Sexual Politics in The Witcher 2

So I’m planning to keep on writing about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for two reasons. First, I question the productivity of having all writers everywhere write about a single game/book/movie for a few weeks before quickly and permanently moving on to something newer. Second, I’m a freelancer, and I don’t get review copies all that often. So when I do get one, I show my appreciation by being thorough both in my experience with the work and in my analysis of it.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about just how questionable the game’s sexual politics get toward the end there.

There are male mages in The Witcher 2, but all of them are minor villains—sexless area bosses who serve mostly to add some fireballs and such to important battles. Female magic-users are a different matter, uniformly attractive and, almost without exception, sexually available to Geralt.

When I say that they are uniformly attractive, by the way, I mean it: many of their animations, both for spell-casting and for flirtation or sex, are identical.

Come to think of it, most women in The Witcher 2 are uniform in that way, drawing from a handful of body-types and a somewhat shallow pool of movements. One sex scene late in the game (the one with that sexy spy sort of a sorceress) is little more than a palette swap of an earlier encounter with a recently rescued she-elf. The only action unique to the late-game sequence involves said sorceress slapping Geralt on the ass before diving into bed with him. Which marks her as—empowered?

In any case, the universal hotness and promiscuity of sorceresses seems innocuous enough—even if somewhat at odds with the “mature” or “grown-up” intent of the Witcher series—and certainly an improvement over the prudish, game-long courtships typical of Bioware fare.

That is, until the third act. Oh my, the third act. Men and women both get killed, but undeniably, the women fare far worse. Sorceresses are pretty much exclusively the ones to be shackled and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and on and on and on. One unfortunate character gets blinded with a spoon.

In a game replete with choices and divergent paths, that rather grisly spoon-blinding business is inexplicably mandatory. And for God’s sake, it happens while Geralt is standing there watching. Geralt, whom the game has taken such lengths to establish as a man allergic to injustice—and who refuses to kill a war criminal literally seconds later—does not give the player the option to intervene and stop a then-defenseless sorceress from having her eyes gouged out. That’s bizarre, not to mention wildly incongruous.

My sneaking suspicion is that CD Projekt RED simply wanted to heighten the stakes of the plot and the grittiness of the world as the game drew to a close, and that the above was simply the most direct route to that destination. But that idea is more than a little upsetting. As Film Crit Hulk pointed out in the context of Arkham City, misogyny and violence against women are all-too-common go-tos for readymade videogame grit.

But whatever their reason, the game’s last few sections contain a hugely disproportionate amount of horrific and not-quite-necessary violence inflicted on attractive and partially interchangeable women. That’s a shame in a game that can and often does do considerably better.

A Zelda Game, But Moreso: Dark Souls and Beyond

I’ve known for some time The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was not my favorite game of 2011. But then it occurred to me that it might not even make my personal top five, given that 2011 also saw the release of Portal 2, Rayman Origins, You Don’t Know Jack, and no less than three games by DoubleFine Productions—not to mention Frozen Synapse, Atom Zombie Smasher, Terraria, To The Moon, Rock of Ages, and new works from Anna Anthropy, thecatamines, and Jason Rohrer.

And then it occurred to me that Bastion had done a better job than Skyward Sword of scratching my Zelda itch, as had Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac and From Software’s Dark Souls. 2011 was quite the year for Zelda games, I suppose, because Skyward Sword was only my fourth favorite of them.

My frustrations with the Legend of Zelda series are well documented, and some other writers have recently voiced similar objections far more eloquently. Simply put, “Zelda needs subtraction, not addition.”

The Binding of Isaac starts from the original Legend of Zelda, and it does add things—randomized content, bleakly appropriate thematic trappings—but it also subtracts significantly: no in-game dialogue, no gentle difficulty curve, no explicit explanations of what items do or why.

