be on edge. Being on guard all the time causes you to fell insecure. By giving up personal vengeance as an option people could concentrate on living.
Right now a good portion of the adherents of Islam do not accept that personal vengeance is a bad idea. Too many times in this country moderate voices among Muslims have been silenced by a threat of violence. In many cases, the moderate voices never even THOUGHT to give air to their thoughts because they feared for their lives. No, I'm not kidding. Right here in this country there have been cases where Muslims have been threatened with violence for saying things that make other Muslims mad.
Charles Moore at the Telegraph in the UK asked, "Where did they get those Danish flags?" His point is well taken. Denmark is not a big exporter to the Middle East, nor do the Danes have that big a presence anywhere outside northern Europe.
How come there are so many Danish flags to be burned throughout the Middle East? I think the answer is kind of interesting. A bunch of imams from Denmark have been making a tour of the Middle East to stoke the fires of jihad. They seem to have gotten their local contacts to stock up on Danish flags. Come on, get a grip. It's impossible for the people having the demonstrations in Palestine to have gotten Danish flags that easily without planning. Danish flags in Palestine? Helloooo... Earth to the West. Where did flags that size come from? In short, these were not spontaneous demonstrations.
The burning of the Danish embassy in Syria is surely not spontaneous. The reason I say that is that nothing happens in Syria unless the government approves. Syria is having a really big problem. The West is asking some pointed questions about a political assassination in Lebanon. It's pretty obvious to me that the Syrians want to divert attention of their citizens as well as the West... elsewhere. I bet they're going to ask for a handout once this is all over.
The protests in Lebanon were NOT spontaneous. They BUSSED in the protestors to Beirut. Yoohooo... Syria is having a problem with the Lebanese because they assassinated a Lebanese political leader. Doesn't this sound like a dandy way of diverting attention?
Palestine just had an election where a set of terrorists called Hamas came to power. The European Union and the U.S. have decided to stop funding them. Isn't it INTERESTING that Hamas is behind the protests in Palestine? When do you suppose they are going to come around with their hands out?
The Iranians just got "referred to the U.N. Security Council on account of its nuclear program. And guess what: When Iran finds itself in the eye of the storm, which, of all countries, will be chairing the U.N. body? Denmark." Do you honestly believe that the demonstrations in Iran were spontaneous?
The burning of the Danish flags in Iraq were sponsored by a group of terrorist insurgents. At least the mainstream media got that right. It's not spontaneous there either.
Now, I will admit that the protests somewhere in the world might be spontaneous, but I am having a real hard time believing that the original protests in the Middle East are spontaneous. This is another front in the War on Terror. Anyone who says different needs to have their head examined.
Segment 1
I spent all day yesterday uploading the scripts for the last nine shows. The tenth show was already out there. I invite you to go out and look at them and make comments. If you do go out to my blog, you have to reset the number of message displayed to some number greater than 100. It was a hard task and I had put it off because it seems like I am all alone here talking to myself. If I am alone, then why worry about it?
However I had one guy say that he actually listened to the show, so I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it, like it mattered.
Eileen and her friend will be gone in a bit. MacKenzie is vegging out here next to me, so she is no help with the Board.
Doing this show alone at night is kind of interesting, because it reminds me of working at the Teague building's computer center late at night back in the late 1970's. There were days when I would go in and not come out for 12 hours or more. The weather sometimes was very different by the time I went home.
I like the smell of the air at 2am in the morning. The spell of wood seems to linger there at that time. The cars have stopped running, mostly. The stop lights are flashing instead of making their regular rounds from green to yellow to red. Mostly it's just me and the night people.
As I said, there is just you and me right now. I am calling to you from the velvet black across the gulf of our mutual incomprehension. I wonder at times whether you exist. I wonder at times whether I exist. We shall see shall we not.
To work...
A symbol has a name, it has a definition and it has substance. I have been making that point for the last two weeks. Most of you, assuming you exist, have thought I was crazy. How in the world can symbols be such important things? How can the misinterpretations of symbols be so important?
Overview of Cartoon controversy
This last week the entire world found out what happens when you mess with someone else's symbols. The Jutland Post in Denmark heard in the autumn of last year that Kare Bluitgen, an author of children's books, could not get an illustrator for a project Mohammed. Bluitgen wanted to explain to Danish children who this guy was that seemed to take up so much of the time of their Muslim friends. It was going to be a standard children’s book with pictures. All of the illustrators the author contacted were worried that Muslims would come and kill them, if they did the illustration.
