Hmm. Suicide bombing and finger fucking. I'm trying to put this together into a humorous composite mental image but other than the bellowing of "Allahu Akbar!", it's just not working.
Gandhi "provoked violent reactions" with his salt march. It turns out that dragging the barbarism of the British into the open was a better way of combating it than pretending it didn't exist.
And before you mention it, yes several individuals who set up this event are (unlike the Charlie Hebdo staff) known asshats. That doesn't change the basic formula of what happened. Do I have to drag out the old "blaming the rape victim" meme here? Because I will if I have to. Or, if you prefer, we can just leap straight to Godwin and talk about just how well appeasement has worked with fascist jerks in the past.
Hint: mockery and blasphemy is a HUGE part of modern American culture. Disregarding the legal problems re: the first amendment, there is a massive amount of culture here that you are implying would need to be changed and censored. Do you really think that is fair, productive or realistic?
ehhhhhh... well it depends on whether you're more of a "giver" or a "receiver" I think. If you mainly looking for mad porn star skillz then no. But there is something pretty special about blowing someone's mind with a sensation that they have literally never felt before... particularly in the case of females, who unless they've done some pretty serious experimenting with toys are not likely to have ever managed to experience much g-spot stimulation.
That said, I'm not altogether convinced your average suicide bomber would be the giving, sensitive type.
What amazes me is that idiots still think "draw Muhammad" "protests" are relevant and meaningful. That ship has sailed. It's just an outlet for bigotry at this point.
As long as they provoke violent reactions, they are relevant and meaningful in the most direct and obvious way conceivable.
If you want actual change, you're going to have to actually do something useful. How about working to help them better integrate into their local communities?
At least one of the shooters appears to have been a recent convert. I could say more about this disgustingly soft bigotry of low expectations thing you've got going on there, but others have said it better than I could.
Sure. Let's get a little more meta so that it can be "why do people suck?" And then perhaps we could smoke some pot and expand it a little more: "why does life suck?"
The big picture matters but I think that the specific, detailed, non-hypothetical picture can also be important.
Do I have to copy and paste my reply to this to every single person who wants to hijack this discussion with non-sequiturs about Christian violence? I don't like Christianity. It has problems, including some problems that involve violence. However, this is not generally relevant to the problem of people being killed for drawing blasphemous pictures. Bringing up a non-fatal attack from 30 years ago does not mean we should give equal weight to the possibility that the next religiously-inspired attack on artists will be launched by a group of Christians. I'm not claiming that Islam is inherently worse than Christianity or that it's been responsible for more deaths throughout history or anything of the sort.
There is a difference between trying to inject some sensible perspective into a discussion dominated by rabid anti-Islamic bigots and yammering on about irrelevant historical examples of Christian violence when people here are by and large (assuming you're browsing at 1+) trying to have a reasonable discussion about current events.
1. I spent ten minutes looking but I couldn't find a youtube clip of this, sorry. He probably phrased it a little better, but that was the gist of it.
2. I really like how this quote can be used to support either argument here--those who say we should be fighting the jihadis, and those who argue that we are simply creating more of them. I think the only sane position is a mixture of these two--clearly, Iraq was a disaster from start to finish (sorry, Hitch), but equally clearly we must not flinch from fighting jihadis when an opportunity presents itself to do so without pissing away trillions of dollars or killing thousands of civilians in collateral damage. (And it should go without saying that certainly shouldn't be shying away from the first amendment at moments like these, nevermind the fact that a few odious asshats happened to be in attendance.)
Sigh. Look, the choice we all have to face is to be terse and elegant vs. cramming seven paragraphs of disclaimers in every single post. I meant to imply a strong statistical likelihood, not a certainly that it was absolutely impossible that a Christian would murder someone over a blasphemous drawing.
Yes, some violence has happened with movies and artwork in the past... generally decades ago. Generally without fatalities. Yes, you can change the topic entirely to abortion and find some fatal violence there. Fundamentalist Christianity sucks too. I'd be very happy to discuss the myriad ways in which it sucks. I would gladly admit that it affects my life in more profound (negative) ways because I happen to live in a predominantly Christian country.
But that's not the goddamn topic at hand. I appreciate the desire to fight bigotry and narrow-minded obsession with Islam, I really do, and I support it.. but trying to immediately change the subject to Christianity after every single reply really does not help your cause.