Similarly, Dark Souls starts from the targeting-optional combat and heady exploration or 3D Zeldas, adding Western RPG character-building and JRPG loot drops, but subtracting all manner of hand-holding. Try to explore an area that is beyond your character’s ability, and no fairy or talking ship will stop you; you’ll know that you’re not ready for the graveyard area when its skeletal inhabitants prove impossible to kill, simple as that. Talk to a Non-Player Character, and in addition to items or upgrades, you’ll get some of the most cryptic, menacing non-information since “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”

And the game’s utterly bonkers introductory cutscene, which explains and explains and explains, still manages not to explain much of anything. Even the most ardent fans of Demon’s Souls, the previous entry in the series, can have a hard time making sense of this second game’s ill-defined Lovecraftian monstrosities (Nito, the first of the dead) and world-building borderline-gibberish (the furtive pygmy, so easily forgotten).

Insane, right? Maybe that’s all intended to be disorienting, or maybe something or other is getting lost in translation. More than likely, it’s a little of both. But the result is a world that feels thrillingly alien and dangerous—a feeling reinforced by every subtraction that the game makes from the now-stodgy Zelda playbook.

Where Skyward Sword (as well as Wind Waker, to a certain degree) draws itself out with fetch quests and backtracking, Dark Souls makes endless, dreamy wandering (punctuated by genuine victories won despite apparently insurmountable odds) a core value.

Hey you, the game says, we know that you’re used to breezing through games, piling conquest upon conquest. But this time, slow down and appreciate this world we’ve made for you. Slow down and appreciate how the items feel, how the systems work, and how many different ways you can approach a given situation. Slow down and get lost in a world that makes no sense, and which is hostile or indifferent to you, but in which you can nonetheless thrive.

That’s what I look for in a Zelda game—and in 2011, I found it in purer form elsewhere. As a longtime Nintendo fan, I find that a little sad. But as someone interested in video games has a medium, I find it pretty damn exhilarating.

The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Selling Art by Marketing “Art”

This is the fifth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Parts One and Two and Three and Four might help new readers, context-wise.

This past year, I’ve been working to establish a small business called Gray Blush Gallery. I’ve tried to mention the project on this blog from time to time without just coming right out and saying buy art buy art online buy original art online buy original art online and do it right now because the original art that you can buy online at Gray Blush Gallery is really quite good and you will rather like it.

Restraint has not always come easily.

Gray Blush Gallery is a place to buy gallery art online, but we usually refer to it simply as a place to buy art online, and I’d like to talk a bit about why that is.

Our advertising and traffic data is (1) necessarily somewhat private, (2) probably boring to most people who are not us, and (3) still inconclusive. But I’ll say this: people don’t usually find us by searching for paintings (even though we have a lot of paintings), or by searching for an art gallery (even though we most certainly are an art gallery, albeit a gallery of ones and zeroes rather than bricks and mortar). And certainly, no one is searching for gallery art, since that’s a term I more or less made up.

The data suggests that people who are looking for an art gallery don’t expect to be able to buy anything. They anticipate a one-way communication in which the gallery presents stuff for them to look at and appreciate, and then they look at it and appreciate it, and that’s that.

Likewise with paintings. Your average Google-user doesn’t seem to be searching for paintings in order to buy them.

When people want to find the sort of stuff that Gray Blush sells—unique art-objects in traditional gallery media—they seem to search simply for art. This means that Gray Blush Gallery gets stuck in among art galleries that don’t sell the work they display, abstract academic discussions about art as a concept, and the sorts of mass-produced art prints in which Art.com tends to traffic.

Now, I’m not badmouthing any of those three groups. I love museums, I’m (obviously) interested in discussing art, and I have no issue with mass-produced art-objects of any kind.

What is sort of an issue, for me personally and presumably for others with similar business models, is that there is no word in contemporary English that clearly indicates the difference between a Starry Night poster in editions of ten-million and the original Starry Night, of which there is only one. We can agree that there’s a difference—and indeed, some will say with great vitriol that the former is not art—but how does one explain that difference to another person, let alone to a search engine?

