Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 41 (rec.arts.drwho)

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So there’s this thing called the Internet, and it’s kind of a big deal, so I suppose we should talk about it. I mean, it’s been lurking about in the background for a while, but it became a genuinely important thing in what Doctor Who was around this time, to say nothing of a somewhat important thing in my life. Because something we haven’t really talked about in the context of the Virgin era is the nature of Doctor Who fandom.

We’ve talked broadly about the way in which computers became standard consumer technology in this time period. The early 1990s were the period where everybody finally got around to agreeing that computers were the future. And so a sleepy bit of high-end technology called the Internet started trickling into mass consciousness. For those who are young enough to have always known an Internet based on the World Wide Web, it may be worth pausing to explain what this meant.

The World Wide Web was publicly launched in August of 1991. But it didn’t really hit breakout “everybody is using this thing” status for a few years. Major bits of the Web like Amazon didn’t even go online until 1995, and it isn’t until the latter half of the decade that “online presence” became a standard feature of practically everything. Up until the mid 90s the Internet was fragmented among a large number of services, not all of them meaningfully interoperable. You had a wide variety of services like (in the US) Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL that offered their own closed-off e-mail systems, chat networks, discussion boards, games, and all sorts of other things. Prodigy, in 1994, was the first of these to offer any sort of interoperability with the Internet at large. Then there were little things like local BBSes – often just computers with modems that you could dial into via a phone number and access online services aimed at the local market.

You also had what we might call the Big Internet, which consisted not only of the World Wide Web but of e-mail and Usenet. For one thing, it’s the chunk that eventually came to eat all of the BBSes and independent services. For another, it had Usenet, a sizable collection of discussion forums and file-sharing services (which were distributed, essentially, by converting files into text). And one of those discussion forums was rec.arts.drwho. Which was about what you’d expect.

The idea that there was an online discussion forum about Doctor Who sounds like the most spectacularly unremarkable thing imaginable in 2012, but you have to realize that in 1993 Usenet was somewhat obscure. Commercial Internet Service Providers existed, but were rare and often charged by the minute. The bulk of Internet users were those who had access provided due to having an account on a system that provided larger services. In practice, this usually meant people affiliated with universities.

Which, in the early-to-mid 90s, actually meant me. With two parents at universities it was relatively easy for me to get such an account on a semesterly basis, and once I started taking actual classes there on the side it became downright easy.…

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We’ll All Die of Sunburn on a Cloudy Day (Blood Heat)

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I’ll Explain Later

We skipped Iceberg, but I talked about it Friday, so Blood Heat. The first book of the “Alternate History Cycle,” a five book series in which the Doctor faces a (for the first four books) unknown enemy who is altering history and causing all sorts of troubles. Or, as the Doctor puts it, “meddling.” So that’s subtle about who it is. In this first book, the Doctor ends up in an alternate universe in which he died during The Silurians, leading the eponymous Silurians to win. The book ends with what is almost certainly the New Adventures’ highest death toll as the Doctor is forced to destroy the entire alternate universe. It’s quite well-regarded, although Craig Hinton is relatively restrained, accusing Mortimore of being “a little more heavy-handed than Johnny Byrne, and considerably more so than Hulke,” though still basically liking the book. Lars Pearson is more unequivocal, calling it “magnificent” and saying that “fans still stand up and cheer about it.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings put it at 24th, with a rating of 72.2%, nestling it snugly between The Highest Science and Birthright. DWRG entry. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s October of 1993. DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince are at number one with “Boom! Shake The Room.” That lasts a week, and then Take That unseat them with “Relight my Fire.” That lasts two whole weeks, at which point Meat Loaf take over number one with “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Pet Shop Boys, Roxette, Iron Maiden, The Prodigy, and Phil Collins also chart, while top ten albums include Nirvana’s In Utero, Pet Shop Boys’s Very, Pearl Jam’s Vs, and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell II.

