Norway had a great response to their terror attack in 2011.
The country would "stand firm in defending our values" and the "open,
tolerant and inclusive society", he said. "The Norwegian response
to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political
participation." -- Jens Stoltenberg, Norwegian Prime Minister [at the time]
This is what we need, not the usual approach of using tragic events to justify new surveillance, law enforcement powers, or military action. The only response that could offer a real long term solution is outreach and education, because fundamentalisms only flourishes in an environment of ignorance and poverty.
One of the few downsides of the technological revolution that we live in, is that everyday it lowers the barrier of entry develop nuclear or biological weapons. If we don't do something about extremest, they will be the cause of our civilization's demise. In the past decade, we have spent $3 trillion fighting wars in the Middle East.[1] That money and our presence there hasn't worked, it's only created a new generation that hate Western values.
I just watched on news footage of hangars and barracks being bulldozed in Afghanistan.[2] What I saw was potential schools and homes being bulldozed. Imaging what could have been accomplished after 911 with $3 trillion invested instead in Education, Science, and Technology. Imagine the good over $800 million each day for a decade could do. Let's stop dropping bombs and start teaching. That's the only way we're going to end this vicious cycle before it's too late for all of us.
>"because fundamentalisms only flourishes in an environment of ignorance and poverty."
Do you mean ignorance as in poorly-educated? Nearly all the 19 hijackers of 911 were quite well-educated. Or are you referring to ignorance rooted in a belief in myth and superstition as manifested in religion? How kindly do you think people are going to take to being told, if even implicitly - by "infidels" no less - that they're belief system has rendered them ignorant? For that matter non-muslims playing any role in the arab world is considered an abomination by fundamentalists.
I agree that change needs to happen but am not convinced it can come from the West. It needs to come from within Islam and the Muslim community. They need their own Reformation.
Reformation is unlikely to come from within the Islamic community.
In the clip below, from Norway, English-speaking Muslims ridicule and dismiss the Western concepts of moderate and extremist Islam. Their rationale is that the same beliefs are shared by the majority.
> Reformation is unlikely to come from within the Islamic community.
I wrote a long response to this but I decided to delete it. Basically this is not very accurate, and familiarity with history of the Middle East and North Africa (including ideologies like Arab nationalism and Ba'athism, or figures like Gamal Abdel Naseer and Hafez al Assad) would show that it certainly can come from within the Islamic world-- primarily because the Islamic world are the prime targets and overwhelmingly the majority of the victims of these actions.
> Their rationale is that the same beliefs are shared by the majority.
Their rationale is also that the majority of Muslims are hypocrites and are not "real" Muslims (when compared to those who follow the extremists' perverse Wahabbi fiqh within the Sunni Hanbali maddhab) or else they would agree with them. Unless we haven't noticed, the prime victim of Islamic extremism is other Muslims, and the prime opposition towards Islamic extremism is other Muslims. To go even further, the primary enemy of ISIS is actually Al Qaeda (in the form of Jabhat al Nusra) and vice versa.
When they say there is no moderate or extremist Muslim, it is because the moderate Muslim does not recognize the extremist as a Muslim, and the extremist does not recognize the moderate as a Muslim. Even the Muslim extremists do not recognize other Muslim extremists as Muslim if they do not pledge allegiance.
There is a reason why these extremist folk are called "Takfiris"-- it literally means "those who accuse others of disbelief." Here [1] is a video between the Western-backed terrorists in Syria and ISIS on a two-way radio call. Pay close attention from about 40s, especially when the Western-backed terrorists ask the ISIS fighters why they do not attack Israel
As an anecdote: In Iraq a fatwa was issued by Ayotallah Sistani to refer to ISIS as "Daesh al Murtad" ("ISIS who has left Islam") but it was eventually brought down to "Asa'ib daesh" ("the gangs of ISIS") so as to avoid the "moderates" receiving the takfiri labeling as it is considered inflammatory.
Arguably this is the Islamic reformation happening. People seem to have a very selective view of the Christian reformation that leaves out all the violence and the fact that the iconoclasts won.
The Internet is demanding that a substantial number people in the world, the majority of whom will never receive visas nor set their feet in Europe, to be responsible for an event that happened in Paris.
- I don't agree. It is valid if you are naive and believe US went around the world twice to spread goodwill and western values to those who despised them anyway, by blasting hundrets of thousands of civilians (and few armed guys along) to pieces. But, if you look at those adventures from economical perspective of those who have huge influence in US politics all the way to white house and can profit nicely from any war effort, there are no big mysteries. Or, just "follow the money" works nicely.
- completely agree on that cash spending point. in fact, my personal opinion is that we shouldn't try to reach the stars/other planets until we solve our massive issues here, ie no person should die from hunger, all children should get proper education/health care, minimize polluting/raping our own ecosystem etc. You know, the basics of fabric of any sustainable advanced society that we sometimes claim to be/aspire to be.
- multiculturalism has largely not worked, at least not for europe's immigration. the issue is lack of any proper integration, accepting european values etc. People here are well aware, and incidents like these will play nicely in hands of terrorists. Further polarization of society, meaning more jihad recruits, more attacks and so on. It doesn't matter that maybe 98% of muslims here are nice people that don't cause any issues (apart from that integration, but if I were living in muslim country, I wouldn't accept their values neither). US fares much better in this aspect.
>>my personal opinion is that we shouldn't try to reach the stars/other planets until we solve our massive issues here, ie no person should die from hunger, all children should get proper education/health care, minimize polluting/raping our own ecosystem etc. You know, the basics of fabric of any sustainable advanced society that we sometimes claim to be/aspire to be.
So how do you suggest to achieve that? A person grows up and wants to go and study rocket science, and you come up and go "sorry kid, come back once kids stop starving in Nigeria"? You can't just assume that if we halt progress in one area then magically the production capacities will transfer to other areas. World hunger would not be solved by stopping space exploration, it's a result of many different political problems, it's not a simple issue.
I am not at all talking about stopping all space exploration, banning rocket science or similar nonsense. Only specifically about manned mission to mars and huge amount of cash that will cost it. Be it a noble cause, there are more noble and pressing ones that will have much more positive impact on our society.
And just because something ain't easy it shouldn't be aspired to be done? Or do you really feel internally perfectly OK throwing away stale food knowing there are kids starving out there? (seen those first hand, not in africa but in india, and to say it's a touching and saddening experience is a gross understatement).
Sure, and that's probably why spending on Nasa is a fraction of spending on Education or Healthcare. The only thing you could change right now is stop that spending altogether. As a society we are already spending much more on helping others than we are spending on space exploration - and the idea that we literally shouldn't do X unless Y happens first strikes me as quite radical - if you are qualified engineer you are free to commit your resources to whatever cause you like. If you want to make water purifiers for poor people in Africa - cool. But if you want to build rockets with your knowledge - also cool. What we can do is provide incentives for people to do the first thing not the other, but I wouldn't take anyone's freedom of choice.
>>Or do you really feel internally perfectly OK throwing away stale food knowing there are kids starving out there?
The answer is yes - because I avoid buying too much food and if there is any left that I am not going to use, then it's the only reasonable option(well, I would use it for compost if I had a garden, but I don't). North Koreans are not going to get any more food on the table even if I stop eating altogether. And as a society we are already spending billions sending food aid there - but there is only so much you can do without getting rid of the regime there. Your argument is the same as someone saying to a child "finish your soup, there are kids in India starving" - but apart from making the child feel bad, it's not achieving anything.
I hear people use this phrase quite a lot. (people on the right and left) but I disagree with those who say that terrorists --people who commit any kind of terror are out to 'win' anything. Typically terrorists just want to terrorize, not win, particularly.
For example, you might have an insurgent group somewhere or other, let's say Caucasus, those movements will have real boots on the ground doing fighting to win 'ground' and they will also have a terrorist operations. The terror operations are not there to win anything --just to instill terror. They are there for nothing else than instill terror. Not shut down buildings, not keep people from going to work or going to market --afterall people will _have_ to continue going to market. That's what I think.
In sports this would be like doing something to get a penalty. Doing something to injure an opponent will not get you the victory. Only points (goals, whatever) will provide the win. A boxer does not win by biting off the opponent's ear, they win by earning more points.
