Now for this:

The interweb is flipping out about Sony canceling the release of the Seth Rogen/James Franco goofball comedy, The Interview.  Some cyber terrorists have hacked Sony and been leaking private emails and information about Sony's apparently nasty and juvenile internal conversations, and they have threatened violence against theaters that decide to show the movie...

Sigh.

I have thoughts, and I have a deepening despair about the direction of the human race.

First of all, here's a thought that should have occurred to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of global politics: xenophobes do not appreciate being mocked.  This goes for the Taliban and Muslim extremists who get all we-kill-you whenever someone draws a picture of the Prophet Mohammed.  This goes for Kim Jong whatever, whenever he thinks about about anyone sniggering behind his back.  Seriously, it's kind of complex for North Korean dictators, they refuse to be photographed next to people that make them look short or otherwise inferior, they force their starving and impoverished people to watch parades of immaculately outfitted military regiments and massively expensive machinery of war.  They have this idea that the west is decadent and vulgar, and Seth freaking Rogen is basically the poster child for decadent and vulgar.  We vilify them as the axis of evil, we lament their human rights violations and brutal oppression of their own people, they call us swine who are fixated on pornography and big macs.  Neither characterization is exactly wrong, but those stereotypes are patently unhelpful.

I'm all for a good satire.  I believe that good humor is important, I like to use laughter to diffuse a difficult situation, but I've also spent enough time around small children and mentally unstable people to know that it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of tool.  North Korea is basically the paranoid schizophrenic agoraphobic of the world community, and they don't have much of a sense of humor.

Am I glad that a basically terrorist group has been able to bully a movie into not being released?  No.  Do I think that someone should have had the good sense not to let that movie get made in the first place?  Yes.  I'm no fan of censorship.  I'm all for freedom of expression, but lets be honest, context does matter.  This movie was not a socially conscious piece that lifted up the absurdity of North Korea's cults of personality and their brutal oppression of their own people, it is a movie where two stooges make potty jokes while bungling through an assassination plot, sponsored by the CIA.

It offends me a little that the CIA actually does plot to assassinate people, it offends me more to present that reality as something laughable.  I don't care who it is.  I don't want to see a slapstick comedy version of Zero Dark Thirty.

Maybe thats why I'm not all free-speech outraged about this, because what has been suppressed was just silly, and the people who worked so hard to suppress it are going to look silly in the long run.  In the meantime the world will get along just fine without the "artistic" contribution of Mr. Rogen and Mr. Franco for the time being.

As for the moral defeat of letting the terrorists win, we need to re-evaluate what real terror actually is.  Terror is what happened in Peshwar.  Terror is what happens daily in Iraq and Syria.  Releasing embarrassing emails and making impotent threats probably should be viewed through a different lens. 

What troubles me most in all of this is how we seem to be drifting farther apart as a species.  On a day when a 60 year old detente with Cuba actually showed a narrow crack, we're still busy setting up other dragons that need slaying.  Can we maybe admit that perhaps Communism is no longer really a threat to our way of life?  Can we perhaps try and see if diplomacy might actually bring these madmen to heel, where war will only make them more frantic and cause them to dig their trenches deeper?

Can we admit that maybe some of the dragons we're trying to slay are actually windmills?