I believe I just acknowledged that the bombs were a problem. I was, in fact, promoting a war of ideas (including offensive ideas--all decent ideas are going to be offensive to somebody) as at least a partial alternative to the bombs.
As for the religion, well, I can't help but notice that they didn't attack members of the military, or military contractors, or manufactures of bombs or other military equipment, or members of congress who voted for the war. No, they tried to attack people who were violating their interpretation of the shariah.
But the particulars of the religion wasn't actually my point here. This specific subset of people, regardless of whether they're "*real* Muslims", regardless of their secret motivations, are murderous and tenacious and they are in fact disrupting the lives of certain peaceful people living in the West. If we can find a way of combating this problem that doesn't involve collateral damage or trillions of dollars pissed down the drain, that's a win. Do you disagree?
I will be the first to concede that religion is merely a prominent symptom of a much more insidious disease that we all probably suffer to one degree or another.
But it is still extremely sad--very "unfortunate"--when people have fallen so far down the well of delusion that they think it is worth killing themselves and others in order to prevent drawings from being made, or to avenge the person being drawn (now dead for 1500 years). Just because there's a sliding scale of self-delusion and meme-worship here that we're all stuck on, doesn't mean we can't weigh the relative nuttiness, the tragedy, the senseless surreal stupid waste of human energy and human life exhibited by those at the far end of the scale. Their myths are worth laughing at because they are more stupid than ours, and they are worth deploring because their consequences are more uncompromisingly grim than ours.
Geeks should understand physics and the effects of train. You jump in front of a train and get (probably) killed. The same can happen if you draw (enough) stupid pictures.
The same can end up happening if you live your life as a coward, meekly allowing other people to impose their religious laws on you.
Then again, in the eyes of a coward courage always does look like stupidity.
Again, my main point is simply that there is a huge gulf between words like "unprofessional", "giggling", and even "awkward" and words like "hostile". You have yet to bridge this vast, vast gulf.
I remember being a teenager. I remember being around other teenagers. I do not remember giggling about particular pair of tits making any of us hostile towards other people who have tits. I remember some girls joking about it and some girls not joking about it. I remember some guys joking about it (a greater percentage than the girls, sure), and other guys not joking about it. I remember a handful of moments that were a bit awkward. What I cannot recall is any trace of anything I would call "hostility."
You were *apparently* comparing the drawing of a historical figure on private property to breaking and entering a Jewish place of worship and barbequing a pig. That seemed to be to be a sort of weird analogy, a sign that some piece of your reasoning was mis-calibrated somewhere along the way. It wasn't exactly the most polite thing I've ever written in my life but it wasn't meant to be some kind of vile ad-hominem attack.
I am saying this sincerely, in a non-mocking tone--recalibrate you view of what these events actually are. Yes, Wilders and Gellar are asshats, but I am suggesting that you evaluate their asshatery in the context of the cornucopia of human douchebags in the country. Yes, I'm sure the hurt feelings of Muslims are real--but try and evaluate the inflmatory nature of these cartoons in the context of the Onion cartoon I set you, or the censored South Park episode, or the Piss Christ controversy from the 90s, etc.
Recalibration is something you do with a tool that you know isn't broken but is for some reason giving weird readings. If you want an actual "fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck your dog and please fuck off and die" type of insult then I'm sure you can get one from someone else around here--just keep on defending the viewpoint of the jihadis instead of defending people like Maajid Nawaz, a liberal *Muslim* who does not believe there is anything wrong with drawing Muhammad. He posted a picture of Muhammad to show his solidarity with cartoonists and he received death threats from Muslim jihadis because of it. By sticking up for the right of jihadis to be offended, you are turning your back on genuine moderate reformers like him.
Recalibrate. I'm sure you're not a stupid or bad person... just, recalibrate.
If you think that this is the one and only bit of Sharia law that us infidels will ever be asked to voluntarily obey, you need to read a fucking newspaper once in a while.
