In checking Prof. Juan Cole’s blog this morning, I noticed he had a post up from a couple of days ago about Draw Muhammad Day. Prof. Cole essentially concludes that the event was reckless (in that it repeats behavior that has in the past inspired violence) and rude, and ponders the extent to which anti-Islamic bias is masquerading as support for free speech.

The juvenile “draw Muhammad” day has generally been avoided by professional editorial cartoonists. One Islamophobic theme apparent in the writing on it is that Muslims are peculiar in their thin-skinned responses to such assaults on their religious sensibilities and that members of other religions never riot or protest. This assertion is not only bigoted but it is silly. So here are some other needlessly offensive cartoon-drawing days that could be adopted by the jerks bothering Muslims today, just to show that they are jerks toward other communities as well. All these subjects have produced vigorous protests or rioting and violence among members of other religious traditions. Me, I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

I don’t doubt for a moment that there are various Muslim-bashers who jumped on the bandwagon for DMD, but I think the necessity of engaging in such behavior is demonstrated by the same events that lead Prof. Cole to conclude it’s irresponsible; namely, that religious fanatics often respond to dissenting views with violence. Since these whackjobs seek to suppress the rights of others, they need to be opposed, period. There’s no other justification required. It’s further incumbent, I think, upon citizens of the world’s remaining superpower, an ostensibly secular state, to carry out peaceful protest and opposition to these violent idiots, since we can do so in relative safety.

If it’s become irresponsible to challenge backwards fanatics, haven’t they already won? Don’t we lose our rights when we refuse to exercise them out of fear of illegal, violent retaliation?

Professor Cole then outlines a list of other drawing-based protests he came up with to show that, as he put it, you can be a jerk to a wide variety of people, not just Muslims. I disagree with the contention that DMD was targeted at Muslims as a whole, but I’m perfectly willing to extend the idea to challenge other groups of zealots who’ve trampled on the right to free expression. That, for me, was the whole point of DMD.

Thus, I completed his challenge, with some minor variations and two omissions for cause:

Proposed Comics #9, 6, and 1 concern the same Ultra-Orthodox extremists in Jerusalem, hating on, respectively, secular government social services, gay people and parking lots being open on Saturday. I compressed this into one comic to save time.

Proposed Comic #7 is about reaction to the performance of a play which concerns, at least in part, rape and violence in a Sikh temple. I completely support the right of a theatrical company to present such a play, but rape is, morally and legally, an offensive act in and of itself, so I won’t risk trivializing it with stick figure art. Thus, the cartoon concerns a stick figure PERFORMANCE of the same play that inspired violence.

Proposed Comic #5 concerns the idea of depicting the violent murder of a Hindu teacher in India, an event that set off a firestorm of retaliatory violence on both sides of a mixed Christian-Hindu community in India. The actual, real life murder of a teacher and his students is not equivalent to the performance of play, or the drawing of a semi-mythological figure from religion. It’s a crime, and a brutal offense. People being upset by it is perfectly rational and understandable, and while violent response to violence is often unproductive, it can’t be condemned in the same way as violence over a cartoon or a doodle. If someone shot up your school, you too might take up arms and commit retaliatory violence. A cartoon on the other hand never killed anyone. For this reason, I’ve omitted #5 entirely; it’s false equivalence to compare these events to violently responding to a form of personal expression.

Proposed Comic #2 concerns a Burger King advertisement in Spain that I think is utterly hilarious. It was also found to be offensive by members of the global Hindu community, and they responded by complaining to the corporation, which pulled the ad. The article mentions no violence or threats of any kind, simply public condemnation. This is how things are SUPPOSED to work in a civilized society; dialogue and conversation with, or at, people who upset you, not oppression or violent censorship. I think this is another false equivalence; you have every right to be offended by speech. Just don’t throw a brick through a window or plant a bomb or set someone’s house on fire. I see no reason to poke fun at a religious community that apparently chose an honorable and reasonable, above all CIVIL response to something that they found offensive.

(Burger King also ran an add that offended Mexican governmental officials, and that was pulled without violence. They really should get a better handle on their PR campaigns.)

So, with two exceptions and some modifications, I’ve taken up the challenge Prof. Cole outlined. While I am a jerk, I hope this goes some way to demonstrating that I’m not specifically being a jerk to Muslims. Rather, I want to annoy anyone who’d threaten or employ violence to silence criticism or commentary on their various mythological beliefs. I think it was that way for many people participating in Draw Muhammad Day.

Without further adieu, here are the truly awful drawings in question, including the original for DMD.

