Some people think the Enlightenment and its political fallout in the West are such a done deal they need no support.
Indeed, they can be safely deserted, undermined, and even betrayed.
Or maybe being a bad boy is a well-rewarded pose.
Or maybe they really are enemies of the culture.
Fish here portrays religion per se as intrinsically totalitarian and rather praises the Muslims for insisting on taking theirs that way, denigrating the Christians for not doing so.
This is Fish.
This is Fish.
Ah, academic pomo.
Why does IHT give this guy a megaphone?
Just wondering.
Full disclosure.
I support free speech and expression not because I speak or express very much but because, since childhood, I have cherished the freedom to read what I damn well please, see what movies I please, and so on.
Hence my rejection of authoritarian or totalitarian religion as well as government.
I am not a publisher, an author, or a performer.
I am a person and my reading or viewing choices are nobody's damned business but my own.
I value cultural and political secularism, freedom from religion, for that reason but also because I am damned if I want to be threatened, bullied, or controlled by some idiot, some crackpot, some loon in the name of his silly-assed, unforgivably stupid beliefs.
I am damned if I want the whole power of the state to coerce me and everyone else into living in accordance with the fantasied wishes of those entirely imaginary and malevolent fictions, the gods, Allah, Yahweh, or God.
Stanley Fish is a jackass who would run for his life, like anyone else but the most ardent of believing fools, at the first knock on his door by the Saudi Isalmic police, there to arrest him for derogating from the message of Mohamed and the dignity of Allah.
And here he fundamentally betrays those who understand that safety from that sort of policing has to be cherished and even defended.
It is most certainly not a done deal and, though he may die before any real damage can be done, I may not and my children and their children certainly will not.
Fortunately, a whole lot of Jews and Christians and others, in the West in general and America in particular, also cherish these freedoms, and that is why the Christian right and the Catholic clergy face such an uphill battle here, trying their best to undo American secularism and impose their rules not only on speech and expression in America but on every aspect of our entire sex lives.
And that is why, unlike Stanley, I view the triumphs of Islam over liberty all over the Muslim world as a disaster first and formost, and usually in fact only, for the Muslims, themselves.
A man who lives in a dungeon may kid himself it's a penthouse; it's still a dungeon.
And the stupid bastard has his children in there, too.
Face the fact.
Meine Gedanken sind frei is a delusion that doesn't cut it.
If you want your thoughts to be free your reading had better be free, your listening, your viewing, and your frank conversation had better be free; and others had better have the like freedom.
I was free to read Marx and Neitzsche and Russell as a kid in high school because the state did not and no one else could prevent their publication, their sale, their purchase, or their possession.
Freedom, though an individual good, is inevitably a political good.
Your thoughts are as free as your country is free.
It matters that we understand this.
Update 9/20/12 1415 hrs.
The Weekly Standard says CBS says witnesses say there was no anti-American, anti-movie demonstration in Benghazi.
Only the attack on the consulate that led to the killing of the ambassador.
Also, the ambassador reportedly feared being killed by al-Qaeda for over a year.
Fox News today says intelligence sources tell them they think it was al-Qaeda and they think a prior detainee from Gitmo was involved.
That prisoner was released in 2007 to Ghaddafi in Libya on condition he would be kept in jail, but the dictator released him as part of an effort to conciliate Islamists.
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