I have, uh, been one of those people that would do something like that. In another thread, to another person. I do it because this person gives unsound support for their opinion. I just call them on it. They think I don’t get it…I do get it, the person asserting their belief just isn’t supporting it correctly.
I dunno if this applies here.
I’ve hunted deer for seven years and only gotten one that way (one by accident with a car.)
If hunting = killing, what was I doing all the other times I was out in the woods with a weapon?
Because one thing contains aspects of another does not make them equal.
Hunting sometimes results in the death of animals.
Creating pornography sometimes results in statutory rape (remember whatserface a few years back. Surely there have been others, no matter how careful people might be.)
Hunting is not killing anymore than pornography is child molestation.
I thought my gay analogy a few posts ago was particularly apt, didn’t you?
Guess again! Any statutory rape would be an accident. With hunting, the kill is the POINT, the GOAL. You may not reach it, but it sure is exciting when you do, right? Otherwise what’s to brag about? Why bring a weapon if you aren’t gonna at least try?
But you know, that’s not what THIS thread is about. This thread, and MY POINT, was about whether and when it is ok to express an opinion that others might find offensive. I maintain that opinions about other’s judgments/choices are fair to express, but that opinions about others’ inherent being are not. What do you think?
How about we do a statutory rape hijack? I think it’s a ridiculous law, don’t you? When I’m 17 years and 364 days I’m a minor who can’t make an informed decision, but two days later I can? Bah. This is a good law to start from, but should always be examined closely by a judge before anyone gets in real trouble…
In the personal cases I am thinking of, the people had little knowledge of my religion (had, in fact, gotten it mixed up with another denomination.) I TOLD them that, I TOLD them that they were thinking of another Christian denomination. I also told them that even if my church had believed and taught the (horrible) things they claimed, I did not. In this case, the accusation was that my church was racist, and that my religious beliefs were racist. Which seems absurd, since my sister’s husband is black (we are white) and they were married in the church.
It doesn’t matter how much you explain some things - some people just know what you feel and believe, no matter how much you insist that they are incorrect.
Re: Ignore List:
Stoid, if I were to believe that you really were “ignoring” me, you would not have responding with that gutless psuedo-response (as I described above). Where you went out of your way to quote someone else’s post to me. That’s not “ignoring”, that is “pretending to ignore, but still get some sort of message across”. Childish, and gutless, in my opinion. And not very Great Debate-like, since this is about Debating. Not Debating-with-People-I-Want-to-but-passively-aggressively-“ignoring-but-not-ignoring”-People-that-I-Don’t-Like. (If you can follow all of that.) But hey - do whatever you want. Just expect to be considered gutless because of it. (At least by some of us.)
OK, let me try to clarify this again.
I DO NOT FAVOR BANNING THE KLAN OR THE NAZI PARTY.
I do not favor asking the government of a municipality, a county, a state, or the country to outlaw the Klan and deny them the right of free speech.
What I do favor is organizing the citizens of the community to take on the fight against the Klan where they are rallying or they plan to rally. I don’t want a group or organization to defend people from Nazis and the Klan, I want people to defend themselves from Nazis and the Klan. That means giving them a figurative bloody nose to show them they’re not welcome in our community and making them think twice before they decide to show their faces around here again. This is exercising our right to free speech.
And I certainly wouldn’t shed any tears if the Klan were harassed into nonexistence in such a manner.
No, organizing a meeting against the Klan across town and not confronting them directly is letting the cockroaches have the run of a dark kitchen. You’re in the living room because the cockroaches aren’t there now. What’s to prevent them from coming in there later? Go lay down the borax in the kitchen and drive 'em out, period; that’s the only way to keep them out of the living room if they’re in the kitchen.
Round 2, eh? 
There should have been far more people there to harass the Klan. Any anti-racist organization worth its salt should have made a point of building a rally of 150-200 people at least for this kind of thing.
I mean, Klan. heh. Funny, I am usually good about misspelling words.
I had the good fortune of living in a suburb of Cleveland at that particular time. I had plans of packing a lunch and hanging out at the courthouse to watch the chaos. Feh. As some local newsman said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Cleveland could give a shit.” The “rally” was a complete waste of time for the KKK. No suprise there. They should have held the rally at 55th and Quincy IMO. They would have had a response there! I got one when I was working in that area, and I’m not even a Klansman OR a racist.
As far as the Klan goes, I say DNFTT. Countering hostility with hostility will only, as many religious wars have proven, increase hostility. They are hate peddlers. “Purchasing” their product entails listening to them in the first place. Fueling the fire involves shouting back.