Words like original and unique do describe the difference, but they can easily be misconstrued as value judgments. A print of Salvador Dali’s work could reasonably be described as unique in its style and original in its aesthetic intent, at least when viewed in its proper historical context.

And besides, lots of contemporary artists are creating original art that is meant from the first to be mass-produced. So neither original nor contemporary will do the trick.

No, as I’ve said, when we want to describe unique art-objects in traditional media, we generally just call them art. Which would be fine, if not for the unruly gelatinous mass of alternative definitions that burdens the term at all times.

By calling gallery art art, we grant gallery spaces and traditional media a mystical, totemic power. We keep them those media and institutions at a distance. We make them remote at best, and frightening at worst.

And if we use a more precise or less intimidating term than art, then ironically, what we’re saying immediately becomes less clear to most readers, listeners, and potential art-buyers. We’re compelled to rely on a word that is vague and spookily unfixed.

So the solution is not merely to start using a different word (which would only confuse matters). The solution, rather, is to demystify gallery art—which is easier said than done, of course. But hey, we’ve worked hard to make Gray Blush Gallery inviting, accessible, and substantive. So that’s a start.

And understanding the history of the word art, and its quagmire of contradictory definitions, and its shaky utility in the marketplace—I would like to think that understanding all of that is a pretty good start, too.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Non-Gallery Art and Inexact Music

This is the third post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here and Part Two is here.

When we say art, we’re often referring to paintings and sculptures and stuff–those well-established visual arts that are generally found in galleries, and that I therefore refer to as gallery art here on this blog. It’s an improvement over just calling those things art, I think, because it doesn’t lazily imply that film and television (and books and games and music and clothing and so on) are somehow not art.

It’s kind of like classical music. We generally understand that term to mean Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and such, even though Mozart’s music is the only one of those three that is Classical-with-a-Capital-C. Bach’s music is Baroque, Tchaikovsky’s Romantic. But colloquially, classical music just indicates that Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky have more in common with each other than they do with Duke Ellington, The Beatles, and The Roots.

So fair enough. An imperfect term, but a fairly clear one, at least. Leonard Bernstein once tried to come up with a better, clearer, more accurate one, and he settled on exact music–as in, music that is supposed to be performed exactly as it is written on the page, as distinct from improvisation-heavy forms such as jazz, blues, and rock and/or roll.

But of course, Baroque music includes a fair bit of embellishment, interpretation, and improvisation. And it wasn’t until Beethoven that sheet music habitually included metronome markings, so it would be disingenuous to say that tempos were all that precise or uniform prior to the early 1800s.

Besides which, Bernstein could not have foreseen Techno. We now have multiple electronic forms that are more regular, more metronomic, and indeed, more exact than any “exact” music. So we may as well stick with classical music for the sake of clarity.

Because if we referred to that music simply as music, we’d be suggesting (with more than a hint of snobbery) that only “exact” music qualifies as music. Which would be supremely unproductive, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident.

So for the moment, gallery art. I’ll go with that, even if it’s unlikely to supplant art, despite art’s many problematic alternate definitions, which I’ll unpack in my next post.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.

Shameless Cross-Promotion

A large portion of this blog is me complaining about things. It’s the nature of a solo writing project, I suppose. When motivated neither by external deadlines nor by a shared sense of purpose, one tends to write primarily, if not exclusively, about outrages and annoyances and such. That’s motivation: Saying things that seem to need to be said, and feeling the relief of having hopefully said them well.

It’s satisfying, to be sure. And it’s a great way to sharpen one’s rhetorical skills. But it is not always, strictly speaking, productive.

Which is why I am so happy to share with you–you being anyone who happens to be reading this–a project that does provide me with practical motivations and deadlines, and that does allow me to share a common purpose with others. It is a project of which I am immensely proud to be be a part, and a project that aims to do genuine good.