Aniconism in Islam ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) doesn't begin or end at "don't draw the prophet." There are moderate Muslims out there who are willing to defy and ignore the entire ridiculous concept, but fortunately for the extremists we have you out here reminding us that not wanting to follow an iron age interpretation of the Sharia is "childish." And if people like you somehow win this debate (I'm not deluded enough to think that this could actually happen--I'm not Gleck Beck or something), in 50 years we'll have the spiritual successors of al-Qaeda and ISIS telling us that a visual depiction of ANY human is offensive to them. And the spiritual successors of people like you will tell us we're childish to poke the bear by daring to draw a stick figures.
Don't believe me? Pick up a fucking history book. There's a reason why traditional Islamic art is a bunch of abstract swirling lines instead of people and animals.
I'm not so sure about that. Trying to assassinate terrorists living in densely populated, predominantly Muslim cites by dropping bombs on them... yes, *that* is a brilliant way to make more terrorists. But having these two asshats die an ignoble death over a few drawings with no collateral damage... eh, on balance I think this is a win.
The alternative is to have them still walking around, murder in their hearts (and remember not every group of infidels who catches their eye is going to be well-protected by police), all the while spouting their jihadi bile to their fellow "non-radicalized" Muslim friends.
You didn't read the Onion article? You really should. If you're especially prudish, you can disable image loading in your browser first.
The thing is Texas is a case of people drawing a historical figure and other people responding by trying to shoot them. Please see if you can grasp the difference. If you can't manage it, try reading the wikipedia article on Aniconism in Islam ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). It's not like there's one huge commandment in the Quran "DO NOT PICTURE THE PROPHET"--this is an extremely thorny issue and by "respecting" the extremists who insist on this absolute ban (even amongst us infidels), you are allowing them to build a slippery slope for their next grievance. Criminal iconoclasm as mandated by Islam has historically (and currently...see ISIS) a very big problem and here you are out defending the hurt feelings of the extremist philistine Muslims instead of the moderate reformist Muslims. Well done!
As an aside, the man who coined "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was an American judge who was imprisoning anti-war activists for the "shouting fire" crime of peacefully passing out leaflets. Your cliched analogy was much more apt than you probably realized.
Organise a "draw Jesus sodomizing Mary" contest in Texas and you'll get crazy Christian jihadists doing the same thing.
No, you wouldn't. You really, really wouldn't.
If you set up an event specifically designed to insult/offend/antagonise a particular religion, you're always going to get a response like this from someone.
I think they're all childish idiots. The people attending that meeting, with their provoking "who can draw the best Mohammed cartoon." Come on, your days at high school are a very long time away and you should behave like an adult now.
Why shouldn't we provoke them? It's a nice, relatively controlled environment with security guards who were able to take them out. We provoke them, they try to murder us, we kill them first. It seems like a very nice system, really. We really should start setting up more jihadi honeypots.
The alternative is what... having these lunatics walking around in our society, on the *brink* of being murderers but not quite there yet, ready to snap on some other occasion when there isn't a SWAT team nearby to take care of them? I'm not really seeing the upside to your plan.
(Obviously, this can be taken too far--the moronic Iraq War was more than just a minor provocation, obviously. But we're talking about drawings here... not dropping bombs.)
It's quite simple. "Deliberate pissing on beliefs" is generally good when the beliefs are crap. Deliberately trespassing and vandalizing other peoples' property is not good. Deliberately trying to kill people for their beliefs is very much not good.
That's the level of deliberate stirring we're seeing and it is designed to get a response - bbq in synagogue level squared.
If I was in law enforcement in that place I'd make them have their international trollfest way out in the desert so bystanders don't get killed if someone takes the bait.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the Texan way of life but in this case I would love to see the exact opposite--jihadi honeypots. Highly visible, everyone armed, fewer visible security guards.
Don't take this the wrong way, but can you bugger off and take with you everyone who has parroted this again and again? I mean fucking hell, you have a 5 digit ID. Have you been doing this for every single religious/political article for the past 15 years? Don't you ever get bored of it?
Political discussions among geeks are simply more interesting than among most other crowds. I believe it's because we are by nature more willing to delve into the gritty details. Like any subculture, there are biases and stupid memes but these flaws are at least occasionally point out and debated... it's not that we don't have an echo chamber here, it's that ours at least has a skylight.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Suicide bombing and finger fucking. I'm trying to put this together into a humorous composite mental image but other than the bellowing of "Allahu Akbar!", it's just not working.
Gandhi "provoked violent reactions" with his salt march. It turns out that dragging the barbarism of the British into the open was a better way of combating it than pretending it didn't exist.
