Throwback Thursday: Satire in Response to Authoritarianism
I haven't really participated in the #throwbackthursday theme before, but I ran across a couple old posts of mine that might be worth sharing again. These are excerpts, so please click the titles for the full original posts. I'm still not sure whether these are really clever, but I hope they spark some new ideas in someone's mind at some point.
A Prohibition Analogy
I have no tattoos or piercings. I have no interest in getting any tattoos or piercings. I find few tattoos or piercings attractive. It's a frivolous expense with no practical value. Many criminals have tattoos, and tattoos are often used as gang insignia, so some people with tattoos are a menace to society. Therefore we should ban tattoos, register everyone who has a tattoo in a national law enforcement database, and imprison anyone caught offering tattoos or piercings.
Pictured: not me. Image credit
Of course that is an overreaction. There is nothing inherently criminal in getting tattoos. That would be an absurd response. But we do need common sense tattoo control to ensure public safety by requiring all tattoo artists get a license and receive regular inspections, right? Public safety demands it! Anyone who gives a tattoo without this license is still a criminal, so we can still fine and imprison them! We can't have a risk of disease spreading, and underage irresponsible tattoo buyers need to be protected! Same for piercings!
A Modest Proposal
Why do women need high-heel shoes? They're a dangerous, impractical relic of the past. Thousands of women suffer serious injury due to heels, and the injury rate seems to be on the rise. These shoes promote blatant objectification of women, and heels are the footwear of choice for strippers and prostitutes, so if you wear heels, it's fair to assume you're engaged in illegal, or at least immoral, activity no matter what. In fact, who needs so many shoes anyway? It's time for ownership limits, heel height restrictions, and an outright ban on stiletto heels. It's simply a matter of public health and safety that we cannot afford to ignore.
These are suicide shoes, not serious footwear! Image credit
Of course, these posts are intended to satirize the puritanical instinct to forbid anything deemed "immoral," and do deem anything new or different as such by default, but we all know people who would probably nod their heads in agreement with these assertions. How can we move toward a wider general understanding of liberty, and help people let go of the instinct to punish people for nonconformity?
Clearly, your derision of public safety is a threat to public safety, and for your own protection, since you demonstrate you are incapable of rationally defending your mind from misinformation, you should be either hanged by the neck until dead, or permanently confined in a space where you can be protected from harm, as well as secure the public from the threat of your words.
This is how it works. This is actually why the English guy who taught his pug the Roman salute in response to a certain phrase was jailed for a year.
Public safety is a threat to public safety, and should be strangled in it's crib now, before it strangles us all on our deathbeds.
Thanks!