Gray Blush Gallery is a new online art-space conceived as a service to artists, to art-buyers, and to those who want to become art-buyers. Our goal is to create a home for what we are provisionally calling mid-market art–that is, a home for all of the wonderful art-objects currently being produced that do not fit neatly or exclusively into the rarefied world of top-tier galleries, or into catch-all “handmade” spaces such as Etsy.

Some artists are comfortable in both of those worlds, and some are comfortable in neither–yet most of the spaces that bridge that gap tend to focus on prints and reproductions rather than unique art-objects. This leaves original paintings, drawings, sculptures, and myriad forms of mixed media art with relatively few opportunities to find buyers, no matter how exciting or well-executed the work it self may be.

So Gray Blush Gallery means to do something about that. If you want to buy art but don’t know where to start, we want to help. If you’re deep into contemporary art and want to see exciting new talent, we want to show it to you. If you produce innovative work and are looking for a gallery that shares your values, we want to be that space, is the idea.

We’re committed to giving our artists the highest possible percentages of our listing prices, we’re committed to packing and shipping the art in an environmentally friendly manner (and also to energy-efficient servers), and we’re committed to direct social engagement. Currently, the family of companies of which we’re a part is working to further agricultural development, health care education, support to previously trafficked women, and elementary school construction in southwestern Ethiopia.

If Gray Blush Gallery sounds like your kind of thing, then take a look at our preview site (which will be around at least until the full site launches) or drop us a line at info@grayblush.com.

That’s what I’ve been up to lately. And while I don’t plan to forswear complaining anytime soon, being productive is awfully nice, too.

Come to Think of It, I Don’t Particularly Want to Play on Roger Ebert’s Lawn

I respect Roger Ebert for admitting that his argument about video games was profoundly stupid. There are two major reasons why Ebert’s original argument was invalid. He now freely admits the first and most important one–namely, that he was discussing a medium about which he knew next-to-nothing. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen,” he says. Amen.

His ignorance of the medium leads him to some truly bizarre conclusions. For example, consider this excerpt from his faux-debate with Clive Barker (who, incidentally, is an expert on video games like a a grizzly bear is an expert on veganism):

Barker: “Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.”

Ebert: “If you can go through ‘every emotional journey available,’ doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?”

The bit about doing Romeo and Juliet naked and upside down–simply put, that is not what games do. It’s more like what movies sometimes do. Interactivity does not allow the player to do whatever he wants. It allows the player to act in a very limited number of ways, within a closed system that is designed to lead him to a certain preconceived conclusion. Sometimes player-action is really no more based in choice than the act of turning a book’s pages: You can either turn the page and see what’s next, or you can put down the book and do something else.

Think of it this way: If you could do anything you wanted in Grand Theft Auto, then the ability to kill prostitutes would not be an ethical issue. Sure, you could kill prostitutes, but you could also drive them to the nearest community college and enroll them at your own expense, and on the way over, you could have a frank discussion with them about class privilege, gender inequality, and safe sex. You cannot discourse with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto, but you can kill them. The ethical problem in Grand Theft Auto is not that you can do anything, and that given that freedom, lots of people choose to kill prostitutes. The problem is that you can do relatively few things, and one of those few things that you can choose to do is kill prostitutes. The option is there because the designers put it there, and the alternative is absent because the designers didn’t put it there.

Even when games have branching narratives (and many do not), there are rarely more than two or three possible paths. And even the hundred-or-so important decisions in the Mass Effect games do not constitute anything approaching free choice. The experience still has an author.

To use Ebert’s own example, Braid:

You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

If he had played the game, which of course he has not, Ebert would know that Braid is specifically about the impossibility of taking back our mistakes. As the game builds toward its famous final level, time manipulation ceases to be an amusing superpower and becomes instead a tragic distortion of perspective: What if you thought, mistakenly, that you could bend the laws of nature to your will? What sorts of mistakes might you make as a result? You would probably make some pretty horrible ones, as the game intends to show you through an interactive–but fundamentally linear–narrative.

Similarly, what if you thought that video games were a space wherein you could do whatever you want, without limitation or consequence? What important things might you miss? You would probably miss the point entirely, as Barker and Ebert both do.

