Speak Easy?

I've always gotten a big kick out of free speech. Free speech is great, but maybe there should be a required class or training session that a person needs to take before being deemed "qualified" to exercise this "right". Some people may find this pretty offensive, and if you do, I recommend hitting Alt-F4 right now.

Moving right along.

Here are a few topics I would cover in the class:

"Rights" Issues

People like to pay a lot of lip service to "human rights," but let's be honest. The entire concept of human rights is a [relatively modern] social construct, and if history is any bit of a lesson, contrary to regular human behavior. Your society may deem that you have a "right" to do or say something, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the society you live in can protect you from the actions of people who disagree with you. They might be able to punish those actions of reprisal, but that's a pretty shitty deal if it means you die for saying something.
Rule of thumb: Moral high ground is nice, but you only live once.
Rule of pinky: Anything that you have can be taken away. Anything.

Responsibility and/of Freedom

Not everyone in the world has freedom of speech. With most "western" countries, it is a privilege given to us as a citizen, so most people totally take it for granted. As with most things that are "given" to us, no matter how awesome they are, people tend to treat free things like crap. When you have to work for something, you tend to value it more and treat it with a little more respect. I'm not going to talk about "gaining citizenship rights" because I wrote about that before. Anyway, when granted something, it is yours and it's important to be responsible with it, It is also important to understand that using it will have certain effects/consequences. "Bearing arms" is a right, but most [reasonable] people understand the responsibilities and possible results of having a gun, and a lot of effort is put forth (by society) to make sure that people understand that guns can be harmful. Why should speech be any different? Most people would agree that words can be more powerful than a 9mm.

Accountability of Freedom

Here's the big one. Yeah, it's a "free country." Many of the things we do don't have any repercussions from the government, but that doesn't mean that your actions might piss off other entities, for example other governments or, urm, Muslims. The rights extended to you by your government are certainly not universal, and the ideas of freedom held by many of your countrymen certainly aren't universal.

I think by now most of you have figured out that I'm talking about the Mohammed cartoons. The main reason I'm talking about this stuff is because of the supposed reason behind why the Danish newspaper printed the cartoons, as seen here:

Rasmussen called it a matter of freedom of speech, echoing the reasoning of the newspaper at the center of the row. Jyllands-Posten had said it wanted to test the limits of free speech at a time it was under threat because of the influence of radical Islam.

Good "test". Well, I hope you're satisfied with the results. I wonder what his hypothesis was prior to administering this test.. He should have called me, I could have told him what would happen. Here's a simple equation that I encourage anyone to use in similar situations:

Test: I am thinking about doing/writing/saying [something that Muslims *might* take offense to].
Result: Outrage, rioting, kidnapping, bombing, death.

Pretty simple.

In response to the cartoons, Iran has decided that it too wants to test the limits of free speech:

Hamshahri invited foreign cartoonists to enter the competition and said it wanted to see how open the West was to caricatures of the Holocaust.

"Does the West extend freedom of expression to the crimes committed by the United States and Israel, or an event such as the Holocaust? Or is its freedom only for insulting religious sanctities?" Hamshahri wrote, referring to the Prophet Mohammed cartoons, in a short article on its back page.

Apparently this guy doesn't read too many American newspapers or magazines or browse internet sites, because he hasn't seen caricatures that people draw of the president, government officials, etc.. I can cruise around Washington DC with a shirt that says, "HE AIN'T MY PRESIDENT!!" or a picture of the President's head on top of Hitler's body and I'd probably get a few High-5s. I certainly wouldn't be thrown in jail.

But let's go back to the whole "Accountability of Freedom of Speech" issue. I think it's lovely that Iran is looking to try out this new found liberty, but had they attended my mandatory Freedom of Speech Seminar, they might learn that when dealing with a country like, say, Israel, the rules are a lot different than in more liberal countries. I wonder how this is going to play out. I think a lot of these fanatics have taken for granted the fact that the USA, unlike other countries, is willing to hamstring itself to protect human rights, even if it means extending human rights to terrorists and other human-rights-ignorers to err on the side of "justice".

So go ahead, Iran, have your contest and administer your own little "test", but don't pretend that it's something other than what it really is, i,e. anti-Semitism, and don't be surprised if you get some unfavorable "test results" of your own. Maybe you'll get to deal with Israel, which may prove a lot more painful than thumbing your nose at the USA.

Either way, it would blow my mind if a war was started over a cartoons published in Denmark. Funny how things work. Like I've said before, I'll be here in Japan, where it's safe. =)

I'll leave you with this picture, which I thought hit the nail right on the head.


Click here for a gallery of images throughout histroy portraying Mohammed. I found this link on InstaPundit