Paging Ted Rall: Your Colleagues Need You

Third consecutive post saying nothing more than "Still alive. In different country." It may not be particularly interesting, but it's true. I am still alive, and I am in a country where thousands of people are marching in the streets threatening violence over a series of twelve political cartoons. At first I assumed the cartoons would have to be particularly bad in order to provoke this sort of reaction, but some of them were actually quite funny. Maybe that was the problem.

Thousands of people on the streets, and no British newspaper has even printed the fucking things. A French publication took the ballsy move of publishing the offending scribbles along with a big headline affirming their right to make fun of whichever sacred symbol they chose. The ballsiness of this move was, however, slightly undercut by the paper's owner, who promptly fired the managing editor and distanced himself from the whole affair, citing reasons of mortality.

First they came for the political cartoonists - twelve very frightened Danes, in this case - and I said nothing, because I can't stand political cartoonists. And yet it seems wrong, somehow, to hack them up with machetes without first holding a trial of some sort. How would we know that the people being torn apart by a raving mob were actually political cartoonists?