And before you mention it, yes several individuals who set up this event are (unlike the Charlie Hebdo staff) known asshats. That doesn't change the basic formula of what happened. Do I have to drag out the old "blaming the rape victim" meme here? Because I will if I have to. Or, if you prefer, we can just leap straight to Godwin and talk about just how well appeasement has worked with fascist jerks in the past.
Hint: mockery and blasphemy is a HUGE part of modern American culture. Disregarding the legal problems re: the first amendment, there is a massive amount of culture here that you are implying would need to be changed and censored. Do you really think that is fair, productive or realistic?
ehhhhhh... well it depends on whether you're more of a "giver" or a "receiver" I think. If you mainly looking for mad porn star skillz then no. But there is something pretty special about blowing someone's mind with a sensation that they have literally never felt before... particularly in the case of females, who unless they've done some pretty serious experimenting with toys are not likely to have ever managed to experience much g-spot stimulation.
That said, I'm not altogether convinced your average suicide bomber would be the giving, sensitive type.
What amazes me is that idiots still think "draw Muhammad" "protests" are relevant and meaningful. That ship has sailed. It's just an outlet for bigotry at this point.
As long as they provoke violent reactions, they are relevant and meaningful in the most direct and obvious way conceivable.
If you want actual change, you're going to have to actually do something useful. How about working to help them better integrate into their local communities?
At least one of the shooters appears to have been a recent convert. I could say more about this disgustingly soft bigotry of low expectations thing you've got going on there, but others have said it better than I could.
Sure. Let's get a little more meta so that it can be "why do people suck?" And then perhaps we could smoke some pot and expand it a little more: "why does life suck?"
The big picture matters but I think that the specific, detailed, non-hypothetical picture can also be important.
Do I have to copy and paste my reply to this to every single person who wants to hijack this discussion with non-sequiturs about Christian violence? I don't like Christianity. It has problems, including some problems that involve violence. However, this is not generally relevant to the problem of people being killed for drawing blasphemous pictures. Bringing up a non-fatal attack from 30 years ago does not mean we should give equal weight to the possibility that the next religiously-inspired attack on artists will be launched by a group of Christians. I'm not claiming that Islam is inherently worse than Christianity or that it's been responsible for more deaths throughout history or anything of the sort.
There is a difference between trying to inject some sensible perspective into a discussion dominated by rabid anti-Islamic bigots and yammering on about irrelevant historical examples of Christian violence when people here are by and large (assuming you're browsing at 1+) trying to have a reasonable discussion about current events.
Two quick notes:
1. I spent ten minutes looking but I couldn't find a youtube clip of this, sorry. He probably phrased it a little better, but that was the gist of it.
2. I really like how this quote can be used to support either argument here--those who say we should be fighting the jihadis, and those who argue that we are simply creating more of them. I think the only sane position is a mixture of these two--clearly, Iraq was a disaster from start to finish (sorry, Hitch), but equally clearly we must not flinch from fighting jihadis when an opportunity presents itself to do so without pissing away trillions of dollars or killing thousands of civilians in collateral damage. (And it should go without saying that certainly shouldn't be shying away from the first amendment at moments like these, nevermind the fact that a few odious asshats happened to be in attendance.)
Sigh. Look, the choice we all have to face is to be terse and elegant vs. cramming seven paragraphs of disclaimers in every single post. I meant to imply a strong statistical likelihood, not a certainly that it was absolutely impossible that a Christian would murder someone over a blasphemous drawing.
Yes, some violence has happened with movies and artwork in the past... generally decades ago. Generally without fatalities. Yes, you can change the topic entirely to abortion and find some fatal violence there. Fundamentalist Christianity sucks too. I'd be very happy to discuss the myriad ways in which it sucks. I would gladly admit that it affects my life in more profound (negative) ways because I happen to live in a predominantly Christian country.
But that's not the goddamn topic at hand. I appreciate the desire to fight bigotry and narrow-minded obsession with Islam, I really do, and I support it.. but trying to immediately change the subject to Christianity after every single reply really does not help your cause.
I believe I just acknowledged that the bombs were a problem. I was, in fact, promoting a war of ideas (including offensive ideas--all decent ideas are going to be offensive to somebody) as at least a partial alternative to the bombs.
