bogus
January 18th, 2012
Today’s comic is dedicated to Rhys Morgan, Jessica Ahlquist, One Law for All, and Salman Rushdie. Heroes, all.
Latest book…
Random oldie…
December 18, 2005-
- NICE T-SHIRT (Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust). Currently unavailable.
John Cage is going to be pissed.
Right on the button!
Oh, how true!
Sometimes, this stuff just writes itself, doesn’t it? But it takes talent to summarize it like this. Don’t ever stop.
Getting really angry not so much at the wing nuts, but the cowardly kow-towing to their threats of violence. We’re bringing it on ourselves, ffs, yeah like a fucking catholic choirboy.
When is someone with real authority going to stand up and condemn these turnip munchers?
Ian Jones
“We’re bringing it on ourselves, ffs, yeah like a fucking catholic choirboy.”
Please tell me I misread you meaning…
Perfectly appropriate.
I’ve changed my Facebook picture to the one of J&M used by Rhys Morgan and UCLU Atheist, Secularist & Humanist Society, in a gesture of solidarity, and hope that others will join me in an “I’m Spartacus” moment.
Come on, who’s with me?
Author – I hope you don’t mind – I’ve put in the link.
Dear Ian Jones,
No authority will stand up and condemn these turnip munchers because they too are turnip munchers! It’s up to us non-turnip munchers to deal with this issue. By the way, you’re very kind in calling these guys turnip munchers…I have heard worse!
🙂 🙂 i like this one
I get your point but you should have made it 1×1 and white, not 0x0. 0x0 causes many feed readers to error out on it, resulting in many people missing the point.
Could you elaborate a bit please Kahomono? I don’t know what you mean, and I want to make the feed work for everyone.
Truly brilliant.
The boys would certainly make George Orwell proud, doublespeak doublegood indeed!
To clarify the above in the event there’s a band or an album named “George Orwell” out there somewhere;
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” And to expand that a bit, “Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act. “
New here, logging on…
Rhys is still getting the most amazing bullying crap on his Facebook page – some of it from his own classmates…along with one alum of his school who made real threats.
Boo hoo, it is to weep
For the pitiful secular sheep
Waiting for some one to tell them
What to in unison condem
Until told, they won’t even squeak.
@NBH take your assonance and shove it up your ass. Unless you simply don’t know what “secular” means and have this bassackwards.
DH
Boo hoo, it is to weep
For the pitiful theist sheep
Waiting for some one to tell them
What in unison to condemn
Until told, they won’t even squeak.
Better?
@kiyaroru Better, but is it what NBH intended? It would be nice to hear from the guy sometime, other than in another opaque Calypso.
Secularists should encourage the spread of the METAMEME. It blocks the growth of violent, intimidating, dogmatic religions such as Islam, in the same way that the mild cowpox virus blocks the spread of lethal smallpox.
-Daz, possibly, rereading it, maybe quotes around “we’re bringing it on ourselves” would be clearer – it’s what I keep hearing, tall poppies etc. The point was- I aren’t going to shut up, the blame lies squarely with the muncher of halal turnips, and transubstantiated crackers.
Quote from BBC about resignation,
“The Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association is continuing with its protest against the image, saying it has wider implications.
Adam Walker, the association’s national spokesperson, said the two student groups had worked well together in the past and said the offence was unnecessary.”
– Damn right the offence was unnecessary. It was unnecessary for you to be offended, Boo Hoo.
I shall be drawing an extra Mohammed on Draw mo day just for you.
please Nassar
stop projecting
and take a long hard look
into a mirror
Speaking of censorship… wtf is going on in the land of the free, bastion of free speech, and defender of liberties world wide? Are you chaps seriously instituting the very internet blocks that the US State Department is delivering tools to circumvent to peeps like us living in dictatorships, so we have access to a free web? Sproing much?
@FreeFox, I’m only just now catching up on emails and news, because I wouldn’t go online, yesterday, in protest. I think Wikipedia shutting down its English version helped the most, though. It’s scary, being an informed American, these days.
@Author, would you like to make a J&M avatar for us follows, one that would link to your site? I’d make sure to use it awhile.
@DocAtheist: Good idea, wish I’d thought of that.
Great strip again, just when I think the world of the religious can’t get any more weird it does, sometimes it almost seems to weird for satire.
@DocAtheist – quite a few people are using the image of the cover of Vol 2 as their Facebook and/or Twitter profile pic at the moment. You just have to upload it to the appropriate place. Making it link here is not something I can do.
