Two things got my attention just now on Twitter, both, I think, very funny.  I didn’t actually LOL.  But I did smile.

First up, this quote:

It is always bittersweet when your relatives bid you fond farewell as you leave for Edinburgh, and only you know how much you are about to defame them for comedic gain.

And next up, this cartoon:

The latter of these two jollities goes way back, and I suspect that the script and the visuals were done by different people.  But the first one is bang up to date, and I am hence able to direct you to who originated it, which I like to do.

This, on the other hand, baffles me:

I recognise financial commentator and funny man Dominic Frisby, on the left there.  But why do Frisby’s shoes have lightbulbs in them?  Who is that other bloke, and why are the two of them waving their fingers like that?  Why are they sitting in the eyes of a giant skull?  Also, what on earth does this have to do with Brexit?  What is it that Remainers have said about such a scene as this, to the effect that it couldn’t happen, or would happen less?  Are the above two gents, like the provider of the quote above, in Edinburgh, for the Festival?  And have the Remainers said that the Edinburgh Festival this year would be a flop?  Yes, that must be it.

LATER: Just noticed where it says spikedmath.com in the cartoon.  So I guess that’s where that started.

EVEN LATER: This:

Also:this.

Here is a recent Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon, although Dilbert himself is not involved in this particular one:

I’ve always thought that one of the many things that won the Cold War for Civilisation and doomed Bolshevik Barbarism to defeat was stealth stuff.  By its nature, stealth stuff is undetectable, and the better it is, the more impossibly undetectable it is.  So, if you cannot detect it at all, it could still be there, and really really good at being stealthy.  Hell, it could be anywhere.  It could be right outside the Politburo’s front window.

Of course, it probably isn’t this clever.  But, how would you be sure?

This was why, when the Americans had got these contraptions working reasonably well, they revealed their existence.  They took lots of spooky photos of these spooky things, and made sure the whole world could see them.  Where, at any particular moment, they were, for you to photo, they did not reveal.

How can you defeat an enemy like that?

Same with Star Wars.  Shooting down all incoming nuclear missiles with all-powerful death rays.  Bollocks, right?  But, again, how could you be sure.

I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier.  My bank, however, doesn’t like this.  Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work.  In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them.  So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on.  Bye bye Tesco.  In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home.  But, I like the exercise.  In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do.  Good.

All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:

“Are you aware that you can now do all of this online?”

Genius.  K. J. Lamb, well done.

One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars.  And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are.  Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century.  Who the hell are you?  Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?

Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it.  The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers.  That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.

I am hopeless at drawing, as you can see.

But having been watching the Six Nations rugby tournament for the last few weeks, and having in particular been listening to the various television commentators, I feel the need to offer you all this attempt at a cartoon.

Anyone who wants to copy this, or indeed copy it and improve the graphics, is most welcome.  I am surely not the first to have thought of this particular observation.

(There was a bit of fiddling about with the presentation of this, on account of my software not actually showing me exactly how a posting like this will look.  Sorry about that.)

But it is a not very good picture of Mohammed, drawn by me, today:

Why?  I can’t say it better than this:

I take no pleasure from violating other people’s taboos. It is not polite and I wish to be polite. In ordinary circumstances if I want to do something that will annoy others I am willing to put up with moderate inconvenience in order to do it out of their sight. These are not ordinary circumstances. People are being threatened, harassed and sometimes murdered by fanatical Muslims for exercising free speech. The media and academia, fearless defenders of free speech so long as there was nothing to fear, have by and large caved in. So maybe it is time for ordinary people to step up. Lots of them. Spread the risk.

Duly spread.

Natalie Solent’s own picture is much cleverer:

To all who are interested in this Draw Mohammed thing, which I most recently posted about here, I really recommend this piece, by a guy who runs an internet site where all the pictures and sculptures and so on ever made of Mohammed are gathered together.  The point being that the claim that this is verboten is relative recent.  Here’s one of the more decorous pictures, in which an implausibly sweet looking Mohammed takes his dictation, or whatever it was, from the Angel Gabriel:

There’s also quite a bit about the insane emails section of the site, where incoming psycho-emails from enraged Islamo-nutters (of whom there really do seem to be a great many) are collected for all to browse.

In among the comments, I found this, from “Big Bird”, who definitely speaks (in comment 40) for me:

I am an atheist so I don’t have a contestant in the invisible man sweepstakes but even a cursory attempt to compare the lives of Jesus and Mohamed will show there is no moral equivalency between the two. If Christians threaten others over a play then they are violating their teachings. If Muslims kill people for insulting their prophet then they are following their teachings.

