The loons are free to do what they want in their homes (if all are freely consenting adults and within the law, another issue), but they must not be allowed to try to bring their values / strange views onto anyone else (other than by exercising their rights to free speech, peaseful demonstration, etc...)
That's all I am saying. THEY are trying to impose their values on us, not the other way round. The only "value" I am trying to impose is that none should impose anything on the others, something that is incompatible with most organised religions' DNA.
Which brings us back to the topic of who decides if something is offensive or not, which we have not satisfactorily resolved.
Are cartoons showing French people as cowards, or treasonous (to take a recent example) offensive? You could easily argue that they are just as much as the Danish cartoons. But you'd be told to "get real" and "grow up" and that would be right. But the fact remains that the Frenchn like many other oft-mocked groups, have thicker skins than all these people that claime to have God on their side and behave like scared little kids running to mama at the slightest hint of hostility to them. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Ignoring the violence for a moment, if you exercise a right in a way that predictably (even if not intentionally) will hurt others, there will be negative consequences. Even if they are nonviolent, there willbe negative, and they will come from the breach of civility.
Now, violent reactions will ultimately hurt the violent party more in the end, because they constitute an even greater breach of civility.
At any time has a choice of whether or not one wants to accommodate others for the sake of convivality. To bring the point home, we have had spats of "ET is anti-British" or "ET is anti-Russian" where it became an issue whether ETers are willing to watch the way ther way certain things for the sake of not alienating subcommunities who were offended. Many people also made the point that the offended parties were being over-sensitive, but as some point a conscious decision has to be made whether or not the majority wants to accommodate the sensitive minority or not. The difference between a virtual community and a real one is that it is much easier to just walk away from the virtual community. In the real world, sometimes you are forced to live side by side and so forced to accommodate.
Now, it is true that radical muslim immigrants sometimes find it hard to accommodate the values and practices of their host communities, but that is no excuse for the initial breach of civility on the part of the larger community.
Ethical behaviour is not about keeping a tally of what others do and being marginally better than them. It's about following one's ethical principles. And gratuitous offence is not ethical, even in the face of gratuitous violence. guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
watch the way ther way
In order to achieve positive dialogue, we all moderate our freedom more or less. And a good thing we do.
Since when it al boils down to ethics, or civilness, there is practically no way that people can come to a consensus on this one. Since I think gratuitous offence is perfectly ethical - but to a certain limit, and context aside. I'm in the camp that finds the original cartoons not offensive, albeit some lame, and 2 or 3 borderline. (The one where suicide bombers were blocked from paradise I though actually witty, and is a theme that has been frequently used in Dutch cartoons.) I say camps, since I think there's no other way: there are only two sides, either you find the JP cartoons offensive, or you don't. Black and white.
But the limit what's acceptable is different from person to person, something I discussed with kcurie: the grey area in this issue forms the splitting factor. Migeru thinks they cross the line; I think they don't and even had a purpose. Nothing to be done about it.
That's also why a number of threads ended up in confusion when the legitimate aspect came into the spotlight, ET being a global community: there is a multitude of different approaches how to regulate offensive material. In the western quarter of the global village, different streets have different views. On a national level, the tolerance bar is higher or lower for every nation, and it reflects the majority consensus per country. Superfluously, it's pretty high in the Netherlands, although I may have a lower bar myself.
In an aside, I find the Spanish solution very interesting in this as it is post-active, if I can put it that way: it regulates after the offensive material was published. I like that a lot better than a pro-active variant with guidelines what's intolerable and then ensuing wrangling before publication whether material is or not.
That shouldn't halt debate, as it is the only way to digest new viewpoints and come to terms with other people's belief what is civil and what not. And there, sadly, something went wrong in the Arabic world where kicking and screaming entered the debate.
Anyway. I'll stop being reflective and will leave it at that. I feel we can not grow closer to a consensus than where we are now.
I say camps, since I think there's no other way: there are only two sides, either you find the JP cartoons offensive, or you don't. Black and white.
Not sure about that. I am personally not offended, though I find several of them distasteful. But I have no problem seeing them through muslim eyes, by which they are either offensive, deeply offensive, or outrageously offensive, depending on depth of devotion and prior exposure to similar things.
For me, the essential divide is between those want legal restrictions on the freedom to ridicule religion and those who do not. The world's northernmost desert wind.
I think the one difference in our approach is that you're one step ahead of me: I put the divisionary line in the problem, you put it in the solutions. For the rest, I get the impression we're sharing the same train of thought.
THEY are trying to impose their values on us, not the other way round
Wasn't that precisely what the provocateurs at Jyllans-Posten set out to demonstrate? Wasn't it their intention (within the context of tension in Denmark between the extreme/hard right and the immigrant minority) to polarize opinion and to promote the idea of civilization clash? Is it really fruitful to fall headlong into their trap?
I don't doubt that there are some "THEY" out there who would like to impose their views on "US". OTOH, we in the West are currently involved (like it or not, the leaders concerned were re-elected) in an attempt to impose our views on them, along the lines: your religion and social organization are archaic and you need some democracy to straighten you out. The "THEM against US" scheme is that of civilization clash, that of the xenophobic Euro-right and the neocons, and, imho, we shouldn't be touching such thinking with a ten-foot pole.
