Thread: Violent rhetoric and the shooting in AZ

Originally Posted by Mr. E

I agree with you on that as well. They do have a level of social responsibility above that of most that they betrayed. The gun imagery was tasteless and out of line, but at the same time within their rights to express. They shouldn't feel good about what they did, but hindsight is 20/20. Had they known that this woman was going to be shot they would not have done it. I don't feel as though any outrage should be directed at them just because of the shooting. Outrage on the grounds of it being tasteless in the first place is one thing, but retroactive anger is illogical.

I disliked it because it was tasteless in the first place and injected a violent overtone to political discourse. That's still why I dislike it after the shooting.

Originally Posted by Think

Mr E. can call me out if he feels that I'm misrepresenting, but it seems to me that he is following the classical view of British Enlightenment thinkers (i.e. Locke, Paine, Hume); actions are chiefly within the domain of the will, whilst memes (hardly classical philosophical parlance, but a wonderfully appropriate neologism) ought to be almost entirely unpoliced (he seems to want to draw the line, quite sensibly, at actual incitement to violence, hence the rather forced attempt to render an overwhelming amount of memetic parlance as metaphorical in content; I'm not referring to the specific Sharron Angle quote, which does strike me as obviously metaphorical, albeit hyperbolic and in bad taste (the result of polemicists everywhere, I think everyone from Crossfire to Christopher Hitchens would have to take some responsibility for this feature of discourse) but the general tenor of the last post he made). Note, in this position, the divorce that tends to occur between opinion and reason (you can say whatever you like in the spirit of partisan hackery, Christine O'Donnell is a witch and Obama was born in Kenya, but if you're actually talking in the forum of reason about the memes propagated by the tea party, then they must be judged in the most extremely positive light possible, lest we dilute the principle of freedom of speech)

I don't think... well first of all I don't think you should nest so many parenthetical phrases together unless you're actively trying to achieve the fogginess of most post-modernist philosophical treatises. This isn't German, where recursion ad nauseum, that is to such as degree as to obfuscate, perhaps with the intention of clarifying, though failing at this goal, meaning, or make a show, albeit a supercilious one of sophistication, perhaps in an attempt to distinguish oneself as philosopher extradinaire as opposed to those seemingly incapable of such extreme feats of sentence complexity, with clause, or maybe just sometimes, though I'm not certain as I am not a native German speaker, perhaps one from Dusseldorf, which is the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, a region in the Bundesrepublik, that would be "confederate republic" in English, of Germany, prepositional phrases, after clause after clause.

Understand? Does that make sense? Yeah it doesn't to me either.

Nor are such exhaustingly long and interminable complex sentences necessary. Writing isn't suppose to be a Chinese puzzle-box of parsing, as you've made it into, but should at all times cleanly and neatly express precisely what you intend with maximal concision.

Anyway, I'm surprised that you seem to not understand the general stance of Americans with regards to free speech. He and I both believe that reprehensible speech need not be viewed "in the most extremely positive light possible," but that it should not be policed. At the very least restrictions should be minimal. There are exceptions to this rule, as you mentioned direct, potentially serious threats of violence. I have to concede that sometimes it isn't clear if violence used in speech is metaphor or is a serious, direct threat to a person.

We rationalize this by believing that there must be open discussion and consideration of all ideas. It's symmetric application of the law with regards to all speech. Pardon the hyperbole of using the word "tyranny" here, but yes we think it will help ensure that there won't be a tyrannical suppression of ideas, either by government or any other large and powerful entity.

Gwahir, on the other hand, is taking the position of a sort of cultural determinism: acts of will are heavily influenced, if not determined, by the conceptual apparatus of a belief system and/or a culture (in fact, he may go so far as to question such a distinction between belief and act at all); therefore, there ought to be a system to call into account demagogues and memetic structures themselves (in some ways this is a predictable anglophone distinction between the USA and the later British territories: the USA was forged in the heat of British Empiricist thinking and is strongly puritan and nonconformist in culture; the remaining British territories are more influenced by cultural, religious and political pragmatism, the wishy-washyness of anglicanism is a perfect exemplar of this thinking; its strength is that opinion and reason are more strongly linked in the public forum, its weakness is in making principle bow to expediency (i.e. freedom of speech is a fine thing unless there's a problem with it; we oughtn't to censor the internet but...etc.etc.etc.))

ugh

So let's throw down the gauntlet: Mr. E, at what point ought the state to intervene against radicalised muslim clerics? Metaphorical language? Actual incitement to violence? Or not at all (i.e. only act against those who are/have perpetrating(ed) atrocities?

I'll answer this as well, since I am siding with my fellow American here.

As I said above, it's not always clear. Here is where Mr. E and I will probably part ways, as he is most likely in favor of a strong government policing presence: I think that usually the government should intervene only when such radicalized clerics provide active support to terrorist or other criminal activity.


EDIT: Whoops, I meant to give "federal republic" rather than "confederate republic" as the translation of "Bundesrepulik." I was listening to something on the radio about a slave revolt, so I guess I have the American Civil War on my mind...