Terrorists do absolutely NOT "just want to terrorize". They have goals. If they achieve their goals through the acts of terror, directly or indirectly, they win.
Has there been a movement which has won in substance through terrorism?
Movements don't win through terrorism. The movements (or however you want to characterize it) have to actually come out and put up a fight if they want to win. Terrorism tends to have the opposite effect --it alienates people from a cause they might actually see some commonality with.
Using the boxing analogy, someone is fighting Muhammad Ali, Ali is up in points, the opponent throws an illegal punch. With that strike is the opponent now winning? No. He is still losing. Further lets say he lands a couple of jabs, is he winning because he got a point? No, he's far from winning. Further lets say he manages to get Ali to change up, change behavior adapt, is he winning? Again no not till he has more points or knocks him out.
Has there been a movement which has won in substance through terrorism?
The republican terrorists in Northern Ireland didn't get everything they wanted, but they certainly ended up with more political power than they had when they started.
I'll give you that --but you must admit it worked because they had a legitimate political arm. It wasn't because they terrorized Londoners. ETA as well they have learned that terrorism is counter productive and seem to have gone legit pursuing political avenues.
I admit that it worked because they had a legitimate political arm as well as blowing things up. The legitimate political arm gave the UK government someone to negotiate with without having to outright obviously negotiate with terrorists. They did negotiate with terrorists, some of whom went on to hold elected office, but were only able to do so because there was a legitimate political arm.
This Norwegian Prime Minister dude doesn't know what he's talking about. That was a mass murder incident, not terrorism. White people can't be terrorists.
It was sarcasm. It's very subtle but it's easier to figure out if you sound the comment out aloud. The "white people can't be terrorists" is the giveaway.
His comment didn't work because it shoehorns an American political narrative onto Europe. But if he'd said something like, "white people can't be looters" in the context of, say, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, it would have been much clearer.
I regret posting it. A comment better suited for Reddit.
> an American political narrative
Reflected two days ago by a former CIA deputy director who called the French event the worst attack in that part of the world since 2005. Norway didn't count apparently.
The question is, can liberalism be intolerant of intolerance?
If this is the exception rather than the rule, then we shouldn't sacrifice any rights.
However, if islamISTS or communISTS or nazISTS or anyone else decides to take advantage of a liberal society and attempt to overthrow it, systematically, shouldn't there be some way to prevent it?
I don't know what's worse, McCarthyism or allowing unlimited growth of violent revolutionary ideas. Of course, the civil libertarian in me says that freedom of expression should be maximized. But I also realize that there are mind viruses out there that compete with liberalISM and despise it for one reason or another. The question is, how intolerant should we be of intolerance? In the United States, for instance, we have become very intolerant of racists and homophobes.
Liberalism is already very intolerant of intolerance. Sadly this intolerance-of-intolerance is very narrowly focused and its goal, if we are all honest, is to change society not defend it.
I could give examples of how we are letting our guard down to those who seek to destroy us... but I won't because I am a coward. I don't want to be hounded by a Twitter or Reddit lynch mod for being "intolerant" or "racist" (despite being neither). Freedom to express our views, when they disagree with the majority, has been successfully suppressed. In other words, Liberalism has won... but now what? How do we move forward? We are not in a good place.
Has our society ever really believed that Great Frenchman Voltaire's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (as written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall). I can't think of a time it has. The pendulum of society swings from tolerating one viewpoint to tolerating the opposing viewpoints.
I stay awake at night worrying about our civilization, not that it does me or anyone any good to do so.
Edit: A little off topic, but if major societal change in history interests you I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. Wrath of the Khans (the story of Genghis Khan) is my favorite so far http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
"Society" is a great mass of people with varying belief systems. Most of the cultural norms are dictated from above, not necessarily by populist consensus.
> Freedom to express our views, when they disagree with the majority, has been successfully suppressed.
Huh? Will you be jailed for expressing your views? Lose your job? End up homeless and destitute? Get beaten up by a pack of rowdy youths?
Freedom to express one's views doesn't mean that everyone else has to listen to them. If a Bible-thumper starts preaching in the middle of a music concert, should everyone stop and listen to respect his free speech rights? Is tossing him out of the concert oppressing his religious views?
> Most of the cultural norms are dictated from above, not necessarily by populist consensus.
Steven Pinker might not agree with you here. See his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined' and the reference in it for some examples of cultural norm changes occurring from the bottom up.
Jonathan Haidt's formulation makes it simple, really. Liberalism prioritizes the moral themes of care and fairness. Other moral themes--loyalty, authority, purity-- must always defer to the first two (in a liberal society). But this is precisely what moral conservatives can not do. Harming or treating others less fairly is morally right for conservatives if it is done so based on loyalty (patriotism, religion, group identity), authority (religion, tradition), and/or purity (religion, sexual mores).
Dan Carlin also has a political show, Common Sense with Dan Carlin. It's worth checking out, too. Even if you disagree with the guy I think his ideas deserve a hearing. http://www.dancarlin.com/common-sense-home-landing-page/
Tolerance as a concept is flawed. Why should you have to "tolerate" things? The very phrasing is combative. I shouldn't have to "tolerate", say, homosexuality any more than I have to "tolerate" the floral wallpaper at my neighbor's. It should simply be a non-issue. I've not yet met a guy I want to sleep with, but it's not like anyone's forcing me to do so. My "tolerance" is a non-entity and it's just odd to even discuss it.
To say you "tolerate" something implies you're against it, but you're gonna allow it to go on. Should I say I "tolerate" Justin Bieber? That'd be pretty arrogant of me to say. As much as I dislike his antics, I, as some random member of the public, should not be able to be in a position where I can be intolerant of him.
An enhanced focus on rationality, critical thinking, skepticism, rejection of magical thinking -- all these things will build inoculation against these particular shitty ideas.
Unfortunately, that also means dismissing religion, deriding modern politics, etc. But as a first start, getting rid of "freedom of religion", and instead focusing on freedom of {speech, expression, association, gathering, thought} wouldn't be bad. It'd cause people to think a bit more critically of what they mean by freedom of religion and so on.
You may not like the idea of tolerance being necessary, but the truth is that almost everybody is "against" things that they nevertheless don't actively oppose. It's just going to happen for any society where the population exceeds one person. Tolerance as a concept has its problems, but I think it is overall helpful.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. I'm against special casing things and promoting the idea we have to respect lies. Homeopathy is just as bad (though not as popular).
I'm neither tolerant nor intolerant of what religion people have, just like I don't care how they go about brushing their teeth. You wanna say a turtle made the world and you must always wear a hat, and that this is an undeniable truth and law if the universe? Great. So long as the government and society doesn't give special preference to that idea vs, say, flat-Earthers or geocentrists, everything's fine.
You are fine if they do things "over there" but as soon as it has anything to do with you you are intolerant.
Everyone is like that - even people who call themself intolerant. You call yourself tolerant, but when push comes to shove you are actually not.
You should stop lying to yourself and actually look at your own thought process to at least be aware of it, even if you are unwilling (or unable) to change it.
As a communist, I'll give you my point of view. To reiterate: I am a communist, not a troll, and this is really what I think.
I think that "free speech" as meant by liberals is harmful. I don't believe that oppressive speech (i.e. homophobic, racist, fascist etc.) should come under the aegis of the liberal ideal of "free speech", at least not until a post-revolutionary society. People take on the ideas to which they're exposed. I'm sure if you look through the history of the Parisian murders you'd find a trail of exposure to extremist ideas.
Literally every single society of the past has considered certain types of speech to be harmful or banworthy.
I imagine you disagree with the vast majority of them (blasphemy laws, lèse-majesté laws, obscenity laws, etc.)
They all thought they were the good guys, that their actions were just and improved society and the people within it. Undoubtedly many of these people were far more intelligent and better educated than you are, yet the culture they lived in blinded them to faults in their thinking.
So my question is this: what kind of obscene narcissism gives you the idea that YOU are the one who finally figured out which stuff should REALLY be banned and which shouldn't? Is "matthieuh" really the endpoint of the history of ideas? Are YOU the man who sees clearly, who transcends his culture, where others could not?
Such lack of skepticism and self-doubt can only be the result of intense, willful ignorance.
The same narcissism that makes you believe that you are right?