As for the religion, well, I can't help but notice that they didn't attack members of the military, or military contractors, or manufactures of bombs or other military equipment, or members of congress who voted for the war. No, they tried to attack people who were violating their interpretation of the shariah.
But the particulars of the religion wasn't actually my point here. This specific subset of people, regardless of whether they're "*real* Muslims", regardless of their secret motivations, are murderous and tenacious and they are in fact disrupting the lives of certain peaceful people living in the West. If we can find a way of combating this problem that doesn't involve collateral damage or trillions of dollars pissed down the drain, that's a win. Do you disagree?
I will be the first to concede that religion is merely a prominent symptom of a much more insidious disease that we all probably suffer to one degree or another.
But it is still extremely sad--very "unfortunate"--when people have fallen so far down the well of delusion that they think it is worth killing themselves and others in order to prevent drawings from being made, or to avenge the person being drawn (now dead for 1500 years). Just because there's a sliding scale of self-delusion and meme-worship here that we're all stuck on, doesn't mean we can't weigh the relative nuttiness, the tragedy, the senseless surreal stupid waste of human energy and human life exhibited by those at the far end of the scale. Their myths are worth laughing at because they are more stupid than ours, and they are worth deploring because their consequences are more uncompromisingly grim than ours.
Geeks should understand physics and the effects of train. You jump in front of a train and get (probably) killed. The same can happen if you draw (enough) stupid pictures.
The same can end up happening if you live your life as a coward, meekly allowing other people to impose their religious laws on you.
Then again, in the eyes of a coward courage always does look like stupidity.
We're talking about drawings, not abortions. Do try and keep up.
Again, my main point is simply that there is a huge gulf between words like "unprofessional", "giggling", and even "awkward" and words like "hostile". You have yet to bridge this vast, vast gulf.
I remember being a teenager. I remember being around other teenagers. I do not remember giggling about particular pair of tits making any of us hostile towards other people who have tits. I remember some girls joking about it and some girls not joking about it. I remember some guys joking about it (a greater percentage than the girls, sure), and other guys not joking about it. I remember a handful of moments that were a bit awkward. What I cannot recall is any trace of anything I would call "hostility."
In this case, yes:
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
One of the best pieces of satire ever created. Also the single greatest case ever made for the necessity of both blasphemy and obscenity.
You were *apparently* comparing the drawing of a historical figure on private property to breaking and entering a Jewish place of worship and barbequing a pig. That seemed to be to be a sort of weird analogy, a sign that some piece of your reasoning was mis-calibrated somewhere along the way. It wasn't exactly the most polite thing I've ever written in my life but it wasn't meant to be some kind of vile ad-hominem attack.
I am saying this sincerely, in a non-mocking tone--recalibrate you view of what these events actually are. Yes, Wilders and Gellar are asshats, but I am suggesting that you evaluate their asshatery in the context of the cornucopia of human douchebags in the country. Yes, I'm sure the hurt feelings of Muslims are real--but try and evaluate the inflmatory nature of these cartoons in the context of the Onion cartoon I set you, or the censored South Park episode, or the Piss Christ controversy from the 90s, etc.
Recalibration is something you do with a tool that you know isn't broken but is for some reason giving weird readings. If you want an actual "fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck your dog and please fuck off and die" type of insult then I'm sure you can get one from someone else around here--just keep on defending the viewpoint of the jihadis instead of defending people like Maajid Nawaz, a liberal *Muslim* who does not believe there is anything wrong with drawing Muhammad. He posted a picture of Muhammad to show his solidarity with cartoonists and he received death threats from Muslim jihadis because of it. By sticking up for the right of jihadis to be offended, you are turning your back on genuine moderate reformers like him.
Recalibrate. I'm sure you're not a stupid or bad person... just, recalibrate.
If you think that this is the one and only bit of Sharia law that us infidels will ever be asked to voluntarily obey, you need to read a fucking newspaper once in a while.
Aniconism in Islam ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) doesn't begin or end at "don't draw the prophet." There are moderate Muslims out there who are willing to defy and ignore the entire ridiculous concept, but fortunately for the extremists we have you out here reminding us that not wanting to follow an iron age interpretation of the Sharia is "childish." And if people like you somehow win this debate (I'm not deluded enough to think that this could actually happen--I'm not Gleck Beck or something), in 50 years we'll have the spiritual successors of al-Qaeda and ISIS telling us that a visual depiction of ANY human is offensive to them. And the spiritual successors of people like you will tell us we're childish to poke the bear by daring to draw a stick figures.