Muhammad Riding a Dinosaur

Naked Hindu Goddesses Riding a Plesiosaur

Various Offensive Things for Ultra Orthodox Zealots with Pteranodon

Stick Figure Production of Play Bezhti (with T-Rex in Audience)

Pool Party with Bikini Girls and Buddha Statue (with Velociraptors)

Orangemen Parade in Northern Ireland (with Pachycephalosaurus)

Soccer Player Using Witchcraft During Game in Kinshasa, with Stegosaurus. (Note: This drawing does not indicate in any way that I believe actual witchcraft occurred)

The entire set can be viewed on a subset of my Flickr page.

Long story short, in response to the South Park-Muhammad-Bear-Suit thing, secular groups at several universities, including here in town at UW-Madison, started drawing Muhammad in chalk. When campus Islamic groups reacted unfavorably, someone came up with the idea of ‘Draw Muhammad Day’ for May 20th. (I found out about it from the Friendly Atheist site)

I completely forgot about this all day, but fortunately, talent is not required, so I now present to the world my own personal drawing of Muhammad for Draw Muhammad Day.

I apologize to fans of dinosaur art everywhere. Heck, I even apologize to dinosaurs – they’ve been dead 65 million years and never did anything to deserve my scribbling.

So Rand Paul has stepped in it over his libertarian ideology, for a time refusing in interviews to support nasty government intrusion like the Civil Rights Act. He has since clarified that, at least on that point, he doesn’t actively support *repealing* it. No word on whether he would have been in favor of its initial passage.

At the heart of all the hubbub here is, as one might expect from a man named Rand, the idiotic pseudo-philosophy of Libertarianism, the half-witted political descendent of his namesake Ayn’s ideas.

First, the cowardly tap-dancing on racism thing actually makes sense in light of Randian thought; Ayn Rand herself hated racism… in that she thought it was kind of the same thing as communism. Thus, it could be cured, as could all social ills, by laissez-faire capitalism.

No, really. Rand, for what it’s worth, saw racism as a flawed way of judging people based on innate characteristics beyond their control and irrelevant to their moral stature. On the other hand, she really hated gay people, because being gay is a completely voluntary choice and also icky. So go figure.

Of course, Ayn Rand’s prescription for everything was pure, almost entirely unregulated capitalism, so she’d have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The magic of the free market would desegregate lunch counters on its own. Her namesake’s pathetic dancing around the question gets to the heart of the flaw in both Libertarianism as a political philosophy and as a movement: it is childish, small-minded and thoroughly unprepared for the complexity of the real world.

Take Rand Paul’s ‘example’ of a restaurant owner being menaced by the big, bad government:

If you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says ‘well no, we don’t want to have guns in here’ the bar says ‘we don’t want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.’ Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?”

See, for Rand and others like him, rights aren’t a complicated proposition dependent on the social fabric, they’re binary; you either have complete freedom, or you’re a kind of slave.

I’m reminded of something I was taught during an undergrad class for my POLS degree in a class on rights: namely, that every right carries with it at least one corresponding duty (as well as the inverse, a duty you’re obliged to perform relates in some way to another entity’s rights). An easy example is free speech: if a person has the right to speak his mind, then you have a matching duty not to knock his front teeth out in response to speech that offends you. Right, duty. In the Libertarian, aka Randian, worldview, only the right exists, and the necessary duties to enforce or enable it are often regarded as tyranny.

Randians claim the government exists to prevent violence and fraud, and thusly things like the police and the military are necessary and proper government functions, but they rarely extend the logic beyond this extremely simple perspective.

Take the hypothetical restaurant Paul talks about. It’s wrong for the government to intrude into the operations of a restaurant… yet it needs to protect its citizens against fraud or theft or violence. So, let’s say you own this restaurant: how is the government going to protect you from fraud? Well, I suppose for a start, it will have to produce a uniform currency, so that when you get paid, you have a reasonable expectation it’s real money. This could be paper, metal, or chickens, so long as everyone can agree on the value of the currency. Then it will have to police that currency, so add some more cops, counterfeiting experts and the like; in the case of chicken money, we’ll need chicken inspectors.

Now you want to buy meat for your restaurant (other than chickens, which are for spending); guess we’d better set up the USDA, hire some inspectors to make sure it really is beef that your supplier is selling and not stray dogs ground into a fine paste. (It’s hard to test the meat AFTER it’s been consumed for trace of Fido) Come to think of it, might want to get some testing done on microbes, make sure it’s actually fresh and safe to eat, even if it is a cow, so nobody sells you spoiled product. Oooh, but that means we have to set up laboratories, hire doctors and biologists, come up with standards for all of that, and then inspect them and enforce THOSE standards too. Tricky. We might as well do the same for the lettuce your restaurant buys, the flour, oil, butter, milk, etc.

