The Denizens of Oz had no problem when the Wicked Witch of the West was crushed under a house. This is the same thing.

I'm not glad he's dead, but boy was he a delusional nut. I actually have Chick Tract somewhere, someone was handing them out to people and I took one. Funny stuff.

I think it's a bit unfair to the Wicked with of the West comparing her to that asshole.

You have a point.

Puting aside that Oz and everyone in it are fictional... The WWotW actually physically harmed people; she didn't just state an offensive opinion.

Wasn't the Witch a person with political power and a person who used and abused it against those who opposed her? This guy was an artist and the most he could've done to the people he hated was draw a defamatory cartoon about them.

Or someone tell me now; offensive cartoons = worse than Hitler?

Hitler => Takes 9 months to produce another Hitler
Jack Chick => Distributes his works to produce thousands of Hitlers in 9 months

Free speech is a dangerous thing indeed /s

If you want to go down this path:
Goebbels, not Hitler.

Hitler didn't kill anyone. He "just" spoke.

And Hitler had political power which was also part of his point about the witch.

Most of the worst dictators and ideological extremists on the face of this planet never conducted their atrocities themselves: Kim Jung-Il, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein. Their power came from their ideological fervour and charisma.

And thanks to the internet, everyone today can have political power, just as long as their propaganda is absurd, effective and inflammatory enough.

Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in swinging political elections in the West of late, which is why it has become a favoured tool of the political and religious extremes.

Political power is acquired and sustained by a critical mass of popular support, endorsement, legitimation. Hitler wasn't the nazi machine. Ideology was. Propaganda was. Racialist, antisemitic common sense was. And those are established, strenghtened, maintained, by discourses. By words and images.

By a flood of "just my opinion, mate".

Okay, I see a lot of people don't give a shit, because giving a shit would make them uncomfortable towards discourses a bit too close to home. But oh joy oh bliss oh so much luck, we are nowadays blessed by the same phenomenon in a more comfortably ideologically remote context :

The ISIS propaganda, on facebook or dedicated sites, in a few extremist mosquees, in prisons, in some neighbourhooids, is also "just words", "just opinions", about the moral state of society, about God, about the blasphemy of homosexuality, promiscuity, music, etc. About the injustices of colonial history. They are all "just my opinion, mate". "Not my fault if the logical implication of these opinions is that the western world is satanic trash". "Not my fault if some people decide to do something against it".

Yet I don't see many conservatives panicking at every criticism (or action) against islamist propaganda.

Well, here I made more or less exactly the same point, and I also listed examples of people who were much more deserving of such hatred.

I was actually tempted to agree with you that this was just a harmless old man really, until, when looking for comic strips to prove that he was, I found a number of other strips which were blatantly defamatory in nature.

Whether I have an issue with the very idea of being allowed to say offensive things? No, not inherently. The boundary that the far right in particular likes to deliberately blur in order to silence criticism of their views is the boundary between offensive statements and defamation, and that's a common problem with far-right extremism and right-wing libertarianism (and no, I'm not saying that these two are the same, hence why I list them separately). I have absolutely no problem with the right of people to say something offensive. Heck, I'm even known myself to tell, repeat and find funny sexist, racist, and otherwise fairly un-PC jokes.

Un-PC jokes and constructive criticism are fair game. Insults, too, to a reasonable extent. But defamation - untrue or distorted public statements made for the purpose of deliberately harming the reputation of or inciting hatred or violence against a person or group of people - is not fair game, and I'm up for punishing it to whatever extent possible. The notoriously lop-sided nature of US society is largely attributable to the ability of the political, oligarchical and religious extremes to defame to their heart's content and mislabel it as "freedom of speech".

Just to be clear: legally and ethically, freedom of speech is a freedom from prior restraint. You cannot be punished for the sole fact of having said or written something in particular. You can, however, be punished for the effects of those statements, intended or otherwise - that's why perjury, libel, slander and fraud are all crimes and fully compatible with the First Amendment.

But well done for arguing with me when I actually initially agreed with you on Chick's supposed "harmlessness", and in doing so actually encouraging me to find the proof that I was wrong to agree with you.

It was a joke man relax! XD

This forum is getting WAAAAAAY too uptight.