Denmark, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, has been having problems with their Muslim minority. Because all of the countries in Scandinavian are socialist states, they cannot provide employment for their native born citizens much less the Muslim immigrants. The Muslims have been involved too much in crime in Denmark. No one in that part of the world wants to admit that.
The Jutland Post decided to finally and completely face the problem of having an unassimilated minority using... political cartoons. Yeah, kind of a strange thing to do. They did this by soliciting entries in cartoons depicting Mohammed, the founder of Islam. They wanted to make the point that the Muslims should NOT use violence to make their displeasure known.
Much to their horror, that's EXACTLY what happened. The Danish government has refused to apologize for the cartoons, making the point that the cartoons are in a private newspaper. The government of Denmark HAS issued apologies that say that they are sorry that the cartoons hurt someone's feelings. The Jutland Post HAS apologized for hurting the feelings of Muslims.
Here's where it gets kind of strange. Radical Islam has made the point that ANY depiction of Mohammed is wrong. Why? Well, Mohammed had a problem with idols when he was alive. He figured that if he allowed his followers to make idols of him, they would worship Mohammed instead of worshiping God. He had seen what happened with Jesus and the cross and did not want that to happen. How the message of "worship God, not idols" got translated into "don't make depictions of Mohammed or I will kill you" is kind of weird to me.
Voltimand over at the Bellmont Club said...
If I draw a tree and call it Mohammed, is it a picture of Mohammed? If I put the name "Mohammed" (or better: "this picture of a tree is a picture of Mohammed") under the picture, is it a picture of Mohammed? If, having done so, I erase the name "Mohammed," is it a picture of Mohammed or a picture of a tree? I would argue that there is no difference between the tree and the picture of some human-like person with the name "Mohammed" or interpretive surrogate phrase under it.end quote
I put these interesting conundrum in order to isolate the utter arbitrariness of the notion of "picturing Mohammed." How much of the "idolatry" involved is the consequence of something intrinsic to the picture, and how much of it is a matter of someone drawing a (potentially rather complicated set of semiotic) conclusion that it is a picture of Mohammed and therefore "idolatrous"?
From another perspective: Does anyone know what Mohammed looked like? If you don't know what Mohammed looked like, how can you be sure that a picture of "Mohammed" is a picture of Mohammed, and therefore idolatrous?
This is worth thinking about, because it isolates the functioning political point in this whole silly business: something will make you mad if you decide that that something is something that will make you mad. If it wasn't the picture of "Mohammed" or a Koran down the toilet, it would always be something else. Muslims are angry because anger is what they do with their lives, and of course anger is like one end of an electrical cord: it must be connected to another terminus for the anger juice to flow.
What is radical Islam doing with this tempest in a teapot? Basically they are making the case that the Danes set out to insult Islam... Period. They missed the point that the Danes were attempting to say that violence in the name of religion is a bad idea. The original project was supposed to promote interfaith understanding. The Jutland Post started this series of events because they were upset that freedom of speech was imperiled by self-censorship. They were attempting to get the Muslims in their country to accept that they were under new rules.
Most of this seems silly to any thinking human being, but to Muslims it is not. The symbol called Mohammed is equivalent to Islam. By depicting Mohammed in a bad light, the Danes appear to be saying that Islam deserves no respect. Could be. The funniest thing I have seen so far is that one of the 12 cartoon has elicited the strongest response. It shows Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. In essence, the cartoon is saying that Islam is violent. How do the members of Islam react to being called violent? They become violent. That's almost self parody.
If this really does turn into a global jihad, they should call it The War of the 12 Cartoons. Is it just me or is that a stupid reason to kill someone?
Freedom of Speech is a symbol. The substance behind the symbol called Freedom of Speech is a means of avoiding violence. Most people will not fight if they can have their say and sit down. We in this country have fought some massive battles and spent a huge amount of money to establish that the press can say pretty much anything. If we back down on this one, I do not know what will happen. I know that Radical Islam will take any backing down by the West as a sign of weakness. The leaders of radical Islam will then demand MORE concessions. Even as we speak, radical Islam is demanding that all countries pass anti-blasphemy laws... except the press in Arab countries would still be able to depict Jews and Christians as pigs and monkeys and murderers.