Don't believe me? Pick up a fucking history book. There's a reason why traditional Islamic art is a bunch of abstract swirling lines instead of people and animals.
I'm not so sure about that. Trying to assassinate terrorists living in densely populated, predominantly Muslim cites by dropping bombs on them... yes, *that* is a brilliant way to make more terrorists. But having these two asshats die an ignoble death over a few drawings with no collateral damage... eh, on balance I think this is a win.
The alternative is to have them still walking around, murder in their hearts (and remember not every group of infidels who catches their eye is going to be well-protected by police), all the while spouting their jihadi bile to their fellow "non-radicalized" Muslim friends.
It's a very strange analogy. If you want a perfectly apt analogy, pleas see the Onion article I linked.
You didn't read the Onion article? You really should. If you're especially prudish, you can disable image loading in your browser first.
The thing is Texas is a case of people drawing a historical figure and other people responding by trying to shoot them. Please see if you can grasp the difference. If you can't manage it, try reading the wikipedia article on Aniconism in Islam ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). It's not like there's one huge commandment in the Quran "DO NOT PICTURE THE PROPHET"--this is an extremely thorny issue and by "respecting" the extremists who insist on this absolute ban (even amongst us infidels), you are allowing them to build a slippery slope for their next grievance. Criminal iconoclasm as mandated by Islam has historically (and currently...see ISIS) a very big problem and here you are out defending the hurt feelings of the extremist philistine Muslims instead of the moderate reformist Muslims. Well done!
As an aside, the man who coined "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was an American judge who was imprisoning anti-war activists for the "shouting fire" crime of peacefully passing out leaflets. Your cliched analogy was much more apt than you probably realized.
Organise a "draw Jesus sodomizing Mary" contest in Texas and you'll get crazy Christian jihadists doing the same thing.
No, you wouldn't. You really, really wouldn't.
If you set up an event specifically designed to insult/offend/antagonise a particular religion, you're always going to get a response like this from someone.
Please stop spouting nonsense: http://www.theonion.com/articl... (NSFW)
Jihadi honeypots! Like rattlesnake roundups, but much more ecologically friendly.
I think they're all childish idiots. The people attending that meeting, with their provoking "who can draw the best Mohammed cartoon." Come on, your days at high school are a very long time away and you should behave like an adult now.
Why shouldn't we provoke them? It's a nice, relatively controlled environment with security guards who were able to take them out. We provoke them, they try to murder us, we kill them first. It seems like a very nice system, really. We really should start setting up more jihadi honeypots.
The alternative is what... having these lunatics walking around in our society, on the *brink* of being murderers but not quite there yet, ready to snap on some other occasion when there isn't a SWAT team nearby to take care of them? I'm not really seeing the upside to your plan.
(Obviously, this can be taken too far--the moronic Iraq War was more than just a minor provocation, obviously. But we're talking about drawings here... not dropping bombs.)
That's the level of deliberate stirring we're seeing and it is designed to get a response - bbq in synagogue level squared.
You need to get your... *something* re-calibrated. I recommend the Onion (NSFW): http://www.theonion.com/articl...
If I was in law enforcement in that place I'd make them have their international trollfest way out in the desert so bystanders don't get killed if someone takes the bait.
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the Texan way of life but in this case I would love to see the exact opposite--jihadi honeypots. Highly visible, everyone armed, fewer visible security guards.
Don't take this the wrong way, but can you bugger off and take with you everyone who has parroted this again and again? I mean fucking hell, you have a 5 digit ID. Have you been doing this for every single religious/political article for the past 15 years? Don't you ever get bored of it?
Political discussions among geeks are simply more interesting than among most other crowds. I believe it's because we are by nature more willing to delve into the gritty details. Like any subculture, there are biases and stupid memes but these flaws are at least occasionally point out and debated... it's not that we don't have an echo chamber here, it's that ours at least has a skylight.
To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens: "They want to be martyrs? Well, good--we're here to help."
I think this would work in a Texan accent, too.