Ian Jones.
Fair enough. On my first reading it looked like victim blaming but with the scare-quotes, all makes sense. Probably my bad comprehension-skills.
This is the thing about “you must not offend Muslims by drawing cartoons” arguments being kow towed to by universities, publishers or newspapers / websites. The core material of the Abrahamic religions is just as offensive to each other and to non believers. The Koran, for example, calls for the murder and eternal torment of every member of the UCL atheist society. Did UCLU ban its Muslim groups from promoting, quoting, displaying or distributing the Koran? And what about all the things it says about Jews? And women (worth half a man?). How is the drawing of a cartoon more offensive than that? Yet nothing is done.
@JoJo – You’re missing the point. Muslims don’t want to be equal/accomodating/considerate they want to be right! More importantly they want us to acknowledge the fact that they are right!
Unruly Simian, I’m sorry to resurrect the pedantic theme so hard to put to bed in these comments, but I have to say “that they are right” is not a fact, it is an extremely uninformed, block-headed, delusional opinion.
@ unruly Simian… that seems to be it, exactly.
Four writers read from The Satanic Verses today at the Jaipur Literary Festival, the one Salman Rushdie had to withdraw from because of the threats. The four were promptly “investigated” by the police. This was tweeted by the South Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, who was tweeting from the festival – so she must have seen the cops actually “investigating” the writers right there in person.
@Ophelia: Sounds really bad (albeit not surprising). It is really scary to see how many Muslims compensate their inferiority complex by boundless self-righteousness and paranoia
@noreligion2: He knows. He was speaking from the point of view of a group of uninformed, block-headed, delusional people who believe in their rightness and the factuality thereof.
I agree that Author and the named people are heroes. Things have come to a pretty pass when to draw or publicise a cartoon, or to speak at a university or literary festival, is heroic.
This would be so much funnier if the cartoon were titled ‘Jes and Mo’
@ Bart – I’m sorry, that went over my head – please explain. Bear in mind that some of us have been fans here for years, and see no need to change anything.
@Bart… yes, I agree. It would be more harmonious.
The LSE Students’ Union has issued a statement on the extreme evil of the LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and its use of Jesus and Mo on its Facebook page. The statement is bottomlessly disgusting.
http://www.lsesu.com/news/article/6001/Statement-on-AHS-Society/
@Ophelia Bensosn… It says it depicts the Prophet Mohammed, but that’s false. As I understand it, Mo is a picture of a body double. I think the LSE SU ought to be asked to correct that part of the statement (I don’t know how to do that. This is my first post here so I’m not even sure if this’ll get through!)
What I don’t get about this whole ruction is the illogical thinking behind the attacks on the cartoons.
The reason for the ban on depicting the prophet was because he feared that pictures of him would lead to idolatry, no one is going to worship these cartoons (sorry author they are good but not that good), The reaction, over reaction, by some Muslims suggests that they regard Muhammad as more then human, in fact they idolise him, ho hum idolatry by the back door. I wonder if they get irony at UCL Muslim Society?
author knows very well the drawings are not that good; author says as much himself.
@Ophelia: What do you expect from LSE, court university of the Gaddafi clan?
One question that these idiots can never give an answer to – and I’ve put it to several down the years – is “Why, if your god is so mighty, do you feel the need to pronounce judgement on It’s behalf?”.
Certainly some may think that they’re proving their loyalty or love towards their god through violence and intimidation, but I think that there’s possibly a deeper reason for the majority of it, and have recently been mulling over a half-formed hypothesis which could help explain their seemingly irrational and over-emotional reactions.
Simply put, if there is a god, and It’s an omnipotent and omniscient (let’s ignore that particular paradox for the moment) god, then surely It would be more than capable of issuing Its’ own threats and punishments on those who offend it. Besides, wouldn’t this god be a little miffed at mere humans presuming to speak, judge and sentence ‘sinners’ on Its’ behalf, something akin to them suggesting that It’s possibly not quite as almighty as It likes to think?
My personal view is that those issuing the threats are not doing so out of a love of their god, but from fear of it.
Every time they see or hear a slur on their particular brand of god go unpunished, they must wonder why there was no apparent ‘divine’ retribution sent down on the blasphemer. The obvious reason for this lack of action from above -to us at least- is that there is no god, but how are the religious to explain it without in some way sowing the seeds of doubt in their own minds? The deity can’t be too busy to act, couldn’t have been elsewhere and missed the incident; it can’t be having a rest or working on another project. Any one of these would mean that the deity cannot have the properties bestowed upon it by the faithful, and without those properties then by their own definition it isn’t god.
