Category Archives: Hate Speech

Before the Dark Forces Took Over America: Those Were the Days……..

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Sometimes, reading and listening to the media and to people, many people both here and abroad, it seems like Dark Forces have taken over America. People talk wistfully of the era of Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Yes, the era of George W Bush is also missed now as part of a Golden Age, and that is an accurate assessment given what has come after Barack Obama. Who would have thunk it way back in 2008?

That is because the Dark Forces have now completed their takeover of America, at least for now. In this dangerous bleak Year of Our, Your, and Their Lord of 2017. Only the federal courts and the media stand between them and wrecking the system so carefully crafted by the Founding Fathers of the United States. The legislature, those who are to consent and advise, have gone spineless. A combination of malevolent lawmakers in the Congress, tunnel-visioned corporate types running the executive branch, and an ignorant uninterested president are leading America to some kind of brink. (Did I leave out single-issue-focused voters?) Widening domestic class warfare and likely more permanent wars abroad, mainly new wars in the Middle East. Even as they claim to be trying to make America great again.

In that spirit, it is appropriate to listen to an old but good song that expresses the spirit of these dark times. It is sung by Mary Hopkins, and is titled Those Were the Days…….

A sad song, now even more bigly sad….

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Garry Trudeau: We Are NOT All Charlie Hebdo…………

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“Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical cartoonist behind Doonesbury, says his fellow satirists at Charlie Hebdo “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” Trudeau made the remark during his acceptance speech of the George Polk Awards in Journalism, according to Peter Bale, the head of the Center for Public Integrity. “Free speech… becomes its own kind of fanaticism,” Trudeau also reportedly said, adding that the job of satirists is to punch up, not punch down…………”

This point of view is not new, others have expressed it during the international cacophony following the terrorist attacks in Paris. But now someone, a great one, at the top of the business of satire has spoken. Funny, it doesn’t sound like blasphemy, either.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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