Not all people value the same things. That we can't give up freedom for security is still just an idea. How much of western culture is really better than something else and just not because we're prosperous.
The difference between bobcostas55's "narcissism" and the communists, is that bobcostas55 is allowed to express his. Holy shit, do I really have to point explicitly to Egypt, Iran, China, Venezuela Russia and the old USSR to show examples of what happens when expression of dissenting thoughts are banned?
Too bad I got tired of sharing and explaining mine in this forum. None of those countries you mention are actually prosperous to a larger degree. Is really shouldn't be that hard making an effort to think outside of you own though pattern should it?
>People take on the ideas to which they're exposed.
Children take on ideas to which they are exposed, adults evaluate ideas before accepting them. Suppressing opposing viewpoints is therefore treating me like a child.
I agree when this is about suppressing opinions, but things are trickier when this is about suppressing disinformation. Pervasive propaganda that appears to be factual can easily manipulate the conclusions of rational adults. Of course, laws that attempt to suppress disinformation are probably ineffective and incredibly liable to abuse outside of restricted domains.
> I agree when this is about suppressing opinions, but things are trickier when this is about suppressing disinformation.
Somebody has to decide what is classified as disinformation. If you have the government do it then whoever the people elect as a censor may make bad decisions. (This is historically what has happened.) If instead you have independent media outlets do it then you have the same problem. Citizens may choose the outlet that publishes disinformation.
The difference is that in the absence of censorship the choice is made by the individual. If 51% of people watch Fox News and Fox News reports disinformation, 51% of people are affected by the disinformation. If 51% of people elect a censor who prohibits everything but what is reported on Fox News then 100% of people are affected, which may lead to a feedback loop in subsequent elections.
It's not that you don't have anyone whose job it is to prevent disinformation from being reported. It's that the person whose job that legitimately belongs to is called a journalist, and you get to choose the ones you like.
I think you'd be surprised. I have family in Paris who have steadily become more and more reactionary as the FN (the French far-right) have been given more exposure, even before these attacks.
And it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to me, it's just completely harmful. In my opinion, things like being against gay marriage, or being racist are objectively wrong and not things that are up for debate.
I'd rather hear you engage in the debate (I'd definitely be on your side in opposing racism) than simply to ban some topics from being discussed at all. The topics will still be discussed, but only in underground cells of fanatics who will not then hear opposing points of view.
I happen to strenuously disagree with communism (perhaps because I have been studying Chinese since the Cultural Revolution, and Russian even earlier, so I have read a lot of communist literature over the decades) but I would try to be respectful and hear you out if you desired to convince me that my point of view is wrong and yours is correct. Hacker News isn't exactly the place for a debate about the rights and wrongs of communism, but I think the key principle is that everything has to open for discussion in a public place where adults can join in to debate differing points of view.
> "I have family in Paris who have steadily become more and more reactionary as the FN (the French far-right) have been given more exposure, even before these attacks."
What makes you think there must be a causational relationship between these two things? Or for that matter, if we assume for the moment that one did cause the other, how can you be sure which caused which? Perhaps the FN has become more and more mainstream as a result of more and more French citizens drifting towards the right.
> "And it's not an "opposing viewpoint" to me, it's just completely harmful."
I don't really understand why being an opposing viewpoint and being harmful are mutually exclusive to you. You do oppose their viewpoint (very strongly it seems), so it surely is an opposing viewpoint.
Everyone has their own different opinion on which policies and ideas are "objectively wrong and not things that are up for debate". Further, how can you even define terms like racism in ways that are not too broad or too narrow. The meaning of these things can change over time and context. For example debates about immigration, affirmative action etc.
Usually things that are vaguely stated aren't great for delineating as "objectively wrong" or not, since the definition can stretch in all kinds of ways.
Come up with something you want to maximize, that most people will agree with, like human health, and find ways to quantify it. Then you can at least start to see which policies lead to which results.
I'm more or less a French leftist but I really despise the stance of this side about freedom of speech.
This is what is ironic with the Charlie Hebdo situation because France and left parties here don't support real freedom of speech, but they always say they do.
I think any idea should be allowed to be expressed and anything less is counter-productive in the end.
I like this Noam Chomsky quote :
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
Having read Charlie Hebdo quite a few times, I often disagreed with them, or found their stuff disgusting but it sure made one think. Pointing out to the obvious ridiculousness of people taking themselves too seriously.
In a way, it is a way to protect ourselves from oppressive speech or at least to have other people adhere to the oppressive speech.
People take on the ideas to which they're exposed.
Do they? Where did the ideas come from in the first place, then, and how have they ever been rejected? I don't know enough about you personally to make any inferences in this case, but usually when a sentence like the above is spoken, it sounds like it was bowdlerized: the word "other" was clearly intended in front of the word "people."
If oppressive speech is to be suppressed--even in a post-revolutionary society--which platforms are to be policed? And with what resources? I'm reminded of John Milton's well-known metaphor, from "Areopagitica," of "that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate." To use another metaphor, ideas spread by every channel. Do you suppose we could dam them all?
I'd conjecture that people do, in fact, "take on ideas to which they're exposed". The proof is simple: if they didn't, marketing would never have come to be a multi-billion dollar industry.
That being said, this in no way implies that people are fated only to have the ideas to which they've been previously exposed or can't actively search out and take on new ideas.
This is no proof. You're assuming that the products and services marketed have little to no intrinsic or social value, and that the consumers do not engage with the marketing critically--on any level. Certainly we all know some people who seem to act as automatically as this, but I doubt I've ever met anyone who truly does.
You could say the exposure is necessary for the idea to be held. With marketing this is, of course, true. And in other aspects of life, certainly none of us comes into the world every morning with a blank slate of a mind. But would removing every expression of an idea, remove that idea? Perhaps in a generation's time? (It can't be done, but it's an interesting question to ask, all the same.) We do know that there was a time when certain hates--homophobia, for instance, to use an example from upthread--did not exist, at least not in a human mind. Yet they're here today. Did they require public fora?
I can be exposed to an idea or an advertisement and subsequently walk away from it, having rejected its worth or its relevance to me. Without having done so, I cannot claim any agency in my thinking. Whether this kind of agency is worth protecting is another question altogether. The liberal ideas of free speech assume that it is.
I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/critical faculties of the customers in an attempt to meet their internally generated needs. In addition, that often the purpose of marketing is to induce consumption on an irrational basis rather than a rational one. The resulting "intrinsic/social value" would then have been manufactured by the marketing process rather than having arisen from reasoned value judgments or needs met by the product but individually arrived at by the customers. To see that activating these mechanisms is the purpose of marketing requires a simple survey of the history of marketing and marketing literature.
This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over.
Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.
I think the major issue here is the implication that people are incapable of not taking on ideas to which they've been exposed. If this were Slashdot I imagine this whole thread would be peppered with the word "sheeple."
Well, we don't need to given these ideas a platform, sure. But I'm convinced that reasonable arguments and education are our best bet. Trying to completely suppress problematic ideas only makes them more appealing, because the question arises why they are suppressed.
Homophobic, racist, etc speech should be just as allowed as speech claiming the world is flat and 100 yrs old. The goal should be to have a society reasonable enough that flawed reasoning doesn't take hold, and instead just elicits an eye roll.
As an Australian, when the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard got up on stage a repeated the mantra "I am deeply offended by the leader of the opposition", referring to various things Tony Abbott had said, I suggested this was exactly the wrong approach for her to take and that she should have just rolled her eyes and laughed at him if she truly thought Tony is out of touch with the average Australia.
Not unpredictably I was shouted down by everyone in the room. Maybe this says something about the people I associate with. Perhaps.
If we disagree with someone why should we be offended? Wouldn't it be better to just say "I think that is a silly idea, lets move on", rather than heaping yet more attention on the opposing views.
I would possibly make an exception to my theorising above. When the marauding hordes are coming over the hill it might be time to dispense with the eye-rolling. It may be prudent to act prior to this occurring. I'm not convinced I know where we go from here.
You're right. Julia played the victim too much. If you're the elected leader of a country, even if you are the victim, you take the higher stance.
Being offended by Abbott, while a normal response, isn't something she should have mentioned. It makes the argument personal, and derails any possible logical argument.