In news, since last entry Israel and the PLO signed a peace accord in Washington DC, with Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands afterwards. Giuseppe Puglisi was killed in Italy due to his strong stance against the Mafia. While during this month the US badly botches Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, leading to the events depicted in the film Black Hawk Down. China performs a nuclear test, unnerving everybody a bit. Benazir Bhutto becomes the first elected female leader of a Muslim state in Pakistan. John Major attempts to revive the blatantly sagging fortunes of the Conservative Party, launches the Back to Basics campaign, which mostly becomes emblematic of failed attempts to relaunch political parties. And members of the Ulster Defence Association attack a bar in Greysteel, Northern Ireland, killing eight.

While in books, we have Jim Mortimore’s Blood Heat, which provides something of an interesting test case for a broader aesthetic and critical issue that has at times lurked in the background of this blog, and that is, in many ways, in play again now. In any given era of Doctor Who there is a critical gravity towards the idea of figuring out the era’s default mode, if you will. In the Troughton era, for instance, the default was bases under siege.…

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Playing with Dolls

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UPDATE, 25/09/12:  If you read this post, please read on through the comments too.  Some astute readers used the comments section to set me straight on some issues both of fact and interpretation.  As a result, my attitude towards ‘Night Terrors’ is now considerably more negative than my initial reaction (which you can read in the main review below).  In fairness to myself, I do spend most of the piece saying what I don’t like about ‘Night Terrors’, including identifying some of what I call the “latent hostility” towards working-class people… but I failed to notice the wider context of the episode and so also the scale of the problem.  I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong (of course, I do really) but I hate that I blogged before giving myself sufficient time to think.  

Okay, my foolhardy project of catching up with all the Doctor Who I’ve not seen in order to re-synch with the new stuff (and hopefully provide myself with blogging material) continues.

Last night I finally watched ‘Night Terrors’. Much to my astonishment, I didn’t absolutely hate it. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good… but it wasn’t actively offensive most of the time either. Which is fairly good going for Moffat-era Who written by Gatiss.

I was horrified by the idea that the Doctor now hears and answers prayers like God, with the pleas of a little boy travelling up to him through the heavens, but that was somewhat neutralised later by some technobabble explanation that made it sound very much like a special case.  In the end, I liked that the Doctor actually seemed comparatively less full of himself, and more like a guy making it up and thinking it out as he went along.  Matt Smith should be encouraged to slow down a bit more often.  He had some nice, quiet moments (inbetween all the usual frenetic gibbering) that were very likeable.  He does ‘kindly’ rather well.

There were cliches galore, of course.  An old lady complains about her knees.  A yobbo guy with a pitbull.  Hoodies, etc.

Where would any mainstream BBC drama be nowadays if it had to try and depict a housing estate without the employment of hostile cliches?  I think the latter stages of RTD’s depiction of Rose’s estate are the last example of such places being sketched without such latent hostility.

But… there was an interesting visual stress on the uniformity and blandness of the housing estate, bathed in that sickly yellow night-time street-light aura.

And this made the opulent but fake interior of the ‘mansion house’ into a fairly interesting visual counterpoint.

Of course, it was entirely predictable that the mansion would turn out to be a dolls house.  But even that was kind of covered when the Doctor immediately realises it when he ends up there, treating the conclusion as though it’s self-evident.  It looks like evidence of two tracks of thought at work in the story.  We’re more on the Doctor’s wavelength than the other characters… which is not self-evidently the wrong way to do it. …

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We Must Look Like Insects To You (Birthright)

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I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Shadowmind, by Christopher Bulis, because this sentence says almost everything there is to say about it.

