re: #39 Charles Johnson

Right on cue I’m seeing people calling for everyone to post the anti-Islam cartoons from Charlie Hebdo. This strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do. We should carry on doing exactly what we were doing before the attack, not indulge in a fear-driven blustering campaign to offend Muslims as much as possible.

1000 x THIS. I felt awful over what happened, regardless of my opinion regarding the magazine, but going online and seeing people waving around the most offensive caricatures of Muslims they published isn’t helping. It makes me feel like I’m the enemy—like I deserve to be insulted for the horrible shit some assholes who are complete strangers to me and live thousands of miles away did. It feels like an excuse for people to fly the freak flags that they usually keep hidden.

So, yeah, I’m not doing the whole #JeSuisCharlie thing. I’m not feeling it.

I blocked close to 20 people on Twitter earlier—the hate’s coming from the right and left— and I’m not even going to read the dozens of Google Alerts that are flooding my mailbox because I don’t want to watch the bigots writhing ecstatically in their hategasms. The media too. They seem creepily eager to talk about and/or repeat the horror. It’s gross.