RosieBell

Bike Boom

I found Carlton Reid's Roads Were Not Built for Cars a valuable reference book and a good read. 

 He's now kickstarting the funding for a new book, Bike Boom.

 

Use of bicycles in America and Britain fell off a cliff in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to the rapid rise in car ownership. Urban planners and politicians predicted that cycling would soon wither to nothing, and they did their level best to bring about this extinction by catering only for motorists. And then something strange happened – bicycling bounced back, first in America and then in Britain. Today's global bicycling boom – even the one in the Netherlands – has its roots in the early 1970s.

And this is what I'd like to explore in Bike Boom, a book that will use history to shine a spotlight on the present, and demonstrate how bicycling in the future has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow. ..

Bike Boom will aim to dig down into historical sources to find out how the Netherlands built a world-class network of bicycle paths – and much of the rest of the world didn't. I'd also like to interview the bicycle advocates and planners of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (and those of today, too) to hear their stories, and learn from their successes and their mistakes.

 Ur-Sustrans built its first cycleway on the Bristol to Bath route from 1979 - 1986.  I remember the Innocent Railway stretch  Edinburgh when it was still covered with ballast and gave you punctures and the tunnel was blocked - that was the early eighties. It is now a black top path and the main North Cycle Network 1, and this was through my own cycling organisation, Spokes.  In the UK the progress has been local and patchy and has taken much patient volunteer effort. 

 

The Innocent Railway - National Cycle Network 1

Cycle racks/stands

Cycle stands at Sainsbury's Gorgie Road. Well spaced so that cyclists don't get in each other's way.

Same Sainsbury's on the Westfield Road side. More narrowly spaced and don't look as pretty though taking up less room. They're usually well used though. It's unusual to find them empty.

The city exists for the care and culture of men

Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938) has some harsh things so say about the centralising effect of the railways and points out how they cut through countryside and cities with an imperial force. The railway in Edinburgh grabbed half of Princes Street Gardens and when I cycle through the old cuttings in the suburbs, now cycle paths, there is a sense of how divorced they are from the surrounding topography – they slice through it – as much as motorways and over-passes do .

Mumford saw the possibilities of the motor car opening up parts of the interior to regionalisation, near water sources and on hills where railways could not go.

Chapter V

“But it is not power alone that has brought with it the possibility of a new industrial, and therefore an essentially different urban, structure. The same holds for systems of transportation and communication. The motor car has decentralized transportation as radically as the transformer and the motor have decentralised the applications of electric energy. Instead of the train, which increased in economy up to a point with the number of cars attached, we have begun to employ, since 1910, the motor car, the motor bus, the motor trucks: a more flexibly used individual unit, which can start or stop, take the high road or the branch road, at its own convenience, without waiting for other cars. And instead of the railroad line, with tended to centralize transportation along the main arteries, and which was more or less confined to the water level routes, at grades of two per cent or less, the motor car has brought into existence the new highway network. Thus the motor car can penetrate the hinterland in a more effective and economic fashion than the railroad could: for economy in railroading depends upon loading the tracks to maximum capacity and confining transportation, as much as possible, to the main routes. Moreover, the motor car can climb steep grades and penetrate hilly country with a freedom unknown to the railroad; and it makes an effective connecting link with the airfield and the airplane. . .

The motor car has potentially opened up new frontiers of human settlement, even as the airplane has extended the outposts of civlization to the very poles. For the uplands, which motors reach so easily, are the seat of the fast-running young rivers and waterfalls, the new sources of power; and by means of motor car and hydro-electric plants areas that have been hitherto remote and unculitvated can now support well-balanced industrial communities.”

So that's the motor vehicle opening up the wilderness in the Highlands of Scotland, for instance, though I'd say that the “well-balanced industrial communities” aren't the money spinners up there (excluding the guys tending hydro-electric stations) so much as the driving tourists.

So in 1938 Mumford had an heroic vision of the internal combusters bringing industry and wealth to the remoter areas, with consequent regional development and the building of small cities among hilly landscapes. He didn't envisage then what mass ownership of the car would do to the existing old cities. Twenty years later he smelt the fumes of mass transport in The Highway and The City (1958) and warned his British readers not to repeat the American experiment:-

“There is, however, one matter that – particularly since the Beeching report on railways appeared – I regret not having dealt with in greater detail: the shrinkage and growing paralysis of the railway systems, and the idiotic notion that the best way to modernize transportation is to wipe out the branch lines of those once fast and efficient carries, the so place the entire burden of transportation upon the private motor vehicle, further covering this error by the even greater blunder of building motor expressways wholesale. This is a major threat to the sound design and well-being of cities.