Agreed. It's worth noting she wasn't elected Prime Minister, I mean not by the people. She got to that position via a leadership challenge, party politics.
> I don't know what's worse, McCarthyism or allowing unlimited growth of violent revolutionary ideas
But what if this kind of terrorist attacks actively seeks retribution? What if the attackers wanted to "stir the pot", to encourage violence against all Muslims as a way to legitimize their own role? "See how the infidels hate you? That's why we must continue our attacks".
In this sense, what does "disallowing violent revolutionary ideas" even mean? Attacking countries suspected of hosting Muslim terrorist groups? Interning suspects in illegal detention camps? Drone strikes? What other ways are there of "disallowing" violent ideas?
What if this is not about an abstract principle of freedom of expression (or lack thereof) but about not doing precisely what the terrorists want?
Small groups of violent extremists have no chance to overthrow a modern democracy, with or without a surveillance/security state.
The effect of those attacks is, however, pernicious if we let it be so. They are an excuse for authoritarians and reactionaries to build a surveillance/security state. And if a nation drifts into oligopoly and a weak well-managed "democracy lite" the pantywaist Hobbesians will defend that situation by saying "but but but... terrorism!"
The "mind viruses" should be fought with "mind antibiotics", not by killing the host. The idea that "thought viruses" will somehow spread without limits (in a liberal society) is a very elitist one, and there is no evidence for that.
The trouble is that whenever I have the opportunity to deliver "mind antibiotics", I'm delivering it to someone who doesn't really need it. And the ones who need it aren't likely to listen to me.
So, do you have an example of how these "mind antibiotics" work? I am seriously interested. This is a great idea, but how to execute it is a huge mystery to me.
The only mind antibiotic I know of is the undiluted truth. Its taste is unmistakeable, but it doesn't always go down easy. For example, learn evolutionary biology, and then evaluate the bipedal ape Homo sapiens as you would any other species. You will immediately find yourself very far off the political map. On the other hand, you will also be inoculated against the absurd shibboleths of all those who deny the truth about human nature—which nowadays is virtually everyone who matters.
> The only mind antibiotic I know of is the undiluted truth.
Please tell me you are aware of the irony in what you say?
How in the world do you plan to be able to figure out what is true and what is not? Those people you deride are quite sure that when they know is true, and they think you are the one with the lies.
How in the world do you plan to be able to figure out what is true and what is not?
Some people have a knack for it, but even then it takes practice. The tools are logic, reason, and evidence. Does that sound trite? It should. But we live in a world where, e.g., a straightforward application of evolutionary biology to H. sapiens immediately yields conclusions which, if you expressed them in an American workplace, would compel your employer to reprimand or fire you. When reporting the results of logic, reason, and evidence can get you fired, the trite becomes the profound.
Those people you deride
I derided no one. Calling absurd beliefs absurd isn't derision.
are quite sure that when they know is true
You assume a false symmetry. They are mistaken. I know this the same way I know that creationists are mistaken. Creationists may sincerely believe they are right, but it's not ironic to observe their error.
Just a little thought for you: Imagine you were born 300 years ago. Would you be as sure about yourself as you are now?
Of course you would be. You would be wrong, but you would be absolutely certain you were right.
As you mature you will realize the world is not as simple as you think.
Knowing the truth is not possible.
You are acting like a creationist. No real scientist would talk like you do - they would be humbled by knowing just how often they were wrong in the past. They would only strive to learn, they would never be certain they own the truth.
What a rich combination of condescension and sophistry! You write as if having confidence on some subjects is the same as thinking you know the truth about them all. And you guess that those with the temerity to express the belief that, e.g., evolution is true (even when applied to H. sapiens!) are arrogant youths who don't yet understand that 300 years ago people believed lots of things that turned out to be wrong. No "real" scientist would talk that way, but don't worry, "you will mature."
Well. My confidence is born of study and reflection, not youthful arrogance. In fact, I am a middle-aged scientist (a real one!). I weight my degree of confidence according to my understanding of the evidence, reserving judgment when the evidence is insufficient to justify a strong conclusion. I'd guess you strive to do the same. Indeed, I'd bet you're confident that evolution is right, and you'd probably cut creationists even less slack than I would—which makes your "knowing the truth is not possible" pablum utterly disingenuous.
> lets ask the opposite question - can liberalism (or any normal person/society) be tolerant of the people/religion/groups/ideology/society which mass-kills people for cartoons (even if those depict a paedophilic Prophet like Muhammad enjoying zoophilia)?
You have the kernel of the answer here. The problem is that "tolerance" is being poorly defined. Am I being "tolerant" of those I disagree with as long as I don't stone them to death? Or do I also have to refrain from saying bad things about them? Or thinking bad things about them?
Murder is to be condemned by society. That's just ground truth. People who murder for religion are murderers. Their actions condemn them, not their religion. Religious motivation is no exculpation. Society has to be "intolerant" of murder and violence in order to be "tolerant" of everyone's ideas.
But there is no way to prohibit bad ideas in the same way as we prohibit violence because people don't agree which ideas are bad. Having whoever wields the biggest stick choose which ideas can't be discussed isn't tolerance, it's censorship.
Hear. Hear. Let's make sure that life in a free society is preserved no matter what threat it is put under.
I see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is calling for individuals and news media organizations to respond to the Charlie Hebdo attack too, and I hope they follow her suggestions.[1]
A historical example I turn to about how to respond to grave national danger is that during the United States Civil War, the 1864 election occurred exactly on the expected schedule, and Abraham Lincoln was prepared to be voted out of office during the middle of the war. Of course in parliamentary systems elections do not occur at predictable intervals as they do in the United States constitutional system, but I've always thought that was a good example of how not to cave in to the temptation of self-benefit "for the sake of the country's stability" by delaying the election or something like that. Lincoln did invoke the power (a power granted by the Constitution from the beginning[2]) to suspend the right of habeas corpus during the War of Rebellion (as the Civil War was called by the Union at the time), but habeas corpus was restored as soon as the rebellion ceased.
We should cherish all of our freedoms all of the time and guard them zealously. We should exercise free speech to minimize the risk of future attacks like the attack in Paris, by openly disagreeing with the kind of thinking that leads to attacks like that.
We should exercise free speech to minimize the risk of future attacks like the attack in Paris, by openly disagreeing with the kind of thinking that leads to attacks like that.
I greatly appreciate your comments on this site, and worry I'm being obtuse, but I'm not sure what you feel is the "thinking that leads to attacks like this". I read Hirsi Ali as saying that we must band together and deliberately offend conservative Muslim sensibilities to protect free speech. This seems greatly at odds with many of the tenets of modern multiculturalism. Are you suggesting that we need to move away from the form of multiculturalism that grants power to the violent fundamentalist?
Multiculturalism, modern or otherwise, is impossible if offensive speech from any one group is not tolerated by any other. (They don't have to like it, merely tolerate it. They should be free to speak out against it, but not to respond to mere words with violence.) We can't just resolve to avoid offense. We need to be able to tolerate offense.
If any group in a multiculturalist society cannot do this, then we must either built up their tolerance to offense, or look back on our objectives and reevaluate if they are realistic.
The idea of having to worry about offending people at all costs is silly.
If there was a group that murdered people for using the color purple, I'm sure tons of people and companies would proudly display people. Why should it be any different here? Why cower because someone might be offended over some arbitrary rule?
Because unlike the color purple, the Islamic community of France is an oppressed underclass. If this was a bunch of racist stereotypes of blacks, would our answer be to continue to publish racist trash?
These things can offend more than just extremists. Obviously this massacre is absolutely terrible, but the content of Charlie Hebdo regarding Islam was extremely offensive, and served mainly to increase the isolation of the French Muslim community
Please dont equate mockery of a set of beliefs with mockery and oppression of a set of people based on genetic traits. I guarantee the French Muslims have not gone through a fraction of what blacks have gone through in terms of outright physical violence and state-sanctioned oppression.
If anything France, and Europe as a whole, seem more than welcoming to muslims, at least from an immigration and social safety net perspective.
Belief systems from Christian to Muslim to atheism must be subject to public criticism and mockery in a free society without threat of violence. People who dont feel this way should be free to leave.