Nigel Robinson’s Birthright, along with the novel after it (which we’re skipping), Iceberg, form a vaguely-linked two book sequence in which the Doctor has one adventure in Iceberg and Ace and Benny have a completely separate one here. In Iceberg the Doctor fights some very dull Cybermen, while here Ace and Benny are stranded on different planets and at different times having a linked adventure with the Doctor’s fingerprints all over it. The book introduces Muldwych, a supporting character in the Virgin books strongly implied to be the Merlin version of the Doctor. It’s pretty well-liked, with Shannon Sullivan’s rankings putting it in twenty-fifth place with a 72% rating. At the time, Craig Hinton declared it “probably the best New Adventures novel published so far,” and Lars Pearson goes with “a crisp and good little story, if a bit unpolished in parts.”

On the occasions where I go to conventions, I favor panels on which there are writers, with my stated logic being that there’s a minimal level of “being able to say articulate and interesting things” that writers necessarily have, and there’s not always for actors. David Banks’s Iceberg pretty much exemplifies that.

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It’s August of 1993. Take That are at number one with “Pray.” The late Freddie Mercury unseats them a week later with “Living On My Own,” which lasts for two weeks and is followed by “Mr Vain” by Culture Beat. 4 Non Blondes, Billy Joel, Madonna, Mariah Carey, and the Urban Cookie Collective also chart, while UB40 dominate the album charts for the entire month with Promises and Lies.

In the news, since last we read a book, Vince Foster committed suicide, giving right-wing conspiracy theorists their favorite part of the Clinton administration. Clinton also announced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” While during this month Buckingham Palace is opened to the public for the first time, and Magic: The Gathering comes out. Thrilling, I know.

On to books then. We’ve been talking for a few entries about the problem that a lot of the New Adventures have, which is that they seem faintly embarrassed to be Doctor Who. There seem to be, once the New Adventures finally got off their mark with Timewyrm: Revelation, three sorts of writers. The first are the embarrassed fans. There’s no serious argument to be had that McIntee, Mortimore, and Lane aren’t huge fans of Doctor Who, but they all seem like writers who will be happier when they move to more “serious” science fiction. The second are the Cartmel-era writers now on the New Adventures. They aren’t embarrassed about Doctor Who, but they have an iconoclastic tendency to want to change what Doctor Who is.

And then there are writers like Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts who actually seem happy as can be to be writing Doctor Who, but who are distinctly a new generation of fans-turned-writers with their own ideas for what Doctor Who can be.…

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Homage to the Future

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I’m currently re-reading George Orwell’s best book Homage to Catalonia.  It’s one of those books I re-read every few years.

I came across this lovely, compact, resonant passage:

I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.

Orwell saw the essential nature of Stalin’s Russia better even than Trotsky.  A state-capitalist bureaucracy, with the role of private capitalists taken instead by an equally-exploitative class of managers.  He also saw that Stalin’s Russia was not socialist, since the essence of socialism is the abolition of an exploiting class, not its replacement by a new set of exploiters.

However, what I love most about this quote is that Orwell is writing in 1937 about Stalinists, but it applies today to the ideological commissars of capitalism.  Fox News, Thomas Friedman, etc, etc, et-bloody-c.  All the corporate goons and mainstream ideologues (all of them far more reminiscent of old-style Stalinist hacks, apologists and party-men than they’d ever dream possible) endlessly telling us that Socialism is the religion of state ownership, state control, state regimentation of the individual, etc.

They tell us this to scare us away – not away from socialism, of which they affect to live in fear but which they secretly regard (wrongly, as history will hopefully show) as a busted flush – but away from ANY criticism, even the mildest bit of reformism, of corporate neoliberalism.

Their bogey is the authoritarianism of old Russia or China… and yet their world of corporate-rule is eerily like such tyrannies.  Corporations are utter tyrannies; pyramidal command structures with little or no internal democracy, scarce accountability, no levers by which the public may control them, the ability and willingness to use violence to defend themselves, etc.

Just as the Stalinized Soviet Union wanted its acolytes and fellow travellers and useful idiots to believe that socialism meant state control, so do today’s ultra-capitalist thinkpriests… and for exactly the same reason, only in moral photo-negative.  The Stalinist argument was: if state control is socialism, then Stalinism is socialism, ergo Stalinism is good.  The neoliberal argument is: if state control is socialism, and socialism was Stalinism, then any state control over capital is Stalinism, ergo state control of any kind of evil.