On this matter, our disastrous American experience with mono-transportation by automobile, which has already gutted out the interiors of our great cities, should be of some service, if only your planners and administrators would take note of the dire results. Unfortuntely, your leaders in transportation are now,,, extravagantly planning to imitate all our mistakes...

Your cities.. will be transformed into extravagant parking lots; . . .you may dismantle the one kind of transportation that would, if properly organized, rescue from this fate: the railroad.

..The congestion that railroad transportation produced in metropolitan areas was excessive: hence the great promise of the automobile forty years ago was that, with its flexibility of movement and its ease in climbing grades that the railroad balked at, it would round out the rail system and produce complex regional transportation network that would provide for a more even distribution of population and industry, instead of the prevailing “apoplexy of the heart and paralysist at the extremities.

Those of use how eagerly advanced this possibilty.. made one miscalculation; we did not realize that dynamics of finance would concentrate on the newer mode of transportation, adroitly giving rise to the religious culture of the motorcar: and that, in the face of common sense, the transportation experts would attempt to do away with the railway and attempt to perform its functions even within heavily populated areas, by means of private motor vehicles...

The current policy of wiping out every other means of transportation than the motor ar and the airplane has been fatal both to the habitability of cities and to economy and efficiency in transportation..
[Preface to the English Edition]

Mumford goes to lament the colonisation of the cars spoiling the old cities - parking in the Place Vendome in Paris and spoiling the townscape of Amsterdam and keeps exhorting Europeans to learn from the American grim experience of “midtown garages, arterial highways, and overpasses and underpasses... “ and to pay heed to the law “the more facilities are provided for the motorcar, the more cars appear”... He lists various measures against the colonisers but says they are palliatives. “The main issue is that the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city. We still habitually sacrifice all the special values of the city to the function of motor transportation, as during the nineteenth century they were sacrificed to the railroad and the factory.” 

No city can solve its transportation problem if it neglects the greatest self-propelling vehicle of all: the pedestrian. A hundred thousand pedestrians can cover half a mile in a faction of the time that sixty-six thousand motor vehicles, each carrying one and a half persons … can carry them. And at the end of their walk, they would, even if they all suddenly decided to sit down, require a similarly minute fraction of the motorcar's wasteful parking street.” (1961)

Mumford has nothing to say about cycling except that the mild congestion that many cyclists caused should have been a warning what motor vehicles could do.

The last essay in The City and the Highway was written in 1957 and is a horrified response to how transportation that relies on the car has distorted lives and cities:-

"In transportation, unfortunately, the old-fashioned linear notion of progress prevails. Now that motorcars are becoming universal, many people take for granted that pedestrian move­ment will disappear and that the railroad system will in time be abandoned; in fact, many of the proponents of highway building talk as if that day were already here, or if not, they have every intention of making it dawn quickly. The result is that we have actually crippled the motorcar, by placing on this single means of transportation the burden for every kind of travel. Neither our cars nor our highways can take such a load. This over-concentration, moreover, is rapidly destroying our cities, without leaving anything half as good in their place.

….What's transportation for? This is a question that highway engineers apparently never ask themselves: probably because they take for granted the belief that transportation exists for the purpose of providing suitable outlets for the motorcar industry. To increase the number of cars, to enable motorists to go longer distances, to more places, at higher speeds, has become an end in itself. Does this over-employment of the motorcar not consume ever larger quantities of petrol, oil, concrete, rubber, and steel, and so provide the very groundwork for an ex­panding economy? Certainly, but none of these make up the essential purpose of transportation. The purpose of trans­portation is to bring people or goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within a limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good trans­portation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers a change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes.

Diffusion and concentration are the two poles of trans­portation: the first demands a closely articulated network of roads—ranging from a footpath to a six-lane expressway and a transcontinental railroad system. The second demands a city. Our major highway systems are conceived, in the interests of speed, as linear organizations, that is to say as arteries. That conception would be a sound one, provided the major arteries were not overdeveloped to the exclusion of all the minor elements of transportation. Highway planners have yet to realize that these arteries must not be thrust into the delicate tissue of our cities; the blood they circulate must rather enter through an elaborate network of minor blood vessels and capillaries.