Did you know that the Washington Post ran a cartoon that defamed the United States military and Donald Rumsfeld? Yes, indeed. It shows this soldier in bed. All four of his limbs are bandaged to indicate that he has lost both arms and legs. A Donald Rumsfeld figure is standing over him saying in essence that he does not care about men and women in the military. How did the military handle it? All six of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a letter to the editor of the Washington Post saying that the cartoon by Tom Toles was over the top. They asked for an apology by the newspaper and Tom Toles. That was pretty much the end of it. That is the civilized way of handling the problem. There was no hint that the military was thinking of using violence against either the newspaper of the cartoonist.
Radical Islam appears to have found an issue where a good portion of their constituents can agree that something needs to be done to violently punish the Danes for presuming to criticize them. The whole problem is that the West and radical Islam are talking past each other. Just as the Left and the Right in this country have a tendency to misunderstand mutual symbols, so does radical Islam not understand the symbols of the West. Or rather, the leaders of radical Islam know that the West is just attempting to stake out the position that violence should not be used in debating a newspaper article. They're just using it as a method of getting one step closer to a global uprising of all Muslims against the West. When you get right down to it, the Arab Street is willing to believe anything.
Most people did not listen to Osama bin Lauden when he talked about the destruction of the World Trade Center. The idea behind doing 9/11 was to rally all the members of Islam to the side of Osama for a holy war. The symbol fell flat because we destroyed the Taliban and Saddam. That does not mean that radical Islam gave up their goal of rallying all the members of Islam to their side. They just started searching for another symbol.
Somewhere in the last hundred years, the West has gotten to the point where we said that we would give up the right of personal vengeance in order to live a quiet life. The thinking went that, if you as a citizen of a Western country could kill your neighbor for a real or an imagined slight, then everyone would always be on edge. Being on guard all the time causes you to fell insecure. By giving up personal vengeance as an option people could concentrate on living.
Right now a good portion of the adherents of Islam do not accept that personal vengeance is a bad idea. Too many times in this country moderate voices among Muslims have been silenced by a threat of violence. In many cases, the moderate voices never even THOUGHT to give air to their thoughts because they feared for their lives. No, I'm not kidding. Right here in this country there have been cases where Muslims have been threatened with violence for saying things that make other Muslims mad.
Charles Moore at the Telegraph in the UK asked, "Where did they get those Danish flags?" His point is well taken. Denmark is not a big exporter to the Middle East, nor do the Danes have that big a presence anywhere outside northern Europe.
How come there are so many Danish flags to be burned throughout the Middle East? I think the answer is kind of interesting. A bunch of imams from Denmark have been making a tour of the Middle East to stoke the fires of jihad. They seem to have gotten their local contacts to stock up on Danish flags. Come on, get a grip. It's impossible for the people having the demonstrations in Palestine to have gotten Danish flags that easily without planning. Danish flags in Palestine? Helloooo... Earth to the West. Where did flags that size come from? In short, these were not spontaneous demonstrations.
The burning of the Danish embassy in Syria is surely not spontaneous. The reason I say that is that nothing happens in Syria unless the government approves. Syria is having a really big problem. The West is asking some pointed questions about a political assassination in Lebanon. It's pretty obvious to me that the Syrians want to divert attention of their citizens as well as the West... elsewhere. I bet they're going to ask for a handout once this is all over.
The protests in Lebanon were NOT spontaneous. They BUSSED in the protestors to Beirut. Yoohooo... Syria is having a problem with the Lebanese because they assassinated a Lebanese political leader. Doesn't this sound like a dandy way of diverting attention?
Palestine just had an election where a set of terrorists called Hamas came to power. The European Union and the U.S. have decided to stop funding them. Isn't it INTERESTING that Hamas is behind the protests in Palestine? When do you suppose they are going to come around with their hands out?
The Iranians just got "referred to the U.N. Security Council on account of its nuclear program. And guess what: When Iran finds itself in the eye of the storm, which, of all countries, will be chairing the U.N. body? Denmark." Do you honestly believe that the demonstrations in Iran were spontaneous?
The burning of the Danish flags in Iraq were sponsored by a group of terrorist insurgents. At least the mainstream media got that right. It's not spontaneous there either.
Now, I will admit that the protests somewhere in the world might be spontaneous, but I am having a real hard time believing that the original protests in the Middle East are spontaneous. This is another front in the War on Terror. Anyone who says different needs to have their head examined.
posted by aRandomTexan at
6:07 AM
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