Re: here comes the sun.....
This was a major issue yesterday on another music-related board I post more often on. First of all, I'll say that I do find some of the cartoons pretty damn funny (especially the "we've run out of virgins" one). But I also think it was absolutely fucking irresponsible and unnecessarily disrespectful stupid to actually publish them. What can I say, my sense of humor is often in contradiction with my sense of pragmatism. ;) Anyways, I'll copy the related part of the post I made to here...I hope it makes sense as it was somewhat directed as a response to a post made one the board on which I originally posted it. I'm also a fairly belligerent motherfucker in general, so pardon my language....
BTW, to answer your initial question, some of the cartoons were published in other European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain) today. I'm not particularly happy about it, but oh well....time to put some fucking popcorn in the oven and put my extra couch in the basement in case it needs to be turned into a bomb shelter. :p
[quote]Personally, I think this entire thing is fucking ridiculous. First of all, the Danish government has no need to apologize for what some right-wing paper publishes in the name of freedom of speech. They can publicly condemn it as disrespectful (might be a good face-saving mood, but little more), but it's not like they could have stopped it. Freedom of the press means FREEDOM of the press, and it is something I do firmly believe in.
But....
The people at that fucking paper who made the decision to publish it should have a king-sized durian shoved up their asses for being so fucking stupid and near-sighted. What the hell did they expect? Freedom of speech/press is important, IMO, but it comes with a certain level of [B]responsibility[/B] and [B]respect[/B]. This newspaper published a series of images which they had to have known would offend a lot of people, and they did it purely for the reason of [B]making a point[/B]. Smart one, shitheads. :roll:
If muslims throughout the world were protesting against [B]just[/B] this newspaper, then I guess it wouldn't be a big deal. But their wrath is being generalized to not only all Danish people, not only to all Scandanavians, but you've got militants attacking EU offices over this.
Wow, great move you brain-dead fuckwit editors. At least you made your point, eh?
As the general grade school rule goes, if you abuse your freedom, it's going to be taken away. If this incident does seriously lasting damage to Denmark or the EU (or closely preceeds terrorist attacks against Denmark), I could imagine seeing this broad sweeping freedom of the press being scaled back.
I guess another possibility is the old saying - "there is no such thing as bad publicity", and this newspaper has certainly gotten a lot of publicity from this thing. Stupid blunder or shrewdly calculated business move? Still just as much reason for them to have oversized rotten-smelling thorny tropical fruits shoved forcibly up their asses.
Now, I won't even touch on the validity of those Muslims who are pissed about it. I am next to impossible to offend (although I love to rant sometimes ;) ) and don't exactly hold religion in high regard, so I'm probably not the most impartial person to comment on this. But I view things fairly pragmatically and thus find it unbelievably stupid that a newspaper would knowingly attack the primary religion of an entire race of people who are feeling pretty damned under attack these days.
This whole fiasco is ridiculously stupid that all I can say is....
[URL="http://www.krelmatrix.com/jesusfucking_thumb.jpg"]link[/URL]
:p
[/quote]
Note: Since I originally write this, the Danish government DID condemn the publishing of the cartoons. Way to save face. Also, publications in several other large European countries (Germany, France, Spain, etc...) have jumped on the bandwagon and published some of the cartoons. This has the potential to blow up in a big and very unpleasant way....