[I really just want to quote the whole of the essay]

we must keep most of the proposed expressways in abeyance until we have done two other things. We must re-plan the inner city for pedestrian circulation, and we must rebuild and extend our public forms of mass transportation. In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is. Before there was any public transportation in London, some­thing like fifty thousand people an hour used to pass over London Bridge on their way to work: a single artery. Railroad transportation can bring from forty to sixty thousand people per hour, along a single route, whereas our best expressways, using far more space, cannot move more than four to six thousand cars: even if the average occupancy were more than one and a half passengers, as at present, this is obviously the most costly and inefficient means of handling the peak hours of traffic. As for the pedestrian, one could move a hundred thousand people, by the existing streets, from, say, downtown Boston to the Common, in something like half an hour, and find plenty of room for them to stand. But how many weary hours would it take to move them in cars over these same streets ? And what would one do with the cars after they had reached the Common? Or where, for that matter, could one assemble these cars in the first place ? For open spaces, long distances, and low population densities, the car is now essential; for urban space, short distances, and high densities, the pedestrian.
Every urban transportation plan should, accordingly, put the pedestrian at the centre of all its proposals, if only to facilitate wheeled traffic. But to bring the pedestrian back into the picture, one must treat him with the respect and honour we now accord only to the automobile: we should provide him with pleasant walks, insulated from traffic, to take him to his destination, once he enters a business precinct or residential quarter. Every city should heed the example of Rotterdam in creating the Lijnbaan, or of Coventry in creating its new shopping area. It is nonsense to say that this cannot be done in America, because no one wants to walk.

…

There is no purely local engineering solution to the problems of transportation in our age: nothing like a stable solution is possible without giving due weight to all the necessary elements in transportation—private motorcars, railroads, airplanes, and helicopters, mass transportation services by trolley and bus, even ferryboats, and finally, not least, the pedestrian. To achieve the necessary over-all pattern, not merely must there be effective city and regional planning, before new routes or services are planned; we also need eventually—and the sooner the better—an adequate system of federated urban government on a regional scale.

Until these necessary tools of control have been created, most of our planning will be empirical and blundering; and the more we do, on our present premises, the more disastrous will be the results. In short we cannot have an efficient form for our transportation system until we can envisage a better permanent structure for our cities. And the first lesson we have to learn is that a city exists, not for the constant passage of motorcars, but for the care and culture of men.

The Culture of Cities

The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford (1938)

Today a great many things stand in he way of grasping the role of the city and of transforming this basic means of communal existence. During the last few centuries the strenuous mechanical organization of industry, and the setting up of tyrannous political states, fit into the general pattern of mechanical conquest, capitalistic forms of exploitation, and power politics. Habitually, people treat the reality of personality and association and city as abstractions, while they treat confused pragmatic abstractions such as money, credit, political sovereignty, as if they were concrete realities that had an existence independent of human conventions...

The new order established in the physical sciences was far too limited to describe or interpret social facts, and until the nineteenth century even the legitimate development of statistical analysis played, little part in sociological though. Real men and women, real corporations and cities, were treated in law and government as if they were imaginary bodies; whilst presumptuous fictions, like Divine Right, Absolute rule, the State, Sovereignty, were treated as if they were realities. Freed from his sense of dependence upon corporation and neighbourhood, the 'emancipated individual' was disassociated and delocalized; an atom of power, ruthlessly seeking whatever power can command. With the quest for financial and political power, the notion of limits disappeared – limit on numbers, limits on wealth, limit on population growth, limits on urban expansion: on the contrary, quantitative expansion became predominant. The merchant cannot be too rich; the state cannot possess too much territory; the city cannot become too big.

...

With the return of entertainment to the house, through the phonograph, the radio, and he motion picture – with the near-prospect of television – the modern house has gained in recreational figures what it has lost through the disappearance of many of the earlier household industries. The radio and the telephone, moreover, have made the house no less a center of communication than was the old market-place.

[This was written in 1938 – and with the last decades seeing the computer and the internet holds even truer today.]