France is not a free society in the same way America is. French people are happy to live under many more restrictive laws but we don't often see it. For instance, Charlie Hebdo's staff could have gone to prison if they had published a cartoon mocking the holocaust. Some people's offense is treated as more valuable than others in France.
In “America”, laws forbid people drink beer in public. Not old, forgotten laws: policemen use these everyday as reason to arrest and search people in the street.
In fact, in recent weeks, did US courts not repeatedly find nothing illegal had happened when the police executed someone who was standing in the street not being a danger?
France is not perfect but you need to get out more if you think “America”, as you call it, is better.
I was just thinking about freedom of speech. I don't deny America has a problem with police violence. It has a bigger problem with violence in general too.
It is still quite bizarre that not being in France, I can safely say "The holocaust didn't happen" But a French person is at risk of having their online identity discovered, then imprisoned just for making a political claim like that. This is really quite scary.
I think this connection is not as arbitrary as you make it out to me.
The intersection between muslims and Arabs is pretty large. I'm not sure the same secular identity politics exists in the Middle East as exist in America.
Beyond that, the Civil Rights movement in America had 3 feet in Islam. I think the comparison is an appropriate one.
Orthodox Islam, to the extent that it was effective in the US Civil Rights movement in the 60s, had its start with Malcolm X and its end with Clarence 13x and his founding of the Five Percent Nation, which is a rejection of Islam at its most fundamental level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_13X It replaces the "Mystery Spook" Allah and the Prophet Muhammed with the individual himself "A.l.l.a.h" (arm, leg, leg, arm, head) which is an acronym of a human being. There is no god, other than the living person. This is nothing more than atheism with a healthy dose of Randian objectivism. I fail to see the "3 feet" you mention here.
You're right in that the oppression is not as systematic. I made the comparison to something universally recognised, but it was exaggerated.
I am not arguing against freedom of speech, but I am arguing for not buying magazines that promote such damaging stereotypes (just like I recognise that far-right parties can exist , but will never donate a cent to them).
The issue for me, is that as a society we trumpet freedom of religion, but to me it seems like this is only accepted so long as your skin is white to go along with it. The attacks on islam do translate to attacks on people from the Middle East.
Most people assume that if you're from Turkey you're probably muslim (even if in name only). The firebombed kebab shop the day after that attack: nobody knows whether the guy was actually muslim, but it doesn't matter to the attackers because this is really a race problem, and not a religion problem.
Hmm, yeah, if people were executed for putting on blackface, it seems a good protest might have people putting on blackface. The point being that even if you normally wouldn't be "offensive" you would to make it clear that offending people is far less important than executing them.
I also like how these cartoons are extremely offensive, as if that has any bearing on anything. Perhaps people shouldn't invent rules that makes them so offended? Like that Onion article about "no one was killed over this image".
I think the idea that we can fight extremism with freedom of speech is wishful thinking. There's very clear indication that pictures as those published not only increase extremism in muslim communities, but also in far-right groups. I also think we are being a bit arrogant if we think that it's a few pictures and not global conflicts that are the main reasons for the existence of these attacks.
So attackers that explicitly call out "offensive" materials as the reason for their attacks are simply unaware of their own motives? The calls for Rushdie to be killed was due to global conflicts, not his writings?
Let's keep in mind that shifts in zeitgeist can shift somewhat quickly --the rise or decline of racism, or the rise or decline of women's rights (say in Russia or China). Things can change due to how people perceive things... but at the same time I don't think anyone outside those societies are or should feel responsibility for how societies change with change in the world...
It'd be like saying, yeah, Japan in the 70s - 80s was at fault for the steel workers in America feeling alienated, emasculated and crushed. No, absolutely not. We needed to adjust, not the Japanese. The world at large changes, you need to change with it.
They are aware of their own motives, but they are probably not aware of why they have those motives in the first place. Offensive materials drive a person to violence, but the question you should ask is "what created this type of person, who kills over a cartoon?"
Note that this does not excuse the actions of the murderer. They are still responsible and still must be punished. But you can punish murderers for their crimes, and adjust your policy so that you don't create so many murderers. They are not exclusive goals.
I'm not so sure about that. What _drove_ the Spanish to drive out the Arabs from Iberia and execute those that stayed behind? What made them act like that? Or what made the Huns go and conquer half of Europe and kill about half of those and subjugate the rest? Was there something which could have prevented that had the Europeans just been different in some way?
Sure, I agree! The policy of being polite, of not calling people out on inane beliefs is what generates these problems. We have failed as a civilization where someone ends up believing it's OK to kill someone for renouncing their faith, for instance.
Which was reiterated in the courts in 2004 in Hamdi vs Rumsfeld:
> Though no single opinion of the Court commanded a majority, eight of the nine justices of the Court agreed that the Executive Branch does not have the power to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without basic due process protections enforceable through judicial review.
Interesting - makes me wonder whether the same thing could happen today. That is, are there circumstances where the US military might side with the president over the constitution?
My (hastily written) email to the EFF on this issue:
=====
"Even as we mourn the losses at Charlie Hebdo, we must be wary of any attempt to rush through new surveillance and law enforcement powers, which are likely to disproportionately affect Muslims ..."
May I suggest the following thought experiment?
Imagine if Hebdo staff had been murdered by Neo-NAZIs (it's certainly within the realm of possibility; the publication skewered the political right as much as it did other groups like Muslims, and fascist groups are known for their love of violence).
Would you be decrying the possibility that new laws might disproportionately effect Neo-NAZIs?
There are many parallels between the politics of Islam and the politics of National Socialism: the rejection of individualism, the anti-semitism, the subordination of all aspects of life to the philosophy, the hero-worship of the leader, etc. etc.
The fact that most Muslims are not actively engaged in Jihad has parallels with the observation that most Germans during WWII weren't actively fighting for the NAZI party. To support an evil philosophy is morally wrong, regardless of whether that philosophy is or is not
religious in nature.
I'm particularly saddened to see the EFF join in the pretence that Islam, in and of itself, is worthy of respect. The philosophy, and the mainstream religious movement itself, is inimically opposed to the freedoms you seek to protect.
I agree that the phrasing was debatable. Replacing the words: "affect muslims" with "affect everyone" would have been more precise and less biased.
But the comparison you just made, equaling todays regular law abiding muslings with passive nazi onlookers in the third-reich, is delusional from a historical standpoint, and despicable from a diplomatic one.
The state fuelled propaganda targeting the jew population after the German economic struggles was a majority culture fuelled by state propaganda that created a scapegoat with racial overtones.
Most muslim "anti-semitism" in the west today stems from a frustration with israels war policy. Not an inherent racial doctrine.
Comparing Jihad to State sponsored activities like SS or Hitler Jugend makes no sense.
Jihad in western countries is created mostly with foreign training, money and initiative springing from international social media.
Being active in the the Nazi army was for most people forced conscription, completely outside of personal volition, e.g. Hitler Jugend, SS etc.
Nazism and Radical Islam are of course both extremely right-wing, conservative and fascistic in their nature. They share a lot of common traits, but their roots and causes doesn't compare.
Lets be careful before we compare all of our fellow muslim citizens with Nazi sympathizers shall we?
Re. anti-semitism in Islam: to claim that it's a response to Israeli politics is utterly false. It has existed in the religion for centuries, in a similar fashion to anti-semitism in Catholicism.
Re. conscription: participation in Jihad is mandatory in Islamic states. Currently, volunteer Mujahideen are fighting an asymmetric war against Western countries on their own soil. Those who volunteer to fight are in fact more morally culpable than those conscripted into service.
"Utterly false". How do you know that? Yes i to can link to a long wikipedia article about Christianity and Antisemitism. Long wiki lists doesn't count as arguments.
I don't believe most modern anger against jews stems from religious doctrine, i really do believe it stems from a more general sense of frustration with western foreign policy.
All religions hate on each other. I know you want to pick out islam as the root of much evil but i just do not agree with how the whole debate is being framed.
I myself am not religious and probably share a good deal of opinions with you. But i have come to despise the way the "new-atheism" conducts itself. It creates tensions and stops conversation. It focuses a beam so narrow, the public discourse has become one dimensional.
The current discourse in atheistic communities, and lately also the general consensus in the media - of deriving some sorts of inherent psychological constants from islam, is detrimental from an academic perspective. It disregards so many other factors at play other than the religion itself e.g. geography, local culture, economics, foreign policies, geopolitics, history etc. People and cultures are different, everywhere.
