I’m not talking about their motivation for not supporting Maher. I am saying that if they disagree with his making such statements anyway, then they are not being cowardly, even if their motivation is the fear of losing business.
Are you saying that you know that they probably agree with him? How can you possibly know this? Many people do not agree.
Flying into an unsuspecting pack of civilians, even if you’re sacrificing yourself, doesn’t really strike me as ‘brave’, nor stabbing to death a terrified stewardess. It strikes me as the act of a sociopath or psychotic.
Was it brave of Charles Whitman to hole himself up in the Texas tower and shoot unarmed people, even though it meant the police would eventually show up with rifles of their own? Doesn’t seem like it to me. Semantics aside, ‘bravery’ implies nobleness, while ‘cowardly’ implies backstabbing.
Wumpus wrote:
Perhaps you are right. There fore I will expound on my distaste for the “marketplace of ideas” argument. It is not only that it’s hackneyed (which it is), but also that it’s flawed. Carry the argument, in the context we are now debating, to its logical conclusion:
Unpopular idea gets expressed on televised forum. Advertiser pulls advertising. Repeat. The end result would be that only popular ideas get air time. Is that really the sort of “marketplace of ideas” our forefathers envisioned?
How does an idea ever become popular if the speaker is too afraid of his sponsor to air it? Some ideas that are unpopular at their inception may become popular and accepted over time, if they are allowed to be aired, rather than being plucked, unripe, from the vine.
I misunderstood your post IzzyR, sorry.
Even if everyody in the decision-making process at FedEx personally disagreed with Maher, my guess is that their decision to pull ads from PI was based on the fear of losing business, and not from their personal conviction. Or possibly, fear of losing their job for not making the decision that their superiors would consider “the right decision”. In either case, their own opinions very likely had nothing to do with their decision. It would in fact have been poor business practice for them to make the business decisions based on their personal opinions.
My humble opinion is that this was an act driven by fear, and hence cowardly by definition.
Who says there is a corporate responsinbility to support free speech? Corporations cannot be brave or cowardly, they can only protect the shareholders interests to the best of their ability. It isn’t a question of whether they act differently from what they truly believe because they don’t believe anything. They are a legal entity, that is all. even if the highest exdecutive on the comapny ladder agree in principle with Mahrer they generally have no right to use the company as a source of income as someone’s soapbox. This does not mean a company is always neutral, it simply means that when the situation is not on the margin but appears to have a substantial impact they have only one responsibility, the bottom line. There is nothing wrong with that at all.
Given that there are only a limited number of bandwidths available to broadcasters, and that broadcasters are using a public commodity under government license, and given that advertisers benefit from the resulting limited viewing choices available to consumers of broadcast television, then yes, I would say that corporations advertising on broadcast TV, at least, have some civic obligation to encourage free speech.
I would disagree with this. If you don’t stand up for someone doing something that you disagree with it is not cowardice, even if your motivation is fear.
But I’d rather not quibble about the meaning of the term cowardly. So let’s say in any event that it is not dishonorable. And there’s no reason to do otherwise.
Is there any way of discussing this topic without quibbling over semantics? I personally don’t think so.
If you take the literal meaning of coward and consider the etymology (to turn-tail) then yes - I agree that the terrorists were not cowards - evil, fucked-up zealots, yes… Cowards, no. A sneak attack isn’t necessarily cowardly. The element of surprise is highly valued by any military force, regardless of the target.
Honor is a little harder to define, as it implies subjective intent. If the sponsors pulled out because of fear of lost revenue, that’s cowardly - good business sense, but cowardly. If they did it because they found Maher’s comments to be against the principles of the major stockholders (yes - I think they probably have principles) then it’s honorable.
It sounds like Maher’s problems stem from the use of a poor example. Distance from your target has little to do with the issue anyway, and he shouldn’t have implied that our military actions = cowardice by any definition.