Fine Distinctions

An excellent article about the proto hipster Nathan Barley, who would answer the phone “Hullo you wanker”. Nathan Barley was John the Baptist to Russell Brand's Messiah:-

 Looking for an online guru with an open-ended nanofesto that boils down to “peace and fucking – believe!”? Sorry Russell Brand, Nathan beat The Trews to the punch by 10 years with the rambling video homilies on his website (back when websites were novel)trashbat.co.ck. Barley aficionados will surely see in Brand some echoes of the show’s Preacherman character, the burnt-out style writer Dan Ashcroft who is bullied by style mag Sugar Ape’s appalling editor Jonatton Yeah? into adopting a voice-of-a-generation role. Replace the cynical weariness with messianism and you have Russell to a tee. ...

 Nathan started life on the TVGoHome website....

TVGoHome was [Charlie] Brooker’s surreal and scatalogical late 90s collection of fake TV listings, including imaginary shows such as Inspector Bumhat, Daily Mail Island and the probably-best-not-explained Mick Hucknall’s Pink Pancakes.

….One regular listing concerned a young media man about town called Nathan Barley. It went under the pithy title of Cunt...

 Chris Morris, the creator of The Day Today and Brasseye, had written listings in secret for TVGoHome. Around 2000 he suggested that they try to develop a show around the Nathan character and east London’s increasingly absurd club/art scene. “We talked about the show for years before we made it,” says Brooker. “Chris was adamant very early on that there should be a tiny acorn of likability to Nathan, something irrepressible. He does terrible things but he has an endearing sort of rabbity enthusiasm to him. In the fake listings he really was a cunt, whereas in the TV show he’s a twat – and there is a difference.

 As there is.

 Kingsley Amis liked these sorts of fine distinctions.

 He says of a club bore: - “he was only an old fart, not an old shit as well.”

 (The Folks Who Live on the Hill)

 That's a wide distinction. But when it comes to the following:-

 A privilege granted to few
Is meeting a pratt on the scale
Of Nicholls: by common consent
A nitwit not fit to shift shit,
Whether more of a bastard or cunt,
Views varied, one has to admit.

 (Kingsley Amis The Reunion)

 The distinction is narrower. But here's a working definition – a bastard will cheat on his partner, a cunt will get back at her with revenge porn. 

The Revolutionary Guard do Facebook, Not Twitter

I caught this on the World Service programme BBC Trending. It starts at 9:35 

Ayatollah Tanasoli, is an Iranian, whose pseudonym translates as “Genitals” or “Penis”. He writes in Farsi but here's one of his tweets:- 

invenTION OF iSLAMIC tWITTER ayatollah TaNasoli will tweit in England now womane dont come

From the interview:-

India (presenter): ...the man behind the page started this Facebook less than two years ago and he's got 20,000 likes. He's also got about 7,000 followers on Twitter. That might not seem that big, … but it is for an Iranian account and lots of the followers are from Iran. It is a country where many people are afraid of aligning themselves perhaps with satire and criticism. …

He pokes fun at their teachings, the sermons, their fatwahs. Here's a flavour of some of the tweets:-

Islam values women's rights, especially those women who give birth to male children.

We condemn any sort of violence, but the violence we commit ourselves

If they had Islamic democracy in France as we do, those cartoonists would not be assassinated like that, but they would be hanged 10 years earlier.

In our governing system, the more illiterate you are, the more progress you make.

India interviews Ayatollah T, using an actor's voice so he won't be identified:-

AT: It is mandatory for Iranian boys to go to military service after they graduate from high school or college and basically you don't have any training, they just want to keep you there but they don't know how to fill your time so they bring in all these mullahs to talk to you. They just gather you in these mosques and soldiers just sit there for a couple of hours or so. The stuff they say about the West, the internet, satellites and all this is so absurd and crazy that it makes you laugh. It is really easy to make fun of so that;'s what I did during my breaks in the army. I created this character. People would come to me, and they'd say, give us a sermon, give us a speech, and that mullah became very popular.

…

[G]rowing up in Iran and going to a school... they brainwash you at a very early age not to make fun of the government or religion and you grow up and you reach a point where you realise why am I listening to this. For Iranian young people the only place we can express ourselves is on line and even that is dangerous. There is no free newspaper, there are no gatherings.

India:- Are you in Iran?

AT: I don't want to answer that.

India: Your followers, are they in Iran?

AT: Some of them are, and some of them are not. Let me give you what has happened in the past two years in social media. At the beginning, it was very good when people trusted each other and they found friends through Twitter, it was like a gang, but eventually the government managed to infiltrate the groups and when they started arresting users on Facebook and Twitter that's when it became very dangerous and I decided to create a character.