“Offensive” opinions can be offensive for three reasons:
Here on the boards I think (2) is the prevalent part, but in the “real” world I’d say (1) is the most common. Pity. I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. Only way to be sure.
You know, I don’t often just say everyone should do what I do. I don’t usually even want everyone to do what I do. I also know that there is just no chance in hell that everyone will do what I do. But if everyone did what I do, then do you know how the next public rally held by the KKK would turn out?
No one would show up. No news guys. No spectators. No counter demonstrators. Just a handful of KKK morons talking to themselves. They get bored. They go home. End of non-event.
But, like I said, there is no chance of it ever happening, because the right of free speech seems to imply that some people have got to listen to it. Are you not aware of what is going to be said by the Grand Asshole of the KKK? Did you really expect to learn something from the Imperial High Fuckwad? Just what the hell are you here for?
To prove them right, that’s what. To demonstrate to this pathetic bunch of losers that their stupid racist opinions are important enough to cross the street to hear. To nurture the hateful desire in their hearts to spew their vomit again. You make it all so successful for them. Getting your attention was the whole point.
Americans cannot ignore idiocy. Therefore, they get to spend a lot of time listening to idiots.
Tris
So let me get this straight. When the Klan exercises their right to free speech, the only proper way to exercise our right is not to say or do anything at all?
I don’t know about “proper”, but probably the most effective thing to do in terms of taking away their power. The more anger you react with, the more powerful they actually are; they have the power to make you/us get angry. If your goal is to keep them from being appealing to anyone, especially young men, since that is their primary source of new recruiting, your best bet is to show young men that you consider them not worth the emotional energy it takes even to hate them. They are worthless trash…do you get angry at trash? No. You ignore it. You are indifferent to it.
If our reaction is a collective shrug and a yawn, how appealing is that to an angry young man looking to piss people off and get under their skin? It’s not. It makes the Klan look like pussies…who wants to join some pussy organization that doesn’t even get the respect of being hated?
Really… the best possible way to get rid of racist trash is to treat them as if they were no more upsetting than shit on your shoe. Because that’s all they are.
stoid
I just can’t see the logic in that argument. I’m someone who doesn’t want the Klan demonstrating in my city, period. So it doesn’t make sense to me to ignore the demonstrations. And if I can find other people who feel the same way and who are willing to build a counterdemonstration to confront the Klan or the Nazis (which has been done successfully here, I might add) then so much the better.
Well, Olent, that’s a shame, then. Because I consider you to be assisting with keeping them alive by acting that way.
Ever hear the old adage, “takes two to tango”?
Ever hear the old hippie saying: “What if they gave a war and nobody came”? If you don’t turn out to demonstrate against them, they aren’t gonna show up. If they are marching loudly down an empty street, what’s the payoff in that?
No one doubts that you don’t like the Klan and don’t want them around. But what exactly do you think you are accomplishing? Do you think the Klan was expecting to be loved and embraced? Let me clue you: they KNOW you hate them. They LIKE that you hate them. That they can stir you up and get you all foaming at the mouth and marching opposite them makes them feel big and bad and powerful. It is EXACTLY the feedback they are looking for. “Look what we can do, we can make you crazy with fear and rage! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!” So, when you “successfully” counterdemonstrate, just know that you are giving them precisely what they want, and doing exactly nothing to lessen their power or appeal to the lost. All you are doing is making yourself feel better. If you are ok with doing that, then be my guest. But don’t kid yourself that you are doing anything to stop them.
I admire your commitment, tho.
stoid
i think anyone should be able to withstand any opinion on any subject differing from his/her own. in reality this is not the case. in real space some people will “retaliate” to disagreement. i consider it prudent to avoid touchy subjects in real-space. in cyber-space i think we should do what should be possible in real-space. if someone CHOOSES TO BE offended, to damn bad.
i had a short conversation with a man in Dayton Ohio once. he asked the chicken and egg question and i said the egg came first. he asks what laid the egg and i said a dinosaur. he says “i don’t want to talk to you.” i guess he was OFFENDED. ROFL!
Dal Timgar
Actually, the last time a Nazi group tried to rally in DC (August 1998, IIRC), we built a strong and well-publicized demonstration of around 1000 people to shadow their march. As a result only 4 Nazis showed up at the rally point outside DC to meet the DC police escort they were scheduled to receive and decided they didn’t want to stage their march after all.
