Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Ex Input:
Madonna's cultural appropriation confirms what a cliche she has become. There' s only thing duller than a Twitterstorm , and that's an Instagramstorm . Particularly when said storms feature figures who like to think of themselves as controversial and as deliberately baiting us : Rihanna posing in a clingy burqa at a mosque, Mario Balotelli posting a racist image , and now Madonna doctoring pictures of African and African-American leaders to promote her new album . Really, the only dignified thing to do is to not dignify it with a response, and move on . Who cares if Madonna straps black ropes on the images of dead black rights icons? As Peter Robinson wrote in the Guardian:"It's slightly heartbreaking that Madonna, an artist who made her name through an intuitive grasp of almost every major trend and zeitgeist fluctuation, is so crap at social media." But sometimes a solely jaded response betrays our own complacency, like resigning yourself to the fact that there will always be people who think of racist slurs as banter , or those who think it is just fine to appropriate the symbols of others to give their own tepid existence some edge , or people who still wear bootcut jeans . It's not OK, no matter how persistent and ever- present it is . Even though Madonna has always been controversial , it also seems that as the world around her has got sharper, she has got duller and more derivative . The appropriation that she and others have carried out is nothing new ; we're just noticing it more . That's because those who are piggybacking on others' journeys do not only have more channels to flaunt their cluelessness and sense of entitlement (Iggy Azalea, walk away from Twitter) but they are also being called out on it more . Whether it is usurping religion - crucifixes and nun habits are passe now; it's niqabs on naked bodies  - keep up - homosexuality or now minority rights , Madonna is a manifestation of how privilege feeds off the authenticity of "struggle" . This is a double plundering that leads to further marginalisation : the dominant narrative will oppress you, then co-opt you, and then weave you into your own tiny little section of the tapestry . Some would argue that slavery and segregation ended long ago (well, segregation in the US in the 60s and apartheid in South African in the 90s, so not that long ago) . But that doesn't mean white people can now happily vandalise the cultural and historical totems of a minority's struggle as part of some universal poster for the white western narrative of overcoming and learning from our mistakes . Imagine a pop artist using the recent CIA torture as part of their campaign - perhaps showing dead Arab personalities being waterboarded . No? Too soon? Well , when it comes to certain issues , it will always too soon . Of course ,  the charitable position is that Madonna, or to a different extent, Iggy Azalea, are not doing this with any high degree of self-awareness or design - they might see all contemporary culture as equal-access human heritage that they can dip into and sample as a vehicle for their talent . They would be right to some extent , but the sad fact is that these modern iterations of minority culture that they are sampling all arose from suffering and oppression rather than from a series of tortured geniuses in drawing rooms across Europe . Yes, there are spaces where our common mix of religious, sexual and racial legacies intermingle - gloriously, sometimes . But that is usually an uncurated, spontaneous thing, not a cynical shopping list . To put it simply , edginess comes from just that : being on the edge . Ironically, all Madonna and her ilk's desperate antics to appear so only confirm that they are, in fact, utterly comfortable and mainstream . Cultural appropriation is now the standard default of the unoriginal . It is a common and predictable template , where one becomes a cliche in trying to avoid being a cliche because you have nothing new to offer - something Madonna would surely be mortified by .

Ex Output:
Who cares if Madonna straps black ropes on the images of dead black rights icons?


Ex Input:
If je ne suis pas Charlie, am I a bad person? Nuance gets lost in groupthink. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many people in France and elsewhere have declared, Je suis Charlie ("I am Charlie") after heavily armed gunmen broke into the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, and killed eight staff members, two police officers, a building maintenance worker and wounded several others . On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people including a number of world leaders such as Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and David Cameron gathered in Paris for a unity rally, to stand in mourning, in defiance . There were cries of Je suis Charlie, Je suis Ahmed(I am Ahmed, the Muslim police officer who lost his life in the attack), Je suis juif(I am a Jew) . These declarations were a display of solidarity with those who lost their lives and those who survived . They allowed people to try and place themselves in the lives of others by using the power of language . We have seen this kind of remembrance before in the face of tragedy : I am Troy Davis ; I am Mike Brown ; I am Eric Garner ; I am Renisha McBride . But we are none of these people . We can and do empathize with the plights of the dead, the survivors and their loved ones . We can and do empathize with how fragile we all are, and with how we cannot be ruled by terror, but why the rhetorical urge to take the place of the fallen? What does it bring them? I, too, have ached since hearing the news of what happened in Paris but je ne suis pas Charlie et je ne suis pas Ahmed et je ne suis pas juif . There are times when silence equals consent, but is the loss of someone else's life really such an instance? Is it reasonable to assume that if je ne suis pas Charlie, I tacitly endorse terrorism? I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally - though , as I have written before , I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence . I find some of the work of Charlie Hebdo distasteful , because there is a preponderance of bigotry of all kinds in many of their cartoons' sentiments . Still ,  my distaste should not dictate the work the magazine produces or anything else . The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo - and writers and artists everywhere - should be able to express themselves and challenge authority without being murdered . Murder is not an acceptable consequence for anything . Yet it is also an exercise of freedom of expression to express offense at the way satire like Charlie Hebdo's characterizes something you hold dear - like your faith, your personhood, your gender, your sexuality, your race or ethnicity . Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink , making it difficult to express nuance . It puts the terms of our understanding of the situation in black and white - you are either with us or against us - instead of allowing people to mourn and be angry while also being sympathetic to complexities that are being overlooked . It has been disheartening to see calls for the Muslim community to denounce terrorism . It has been disheartening to see journalists highlighting the stories of "good" Muslims , as if goodness is the exception to the rule of an entire people . We will continue to see discussions of satire, the freedom of expression and its limits . We will see speculations as to how such a tragedy can be avoided because it is easier to speculate than it is to accept that we cannot prevent terrorism . We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong . Life moves quickly but , sometimes, consideration does not . And yet ,  we insist that people provide an immediate response, or immediate agreement, a universal, immediate me-too  - as though we don't want people to pause at all, to consider what they are weighing in on . We don't want to complicate our sorrow or outrage when it is easier to experience these emotions in their simplest, purest states . The older(and hopefully wiser) I get, the more I want to pause . I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel . I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption . The demand for response from all of us through the means available to us, most often our social networks, rises in part because we can feel so impotent in our day-to-day lives . We are people with jobs and families and our quotidian concerns . It is easy to feel impotent in the face of terrorism in Paris or hundreds of girls being kidnapped in Nigeria or a bombing at an NAACP building in Colorado or an unarmed black man being killed by a police officer . Within our social networks, we can feel less alone . We can feel less impotent . We can make these gestures of solidarity . Je suis Charlie . We can change our avatars . We can share our anger, our fear, or devastation without having to face that we may not be able to do much more . But we still feel impotent and we still feel inadequate . When we see people not participating in our expressions of solidarity-- not showing their awareness of their own impotence-- we see something we can possibly change . That is why we demand allegiance .