India: On your feed you are mocking religious leaders and you are against the government. Are you not worried about yourself?

AP: But I am worried. Everybody is worried.

India: And do you not worry that some of your tweets are going to upset other Muslims?

AP: That's my intention. I want them to be upset. I want them to think. The first thing that people in the Middle East and Iran should understand is that nothing is offensive, nothing is sacred, nothing is supernatural, and when they understand that then I think a lot of problems will be solved.

India: What sort of response do you get to your tweets?

AT: I don't want to brag but I get a lot. On Facebook every day I get more than five or six emails and they all say we love what you're doing. I realise that a lot of people are thinking like me, and they think okay, he said what we wanted to say.

India: Have you received any negative reaction or any threats?

AT: Oh yes, especially on Facebook because the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard right now they're on Facebook and not so much on Twitter. I get a lot of emails, contact. They just want to make you scared. They say, we know where you are, and your mother is a whore and your sister is a whore and we will find you and we will rape them and we will kill you but I know they are lying. And they think that that way I will stop and I won't tweet any more but that doesn't work for me.

India: Do you think they are from the government?

AT: Most of them are because I go back and I check their profiles and I know about a fake very fast.

India: Do you think what you are doing is jeopardising other people who have a voice on line? [The “provocative” and “responsible” gambit.]

AT: No. I think what they do is jeopardising what I do. After I started this other people created similar characters and some of them tried to contact me saying, Oh let's start a hashtag or create a campaign, and I said to them, don't contact me because it's dangerous. Wherever you are, good luck and keep doing this. Trust no-one.

…

India: Here he's talking about a Facebook user called Soheil Arabi.  He's currently in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran where he's been for the last year. His posts were quite political. They were criticising the Islamic revolution for example. But he has now been charged with insulting the Prophet Mohammad, which carries the death penalty. So I asked the man behind the Ayatollah Tanasoli account what he thought about what's happened.

AT: This is a tragedy. This is so against everything that humanity stands for. We have to defend freedom of speech. And then the nuclear thing and all other stuff will follow. If you forget about this basic thing, you are going against the direction of history and I cry sometimes at night thinking about it. I'm sorry. I don't know. People don't understand how tragic this is.

India: You must feel quite powerless to do anything because you write and publish on social media too.

AT: Well, it's like other people are laughing at my jokes, but when you are not allowed to tell people who you are, you are in a solitary prison with no windows out and you are screaming. And you are happy because you are so loud but nobody can hear you and it doesn't change anything.

India: Do you think you will see a day when you can reveal your identity?

AT: I truly hope so. It's just the fact that we do all this and we are forced to be hidden from the government. It makes you feel that you are different from the rest of the world, like you're not part of the world. And yet I hope some day people can be who they are, Be who they want to be and say what they want to say.

(I suppose that would seem very naive – sorry unnuanced – to a certain kind of Westerner. Will Self, one of our most prominent intellectuals, drawls that free speech is like a sexual fetish. I don't know if anyone made such a howl of longing for sado-masochism and cross-dressing as this man does for liberty.)

I transcribed this piece thinking it was one small thing I could do.

Punching up, punching down

Re Charlie Hebdo:-

“The point of satire is to attack the powerful, to expose their hypocrisy and absurdity, and of course to be funny. If satire is directed downwards it is not satire, it’s bullying.

So doubly wrong there Tim Sanders at the Socialist Review. (H/T Tendance Coatesy - do read his whole piece)

Two elementary objections:-

1. Mohammad and Islam are very powerful - to a gruesome degree in some places; 
2. It's not the point of satire to attack the powerful. The point of satire is to ridicule absurdities. It's not just the powerful that are absurd.

Tim Sanders belongs to some left wing groupuscule. I suppose he'd admit that left wing groupuscules are (sadly) not powerful. They had the piss gloriously taken out of them in The Life of Brian with the The People's Front of Judaea vs the Judaean People's Front.

Here's a video clip to refute his argument:-

 

1. It's funny – one of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest films
2. It attacks the powerless – who happen to be absurd in this instance. In fact their powerlessness is part of their being ridiculous.

However word seems to be getting about that satire MUST attack the powerful otherwise it isn't really satire - punching up against punching down. Will Self said something incoherent about this on Channel 4 (both he and Martin Rowson are purgative – see them fisked here.)