Indeed.  And that makes “their teachings” the fundamental problem, I would say.  It’s no good concentrating only on the nutters who take these teachings dead seriously, and saying that this is the entire problem.  The sane-apart-from-not-rejecting-their-teachings Muslims have also got to be told that this whole disaster is also their fault, arguably more their fault, because they are otherwise sane, and because, assuming for now that relentless claims to this effect are right, there are more of them than there are of the nutters.  They are the ones doing the big, long-term damage, and they ought to know better.  They keep “their teachings” alive and revered and hence liable, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, to be acted upon by anyone nutty.  Or not so nutty, when the opportunity for some of serious conquest arises.

It’s like we’re dealing with a combination of God and Lenin.  The aim should not be coexistence.  It should be victory, over the whole thing.  We should aim for a world where the number of and nature of the people who even say that they believe this stuff is small enough and harmless enough for it not to matter any more.

To me, the virtue of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is that, as well as insisting upon the right of all to be offensive with what they say and draw and paint, it keeps the argumentative pot boiling concerning the more serious aspects of all this.  What’s going on here?  What’s the big picture?  What is to be done?  Etc.

Presumably I’m not the only one getting this:

Hey Brian,
This whole thing has totally freaked me out.
I can’t even eat and ... I usually eat constantly!
Fox issued a new article today.
My site has a statement on it that is au courant.
There is no place to send in drawings that I know of.
I heard that someone has set up a CACAH site.
This was always about the first amendment for me.
Keep up the swell work!
I need to get my sense of humor back!
Thanks,
Molly

Fox News

mollynorris.com

She sounded nice in that little radio interview I linked to yesterday, and that sounds nice too.

Good news, though.  We have a new diet: the Insult Mohammed diet.  Insult Mohammed, and with all the cacah you might find yourself stirring up, you won’t be able to eat!.

At mollynorris.com, which (unlike MN’s Wordpress blog) I had no problem getting to, a new Molly Norris cartoon:

I told you she was no right wing carnivore.

And underneath that, the statement, which includes this:

I hope for the sake of this country that moderate Muslims will speak out with everyone else against any violent members of that or any other religion. That way I would know that there is a difference. Maybe this cartoon I made, this fictional poster of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” had such a wildfire effect because it is finally time for Muslims and non-Muslims to understand one another more.

Hm, yes.  But what if, the more Muslims and non-Muslims understand one another, the more they decide that they hate each other?

One thing I can say with absolute certainty.  I do not feel in the slightest bit let down.  This is like a really good farcical novel.

As I have just commented at Samizdata, it turns out that the originator of this idea, one Molly Norris, was just kidding!  From the WSJ today:

After the massive response to the cartoon Norris posted this on her website:

“I make cartoons about current, cultural events. I made a cartoon of a “poster” entitled “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” with a nonexistent group’s name - Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor - drawn on the cartoon also. I did not intend for my cartoon to go viral. I did not intend to be the focus of any “group.” I practice the first amendment by drawing what I wish. This particular cartoon of a “poster” seems to have struck a gigantic nerve, something I was totally unprepared for. I am going back to the drawing table now!”

Once again I find myself disagreeing with James Taranto, this time respectfully (see earlier posting by me). He thinks this is a bad idea (i.e. a bad idea to take seriously), because it will piss off peaceful Muslims and make enemies of them.

I, on the other hand, think that all Muslims, however peaceful, say that they worship a thoroughly nasty collection of printed writings. If they believe what these writings say, they already are enemies. If they really are peaceful, and don’t believe what these writings say, they should stop saying that they do. (End of Samizdata comment.)

Taranto quotes one the first US critics of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day (serious version), Ann Althouse (linked to from here yesterday), who said this:

Depictions of Muhammad offend millions of Muslims who are no part of the violent threats.

But, to repeat my above point, they are part of the violent threats.  They are Muslims, which means they perpetuate the notion that what it says in the Koran, etc., is the unchallengeable word of god.  They should stop doing this.

Am I wrong about this?  Are there “Muslims” who explicitly say that all the belligerent, jihad stuff in the Koran is evil nonsense, either not said by Mohammed, or said by Mohammed in error.  In short, do any “Muslims” say that the Koran is wrong?

Blog and learn and all that, but I’d be very surprised to learn that there are such Muslims.  My understanding is that most Muslims have been taught at a very early age - and from then on they assume that - the Koran is the definition of goodness, many (most?) of them pretty much leaving it at that.  Of those who have actually studied the Koran in some detail, they either take what it says in the Koran very seriously and become very anti-infidel and anti-Western, or else they tie themselves in knots pretending that what it says in the Koran isn’t belligerent and threatening towards unbelievers, Christians, Jews etc., seizing upon the occasional friendly-sounding bits and ignoring all the nasty ones.

If anyone says Christians also cherry pick the Bible to make that nicer than it is, well, I think I have good answers to that, but this posting is about Islam.