The GirlAlive Blog

What should I write?

I have no ideas. I’m depressed and bored and I still have no job. Oh, and I’m also no longer eligible for unemployment benefits, so I have no money and can’t afford to pay my bills.

So here’s my idea: tell me what to write about. I’m trying to prove myself as a decent writer to potential employers, so I want you, my readers, to tell me what to write about. What do you want to know about? The last book I read? The reproductive habits of anglerfish? My favorite sideshow freak? A short story about a hamster? Suggest a topic in the comments, and if I like it, or if enough people second the idea, that’ll be what I’ll write about. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Then at the end of that post, I’ll ask for more suggestions. This will continue on an approximately weekly basis until I get tired of it or until I get a job.

So let me know what you want to hear about. Nothing is too weird or obscure. I will probably not write anything that violates my personal privacy or morals. And my husband has veto power over topics that are borderline. Go for it. Tell me what you want to read. Pass this post around to your friends. Spread it around. The more ideas I get, the better.

Just a few more items about drawing Mohammed.

The big day was yesterday. People all over the world drew Mohammed and Muslims all over the world had hissy fits. Pakistan banned Facebook and YouTube, only to re-open YouTube when they caved to terrorist demands and deleted a bunch of videos for being “blasphemous”. I didn’t know that YouTube was my religious authority, but apparently they have decided they are. By this morning the main Everybody Draw Mohammed page was removed from Facebook. (At this point it is still unclear whether the Facebook page is down due to Facebook spinelessness or hackers – again. It is back now, and the admins tell us that it was down due to Muslim hackers tracking the personal information of one of the admins and sending him very specific death threats. That admin panicked and took the page down, but now he has stepped down as an admin and the page is back up.)

I’m deeply disappointed in the cowardly reactions from YouTube and other American corporations (like Viacom). Since when do we just give in to terrorist demands? This protest from Muslims was not about drawing Mohammed. They don’t even have any true religious backing for their claims about drawing Mohammed (which I’ll get to in a minute). This was about the Muslim world trying to impose Sharia Law on the western world, the way they do in their own countries. Their goal* is to make the entire western world dhimmi, which is to say a person with no protection from the Muslim world, but with an obligation to follow Sharia Law anyway. We do not need to cave in to these demands under the guise of political correctness. They are stripping us of our religious freedom and our free speech, and that is not something we should ever give in to for any reason. Not after all the wars we’ve fought to get to where we are.

There is nothing in the Quran about drawing pictures. Nothing. There are some passages in various hadith that are very anti-art. But they are against all art depicting people, animals or plants, not just the Prophet and other important figures, as Muslims will claim. These writings also do not prescribe any earthly punishment for people who draw pictures. Mohammed himself believed that their punishment was God’s business. (And Mohammed was not shy about prescribing beatings and death for various sins.) Please read this brilliant article if you want more detail about this. This is important: I do not want to hear from any Muslims who have not read that article. Please make the effort to understand your own religious texts before forcing them on others. Because the truth is, if you’re here on the internet you are already breaking Sharia Law, and you have no right to try to impose that law on me, when you don’t find it important enough to follow for yourself.

To end with, I found a great video that expresses very well how I feel about this issue. It is a vlog from a religious studies teacher who stuggled with this issue on a very personal level because he truly does have love and respect for people from all types of religious background, including Muslims.

And one more site if you’d like to do some more reading on Islam:
TheReligionofPeace.com

* This reference of “they” refers to the leadership elements of Islam, not the average Muslim going about their daily business. The average Muslim has no idea what their leaders are using them for, so unless they are getting in your face and starting a fight with you, they should be treated with the exact same respect you’d give to anyone else on earth (with maybe a hint of pity).

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

I’m giving you fair warning right now that there are people who will find this blog post offensive. Probably offensive enough that they’ll threaten to kill me.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -First Amendment of the US Constitution

If you are a fundamentalist Muslim and you believe that viewing depictions of the prophet Mohammed is a sin, please scroll carefully because I have no intention of forcing anyone to do anything they believe to be a sin. There will be a drawing of Mohammed below and if you believe that viewing such things is wrong, please don’t look at it. Maybe it is a drawing of your prophet. Maybe it’s just a guy named Mohammed. It’s hard to tell, since half the Muslim men on earth seem to be named Mohammed.

In the last couple years, cartoonists in the Netherlands and Sweden have had death threats against them, and even have had their houses firebombed and have generally been terrorized by Muslims who are offended that they drew pictures of Mohammed. Most recently, an episode of South Park was censored into meaninglessness because Trey Parker and Matt Stone depicted Mohammed. Even though they didn’t really. He was in a bear suit or in a trailer the whole time. It was censored because Comedy Central recieved death threats from Muslims.

Where does this come from? I’m not even sure. The Quran does not forbid depictions of Mohammed. This is a rule that was brought in later, probably around the 16th century. Until that time it was common for Muslim artists to draw full depictions of Mohammed and it was no big deal. Then sometime in the 16th or 17th century they decided that drawing pictures of the Prophet was wrong. It was originally supposed to be to prevent idolatry, but the spirit of this rule seems to have been completely lost to those who follow it to the letter.

Now the entire Western world is being bullied into following this debatable rule of Islam, whether we are Muslim or not. They argue that we are not respecting their religion. I would argue that freedom of speech requires that we be allowed to be disrespectful. Trey Parker and Matt Stone frequently depict Jesus (who is my own savior whom I love) as a dimwitted cable access show host. And whether I am offended or not, I would not deny them the right to depict Jesus any way they want to. Because how people depict Jesus does not change who Jesus is. Yeah, South Park is disrespectful and blasphemous. They offend everyone. But so far, the only people who think it’s okay to kill someone for being offensive are the Muslims.