“You always have to ask with something that purports to be satire, who is it attacking? Are they people in a position of power? And if it’s attacking people in a position of power, is it giving comfort to people who are powerless and who are assaulted in some sense by those powerful people? This is not the dynamic with Islamist terrorists, they are not in power in our society, and it is not comforting the people who look at these cartoons whether in Charlie Hebdo or in newspapers here, they don’t feel better about themselves or about life to see Islamist terrorists mocked or the beliefs of Muslims in general mocked - why does it make anybody feel better?”

Islamists do have power within our society. In that interview the cartoonist Rowson said he wouldn't draw Mohammad in case staff at newspapers got killed, i.e. he obeys the assassins' veto.  Pissing off Islamists and their followers seems as morally imperative as pissing off David Cameron and his – except that David Cameron won't execute you out of hand.

When Rageboy was in one of his fits about a crappy film - those fits which would be funny if they weren't sinister, it made me feel better to knock this cartoon up.  Caption:- Film Critics Revolt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self teaches contemporary thought at Brunel University but his notions of satire seemed to have stopped at Spitting Image. One thing to notice about modern culture, as I thought last night when watching Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipes, which twists the tail of the ordinary glazed-eyed citizen as well as world leaders, is how it is flooded with satire, with piss-taking, with smart-arsery, with Reddit, and Cracked and Weird Al Yankovic. It's the modern idiom. Selfie, with his natural tone of sneering contempt and his ultra-punnable surname, is evidently the fish who doesn't know it's water he's swimming in as he hasn't noticed that early twenty first culture in the anglophone world is satirical to the point of misanthropy, which makes our politicians despised to an unhealthy degree, because, they, poor buggers, have to talk in the language of hope and belief, and it's as if they're speaking Victorian Uplift, while we their voters speak Modern Cynic.

However Self may have been doing a piece of satire of his own – perhaps a subtle reference to the English academic in David Lodge's Changing Places (a satire against the not very powerful) who boasts he's never read Hamlet.

Satire can be cruel, or it can be gentle. Goodness Gracious Me was rather gentle about its crass whites, its social climbers the Coopers and the bloke who says Indian about every invention (who should be resurrected as a Muslim saying, “It's in the Qu'ran” about genetics, embryology and thermodynamics.)

Jonathan Swift punched up at politicians in Lilliput and Brobdignag, and scientists in Laputa, but come the fourth voyage he was punching downwards at grovelling humankind. The Simpsons punches down at America's blue-collar class. Shameless punched down at the British underclass. The Royle Family punched down at the British working class and Rab C Nesbit punched down at the Scottish schemey.

Mo Dawah, one of the best things on Twitter, aims his darts at the target of the “community leader” - who has a helluva lot more power than their victims though less power than the Government.

We must not be afraid to address the problems within our community, by introspecting fearlessly on how it is everyone else's fault.

We have to fight the hegemony of hetero-normative racist patriarchy that tries to blame the perpetrators who are victims too #Rotherham (Now that one is savage.)

Sick of double standards of liberal fascists imposing freedom to say what I want on me, whilst denying my right to impose censorship on them

Meanwhile the Charlie Hebdo disapprovers reach for their Holocaust. What would you think if we made cartoons about Jews in gas chambers hey? Hey?

Well I'd think you were a shit of course, but I already thought that about you.

However, let's treat this seriously for a second or two and spell out the difference between making fun of a religion with its sacred objects and a staggering, culture-breaking historic event that still has living witnesses. Here are a couple of cartoons featuring women – one semi-mythical (though admirable on the whole).

The Virgin Mary/Our Lady

A rape victim

I'm sure you Holocaust cartooners can find something absurd and ridiculous about her plight and will knock up a nifty speech bubble. As for me I never want to google “rape victim” images again.

Actually if I was Charlie Hebdo I'd do a caption like “Her skirt must have been too short” which, to explain to those who are slow on the uptake, would be a satire against rape-victim-blamers. But I haven't got the heart or stomach.

My satire is constrained by my own boundaries and that of the shared culture, where we judge what is outside of enough. We can estimate satire as good or bad in all sorts of ways, but not that it only should attack the powerful. Cartoonists laying into a religion shouldn't have to think again, except for the prudential reasons that now are forcing us to mind our manners or else.