These arguments are clones of each other, wearing different suits.  And both are the purest cant, invented by tyrannies for the justification of tyranny. …

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 40 (Dark Season, Century Falls)

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If you want to date your argument from Press Gang then the story of Doctor Who’s return begins a few months before its final season. But Steven Moffat didn’t bring Doctor Who back, and indeed has said in interviews that he could never have done what Russell T Davies did with the series without having seen Davies do it first. In that case, then, the return of Doctor Who begins about two years after its cancellation, in November of 1991, with the debut of Russell T Davies’s first created television series Dark Season.

Dark Season is a straightforward show – a bit of a nostalgic throwback. It features a trio of schoolchildren investigating sci-fi mysteries going on around their school. The plot is split into two three-episode runs, with the fifth episode cliffhanger suddenly revealing that the villain of the second story is in league with the villain of the first story. Our main character is Marcie, whose conceit is that she more or less recognizes that she’s in a sci-fi television show and so plays for the right set of conventions instead of bumbling about trying to figure out things that the audience had ages ago. Aside from being entertaining, this also means that Davies can pick up the pace nicely. Finally, it’s obligatory to mention that Dark Season features a very early role for Kate Winslet, who is famous for stuff.

The fashion these days appears to be to suggest that Dark Season is not, as it initially appears, a direct heir to Doctor Who. This is absolute rubbish. Dark Season is as flagrant a Doctor Who descendent as has ever been descended, so much so that it’s tempting, albeit inaccurate, to call it a clone. The script could be trivially adapted into a Doctor Who story to fit into Season Twenty-Five or Twenty-Six. Marcie, the lead protagonist, is channeling Sylvester McCoy throughout her performance to a degree that is downright creepy given that she’s playing a pre-teen girl, prone to cryptic mutterings mixed with solid humor. You’d barely need to change her dialogue to have her work as the Doctor. Combining the roles of Reet and Tom into a single companion would have been somewhat trickier, but even there you’re not looking at much – spin one off into Ace, and keep the other as a temporary companion to give the Doctor and Ace a way into the events at the school and you have a pair of linked three-parters.

Which begs the question of why the party line is that Dark Season isn’t a Doctor Who . To some extent the answer is one of saving Davies from a genuinely unwarranted reductive summary of his career. If his first show is a Doctor Who knockoff and his eventual crowning glory in television is bringing Doctor Who back then the rest of his career gets reduced to, well, the stuff he did when he wasn’t doing Doctor Who. Which is terribly unfair to a host of genuinely important and quality television that Davies wrote and created.…

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It Came From Uranus

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I finished reading Stephen Baxter’s Doctor Who novel The Wheel of Ice today.  The novel had its moments.  There is one description of an attack upon Zoe by a group of ‘blue dolls’ – fabricated avatars of an ancient artificial intelligence – that is rather well done.  The blank black eyes and needle teeth are fairly routine but there is something oddly disturbing about the descriptions of their paddle-like hands.

On the whole, however, I found the book rather uninspired.  The phrase I just used – “ancient artificial intelligence” – says a lot about the book’s use of somewhat familiar tropes.  There seems to have been an attempt to evoke the ‘base under siege’ / ‘humans in the future’ formula so often said to be typical of the Troughton era… but with the ‘siege’ coming from within the colony.  However, Baxter is perhaps a little too interested in the technical details of the solar system.  We get an awful lot of scenes where the action stops dead so the characters can explain neutrinos to each other, or describe the chemical composition of Titan’s atmosphere.  There’s also a lot of stuff about how a space colony would actuallly work in technical terms, but it’s not terribly relevant to the story.  So, once again, the action tends to pause so that people can talk about waste recycling.