This is not okay. Grown-ups use words to work out their differences. They debate ideas and try to understand each other. They do not scream insults and threaten violence, which has been the overall most common response from Muslims to the movement on the internet to have an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I’m sick of living in a world where adults think it’s okay to act like bratty toddlers in the name of religion.

Europeans fought and died during the Reformation because the Catholic church forced people to be Catholic or die. Then some governments became Protestant and killed people for being Catholic. Out of this mess, America was born with the core belief that no government has a right to tell its citizens what religion to follow. We fought hard to create a society where people can live in peace, knowing that their religion is a protected personal choice.

There are a lot of things that non-Christians do that I find offensive. Using God’s name as a swear word is offensive to me. I find smug and condescending athiests who are constantly trying to convert everyone to athiesm offensive. I find Westboro Baptist Church offensive. There is nothing about the KKK which is not offensive. But there is no law that says that Americans are protected from having their feelings hurt. Hurt feelings are the problem solely of the victim of the offense, not the offender. As one of my freedom-loving friends said, “That’s why it’s called ‘taking offense’ and not ‘having offense forced on you.’” I may feel offended by these people. I may even occasionally harbor hatred of their actions. I may believe that they’re going to hell for their actions. But I still defend their right to be stupid and offensive. They have every right to offend me and hurt my feelings. They even have the right to insult my God. My God is a grown-up and He can handle it.

That is why I’m drawing a picture of Mohammed. If you don’t want to see my drawing, I warned you at the top of this post, and you have no one to blame but yourself for seeing it. I am not a Muslim, and I will not be bullied into following your religion. It’s not about hating Muslims because I don’t. It’s about freedom. And if you cannot handle this kind of freedom, maybe living in America and Western Europe is not for you.

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Picture below.

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I’m posting this 2 days before the Draw Mohammed Day to give other people a chance to think about how important freedom is, and maybe give them a chance to take a stand. (And the main largest Facebook group about Draw Mohammed Day has degenerated into a lot of crying Muslims and very happy trolls. If you go there, be prepared to have to ignore morons of every type and variety. Some of the smaller ones are a bit more rational.)

(By the way, the llama’s name is French. If you understand that reference, DFTBA!)

Note: On 20 May Facebook removed this picture from my account as “offensive” and violating their terms, yet they refuse to tell me in what way it violated anything. It does not attack a group or individual. It promotes peace.

Without Leno, Conan had good ratings

I’m just making a small aside here for a minute to apply some numbers and facts to the statement that Leno made about Conan having poor ratings back when he did his Oprah interview. I bring this up because some people actually believed him that Conan was failing. Let me show you an interesting chart.

Conan consistently beat Letterman in the ratings, and he was in fact gaining more of an audience in early September. Then The Jay Leno Show premiered on the 14th of September. Conan’s ratings continued upward for about a week, while people checked out Leno’s new show. Then the ratings plummetted downward when everyone stopped watching Leno. The truth is that Conan was on a trend of beating Letterman soundly until his lead-in changed and it was only after the Jay Leno Show started running at 10 that Letterman ever beat him in the ratings.

Don’t forget, the Jay Leno Show was cancelled because the affiliates complained that no one was watching the local news anymore. As Andy Richter pointed out on Regis and Kelly, the local news didn’t suddenly get bad. The primetime lead in was crap. Most people weren’t watching, and the few that were turned off their tvs and went to bed before the news. And yet Leno tried to say that Conan damaged the Tonight Show with poor ratings, even though it is fairly obvious that the poor ratings are directly due to Leno.

I still think that Leno is not entirely the bad guy in this. He’s selfish, and he’s a liar, and his word means nothing. But let’s not forget that the real villain behind this is Jeff Zucker. He has no background in scripted entertainment and he doesn’t belong at the head of NBC. He singlehandedly drove the former number 1 network down to number 4, where it has been since 2005. He is an incompetent moron. He should not be wearing a suit and giving orders from a big corner office. He should be wearing a paper hat and operating a deep fryer.

Who struck out?

In a recent radio interview, Jay Leno addressed the issue of people boycotting his show in the wake of the Conan O’Brien fiasco. He said, “You don’t boo the next batter up just because the last batter struck out.” Really? Let’s look at a replay and see how that game really went.

(Sorry, dad, but Jay keeps digging himself deeper and acting like an ass.)

Debating socialism in America.

I’ve heard that there are people in the US protesting the idea of the government being involved in health care. They think that the National Health Service in the UK is terrible and socialist.

But if you don’t want the government involved in healthcare, how do you support so much of the socialism and government control that already exists in America?

If you don’t want government healthcare, why do you put up with public, government run libraries? Free books for everyone? How is that capitalist? Privatize libraries and keep knowledge and information in the hands of the rich.

And what about firefighting? Back in the good old days, there were dozens of competing fire departments in each town, and they only put out fires for people who had paid for fire insurance from their company. If you didn’t pay, your family burned. Isn’t that a more capitalist way to do things? If you don’t have money, why should the rest of us pay to stop your house from burning?

The worst of all is public schools. Why should the government be deciding what your children learn? That’s why there are still private schools. But people who send their kids to private schools are still forced to pay taxes supporting public schools. And people without kids have to pay to educate other people’s children. If you can’t afford to educate children, you shouldn’t have children. Isn’t that more capitalist? I mean, it is extreme socialism to offer equal education to all children. If you’re against public healthcare, you should be equally petitioning to privatize all schools.

If you’re against socialist health care, why aren’t you protesting the other marks of socialism in America? You fight against equal healthcare, but you tolerate equal libraries, schools, police, firefighters, and roads for everyone. Seems hypocritical to me.