Also this. Employees can leave, which is a better deal than we offer our armed forces members when we send them overseas to “fight for freedom” after they only signed up for one weekend a month with the national guard thinking they’d be fighting hurricanes.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, at this point, we know that continuing to publish the comics will result in more deaths and more violence. By continuing one, you’re inviting the other. And IMO, that’s the height of irresponsibility. You’re compromising the safety and well-being of your employees. And once your employees leave, you’ll be jeopardizing your business. (Unless your business IS the comics, then you’re kinda screwed either way.)
edit - I understand and agree that employees can leave if they want, and I fully support the freedom of the press to publish whatever they want. But know this–if you publish the cartoons and you get whacked, then that makes you a hero. A courageous, martyred, brave, hero who stood up for his beliefs in the face of adversity.
And you are also dead. I would rather be alive, and just publish Dilbert or Garfield or something.
Patrick Henry would be so proud.
Dude! We’re talking about a fucking cartoon, here. It’s not like the Redcoats are coming to rape our women and eat our children or something.
What exactly do you hope to gain by putting people’s lives in danger? Do you seriously want your little girl to grow up without a father simply because you want to assert your right to…a comic strip?
The revolutionary war began over taxes and government representation. The easy road would have been to do nothing. It’s not about a cartoon at all to me. It’s about freedom of speech in the face of violent threat. We can’t cave to that threat for the same reason we couldn’t with the North Koreans and the same you can’t with hostage takers. It sets a very dangerous precident and validates a model.
Yes, I am a very ideological person about human rights and freedom. I feel strongly enough about the right to uncontest and unthreatened freedom that I would choose for her to have that world and pass it on to her children rather than not. Otherwise why do men in Texas go to serve in Afghanistan over terrorist attrocities committed in New York. It’s the way I was raised. My dad always ran his business under the belief that he built it with his own hands and he’d rather see it run into the ground and us on the street than run in an amoralistic fashion. At one period when we were growing up the business was on hard times and looked like it may collapse. He honored the commitments he’d made to charities and gave more to charities than he made that year. It’s a lesson more than any other I hope to pass on to my daughter rather than hide behind her from what I believe is right.
Well that is the counter argument right there. In our western cultures it is nothing more than that : a comic strip.
It is absurd that huge corporations are scared to do something as trivial as that.
And BTW, media corporations around the world are publishing them. The cowards seem pretty confined to English-speaking countries / regions. I know first-hand that Québec and German media published them.
The US stopped being the beacon of freedom years ago when it became a litigious society. I’ve long said there is far more everyday freedom in Europe these days and stronger support for it.
On censorship, you Brits have all sorts of weird stuff. There was a Daily Show episode that was banned because it had a satirical segment about parliament. And courts are sympathic granting publication bans on all sorts of matter involving important people. And on the adult media censorship stuff… Why is it up to the government to dictate expressive media performed/created by consenting adults? I think this is pretty draconian. Its not just censoring rape porn, but a variety of things deemed untasteful by the upper crust. Now the UK isn’t a terrible country on freedom of press/expression/speech, but its not a leader IMO. The overall coziness of government and media is also concerning, I think. How many media execs have peerage? And yes, Japan is sketchy. That’s not a freedom of expression issue, but rather a protection of minors issue.
What is wrong with that? Any self-respecting government should be trying its best to control the media.
I’m with Black Swan. Everyone should be posting the comic. Get it out there for everyone to see. Desensitize.
I don’t see how not publishing the cartoons is a sad day for freedom. If these publications published these cartoons in the past and all of a sudden stopped because of what happened this week, then I agree. But these publications never published these cartoons in the first place, not when they first came out or anytime since then. They didn’t because they found, rightly or wrongly, these cartoons in bad taste, provocative and disrespectful. If I was in charge of a reputable magazine and I found images in bad taste and in addition I found that publishing these images could alienate a portion of my readership, I wouldn’t publish them either. Satire isn’t the raison d’etre of the Financial Times. You can pay hommage to the fallen without disrespecting other people.
“Shame on much of the English-speaking media for not publishing the caricatures…”
Yeah, sort of like the Sony stupidity where the American population exclaimed “shame on Sony of realizing they were engaging in risky behavior, keep doing it you cowards!”. Never mind Sony realizing their actions were disrespectful and ugly…that was never even a possibility. …and so the “war on terror” continues with the West antagonizing weaker people, and the antagonized seeking revenge in the only way they can, and then the West screaming “OMG we are so victims!”. It’s such a joke, seen the movie, know how it ends.
While I agree that said media did not owe it to Charlie Hebdo to show these shitty caricatures, it would have been a nice token of hommage to the fallen and to freedom of speech. But that is not the point. The point is that those caricatures actually made the news. It would have been normal to show them to inform viewers and readers of the cause of what happened.