There is an attempt to adapt the characters of Zoe and Jamie to new situations that also causes a slowing-down of the action.  It would be okay if they had genuinely interesting things to do… but Zoe gets to tell bedtime stories about the Karkus to a toddler and Jamie falls in with a bunch of naff ‘rebellious’ young people who say excrutiating things like “Cowabunga, granddad!”.  I shit you not.

There’s a rather likeable Scottish robot called Mac who gets developed only so far before being sidelined and then brought back for a rather twee ’emotional’ bit at the end.  It’s characteristic of the novel that this cathartic final scene for Mac is bordered by lots of technical talk involving him being sent to Uranus to mine tarranium (it came from Uranus, I knew it did!).  There are lots of continuity references in the book, if that’s the sort of thing that spreads your marmite.

The book also has a go at being political… and that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about.  There is a nasty corporation called, rather amusingly, Bootstrap… as thought it was set up by Norman Tebbit or someone like that.  The representative of the corporation is a nasty woman who is nasty because she’s nasty, and a woman because she’s a woman.  She does nasty things in a brusque, rude manner, because she’s nasty and brusque and rude.  Everybody else in the story seems to be well-meaning, if equally characterless.  Some are delineated by being Spanish or Welsh.  The rest blur into one indistinct melange even as you read.  (So quite like a mid-Troughton space base story in fact!) …

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Before Light and Time and Space and Matter (White Darkness)

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I’ll Explain Later

David McIntee’s White Darkness, the fifteenth New Adventure, features the TARDIS crew in early 20th century Haiti during the events leading up to the American occupation. It also has them fighting Cthulhu and zombies. So it’s a bit ambitious. The Cthulhu stuff is what it’s best known for these days, since that becomes a bit of a theme for the New Adventures, but it’s just as notable for introducing McIntee, who went on to write scads more books, and his research-heavy historical style. Reputation-wise, it’s middle of the road – Sullivan’s rankings have it at fortieth place, with a 65% rating. At the time newly installed Doctor Who Magazine reviewer Craig Hinton displayed a flair for the lousy pull quote by describing it simply as “an enjoyable adventure story.” I, Who goes with more outright ambivalence, calling it “solid, albeit a bit passionless and unimpressive.” DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s June of 1993. Ace of Base are at number one with “All That She Wants,” unseated a week later by UB40 with “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You,” which lasts for two weeks before Gabrielle takes over with “Dreams,” making this the first actually volatile month on the charts I feel like we’ve had in a while. The Spin Doctors, Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, The Pet Shop Boys, and Haddaway also chart, the latter with “What Is Love,” AKA that song from the Saturday Night Live sketch.

While in the news, Andrew Wiles proes Fermat’s Last Theorem. Loreena Bobbitt does the thing that she’s famous for. Clinton orders some casual bombing of Iraq. Kim Campbell becomes the first female Prime Minster of Canada.

While in books, it’s White Darkness. And thus an intersection with my life again. June of 1993 is the summer before sixth grade for me. I was, by this point, a Doctor Who fan, and it’s in sixth grade that I discovered the New Adventures. It started with finding one or two in a book store – probably either the still-open Barnes and Noble in Danbury, Connecticut or the now-closed Borders in Farmington. I know the first two books I got were White Darkness and Lucifer Rising.

Memory deceives just a little bit here. I don’t remember exactly what month – it was certainly a bit later than June. I can’t quite place exactly when my relationship with Doctor Who snapped into the present such that there was such a thing as a new release. I started buying issues of Doctor Who Magazine when I saw them in the comic shop in this period, but my comic-buying days were nearing an end this year – I bailed out of them completely in the fall of 1994. So there was definitely a point around here where I became aware of the fact that new Doctor Who was coming out on a fairly set schedule, and that there was such a thing as a community responding to it.…

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Double Coded

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There’s a scene that is evidently supposed to justify the way Moffat’s version of the show has been talking the Doctor up as a powerful, scary, dangerous bad-ass.  It supposedly justifies the Doctor’s own increasing tendency to appear decidedly impressed with himself, to see himself – and talk about himself – as Mr Scarypants.  It justifies the decision to show him (especially in Moffat scripts) as being hubristic, bombastic, aware of his ability to strike terror into the monsters.  Look me up, Vashta Nerada, and then run away.  Look me up, Atraxi, and then run away.  “There’s one thing you never put in a trap…” and “Don’t ever think you’re capable of playing games with me…” and all that pompous, I’m-so-hard, showoffish bum-gravy.