Do you think most muslims practice their faith based on intense historical investigation and religious reading? And do you think that they come to the same conclusions? They don't.
Most muslims get cherry picked info. They read a little, some don't, many gets lots of info from moderate imams, few get loads of material from radical imams. Some are Sunni, some are Shia, some left-wing like parts of the kurds, some are progressive like much of the youth in Iran. Many people have daily battles with the radical parts of islam all over the middle east. The Arab Spring was a strong testament to this. I have met many progressive muslims from all over the middle east over the years. Highly educated, well spoken. Many of them still cultural muslims whoms most fundamental problems with the west stems from the incessant and extremely detrimental foreign meddling in the middle east.
Several countries in the middle east were pretty progressive before war tore them apart in the mid to late twentieth century. Proxy warfare between the US and Russia. CIA funding of assorted radicals up through the decades, coups that lead to theocracies. Israels wars that lead to a radicalisation of large parts of the muslim youth. And western alliance with the largest promoter of radical islam, Saudi Arabia.
Furthermore the incredibly incompetent way the US war machine played out Shia against Sunnis, and therefore directly aided the creation of ISIS today.
the list goes on. Watch the frontline documentaries on Iraq or Isis to get a gist of how catastrophic the western countries still act to this day.
All of these factors and more, have now created this radical, angry and war-damaged version of Islam, that now clashes increasingly with western values.
My point is that i think it is extremely detrimental to focus on Islam as some sort of absolute culprit of the atrocious acts, rather than create an explanatory model with the myriad of factors spanning a century, that has made certain groups of people come this.
> Most muslim "anti-semitism" in the west today stems from a frustration with israels war policy. Not an inherent racial doctrine.
That is 100% completely untrue. The evidence is that ordinary Egyptians who loath the Palestinians, and have a peace treaty with Israel STILL hate the Jews.
Muslims are willing to tolerate Jews if the Jews are in the position of subordinate, but as soon as the Jew "lifts his head" as it were that tolerance vanishes (the Jews living in Iran is a great example of this).
So what you are saying is that because parts of the Egyptian population, dislike palestinians but still hate jews, their anger must surely stem from inherent religious traits.
That is just a bad chain of logic.
Rather a the much more logical and broad explanation that _Israel is Egypts freaking neigbhoor_ and has been attacked by israel several times over the years.
Off course the vast majority in Egypt will have a problem with jews after several wars. This is what i am talking about in my other posts. To create an explanatory model from one factor, religion, is pathetic, especially when you realize that these two groups of people has been neighboors at war.
That the situation would be different if israel did not have such and incredibly bad relationship with the whole region.
Is it difficult to contort your brain into such backwards logic?
First I notice you have no reply to what I said about Iran.
Second, "has been attacked by Israel"? Really? Or perhaps, attacked Israel because they hate Jews so much?
"Have been neighbors at war"? The last war was 41 years ago! That's a long time to hold on to hate.
And yet somehow, the Jews in Israel do not hate the Egyptians. What makes them different? According to you they have a much better reason for it, considering things like the Yom Kippur war.
Your convoluted logic is backwards and wrong.
> That the situation would be different if israel did not have such and incredibly bad relationship with the whole region.
It's bizarre how you try to somehow make their hate, Israel's fault.
Why are you so agressive in your argumentation that the conflict is so black and white?
I am not saying it is israels fault. I am saying that many people of middle eastern origin are very against the way israel conducts itself. And that this factor probably has more weight when people of middle eastern descend decides to hate jews.
This stands weather or not you agree with that opinion. I am not excusing hatred towards jews. It's incredible that you need to inform people on this. Trying to find models of explanation is not the same excusing any parts of that model.
I am also stating that it is both intellectually dishonest, and dangerous to ascribe complex cultural mechanisms such as animosity towards israel and jews to single factors like "It's just because they hate jews", and not complex web of historical and cultural factors.
Also you sound extremely bigoted when you say "they just attacked israel because they hate jews so much". Come on.
Also you highlight the Yom Kippur war. The six-day war was 6 years prior, and Israel attacked first. You can always cherry pick and make it look like someone started.
Lastly, i have a few israeli friends. They all loathe their own foreign policy as do large parts of the israeli population.
> Most muslim "anti-semitism" in the west today stems from a frustration with israels war policy. Not an inherent racial doctrine.
The claim is false.
Why does it matter that the claim is false? Because it goes toward solutions. If your claim was true then solving the problems with Palestinians would solve the hatred.
But since your claim is false this will not happen. There is in fact nothing Israel can do to stop the hate except not exist. (The subordinate thing I mentioned earlier.)
They hate Jews not for their religion (I should have clarified that), but for existing as a strong nation. But their hate is directed toward Jews, not just toward Israel.
> Also you sound extremely bigoted when you say "they just attacked israel because they hate jews so much". Come on.
It's also true. Yes, they wanted territory and such, but why did the population support the attack?
> The six-day war was 6 years prior, and Israel attacked first
You are cherry picking yourself. Egypt closed the straights first, and started massing for war. Historians agree that Egypt was the belligerent here.
> Lastly, i have a few israeli friends. They all loathe their own foreign policy as do large parts of the israeli population.
Toward Egypt? No they do not. The Israeli population wants peace, that is why they are upset. But they do not loathe the policies, they loath that nothing has been solved.
Especially after the utter failure that was the withdrawal from Gaza Israelis no longer really believe peace is possible. There is nothing Israel can do to accomplish it, except not exist.
Ok so we actually agree in that much of the animosity towards jews stems, not from an inherent theological constant in islam but rather the israeli conflict situation and other regional factors. This was what i was trying to communicate, because the discussion started with a ridiculous comparison to nazi ideology.
It sounds like you really just don't like muslims because they are on the opposite side of the israel-palestine conflict.
Personally i agree that the situation is terrible, and quite a mess. But if you can't see there are several groups, factors, policies, wars and incidents to blame/explain the current situation you are blinded by the israeli perspective.
There are always two sides of the story in conflicts that span decades.
Lastly the israeli population is pretty divided in their political leanings and observations. Some are hardliners and certainly will sacrifice short-term peace in return of a total take over. A large part of the more progressive youth are split in their views, especially after mandatory IDF conscription. Parts of the large minority are frustrated with the hardliner rhetorics, still others cry for a more agressive stance.
It seems to me that you ignore the nuances of regional conflicts.
One of them being that Israel has not made any note worthy mistakes that would lead to any hatred towards them, which is ridiculous to expect in conflict with continous hot warfare, spanning several decades, and with a death toll much, much higher on the palestinian side.
> Ok so we actually agree in that much of the animosity towards jews stems, not from an inherent theological constant in islam but rather the israeli conflict situation and other regional factors.
Not quite. It doesn't stem from Israel, it stems from Jews (and other groups too!) raising their heads up and not being subservient. Israel is an example of this, but not the cause of this.
Your claim is that it is because of Israel, as I said before this claim is wrong.
Muslims do not have a problem with the Jewish religion, but they do have a problem with Jews.
You abhorred the comparison to Nazis, and the comparison is not completely valid. But there is one thing in common: Both groups believe themself to be superior to all others.
You are wrong when you think Muslim antisemitism is because of Israel.
It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind.
First of all, I completely disagree. You yourself admit the email was hastily written and that tells me you didn't take the time to actually consider the opposing point of view.
I'm not religious, myself. I know several muslims though, all believers to varying degrees. They all think very differently from one another and have completely different opinions about various parts of islam. One thing they do have in common is that they all condemn those attacks as heinous, disgusting and a disgrace for those people to consider themselves muslims.
You talk about an "evil philosophy" as if this is what islam intended. Plenty of murders and bombings, even genocides, have been committed in the name of a much more popular religion, yet I'm fairly certain you do not think of that religion as an "evil philosophy".
And if you do, please consider that everyone, no matter their philosophy, also have the freedoms you talk about. Those freedoms do in fact include the freedom of faith.
Your reasoning regarding your own thought experiment is flawed. In this world, neo-nazis do not have to fear consequences to such actions. At least not theoretically (which is what your thought experiment suggests), and because neo-nazism is kept off the mainstream media, unlike islam in some countries.