Reason Number Two:

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art.

If you have to reject something on “purely theoretical grounds,” even when that conclusion runs contrary to observation or common sense, then you’re either (a) working with a bad theory, or (b) being a sophist. The point of theory is to systematically explain real objects and actual experiences, not to trap us in snooty technicalities.

A simple example: Around the turn of the 20th Century, the general consensus was that photography and filming were technical operations rather than creative pursuits, and that photographs and films therefore did not count as art. Eventually, that theory was revised–specifically because people began to understand the medium, and the skill required to work in it, and the many subjective choices it involves–and it suddenly seemed silly and pointless to exclude photography and film from aesthetic discourse. The problem was the theory, not the thing being theorized.

“I concluded without a definition [of art] that satisfied me,” Ebert says, ending this discussion about what art is the only way that any discussion about what art is ever ends.

The Fundamentalist’s Paradox

Recently, I posted a three-part entry. My goal was to take a look at what Revolution Muslim, the group that warned Matt Stone and Trey Parker not to show an image of the Prophet Muhammad on South Park (and implied that the duo would almost certainly be murdered if they did not heed the “warning”), had actually said. I thought that it was important not to immediately dismiss the website as being too “radical” to hold a valid opinion–to meet it on its own terms and engage in the kind of open discussion that at least one of its bloggers claims to want. I want to approach everyone, and especially those with whom I strongly disagree, on terms of mutual respect and shared humanity.

But man-oh-man, does Revolution Muslim ever make that difficult.

Revolution Muslim is down at the moment, because of hacking or heavy traffic or both, so I am unable to look up the name of the blogger to whom I was responding. But at least one person at that website, Younus Abdullah Mohammed, is a massive hypocrite, and his hypocrisy has given me the opportunity to bump up against the outermost limits of my own patience and tolerance.

In a recent Gawker interview, Mohammed said that “We already know the outcome as Muslims… Islam will take over the world,” and will triumph over “the filth and trash that is America.” He said that most Americans are “dumbed down, stupid and pathetic.” He said that “it’s very justifiable to act violently against Western aggression,” and that “we did not start the war on September the 11th 2001. You started the war.”

Since that “we” is ambiguous–does he mean Muslims generally, or just the ones who commit acts of terrorism?–I am not in a position to answer that particular claim. But I am in a position to point out that Revolution Muslim is based in New York City. As Jon Stewart observes, Revolution Muslim can only say all of this “because of how much we, in this country, value and protect even their freedom of expression.”

And indeed, I value Younus Abdullah Mohammed’s freedom of expression very highly, even when he spouts hateful, perplexing gibberish about “Darwinist faggots who are as despicable as the rest, walking around eating your Triscuits.” (I’m pretty sure that evolution happened and is happening in some form or another, and I do enjoy Triscuits, so I guess that I am just such a “faggot.” I’ve been called worse). Younus Abdullah Mohammed is absolutely allowed his homophobia, his implied disbelief in evolution, and even his ill-defined hatred of this nation’s beloved snack crackers.

But if Islam were to “take over the world,” do you think that analogous dissent would be allowed? Do you think that I could have publicly called the Taliban “trash” as a citizen of Afghanistan, circa 2001, without being imprisoned or killed?

The central irony of Revolution Muslim is that it could only exist in the kind of society that it actively seeks to undermine and overthrow. Free speech allows for tirades against free speech, but theocracy does not allow for tirades against (or even minor disagreements with) theocracy. Speaking out against free speech is something of a self-negating principle.

Incidentally, in the Gawker article that I quoted above, you will find a reproduction of the 2005 cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb on his head. Have a look, and downland it and archive it, because its availability is unreliable; due to the spectacular cowardice of the Western media in general, lots of people have yet to see the image at all, and it’s worth knowing what all the fuss was about. I can certainly see why the image was and is considered offensive, but that’s all the more reason to see it for yourself and form your own opinion.