Happy Draw Mohammed Day!

[Silent3]

65. Obviously your definition of "reasonable people"...

...differs greatly from mine. You don't have to be an authoritarian to be suspicious of excessive "THEY"-are-all-out-to-get-us suspicion.

Al Franken did a good job in one of his books (I forget which one right now) describing the problems with our major news sources these days. Those problems are real, and large grains of salt are often required, but other than built-as-propaganda outlets like Fox News, there isn't a whole lot of outright long-term goal-driven fabrication of stories out there.

There's laziness, sensationalism, poor fact checking, false "balance"... but the idea that reports of Muslim violence and threats instigated in response to mere cartoons is a media fabrication, when plenty of different news sources from different countries report these stories, as if their all one THEY in collusion to create a fictitious menace... that's where you go overboard into conspiratorial paranoia and leave the company of "reasonable people" yourself.

As to your last statement, why would anyone believe that drawing deliberately offensive, demeaning caricatures and flaunting them in the face of their intended target be an entirely safe activity? When has it ever been completely safe to taunt and insult people? I believe most reasonable people would say it's just stupid.

Which leads you right to my point. You're denying the stories of this violence, then admitting such violence is to be expected. If the violence to be expected, why would stories of it have to be made up?

If simply seeing a drawing Mohammed makes a person feel "demeaned" -- or maybe just hearing from someone else that such a drawing exists -- more than half the problem belongs to the person who lets that drawing get to them so much.