Let’s be real about what Charlie Hebdo is. Calling it “journalism” isn’t quite right. Even the term “satirical newspaper” puts it on the same level as The Onion, which isn’t very fair to The Onion, which strives for at least some degree of cleverness and subtlety, most of the time.

Paging through translated cartoons from Charlie Hebdo’s past, the comparisons that kept coming to mind were to Mad magazine or pre-David Wong Cracked, but while the sophomoric level of humor fits—we’re talking single entendres on the level of this crappy joke about the Pope raping choirboys—none of those publications ever descended to quite the same depths as, say, making fun of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram by portraying them as pregnant welfare queens.

The best comparison here for an American audience is, well, Internet stuff. The stuff that ends up in censored form on Tosh.0—the kind of videos, images, and text memes you see linked from 4chan or Something Awful. The most mainstream comparison is, I suppose, South Park, and it’s true that I got sick of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 2edgy4u schtick sometime around Team America: World Police. To be fair to them, South Park has only portrayed Muhammad a couple times, each time as part of a meta commentary on the politics of portraying Muhammad.

When the only thing you’re reverent of is irreverence, when the only thing you hold sacred is the idea that nothing is sacred, well, you eventually get chan culture, you get one long continuous blast of pure offensiveness and taboo-breaking for taboo-breaking’s sake until all taboos are broken and there’s nothing left to say. You get people who shout racial slurs in unbroken succession all day and think they’ve accomplished something in the name of “free speech” by doing so.

Well, that’s their right in a free country. It may be fun and it may get them paid, until oversaturation ruins our sense for irony and destroys the market for it.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Is it Thompson?

Too hill-y...not enough watermelon-y

Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.

Watermelon-y?

Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.

And it definitely was not okay in the slightest to murder the staff of Charlie Hebdo, even if the publication that was their life’s work was a crappy low-tech dead-tree version of the obnoxious anti-religion memes on /r/atheism.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

I think its almost remarkable in the US we have not had a major terror act since 9/11. For every one they bust and gets public recognition there are probably 5 mroe that we dont hear about.

Even though I will admit every time I hear about these guys schemes, I think what fucking idiots they are and they make terrible villians.

we ok with this place yet?

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

This is going to reach a head pretty soon.