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APR Pies, or Jackboots? 12 2005 My new friend Dadahead seems to be under attack from right wing morons hyperventilating over his defense of pie-throwing (in this case, at ultra-conservative David Horowitz). Why, if you took your news through Right-wing News' filter, you'd be liable to believe that Yes, in the world according to Dadahead, people who disagree with him don't have a right to speak at all, not even to groups of supporters who want to hear their message. But free speech is a right reserved for human beings, is it not? And in Dadahead's world, people who disagree with him apparently do not rise to that level. No wonder right-wing panties are in knots--it seems jackbooted Federal thugs have confiscated their senses of humor! Let's go over some basic points here: 1. Hitting a person with a pie is not denying that person the right to free speech. I am sick and tired of people whining about the First Amendment when they do not understand it. If the FBI had thrown a pie at someone, we'd have something to talk about. Unless the person holding the pie is an authority figure, they are legally on the same footing as those they may hit with said pie. "Free speech" is about the government or other authority restricting or punishing expression. Your fellow citizens cannot violate the First Amendment, period. 2. Wait--I'm not entirely correct on that last point. If the pie-thrower were to hold the pie in your face until you suffocated, that could certainly be construed as violating your rights. But as long as you can still speak (or, at the very, very least, type) post-pieing, your free speech rights are remarkably left intact. Unless, perhaps, the government declares getting hit with a pie to be illegal. 3. Most importantly, pie-throwing is inherently funny. If you do not get this point, you don't deserve to live. Oops! I guess if any Freepers read that last sentence, they'll immediately assume that I want to kill anyone who disagrees with me. Of course, if I had said, ""We should invade the pie-throwers' countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" and got into drag on Fox News, they'd think me a perfectly rational, if somewhat overly passionate person. "But, D. J.," I hear you cry, "you don't know what getting hit by a pie is like! You couldn't possibly imagine the horrible trauma experienced by those brave, innocent jackasses who get hit with pies by liberal pranksters every few months!" Actually, I think I've got a pretty fair handle on the the whole pie-throwing thing--because I was pied and lived to tell about it. It's hard to believe (because I'm still expressing myself freely, I know), but I myself was hit with a whipped-cream pie while I was running for student government president at McGill University. Even more shockingly, I was the one who arranged to be hit with the pie in the first place. Yes, when I was the editor of the humour magazine there, I ran at the head of the Red Herring Institutionalized Revolutionary Party/Liberation Front ticket. I had my roommate construct a whipped-cream pie, and then got one of my opponents (in fact, he was another joke candidate who had been inspired to run against me by my very own writings critical of the student government) to throw a pie at me at the end of my speech. Right-wingers must be recoiling in horror. How could someone voluntarily submit to such a cruel and unusual punishment? How could someone allow themselves to have their very rights to free expression insidiously stripped from them by means of that most liberal of whipped creams, Redi-Whip? Because it's funny, you dolts. And relatively harmless, even if the elections committee made me clean up the mess after the debates myself. You know what? I laughed the whole time I was scrubbing those dirty windows. Many people have noted that conservatives have been trying to paint themselves as victims, even though they control the government, most Fortune 500 companies and much of the media. Sorry, kids, I don't buy it.
And as for rightwingnews.com's further comment that
That's the sort of "nuanced" opinion that most people probably associate with the sort of thugs who walk around with shaved heads and swastikas on their arms, darkly muttering about "subhumans." What was that Dadahead said early on in his rant, "They will call us Nazis...?" Well, if the jackboot fits...Let me say this: if the Nazis were pie-throwers, my grandfather wouldn't have lost his entire family in the Holocaust and had to spend five years hiding from the SS in the forest. My grandmother wouldn't have watched German soldiers kill her neighbors in front of her very eyes or had to smuggle her parents and siblings into a Soviet prison colony just to get away from the Third Reich. And I wouldn't be crying as I just typed that.
Calling people Nazis because they aren't outraged about a pie being thrown is so insulting I want to do much worse things to such idiots than throw a pie at them, and that's no fucking joke. {977 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments[259] |
 
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