my ass.
To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.
Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute's novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.
...
Most of the censorship religious violence inspires, however, is self-censorship. Writers put down their pens and turn to other subjects rather than risk a confrontation. So thoroughgoing is the evasion that when Grayson Perry, who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true in 2007, the media treated his candour as news. 'The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,' said Perry, 'is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.'
It should be noted that these are also some of the people who practically wet their pants in indignation when someone points out that a lot of muslims really ARE violent bigots and racists who do these things.
I'd point this out to people I know, but considering you have to show pictures before they'll admit their compatriots DID call Bush a nazi and threaten murder and such, they'll just- if they deign to take notice at all- say something like "He hasn't been as strong on civil rights as I'd like." The fact that they want to give terrorists and enemy troops the same rights as someone busted for petty theft in this country is disgusting on its own part.
"Well, no, those glaciers are NOT melting; but don't worry, other things will melt and we'll still all drown!"
Know someone who believes that "Romney isn't paying his fair share!" crap? Show this to them. Borrowing a part:
When you invest in something, you are gambling with the money you already have. There is no guarantee that you will make a profit, and in fact you may lose everything. Risk is the greatest disincentive to investment. The only reason we have investment is because the potential rewards outweigh the risks. As you lower the incentives to invest, you lower the amount that will be invested. The second biggest disincentive is that even if you make $100 on that stock you bought, you’re going to give the government $15. Raise that to $35 and you just made risky investing look even less interesting. Make it not worth it, and people quit investing their money at all and sit on it instead. Then watch the economy implode.
“But fair share! FAIR SHARE!” sob sob whine blather.
Because half of us not paying anything in income taxes at all isn’t fair enough? Okay, so raising the capital gains tax is stupid, but you still want to stick it to those pesky rich people. I know! Let’s raise the corporate income tax! Rich people own corporations! That’ll show them!
(for the record, do you have a 401K? Then you own corporations too)
Despite already having one of the highest corporate tax rates in the functioning world, let’s go ahead and jack that sucker up! Except that corporations look at taxes as another expense. If you tax them more, they simply pass that along in the cost of their product to the consumer, as in you and me. If the expense becomes too much of a burden and causes their prices to rise to the point that they are noncompetitive, they either go out of business and you lose your job, or they move to another country that doesn’t molest them as much, and you still lose your job. They exist to make a profit for their stockholders, not to pay for your good time.
See why class warfare sucks?
Bold is mine; because it's amazing to me how many people seem to have no bloody idea how some of this "Tax the rich!" stuff winds up biting THEM in the ass.
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