The scene in question is said, by some, to throw all this into relief, to undermine it, to pull the rug from under the Doctor’s feet, to be the reversal towards which all this was leading, a treacherous terminus that forces us to reassess our hero’s morality, and to make him reassess it too.

The scene is near the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  It’s the scene where River rebukes the Doctor.  He says “None of this is my fault!”, referring to the war waged by the anonymous military people and their anonymous Headless Monk friends, the war in which Amy and her baby have become unwilling pawns, in which other friends and allies of the Doctor have been killed.  River snaps back at him that it’s all his fault.  He brought it all upon them by allowing himself to become a figure of terror to the bad guys, a warrior… to the point where even his name – “Doctor” – has come to mean “mighty warrior” in the language of the anonymous military people.

You see, Doctor, what a pass this has come to?  Ooooh, you have become what you were fighting.

Except that it doesn’t do or say or achieve anything of the kind.  If that is the intended import of the scene, it fails miserably.

Firstly, how many times are we supposed to have seen the Doctor bitten-on-the arse by his own hubris now?  And when has it ever changed his behaviour?  He’s supposed to have been humbled at the end of Series 5… only to come back at Christmas, so arrogant, such a self-appointed puppet-master, such an unrepentant and moralising neoconservative of other people’s souls, that he inserts himself into a man’s past, his memories, his innermost self, and rewrites his life – as he watches.

It’s similar with the Doctor’s ‘lesson’ at the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  Once River has finished lightly scolding him, and he’s finished looking faintly sheepish, he instantly snaps back into normal mode.  River – the quintessential Moffat ‘strong female’… i.e. slavishly obsessed with her man – goes all gooey-eyed as she reveals her (entirely predictable) identity and the Doctor, grinning, announces to Amy and Rory that all is well.  He knows that they’ve just lost their chance to raise their daughter, irrevocably, forever.…

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Murder is Murder

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The terrible killings of Americans in Libya have provoked an entirely foreesable reaction.  Loads of smug conservatives and equally smug liberals have found common cause in singling out Islam as violent and intolerant. 

That cartoon in The Onion is a good example.  ‘Nobody Murdered Because of This Image’ reads the headline, above a cartoon of several non-Muslim religious figures engaged in an explicit gang bang.  Because only Muslims kill people for bigoted reasons, you see.

It’s interesting to witness the implicit hierarchy of human value.  The (entirely deplorable) murder of Americans by Libyans elicits howls of outrages.  The (equally deplorable and far more common) murder of Arabs and Muslims in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine etc by the American and British militaries – and/or NATO, and/or the Israelis – doesn’t provoke any such widespread and sustained spluttering horror.  It’s for ‘them’ to die at our hands.  That’s just routine.  And ‘they’ mustn’t draw any conclusions from this (i.e. the West despises them and values their culture at nothing) because if they do then that’s the medieval intolerance of Islam talking.

Of course, nobody who died at the Embassy deserved to die, nor would they have deserved to even if they had been involved in creating the disgusting, hateful, maliciously provocative film that everyone is talking about.  Most Muslims would agree, I’m sure… even those who were insulted and shocked by hearing about the film. 

Meanwhile, our Western response (the response of those who are supposedly living in the civilised, liberal, modern, progressive, democratic world… as opposed to the lands of the backward, whom we take it upon ourselves to slaughter in the name of freedom) will probably be to massacre yet more Arabs and Muslims.

And all those people who chortle over the religious touchiness of Muslims will immediately go blind and deaf.…

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