You probably need a way to cook your food, come to think of it, so we’ll need to have a system set up so that you can fairly purchase electricity and/or natural gas, oil, etc, to do so. Darn though, we wouldn’t want your business to get ripped off doing that, so hire on some more inspectors, bureaucrats, and so forth. Since this whole prospect has gotten pretty complicated and expensive, we’re going to need a Treasury, accountants, and some system to pay for it all, aka taxation, so slap on some more government there. Can’t rob the government workers of *their* time after all; that’d be theft too.

Now the building your restaurant is in is a complicated thing. You have to be able to buy or rent the land, buy or build a structure on said land, stock, staff and occupy it, all without fear of being ripped off or robbed. So you’ll need the land surveyed at some point, plots drawn up, documents filed, heck, an entire office of land records and deeds is probably a good idea, better hire some guys to do that. To make sure you’re getting the building you thought you were paying for with your government regulated chickens, you might want some building codes, people to inspect them; it might be more straightforward to require certain training and licenses of builders and contractors beforehand, just to be sure. Now you need to get things like equipment, from stoves to napkin dispensers, and somebody needs to watch your back on all of that, so add in a ton of additional regulations, especially safety; nobody likes lead in their cookware these days. Messy.

I could go on, but the point is clear by now; the simple ‘right’ to own a restaurant is in fact an incredibly complicated proposition entwining public and private enterprises. One right to property on the behalf of someone who wants to sell burgers for a tidy profit creates a slew of duties and responsibilities for others, ranging from the obvious (don’t rob said burger store) to the less obvious (whether a slaughterhouse three states away can or can not slaughter a particular cow, for fear it might have Mad Cow disease). It isn’t all about the brave burger magnate, standing astride the food service industry like a god, creating value out of nothing. It is, in fact, a process, and it is both necessary and proper that, in exchange for all the benefits a government provides listed above, it ask for corresponding payments, aka duties, in return.

What about the specific example Paul brings up, the issue of guns? Well, what about it? Let’s say the government decides that, in fact, it doesn’t want guns taken into privately-owned restaurants. It turns out a lot of shootings are happening when people get drunk, and so restaurant revenue is down, as nobody really wants their kids dodging ordinance on the way to the condiment stand. That’s bad for government, in the form of increased outlay for cops and coroners, and bad for restaurants as a whole; on the other hand, let’s say we live in a fantasy world where there’s been some kind of alien invasion, and we need a well-armed populace to fight off Kang and Kodos at all times. Perhaps then the math would work out differently, and we would have to *require* restaurants to allow private citizens to carry guns for the public good (I’m really reaching for any sort of hypothetically plausible reason the government might dictate that you have to allow firearms in your burger joint, outside of NRA campaign money).

Of course the real issue Rand Paul is trying to duck here is that Libertarianism, despite its prophetess condemning racism, really has no answer to the problem of people being asshats. Human beings are not rational, no matter how much Ayn might have wanted it to be so, and they persist in acting irrationally and hatefully down through the generations. (And that doesn’t even start to address the fact that racism can be highly lucrative, and thus a rational path to great wealth). Though an individual, hateful burger joint owner might not like serving a particular ethnic minority, the fact remains that said minority pays into the same system that inspects his meat, patrols the streets outside his shop and protects him in the event of a fire, that hauls away his garbage and makes sure his sewage ends up somewhere far away and not right back in his own tap water. They’re citizens, and they have a right to their piece of the pie, a pie they helped pay for. So when your idealized, small-minded entrepreneur takes all the innumerable benefits of our civilized society, our police, our firefighters, our streets and electricity, inspections on our food, courts to settle our disputes, when they take value out of that system, and then refuse to pay out their obligation according to the law to the same individuals who support them in a hundred direct and indirect ways, they’re not being brave iconoclasts.

They’re thieves. The very worst kind of people, supposedly, to a property-minded small government type like Mr. Paul. They’re robbing people of their government’s time, and therefore of their tax dollars, by refusing to treat them like any other citizen, despite having been the direct beneficiary of so much aid from the government they claim to abhor.

So if they don’t like it, they’re free to go try and open a burger stand in Somalia. In the meantime, desegregating lunch counters is a small price to pay, an inconsequential duty to trade for your rights.

A small price, unless you’re Rand Paul.