There is not an US and there is not a THEM, and freedom of speech is not the value that all Europeans hold most dear either as some have said (there is not a single such value, since there is not a single US). guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
I am of the conviction, and strongly so, that there is a reason these declarations/charters is viewed in the international community as the most important treaty for much of the work of the UN, and certainly the European council, and the European court of human rights. Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
In this whole debate I have not said that there is not a right to free speech, but that rights need to be exercised responsibly, and that JP had an axe to grind and were being disingenous. Another thing that has come out of this is that I have actually had a closer look at the Spanish constitution and (today) at the section of the Criminal Code dealing with crimes relative to the exercise of fundamental rights and public freedoms. It doesn't seem as clear-cut as some would have us believe. guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
Not in the sense that it is exclusively European, but that it is one of the core elements on what the European cooperation is build upon, and what both in legal terms, and socially is established as a common "European ethical fundament", one of the lessons of WWII.
On the charters of fundamental human rights, there has not been much room for manoeuvres by individual governments, of course the follow-up to implement, is another story. Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
Yes, they're offensive, but the degree of passion and rage in response to the offence in most folks is going to depend on ... [drum roll] context.
Is it just possible (humour me for a minute here with a thought experiment) that "the French" (ah, these national pesudo-persons) have thicker skins than "all these people" because they have been for many years a colonising rather than a colonised population -- that while Americans or Germans may be thumbing noses or making puerile Francophobe jokes, the borders are safe and no bombs are falling, that we (calm and rational) people can look up at a plane crossing the sky without cringeing and running for cover, that all of our friends and relations die in car crashes or of natural causes, not as "collateral damage"...? That Frenchmen and women abroad are not being arrested and detained purely on the basis of their last names or accents, or spirited off to undisclosed locations to be tortured? That despite occasional snook-cocking, the Theys who insult or mock the Us are not actually ready, willing and able to invade us with the intent of real personal harm any day now, and that at this point it is Our grandfathers that Their grandfathers may have shot or bombed or held prisoner, not our brothers or sisters or (even worse) our children?
If similar mocking cartoons were published by the Boche during the occupation of France, can we really say that "thick skinned" and rational frenchmen and women would not have stepped up their Maquis activity locally, in furious response to the salt in the wound? (To the occupying Germans, the Maquis were of course "terrorists"). Historians recall the abuse, the public humiliations, the shaving of heads of women who slept with German soldiers [and how much real choice did those women have? who was in a position to protect them?]... was that a tolerant, rational, thick-skinned reaction? no, instead an ugly expression of outraged pride, nationalist rage, the personal need to get revenge, to take it out on perceived "collaborators" regardless of the calculus of power... whatever. not rational, not admirable, not proportionate, not just, but regrettably all too human.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. -- Walt Whitman
What I'm saying (have been for some time and at far too great length) is that it's easy to be calm and proportionate and rational when we're -- on the whole -- winning and fairly comfortable. I would not expect a temperate response to a jibe or jab from a person whose sore toe I'm standing on... or even one whose sore toe someone else is standing on... get off the toe first, is my philosophy, before I start upbraiding them for their inadequate sense of humour :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
I suspect the same happened in the US in 2003. It's just nice once in a while to have a go at hate speech with a target that doesn't really mind. Because it is pretty violent and nasty (if sometimes funny), and even when you're used to it (the level of French bashing in the UK press always leaves me bemused), it can be painful to hear. I do suspect that the current bit of self-flagellation is to some extent inspired by the permanent bashing of the French and the French model in the English language.
But in the end, it tells more about the basher (who feels threatened, scared, unsecure) than the bashee. The Danish cartoons show their latent fear of brown foreigners; the Muslim (over)reactions shows their terror at the insidious liberal ways of the West.
How do you fight fear and build trust? Be responsible. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
as long as the "insidious liberal ways" of the west involve controlling Muslim countries directly or indirectly, bombing Muslims, ignoring the plight of Palestine, etc., the Islamists' fear has somewhat deeper roots in reality than the Danes' (no matter how overheated and bizarre the ensuing rhetoric may become -- the greater the fear, the more bizarre the rhetoric will get). that said, I must also admit that with economic hard times a lurking possibility and social safety nets being vandalised wherever we turn, the fear of proletarians that immigrants will cheapen labour and drive down living conditions is also rooted in present realities. (divide et impera -- we plebes are least dangerous to our masters when we are at each other's throats.)
oh dear, everybody needs a Time Out, says the long-dormant day-care worker in me :-) [a job I did for a while as a teen]
another reflective riff: I think many of us fear -- deeply, in our bones and gut -- the slow or fast death of the Enlightenment, the recrudescence of zealotry and factionalism and fundamentalism, the stifling of science, a degradation in the quality of arts and letters, the decline of literacy, the failure of democracy, the coarsening of public discourse into jingo and brawling. we look around and fear a dying of the light -- at home, not just abroad.
and that fear I think informs our distate for and terror of the clerical authoritarianism and repressive ambitions of fundie Islam. but the imminent threat to my own personal freedoms comes from my own Western world, from the "security state" apparatus, the unravelling of the Constitution and the separation of powers, the disregard for posse comitatus and habeas corpus, the rise of evangelical rightist xtianity and its strong presence in the professional military... it is these forces that are starting to revoke my rights and restore feudalism in my time. it is easier to fear and revile repression and obscurantism with a foreign (and dusky) face, an alien power which I can "keep at bay," than to come to grips with what may be growing under the bed in my own house...
... a man was appointed by BushCo to one of the highest medical administrative posts in the land, who believes that most gynaecological troubles can be cured by prayer. imho we are reasonable to be afraid... but is our anger and defiance focussed where it needs to be? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