Personally, I believe that the sponsors realized that Maher’s comment was innapropriate, and they wished to distance themselves from the controversy - to protect both their honor (good name) and their profits.
So…[ol]
[li]The terrorists were not cowards in the strict sense of the word.[/li][li]The sponsors are not cowards, either.[/li][li]Maher screwed up.[/li][/ol]
Cowards? For sacrificing themselves to what they believed was a greater good, no; for flying planes into buildings full of innocent people, yes. Warriors? Yes, but warrior != hero! Call them cowards, call them warriors, but no one thinks they were men who should be celebrated for their actions.
And, as someone said, it’s called “Politically Incorrect” for a reason, and Maher is one of the freshest things on television. Besides, he agreed with someone else - why isn’t the guest being lambasted instead of the host? All he does is steer and participate in the conversation.
Esprix
Let me throw out a WAG about FDX. They may have been less worried about losing business than about ticking off their pilots and may have been personally outraged at the top of the company.
Federal Express Corp. was started by a Navy flier. They give strong preference to veterans in their hiring, and many of their pilots were Navy fliers. Indeed, many are still in the Reserves. IIRC, FDX took an earnings hit during the Gulf War because so many of their pilots were recalled.
Military pilots, you may be aware, are often called into close quarters for bombing missions, etc. But if they can manage it, especially agains airbourne targets, they generally try to launch missiles from a distance. In other words, exactly the kinds of folks Maher seemed to be talking about prior to his clarification.
My two cents:
(1) The real cowards are Sears and FedEx – they’ve been running ads with Politically Incorrect before, so I can only assume they were aware of Maher’s views and didn’t have a problem with them. If they backpedaled just because Maher misspoke and stuck his foot in it, then that’s cowardice.
(2) Terrorists are “cowardly” IMO the same way big-game hunters are cowardly – they are fighting against innocents who aren’t aware that they’re being targeted, and who aren’t as well-armed as they are. I’ll give them a few props for being willing to die for their cause, but attacking an unsuspecting and unarmed civilian is much different than attacking an alert, trained and well-armed “enemy” soldier.
I don’t get the distinction you are making…if they are willing to die by crashing themselves into buildings, what is it about an alert, trained and well-armed enemy soldier that they would be afraid of?
stoid
PS: As an aside, I liked this quote: “Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers.” I’m not religious, but the bottom line is that there is no courage if you feel no fear to begin with.
Okay, I’ve been trying for months to figure this out…what the hell does WAG stand for?
Wild Ass Guess
WAG= Wild-Assed Guess
Anyone who has watched Mahr’s show will realize what a big fan of the military he really is. I’ve been a regular viewer since the program started on Comedy Central and he’s always supported the military. He thinks they’re one of the most important government institutions and he believes they should be paid more.
He never said the military was acting cowardly what he said was that we acted cowardly in the past. Are more recent responses to terrorist actions have been to bomb them from a distance. We’re not bombing them from a distance because we think that will get the job done. We’re bombing them from a distance because we’re so scared that one American soldier is going to get killed. And no politician wants to risk that.
And I think he made a valid point. During the Kosovo thing some Americans got captured and everyone freaked out. In Somolia some Americans were killed so we pulled out. I think a lot of nations don’t think we have the stomach for a long drawn out war. I think it is time that America got over Viet-Nam and figure out that not every war is going to be like that.
I think people who were up in arms about Mondays PI either didn’t watch the show themselves or don’t know anything about Mahr’s beliefs. I don’t always agree with him but it is nice to see someone who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.
Marc
Well, spoke-, you’d rather label arguments before responding to them; I don’t have so many labels.
To begin:
Given that no government attempted to stop Maher from saying what he said and that Fed Ex hasn’t tried to stop him from saying it, you’re wrong to invoke free speech.
What you seem to be calling cowardice is FedEx’s decision to distance itself from Maher.
