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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

What makes it remarkable?

Perhaps the double standard that some political and religious figures are subject to satire, while others are held to be sacrosanct and untouchable.

And that these protections would be enforced by silicon valley progressives, whom followers of those figures would gladly torture and execute if given the opportunity.

I can understand (although don’t agree with) a decision to block these things based on respecting everyone’s religious beliefs. Blocking satire of a specific religion though points towards caving to fear rather than a rational policy choice.

It rather depends though doesn't it. It's very clear in Islam that images of the prophet are forbidden, they find it offensive. So out of respect it would seem reasonable to disable that. It's not then reasonable to disable generating images of jesus or the pope. Why? Because christians don't object to images of the pope or jesus. If there were specific things that christians found offensive, I think it's reasonable to disable those things too. It's not giving Muslims special treatment, it's about being respectful to all religions, it's just that being respectful means making reasonable adjustments for each of their concerns.

I think you are ignoring the elephent in the room:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

I think the concern is more that someone will show up and murder everyone in your office for allowing drawings of the prophet Mohammed than concern it is "offensive" per se.

I'm not blaming a company for making the decision to not put their employees lives in jeopardy, but let's not pretend this is some benign judgement call over whether to offend someone.

The terrorists won.

You can say you wouldn't mock the prophet Mohammed because you fear some Islamic terrorists might come after you. I understand that. But you can't say that's why someone else is choosing not to, as I explained - I wouldn't depict the prophet simply because I think it's disrespectful to Muslims. You shouldn't impose your reasons on someone else. Personally, I don't think you can point to 1 terrorist incident almost a decade ago and say that somehow that's changed everyone's behavior. If it has, that would be weird - we don't avoid criticizing Mohammed bin Salman or Vladmir Putin despite knowing for a fact that they've both ordered the assassination of their critics/enemies.

You can explain why you personally would not draw the prophet Mohammed but we're not talking about you, we're talking about a company in the business of generating A.I. drawings I believe.

Or maybe we're more generally talking about a hypothetical media company, I'm not sure.

We know for a fact that high profile media companies avoid drawing Mohammed due to death threats, not out of sensitivy to people of faith:

"South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were threatened in 2010 for the prior depictions of Muhammad. That prompted Comedy Central to remove voice and visual references in the episodes, and eventually to pull the entire episodes from streaming."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2020/06/south-park...

That incident I linked to wasn't the only terrorist incident so I don't think your characterization of why I linked to that attack is reasonable, you seem to be implying that I drew a wild conclusion based on one incident, as if I couldn't possibly have been aware of other attacks.

I'm confused about your reference to Putin. As far as I know he only orders assassinations of Russians and Russian ex-pats and non- Russians making fun of him have been perfectly safe.

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