Originality Is Dangerous. It Challenges, Questions, Overturns

I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, As We All Must, To Defend The Art Of Satire, Which Has Always Been A Force For Liberty And Against Tyranny, Dishonesty And Stupidity.

One Of The Problems With Defending Free Speech Is You Often Have To Defend People That You Find To Be Outrageous And Unpleasant And Disgusting.

We Have Come To Think Of Taking Offence As A Fundamental Right. We Value Very Little More Highly Than Our Rage, Which Gives Us, In Our Opinion, The Moral High Ground. From There We Can Shoot Down At Our Enemies And Inflict Heavy Fatalities.

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

I Have Been Only The Humblest Jugglers-with-facts; And That, In A Country Where The Truth Is What It Is Instructed To Be, Reality Quite Literally Ceases To Exist, So That Everything Becomes Possible Except What We Are Told Is The Case; And Maybe This Was The Difference Between My Indian Childhood And Pakistani Adolescence--that In The First I Was Beset By An Infinity Of Alternative Realities, While In The Second I Was Adrift, Disoriented, Amid An Equally Infinite Number Of Falsenesses, Unrealities And Lies.