Neo-nazism is not a religion. It's easy to drop the N-bomb on islam comparisons but a lot harder to justify it once you get past the fairly childish prejudice that "they're both extremist mindsets, so they're the same". You've drawn some parallels that most muslims have nothing to do with. Will you find a lot of neo-nazis that follow nazism because they find peace and understanding of the universe in it?
I could argue a long time on how this logic is flawed but I'm fairly certain it won't go anywhere. I just hope that you, personally, appreciate that an extreme majority of muslims aren't merely passive about such behaviour, they're very actively against it and revolted by it. What do you think they can do about it, exactly? Stop believing in their own god? You're removing their freedom of faith if you ask that of them.
I was actually heartwarmed by the european response to the attacks, they have been my own personal light of the past 12 months. I've seen that my country of birth is not as bigoted as I thought, and that its media is in a much better state than I suspected. All of this because they did, in fact, all made a point to make the difference between those wastes of DNA that perpetrated the attacks, and the religion as a whole.
Please don't make the mistake France avoided.
PS: I upvoted you because I'm hoping for some decent discussion on the issue here. I hope others do the same.
"It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind."
You'd be surprised, I think. I've changed my mind several times on this issue, and I'm still mulling it over. That email represented my current thinking on the matter, quite directly given the speed with which it was written.
This is _another_ rushed reply, & I'd like to reply later in more detail if time permits.
Some background: I'm an atheist, and I don't (or at least I try not to) distinguish between religious and non-religious philosophies. I happen to think that the greatest religious evil in the world today is perpetrated by Christians against Africa, by way of a prohibition on contraception.
Re. freedom of faith, take one example. If your philosophy mandates the execution of apostates, then your philosophy is evil. If you choose to belong to it, to support it, then you yourself are supporting evil even if only by lending it your moral sanction.
This is true regardless of whether your philosophy is religious, or not.
If your God tells you to murder apostates, then yes, in order to be a decent human being, you need to reject your God - [edited to add]: or, at the very least, find an interpretation of your religion that rejects that mandate. Another example: if you're Catholic, acknowledge the torment and suffering that your religion is inflicting upon the poor in Africa, and change denomination to one that allows contraception.
It seems as though you are giving Islam special treatment by virtue of it being a religion.
(Disclaimer: I'm an atheist myself. I'll try to make this as coherent as possible, bear with me.)
"Everyone has a right to their opinion", as long as it remains an opinion. Right? But let's elaborate a bit on that.
Some background first: We, as humans, most likely will never really know the answers to the very existential questions in the universe. If you start asking "Why?" a lot, go all the way outside of the bounds of society, you'll find a lot of very weird questions that you would think you'd get an obvious answer to, but it always tends to come down to "because that's how we defined it".
An extreme example: "Why is killing bad?" - An easy question to answer within the bounds of a functional society, but it's not easy to keep answering it if you remove that boundary. Since you're a fan of thought experiments: Many insect species' females eat their mates after copulation. What if our society evolved from such a basis and never quite got past it? You would face the same challenges explaining why not eating your mate would be positive for an established society. (Fun weekend project: Read post-apocalyptic books while keeping such considerations in mind. Authors tend to have a field day with these questions...)
Okay, now that that's out of the way: We, humans, do get to define our own ideologies. We get to define what is good and bad, because unlike with mathematics/physics, nature does not dictate rules for philosophy.
What I personally believe is that for those potential ideologies to have a chance to prosper, we must never remove their voices. You can choose not to listen to them, but removing the opportunity for them to spread could in fact remove a change for the better. Just like it could prevent a change for the better, but then we go back to the argument earlier: who are we to judge what is good and what is bad? We get to define it, but those that come after us may disagree. At least we have a choice.
So no, I'm not giving islam special treatment, I'm just careful of not removing its voice, as much as I can disagree with some of its ideologies (and agree with some others).
This is a very tough subject. We don't know where the lines are, different people tend to put them in different places. The law is what we've chosen to draw the lines for us, and we change it all the time. But without differing opinions (christianity, islam, vegetarianism, nazism, kopimism, ...), we can't ever hope to change.
And isn't change the reason we are here, exchanging experiences and ideas?
People here live in a bubble. We're afraid of an orwelian society, but in the case of france, we're still unable to catch those guys eventhough they :
- killed people in the center of Paris, including cops protecting the area.
- left their id card at the back of the car
- had 2 car accident while running away inside Paris and changed the car twice
- stopped at a gas station a few kilometers away from paris to get some gas,where the owner recognized them.
- were already under monitoring by the counter terrorism, for having tried to go to war in iraq ten years ago.
- have 8000 cops chasing them all over the country, and 24 hours later, they lost their tracks, for the second time.
We don't live in an orwelian society. We REALLY don't.
1)
The inability to instantly catch potentially well trained and prepared people on the run in a large capital, does not exclude a surveillance state.
2)
The revelations of the recent years has not garnered so much attention because of live tracking abilities, but because of the intelligence services almost incredible omnipresence, their ability to store and therefore retrieve data over many years and lastly the enormity, sophistication and agression of the whole endeavour.
You should know that if you have followed the debate even slightly.
3)
Plenty of people in the hacker and rights communities has pointed to the fact that the this grand effort will probably both be failing in catching terrorists with enough technical training and be used to target non-terrorist activity in the end, i.e. regular citizens.
Your argument is a classic straw-mans argument.
*added
4)
For me to grasp that technically minded individuals like yourself, is accusing the vast majority of the most intelligent people in the computer science community of crying wolf, and to be living in a fantasy after the ever increasing revelations over the past years - is very difficult.
Arguments like yours based on completely made up premises makes me hope people like you are either a paid shills, completely out of the loop or just an infinitely small minority.
We need to stand up for our rights more than ever today.
> We don't live in an orwelian society. We REALLY don't.
1. This is France, so it really only speaks to how things are happening in France. The majority of the people on this site are probably concentrated in Bay Area, which is not in France. Life in East Germany under the Stasi was pretty bad, but it also didn't describe conditions everywhere.
2. You could almost view this in the same light as DRM on media. The criminals easily skirt it, but the normal people are left paying the price (a degraded experience in the case of DRM; a watchful government eye in the case of surveillance).
Exactly, in Orwellian societies there should always be an enemy to justify more control and surveillance. Even better if they are on the run for a while then later you can pull them out for the 2 minutes of hate. Wars on Terrorism, terror cells, terrorists in caves, Eastasia/Eurasia, and on and on are used to beef up defense, tracking and police force through fear.
I was watching a BBC documentary on Vikings and they cited multiple occurrences of early British leaders using the threat of Viking invasions in order to influence the populace. But the number of occurrences of invasions actually taking place in historical records are nearly non-existent.
So to further this point, the threat doesn't actually have to be tangible or to actually have taken place to be well utilized.
Considering the vast number of tangible, actually occurring, problems that are being neglected there seems to be a long history of poor resource allocation in human culture thanks to fear.
Well it's just more proof that mass surveillance doesn't work...to catch terrorists or those willing to commit massacres. If someone wants to go at a subway station tomorrow and start stabbing random people or shooting them (especially in US), a surveillance state isn't going to stop that.
What does work, however, is being able to use mass surveillance for economic espionage, high-level blackmail, spying and building cases against activists and those wanting to "harm the government" (in a "revealing the truth" kind of way), selective oppression, and so on.
Perhaps that makes it even more terrifying though; a society with Orwellian capabilities (surveillance, spying, death and imprisonment) but without that singularity of vision or execution? These capabilities in the hands of people who frankly don't deserve to be within an ocean's width of power is what I fear, not the society as depicted in 1984 itself.
I understand your frustration that those guys have not been caught yet (they will eventually) but now I feel the same frustration but didn't we know that "anti-terrorism" laws and surveillance are ineffective in practice ? I remember this objection being made at the time these laws were proposed.
Then again this is actually beneficial to a surveillance state as this can be used to put even more surveillance and get the population to accept it.
This is no different as using CP and piracy as pretexts for Internet censorship, or from a web company running on investor story time admitting that advertising revenue currently sucks but this means there is much room for improvement.
