Long live the mob!

If my neighbor calls my wife a whore and I go over and punch him in the face, I am not stifling his free speech. I am violently paying him back for his crude, slanderous insult.

Free speech is curtailed by governmental action, not by individuals acting sometimes imprudently or illegally. The right to free speech is not absolute and is rightfully and hopefully judiciously curtailed by legal instruments enforced by the state, hate speech being the best example of properly restricted expression which does not deserve the protection of constitutional imprimatur.

Individuals may not feel the state has done its job and either challenge within the legal framework the perceived oversight, or take matters into their own hands. The deplorable killing of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo is a heinous example of  extralegal overreaction __ of violently taking matters into ones own hands.

I don’t condone violence. But whether I condone it or not is irrelevant. Ugly shit has been happening for thousands of years. A lot of people oppose it and it keeps going on. Some of it is sponsored and promoted by the very state that we depend on to maintain some sanity in society and the world at large. Humans are a very violent species, the only one to inflict pain and death on its own purely for amusement and pleasure.

But with the latest relatively minor incident in Paris __ I contrast the handful of deaths there with the tens of thousands the enlightened West inflicts on other countries as a matter of policy, day after day, month after month, year after year __ we see the epic confrontation between two vast cultures shaping up.

Isn’t that just what they wanted? __ a “good reason” for the world to erupt in total war. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, North Korea, Ukraine, Russia, and China aren’t quite enough kindle to get the conflagration going. But now, yes NOW we’ve got some serious shit going down! NOW we’ve got millions of people in the streets doing the dirty work that our presstitute media and propaganda machines couldn’t quite get right. Finally, the people will demand total war!

The mob has spoken.

Long live the mob!