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Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center's annual gala in protest over the organization's decision to give its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked on January 7th:
The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, The New York Times reports. [...] Kushner, in an email to The Times, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo's "cultural intolerance" and promotion of "a kind of forced secular view." Those views, The Times added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event. Carey told The Times that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression." A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" he said in an email to the newspaper. Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel The Satanic Verses, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are "horribly wrong."
Glenn Greenwald has written about the controversy over at The Intercept, which is hosting letters and comments written by Deborah Eisenberg and Teju Cole. Greenwald notes:
Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression. Indeed, some of the most repressive regimes on the planet sent officials to participate in the Paris “Free Speech” rally, and France itself began almost immediately arresting and prosecuting people for expressing unpopular, verboten political viewpoints and then undertaking a series of official censorship acts, including the blocking of websites disliked by its government. The French government perpetrated these acts of censorship, and continues to do so, with almost no objections from those who flamboyantly paraded around as free speech fanatics during Charlie Hebdo Week.
From Deborah Eisenberg's letter to PEN's Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, March 26, 2015:
I can hardly be alone in considering Charlie Hebdo's cartoons that satirize Islam to be not merely tasteless and brainless but brainlessly reckless as well. To a Muslim population in France that is already embattled, marginalized, impoverished, and victimized, in large part a devout population that clings to its religion for support, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.
Was it the primary purpose of the magazine to mortify and inflame a marginalized demographic? It would seem not. And yet the staff apparently considered the context of their satire and its wide-ranging potential consequences to be insignificant, or even an inducement to redouble their efforts – as if it were of paramount importance to demonstrate the right to smoke a cigarette by dropping your lit match into a dry forest.
It is difficult and painful to support the protection of offensive expression, but it is necessary; freedom of expression must be indivisible. The point of protecting all kinds of expression is that neither you nor I get to determine what attitudes are acceptable – to ensure that expression cannot be subordinated to powerful interests. But does that mean that courage in expression is to be measured by its offensiveness?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @08:42AM
Or, you know, people who don't hate SystemD enough.
(see yesterday's Linux thread for examples)
That's a fellow that goes by MikeeUSA online. He's a deranged jackass with a boatload of issues and an agenda against Debian. He also has a massive hatred for women for some reason, so any discussion he inserts himself into invariably trends toward ranting against women and labeling anybody that disagrees with him "feminist" or "SJW" or something similar. He's been around for 10+ years doing this shit, I think, though I only learned about him in the past year or so thanks to his appearance on SN. He leaves a highly identifiable trail of word-vomit online, so it's not difficult to get an idea of what dealing with him is like.
[Anyone easily offended by words should probably skip this next paragraph, I'm not one to self-censor]
Imagine a hypothetical version of APK that scours the web for mentions of host files, and whenever he finds one, he tells everyone how they could just use a hosts file to solve all their problems. (Okay, that part isn't any different than the real thing.) Except this hypothetical evil APK is crazier than normal and, in every discussion, blames "niggers and jews" for every problem in every discussion that mentions /etc/hosts. And, once he joins a topic, he sticks around for days replying to everybody, fighting all and sundry and accusing them of being "nigger lovers" or "kikes" because they called him out on being insane or stupid. That's MikeeUSA, except with Mikee, he hates women and Debian, so every discussion ends up with him blaming them for all problems ever and accusing everybody of being SJWs.
He's been doing this stuff long before systemd existed existed, and his diatribes and harassment also predate the SJW moniker. He just uses whatever tool is convenient to further his own insane agenda. The only reason he's anti-systemd is because Debian's adopting it and a portion of the Linux community dislikes it, and he picked up "SJW" because it's a polarising label. They're both just fuel for his lunatic crusade against Debian at this point. I've seen him on Slashdot doing the same shit, and unfortunately for us, he found SN and apparently decided its smaller size and greybeard anti-systemd leaning makes it easier to spread his insane bullshit.
His writing style is easy enough to pinpoint once you know it, since it tends to carry an unhinged zealotry that stands out. Ignoring him is simple, but the problem is he manages to discredit people with useful commentary and insightful opinions simply by claiming to be on their side while waging his personal war that nobody else is involved in. As soon as he uses someone else's cause to further his own lunatic agenda, people seeking to discredit that cause will use him as an example of why that cause is wrong. He's like a living example of how false flag operations can discredit a movement, except that he seems to really just be a deranged nutter with a keyboard that manages to achieve similar results.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 29 2015, @06:42PM
That's a fellow that goes by MikeeUSA online.
I wonder if he is the one who keeps modding me down (a day later) for calling it out.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:08AM
I would hope that MikeeUSA does not have high enough karma to ever get mod points...