If you drank the koolaid and actually believe that surveillance was effective in preventing terrorism or catching terrorists afterwards, well I'm sorry you got duped.
i'm sorry but the argument saying that surveillance would only affect innocent civilians is just as sily as saying it would only affect terrorists. Either the state has the effective ability to track people's activity, or it doesn't.
My comment was just to show that, currently, the state's ability to monitor people ( in general, in france) is, contrarely to what all the posts about privacy on HN tend to suggest,still very very limited.
The two suspects were identified and the manhunt began because an ID one of them left behind in their car. Police arrest the wrong person? Sure, but the ID wasn't faked to lead them to someone else or anything like that according to any reporting I've seen.
> His identification card was found in the vehicle abandoned after Wednesday's attack, Cazeneuve said.
> "It was their only mistake," Dominique Rizet, BFMTV's police and justice consultant, said earlier.
Also worth mentioning: The authorities already knew the subjects. The supposedly even had recent warnings regarding Charlie Hebdo. They have had police officers there for a long time, too. And for most cases of terrorism in the last decades it was the same.
Generally, the police usually knows about the suspects before. They just can't do much before they commit a crime. The unwarranted surveillance of everyone can't possibly prevent attacks by people who already were filtered anyway. Much better to invest the budget in classical targeted intelligence and police work and into improving the response _if_ something has happened.
The general population has been sold a bill of goods by those in power that those in power cannot possible make good on. As long as there are small groups of armed individuals, highly motivated and unmoved by the fear of laws or death, a government cannot guarantee the general populations safety.
Only when the people finally come to understand this fact and decide to make good on the need to provide their own protection will you see a change in the reaction to these events.
This idea is what continues to drive the gun vs. anti-gun movement in the USA. Individuals still want to be able to provide for their own protection, while the other side wishes that we rely upon government to provide that protection.
Like it or not the unarmed police officers on bikes were just more sheep sent to the slaughter by a government that had convinced the people that it could provide for their safety. When it not only failed totally, but is still failing today as the people are no safer then they were yesterday.
It's also interesting to see how American media is reacting to this attack, in a manner that's completely opposite of how the French media reacted, or other journalists in other countries.
Just like with the Sony threat, Americans seem ready to holds their hands up at any threat now:
The best way to hurt the terrorists is not to kill them. They want to die for their cause. It's to show that you are not afraid of them. Terrorist attacks are meant to create "terror" in populations, so the population or its government react a certain way.
The US gov/population is reacting exactly the wrong way to terror attacks. France or Norway (that massacre a couple of years back) reacted the right way. Being "scared of offending the terrorists" is exactly what the terrorists are going for, and if it works once, why not try it again when something else offends them?
So the US is now "soft on terror"? This isn't what I recall happened after the attacks on the WTC on 9/11 or on the Murrah Building in OKC. In one of those cases, the US launched a "global war on teror" along with an invasion of a country thousands of miles from home.
The US can be blamed for making a lot of mistakes regarding terrorism, but I don't think being too gentle is one of them.
I think its more an issue of being hyper-motivated by the fear of terrorism than being "soft on terror". Both cowering under the bed and sacrificing freedoms to domestic authoritarians while dropping bombs all over the world can be manifestations of the sensitivity to fear of terrorism.
but America hasn't had any real serious internal terrorist (using the term loosely) threats for 70+ years.
Europeans are far more used to violence like the PIRA/UDA in NI Eta in Spain and the RAF in Germany. For example I know two people going through the truth and reconciliation process in NI.
And if I had had to goto NI on business during the troubles I would have to be very careful about where I went and who I told who I worked for - the down side of working for "crown forces" let alone that I was the product of a mixed marriage.
> along with an invasion of a country thousands of miles from home
The U.S. didn't invade Iraq as a response to terrorism. They invaded Iraq because of the threat of "Weapons of Mass Destruction". Many people just assumed Iraq was behind 9/11 simply because the government wanted to invade them after 9/11, and the government did little to dispel that mistaken notion. And we all found out that Iraq having "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in the first place was a mistaken notion as well.
> The U.S. didn't invade Iraq as a response to terrorism.
Fear of terrorism was one of the reasons for public support of the war and it was heavily pushed in the pro-war propaganda.
> They invaded Iraq because of the threat of "Weapons of Mass Destruction".
In the run-up to war, both supposed direct ties between the Iraqi regime an al-Qaeda (and direct ties between Iraq and one of the 9/11 attack specifically) and the threat that if Iraq acquired WMDs it might transfer them to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups for use against the US were trumpeted. WMD and terrorism are not mutually exclusive motivations for war.
The supposed connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda (including a supposed link between Iraq and 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta) was still be trumpeted months after the 2003 war began, even just before the 9/11 Commission issued its finding that no such connection existed. [0]
Remember that the "airplanes are hijacked and flown into buildings" model was neutralized on the morning of 9/11/2001. It only worked three times, the fourth time it was attempted, that same morning, it failed.
With that in mind, consider the massive overreaction to that specific type of threat. Entire government agencies were created to combat it, despite it already being solved.
As free speech advocates, we mourn the use of violence against individuals who used creativity and free expression to engage in cultural and political criticism. Murder is the ultimate form of censorship
It always amaze me why do world want to practice freedom of expressions against Islam only. Why not one is allowed to mock Holocaust like things by using same tool of freedom of expression?
Too soon. The main dudes are still out there, and now there's some warning about legislation? You can't warn about consequences when the wound is so fresh -- we're still in emotional-trying-to-process-land.
I saw this after 9/11... people protesting generically against war on 9/12 in SF. I normally am a big supporter of the EFF but this feels out of touch with reality.
The legislation that enabled the perpetual state of not-quite-war the US has been in since then[1] was passed after a memorial ceremony mere days after 9/11. The text itself was drafted within less than a day after the events.
The terrorists, the various governments, people killing each other, the EFF, the predictable media response, the endless commenting and discussing by everyone who has a keyboard--as if what they have to say really matters--and the fact that nothing will change. Absolutely nothing.
Interesting! I didn't follow the Tiny Doo story too closely but read more after you posted.
Except I am not sure what you mean. Are you saying that people SHOULD be mad that we're prosecuting Brandon Duncan because of his published work? I'm assuming that's what you mean, and if so, I suppose I agree.
Let's call a spade a spade here. Government's don't care even a little about protecting their people with the surveillance bills that come from events like this. They're just using events as an excuse to grab power from the people. We all know that. If they did care, they'd be pouring money into driver-less cars to reduce road fatalities. Let's stop even attributing decency and sense to government actions and just admit they're power grabs.
The EFF is already probably too aggressive/extreme in their messages for most of the public, so I see why they say it this way. But we don't have to be PC about it. This article should be titled "Governments, please mar the trajectory at Charlie Hebdo by claiming you care about it."
Some of what you said carries merit but it overall smacks of rash overgeneralizations. Most government actions start with good intentions at heart, but they are often gamed and manipulated to personal benefit by those capable of doing so.
Also, we can agree that much less should be spent on intelligence activities, but pouring money into driverless cars is a terrible example of what they "should" be spending money on.
It's fair that I'm not providing enough evidence here. I think we'd both agree they good intentions when they outlawed unpasteurized milk or made a patent system. It's hard to get clear evidence on intentions, but recent laws about internet surveillance of Americans that are justified by saying the prevent terrorism are pretty clearly not about terrorism. Before terrorism, there was the cold war, before that there were countries that might invade us, etc. History is littered with lies from governments about why they spy on their own citizens and most of the time governments and government officials seem to do it for their own gain and protection. In this sense, it's fair to assume the people doing it now are also doing it for that reason.
Also, I'll admit I don't want them doing driverless cars either, but it would at least be clearly intended to reduce fatalities. Perhaps medical research is a better example? You tell me.
These types of comments point to the problem which is a fundamental lack of trust between government and its citizens. Democracy, or any other type of government, cannot function if people do not have a basic trust in public institutions. Of course, government needs to earn that trust.
The problem is, you actually need an all-seeing surveillance state if you're going to mass-import millions of Muslims in to a non-Muslim country. The violence will keep getting worse as their numbers in Western countries grow and the spineless dhimmis continue to apologise for them. Unfortunately beyond a certain point (which we seem to have already passed) it is simply impossible to stop, no matter how efficient the state is at foiling their plots.