Yes, I agree. They KNOW we hate them. And they knew what kind of reception they were going to get if they decided to set foot in DC. And they stayed the hell away. It’s been two years and we haven’t heard a thing about any future demonstrations since.
I’d argue that success put more power in the hands of the anti-racists than the Klan or the Nazis themselves.
Gaspode
Your question needs to be refined IMO.
Are you asking:
(1) If there is a universal and objectively real ethical standard against which one could measure expression of opinions?
or
(2) What rules apply as normative behavior for the culture and society you are referring to?
The normative rules of societies differ greatly by location and time. What would be viewed as quite fine in one place at a certain time and spoken by a certain person, might get you a drink of hemlock in the same place at a different time, or thumbscrews in a different place at the same time.
You have to be somewhat aware of by whom, where and when the expressions are voiced.
So if you are asking if any form of expression is allowed in say, North-American dominated message boards, the answer is no. You will be very swiftly exposed to the principals which Chomsky and Milgram have shown.
If you are asking if expression “should” be free then you are either addressing objective and universal standards again, which have yet to be discovered and shown, or you are asking about utility.
Utility would say that based on some other normative value in the culture you are addressing, the outcome of not allowing free speech would be to the detriment.
In other words, not allowing free speech would cause an effect that was damaging to some principal seen as very valuable to the society.
Y’know, I think everybody has a valid point. Olentzero, I agree that it’s best not to let the Klan operate in a vacuum. Stoidela’s approach has in fact been tried in some localities; I read of at least one counterevent scheduled at a Klan march in which the opposing side gathered in a park on the opposite side of town and offered food, games, and fun. The intent was to let the Klan march down an empty street, basically jerking themselves off with nobody watching. Fine in principle, but there were still some curious locals who wanted to see the hooded morons for themselves. I still believe that if you give them enough rope, they’ll hang themselves (irony intended), but admittedly it’ll take quite a while.
But at the same time, Stoidela is also right, in that provoking an angry reaction is exactly their objective. As long as people are willing to stand across the street and scream and yell and wave “Racists Go Home” signs, the Klan is perfectly willing to keep showing up and eliciting that response. It’s nice that your counterdemonstration seems to have made them disappear back into the woodwork, but it’s not as if they vanished completely; they just scuttled back into obscurity like the cockroaches we keep talking about. They’ll be back – maybe not this year, or this decade, but make no mistake, they’ll be back. Stoid is correct to say that your anger gives them, perversely, power and longevity they don’t deserve.
I’d like to propose a slightly different approach, one that combines meeting them head-on with refusing to grant them their desired response. What if they found themselves in the middle of a crowd that was dead silent? Not sullen or surly, just condescendingly quiet, like looking at monkeys at the zoo. Or, on a different tack, what if the crowd just plain laughed at them? Instead of signs like “Hate is not an American value” or “All people are equal,” what if the signs said, “This is a joke, right?” Or simply “Morons”?
The angry young man Stoid refers to will be attracted to a movement that gives him any feeling of power and influence, no matter how sick and twisted, but it seems unlikely he’d be willing to join a group the opposition doesn’t even take seriously enough to get mad at.
BINGO!
When I was a little girl growing up in Hollywood, there seemed to be a truly amazing number of men who wished to show me their penises. (Is that still true? Was it true for women in other locales? My memory is probably flawed, but I remember it being, if not a daily, at least a weekly occurance) When I was very small, it was scary, but as I got older, I learned the perfect way to handle it: Laugh at them. Showing fear or anger just emboldened them and seemed to make their dicks harder. Laughing at them caused their penises to shrivel instantly, they would zip and flee.
Same thing here. Laughing at them would shame them worse than anything else you could possibly do.
stoid
I think the one fundamental mistake in that attitude about the Klan and the Nazis is that you’re actually taking them too lightly. These are not a bunch of overgrown kids running around going “Oooh, look! I’m a racist! Doesn’t that PISS YOU OFF?! Ha ha ha ha ha.”
These are (generally) men with a serious political agenda of hate. They’re not out just for attention or shock value. They’re out for membership and to build their organizations. I’m out there not just to show the existing Klan members I oppose them, but to show potential members this is the kind of reception they can count on getting if they decide to join. Not meeting the Klan head-on, either by building a demonstration somewhere else or not doing anything at all, shows potential members that they can safely join a racist or fascist organization and not expect any trouble. That’s not a message I particularly want to send.
Maybe they will be back, sooner or later. I honestly think it will be later, given that they know what kind of response they’re likely to get the next time. But I’ll be out there doing what I did the last time, making sure they know I don’t want 'em around.