At this point, moderates generally console themselves with the thought that we cannot ‘know the mind of God’, so tend to go for the ‘judge not, lest ye be judged’ method, and the really nice ones might even pray that we may be shown the way, but the poor sods brainwashed from birth to truly fear the O.T. monster can’t leave it at that, not if they’ve pondered, however briefly, any of the above ‘excuses for God’.
Why not? Because by asking the questions they would effectively be showing doubt in what they believe to be an absolute dictator, one that demands absolute faith and punishes doubters most severely indeed, so to their way of thinking something as simple as a sketch can lead them to doubt and therefore – in their minds – to hell; and THAT scares them. So they lash out at what they perceive to be the source of that fear, which sadly isn’t the god that failed to act, but the action that it failed to act upon. Ironically, they must also be aware that by acting as ‘god-by-proxy’ they are once again inviting Its’ wrath, which scares them even more and leads them to redouble their attacks, thereby acting as ‘god-by-proxy’, and on and on ad infinitum.
@AofS I think you over complicate the thinking of these cretins. They are not thinking any of the things you project on them. They are not thinking at all. They are reacting emotionally to what they perceive as an insult, not to their supposed god but to themselves and to their culture. They are not trying to defend their god. They feel personally attacked. They feel that their culture is under attack. They see westerners as powerful bullies who bomb and kill for Christianity and oil. They see their country of origin and culture as constantly being exploited, dominated, put down, and insulted. All of this makes them touchy, to say the least. So they react. If they were capable of thinking under these circumstances, they wouldn’t be such idiots generating so much irony.
I just hope they learn to gain some perspective, and get used to being insulted. They need to insult us back, not try to shut us up. Right now they go looking for insults just so they have an excuse for their anger. And their leaders collect “insults” to spread and inflame the passions of their followers.
I agree mostly with DH (only that it applies not only to Arab Muslims, and not even just to religious peeps, nationalists ranting about foreigner stealing their jobs and imposing their cultures, or political ideologues who identify themselves with either the exploited proletariat or the exploited economic backbone of society are basically the same breed), but I think part of the problem (at least for devoted Xstians) is that they read the bible very selectively and with a very strange and unrealistic bias.
There is stuff in there that tries to depict God as this even minded, fair playing, loving paternal guide, guardian of morals, and in need of little helpers who spread the happy message. But it’s mostly NT stuff and mostly just what third parties claim about God. In the OT and in most stories where God actually acts Himself and where we can judge Him by His deeds, He isn’t at all like that. There He is jealous, cranky, unfair, fickle, cruel, passionate, blundering, bossy, whining, and generally totally neurotic. And He doesn’t really give tuppence about any of those complicated diatary or sexual rules you find elsewhere.
The peeps he shows real love to (and sometimes tough love at that), like David or Jacob, aren’t goody-two-shoes types. They are thieves, robbers, liars, cheats, vagabonds, and scrapers. But God obviously loves them more than most. Why? Well, from the stories, I think He does because they love life, they love, if you will, God’s world. They don’t wait for some heavenly post-mortem hosannahs, but they “drink life to the lees”. Take the scene when David expresses his thanks by dancing naked in front of God (and the people of Israel) in spite of the disapproval of his high-born wife and other courtiers, and how God makes him forefather of the Messiah for that.
No matter if you take God as metaphor or literal ominpotent guide of destiny, THAT image of God actually describes real life. Life mostly does reward you if you meet it head on and with strong passions and desires and the ability to appreciate the present. Even if you violate a couple of ethical rules on the way. God’s will or just natural run of things? Either way, that depiction of God is pretty consistent with empirical experience. :p
It is incumbent upon all of us who object to being bullied by activists who purport to be mightily offended by mild satire concerning their religion and gods, to react strongly with yet more satire and laughter. The LSE Students Union authorities have made fools of themselves by their hysterical reaction to the protests sent in about the J&M cartoon on the Atheist and Humanist website.
Personally, I do not regard the Koran as a holy book. I do not think that Muhammed was the perfect man – a bit of tosser, actually. I reserve the right to laugh at, poke fun at and generally show my complete and utter disrespect for Islam and all its works. If that gets up anyones nose, then so be it. While I am at it, I wish to go on record as saying I feel the same about Christianity and its various churches.
Just who do these religious nutters think they are?
David Amies