To summarize:
[li]Maher makes unpopular “speech”.[/li][li]An entity that is associated with such “speech” doesn’t want to be associated with it.[/li][li]That entity ends its association with the speech.[/li][li]You call them cowards.[/li]
Finally, you decide to deal with the argument, you give us this:
and
Wherein, I believe you suggest that the marketplace for ideas means that advertisers on commercial TV must support unpopular speech because the TV airwaves are public. Therefore, on the offhand chance that an unpopular idea might become popular, the only “brave” course of action is for advertisers to pay for speech they do not support.
But, you ask whether the opposite is what earlier thinkers imagined. Yes it is. Remember, the speech was heard. It was found to be unpopular. It gained no support. This is the logical conclusion of that argument, as I presented it the first time. To summarize
[li]speech is heard.[/li][li]If unpopular, then it loses support or fails to gain support[/li][li]If popular, it keeps support or gains support.[/li]
Cowardice, in regard to free speech, is preventinf unpopular speech from ever being heard. That hasn’t happened in this situation so far. It might happen in the future. That is the risk Maher took when he decided to speak in the first place. There is no reason to support unpopular speech on the off-hand chance it might one day become popular.
spoke-, As I read what you have read, I think that you are suggesting that commercial advertisers have some obligation to fund unpopular speech because the airwaves are publicly owned. Such an idea bothers me. Here in America, if you wish to put forward unpopular ideas, it is your job to find a forum - it isn’t anyone else’s job.
It is not cowardice for FedEx to step away from speech it doesn’t like. Cowardice would be stepping aside as the government muzzled the speaker. It is not cowardice for Maher’s words to stand or fall on their own merit. It isn’t cowardice for FedEX to not want to appear to be propping those words up.
I’m having to dash off to work, so I will have to read all the responses to this thread in their entirety later.
I just wanted to add, I saw Maher on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night, and I think it was obvious he was totally misunderstood. I didn’t get the impression that Bill O’Reilly was all that critical of Maher. And yeah, Maher said that he has always been a big supporter of the military.
I think he got a raw deal. I hope things work out for him.
Not accomplishing his goal – dying while the enemy lives. E.g., a terrorist crashing a jet into a skyscraper is thinking, “I’m going to die, but I’m taking all these enemies with me!” Whereas facing an armed and ready opponent is more of a “If I do poorly, I will die, but he won’t.”
Besides, IMO the idea of sucker-punching an unsuspecting foe smacks of cowardice. Smart cowardice, mind you, but still cowardice.
I think it was Maher’s guest, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza who first made the cogent argument that, like them or not, the terrorists who destroyed the WTC were NOT cowards! Far from it! They were men with an utterly different value system from ours, a value system that made them believe it was courageous and honorable to give their own lives, if it meant taking out thousands of “the enemy” (that is, US).
Were the Japanese kamikaze pilots “cowards”? of course not! They were incredibly brave. Evil, maybe. Insane, maybe. But not cowards, by any means.
In many respects, Bill Maher’s point was well taken. American military policy has been hamstrung for a long time by a near-total unwillingness to sacrifice any American lives. During the crisis in the Balkans, we wanted to “do something,” but we didn’t want any of “our boys” coming home in body bags. So, we sent in planes to drop bombs from three miles up! It was deemed more important to keep our pilots alive than to let them fly low enough to accomplish anything useful.
In the same way, when Bill Clinton wanted to take action against Osama bib Laden, what did he do? Did he send ground troops after him? No… he fired some long-range missiles at some questionable targets. The end result, to paraphrase President Bush, is that we fired a $2 million missile to blow up a $10 tent.
I am NOT blaming Clinton for that. Actually, I’m blaminmg the American people. If politicians are terrified to take military action that might be effective, it’s because the American people are likely to turn against them the moment American soldiers start dying.
It IS cowardly to make long-distance air or missile strikes, knowing they won’t accomplish anything, simply to give the impression that we’re “DOING something.” IF a war is worth fighting, it’s worth expending lives for. If we’re NOT willing to see our people die, we should get out of the business of war entirely.