Ex Output:
These declarations were a display of solidarity with those who lost their lives and those who survived In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many people in France and elsewhere have declared, Je suis Charlie


Ex Input:
What freedom of speech? The photos of 40 of the world's government leaders marching arm-in-arm along a Paris boulevard on Sunday with the president of the United States not among them was a provocative image that has fomented much debate . The march was, of course, in direct response to the murderous attacks on workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by a pair of brothers named Kouachi, and on shoppers at a Paris kosher supermarket by one of the brothers' comrades . The debate has been about whether President Obama should have been at the march . The march was billed as a defense of freedom of speech in the West ; yet it hardly could have been held in a less free speech-friendly Western environment , and the debate over Obama's absence misses the point . In the post-World War II era, French governments have adopted a policy advanced upon them nearly 100 years ago by Woodrow Wilson . He pioneered the modern idea that countries' constitutions don't limit governments; they unleash them . Thus , even though the French Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, French governments treat speech as a gift from the government, not as a natural right of all persons , as our Constitution does . The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal . When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down -- permanently . The theory of anti-hate speech laws is that hate speech often leads to violence, and violence demands police and thus the expenditure of public resources, and so the government can make it illegal to spout hatred in order to conserve its resources . This attitude presumes, as Wilson did when he prosecuted folks for publicly singing German songs during World War I, that the government is the origin of free speech and can lawfully limit the speech it hates and fears . It also presumes that all ideas are equal, and none is worthy of hatred . When the massacres occurred last week in Paris, all three of the murderers knew that the police would be unarmed and so would be their victims . It was as if they were shooting fish in a barrel . Why is that? The answer lies in the same mentality that believes it can eradicate hate by regulating speech . That mentality demands that government have a monopoly on violence, even violence against evil . So, to those who embrace this dreadful theory, the great loss in Paris last week was not human life, which is a gift from God ; it was free speech, which is a gift from the state . Hence the French government, which seems not to care about innocent life, instead of addressing these massacres as crimes against innocent people, proclaimed the massacres crimes against the freedom of speech . Would the French government have reacted similarly if the murderers had killed workers at an ammunition factory, instead of at a satirical magazine? And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion . You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government . This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French:"I am Charlie Hebdo." Those whose buttons proclaimed"I am not Charlie Hebdo" were asked by the police to remove them . Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully,"I am Kouachi" were arrested . Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes . What's going on here? What's going on in France, and what might be the future in America, is the government defending the speech with which it agrees and punishing the speech with which it disagrees . What's going on is the assault by some in radical Islam not on speech, but on vulnerable innocents in their everyday lives in order to intimidate their governments . What's going on is the deployment of 90,000 French troops to catch and kill three murderers because the government does not trust the local police to use guns to keep the streets safe or private persons to use guns to defend their own lives . Why do some in radical Islam kill innocents in the West in order to affect the policies of Western governments? Might it be because the fruitless Western invasion of Iraq killed 650,000 persons, most of whom were innocent civilians? Might it be because that invasion brought al-Qaida to the region and spawned ISIS? Might it be because Obama has killed more innocent civilians in the Middle East with his drones than were killed by the planes in the U.S  on 9/11? Might it be because our spies are listening to us, rather than to those who pose real dangers? What does all this have to do with freedom of speech? Nothing -- unless you believe the French government .

Ex Output:

The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal