I have concerns that this attitude ultimately means that we will allow thugs to dictate not only the manner in which we choose to express ideas but ultimately which ideas we may express. I see you have a nice little formula I might use to determine whether or not I should voice a criticism are particular way but I’m not really sure how useful that formula is. I understand your concerns regarding potential loss of lives and I recognize that they are valid concerns so I’m not trying to be glib here.
With rights come responsibilities. This phony preacher in Florida has a right to free speech, he also has a responsibility to use it in a way that doesn’t harm innocent people. A genuine Christian would not act in a manner that results in the direct or indirect murder of people who never even heard of this nut prior to the storming of the UN compound. He has the right to burn the Koran and the responsibility for the violence and murder that followed it. The Muslin extremists that perpetrated these heinous acts are just as culpable. Being offended and responding by the murder of innocent people not even remotely connected to the act is truly the work of the morally insane. If Jones I can’t use the word (Pastor) really wants to make a statement he should try this stunt where the blood of his “right to free speech” still stains the ground. I think his right would be precluded by his responsibility to protect his own worthless hide.
There is a particular madness to those who insist upon their rights. Jefferson Davis, as a West Point cadet was court-martialed for being drunk on liquor. He argued that he was drunk on beer, not liquor. It worked. He later of course maintained that the Constitution did not specifically ban secession, so it was allowed.
So there, it is technically true so there. People like him stamp their Mary Janes and stand on their rights. If people die, no biggie. After all he is right and that is all that matters.
If the guy in Florida technically in the right. Sure. Is he an ass. Sure. But the main thing is he found his own little loophole, and so he can thumb his nose at the world.
A strange sort of madness.
http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/justice/children.slain_1_deanna-laney-jury-rules-god?_s=PM:LAW
What’s the difference? As far as they’re concerned, god was speaking directly to them through the Quran. And this woman was educated and raised in a first world country. They probably can’t even read, or understand basic 5th grade science. They’re ignorant to the extreme, and believe what they did was 100% morally justified. They probably haven’t even had the chance, like this woman, to even consider an alternative way of life. What is insanity, if not delusions leading to the possibility of harm to themselves or others? How is their belief that god wants them to kill the infidels different than John Hinckley, Jr. thinking Jodie Foster wants him to kill Reagan?
You seem to be very angry and adamant in attempting to make this a “Right Wing” bigger picture thing in most of your postings. I am proudly conservative and don’t apoligize for it. I don’t expect you to feel bad about being a liberal. If you paint with that brush then all conservatives are violent christian gun owners. Subsequently all liberals must be gay atheist tree huggers worried about how things make them feel. I honestly think we both can agree this isn’t the work of the tea party or moveon.org, there just happens to be alot of people out there that are misguided but not as part of a political strategy . Jones did what he did and it was utterly senseless. But come on he didn’t do it after watching Glenn Beck or Bill Maher.
Is he criminally responsible? That’s up to lawyers. Is he morally responsible? Yes, not solely, and not as much as the killers or imams that unleashed them. He isn’t in a conspiracy by the way. He’s purposefully going out of his way to create a situation where a fire will start.
Yes.
Ten thousand years from now if his ass-hattery drives a Muslim android to discharge its battery on a metal subway terminal, electrocuting ten passengers, he will still hold some responsibility.
You’re responsible for your actions until the heat-death of the universe. If you kill my cat, it isn’t all good in a hundred years. It may not matter and be relevant, but morally you still would have been wrong to do it.
I know you were sleepy when you wrote this, but you need to learn how to read for meaning.
Some few Muslims are insane. Much as some few Christians are insane. They are a known quantity. They happen. You can depend on them (the few insane ones) in acting in a predictable way to stimuli.
Much like you can predict a wolf feeding on a carcass. The point isn’t that the few ultra-fanatic Muslims don’t have free will, the point is that they are a known quantity. Like knowing a forest is dry and flicking a cigarette out the car window.
You also misunderstand that blame or guilt isn’t a finite quantity that lowers for one as it accrues to another. This is for some reason difficult for some people to understand. Possibly because those people want simple answers.
As in an example upthread, if you whisper to a known wife-beater than you saw his wife kissing some dude at a club (when you didn’t), both you and the wife beater are to blame for the beating she gets. His level of guilt doesn’t drop because of yours. You are both assholes. Much as Jones’ guilt doesn’t diminish the responsibility for the murdering dudes in Afghanistan.
I don’t. You didn’t understand what you read.
Of course not. Because it’s not true. You didn’t understand what you read.
Of course not. No one is saying that, you laughably misunderstood simple words.
Again, your entire post exists because you cosmically misunderstood the whole conversation and saw an opportunity to score points.
Please read the thread when you wake up and try to actually understand it.
Exactly this.
Imagine someone handed you a button, and told you: “If you press this button, people will likely be killed.” You don’t know if it will release killer bees, or provoke murderous fanatics, or drop a huge block of stone on peoples’ heads, but you’re near certain it will result in deaths. And you press the button anyway. Are you responsible, to some degree? Of course you are. In terms of gauging the morality of your action, it doesn’t matter what caused the death at the other end. The only relevant equation, as VarlosZ has been saying, is whether pressing the button resulted in some greater good than the deaths that resulted.
And for the record, I think the murderers are clearly the most guilty party in this scenario. By a large margin. But that doesn’t absolve Jones of his own guilt, in that he took an otherwise-unnecessary action which had a clearly-foreseeable consequence of people dying.
Yeah, just like the people calling doctors who provide abortions mass murderers have “no responsibility” when someone murders a doctor. It’s all very convenient; it allows the leaders of the Right to commit murder while pretending to innocence.
There is no equivalence between the American Right and what passes for a Left in this country. You cannot be right wing by American standards without being irrational or immoral, because America is already so very far to the right. There’s no room for rational, moral behavior on the right. “Left wing” on the other hand is a far more diverse set of possibilities because it consists of the majority of possible human behaviors and attitudes, given how narrow and extreme the Right is. The vast majority of humanity is by American standards “left wing”.
As for not calling the Right bad because then they’ll call liberals bad things? They do that anyway. There’s no point in being nice towards the Right; nice or nasty, all they’ll offer in return is hatred and attempts to harm or dominate you. Just look at the complete failure of Obama’s foolish attempts at compromise.
You don’t get to deal from a stacked deck. You want to frame the debate in such a way as to make only your opinion valid. I flatly reject this notion.
I further flatly reject any policy of appeasement. We cannot and should not live our lives in fear that someday, somewhere, some radical nutjob just might decide to commit a criminal act and offer some random act on the other side of the world as an excuse for the crime.
Yes, we should assert our right to grossly insult their religions proudly, confidently, and sanely.
You’re making the typical lawyer’s error of confusing legality under one’s own law with broader human morality. Yes, of course this guy has no *legal *responsibility, under US law anyway, but that wasn’t actually the question, now was it?
The stupidity of people thinking that those who criticise religion, politics or other ideas are responsible for the violence done by the backers of the ideas makes me want to beat my kids with my leather belt. I hold you morally responsible for any damage done to the kids.
The term you’re searching for is “incitement”.
Yes. That kind of people incite me to do violence.
And sometimes that’s their purpose. Meaning they are accountable for it.
Exactly. Intent matters when it comes to moral questions.
Very well. The only reason the book burning caused this thread was because of choices of some dark age goons. Had they not been evil pieces of shit the flaming Koran would have been irrelevant.
All responsibility keeps coming back to the murdering, psychopathic, subhuman garbage. They alone killed someone in cold blood. They alone choose to follow their delusions.
Quite frankly the society they live in shares some blame for this threat too. Americans and Russians having a good chunk of the responsibility share quite a bit of blame for this as well. Let’s we define this American, Russian, and Afghan amalgamated national blame as Q, where Q is responsibility for the state of the local society.
The society that this happened in is one where extremism like this is tolerated. How many innocent people would Canadians kill if we burnt the Stanly Cup? 0 How many innocents would China kill over a foreigner burning a picture of Mao on foreign soil? 0 but they would throw a shit fit. Therefore be headings such as this are a function of a society.
For reasons owning to history Afghanistan society Q is defined by shitty things the US and Russia did, and not so great responses to those things either. Therefore the Q is a function of the US, Russia, and Afghanistan actions. The exact definition of Q (which parties get what share of blame) is another debate.
The society Q is responsible for is one where insane, delusional, assholes aren’t treated, or jailed. Had it been one where they were the book burning would be irrelevant. Therefore since the murders happened, even reducing the murderers to robots (meaning they have no freewill and therefore no moral responsibility), we find the blame falls on American, Russian, and Afghan national actions.
However doing that would be wrongheaded because the murdering pieces of shit do in fact have free-will and are in fact moral actors. There is no excuse for murdering innocent people like that. It doesn’t matter what their countrymen did, ir doesn’t matter what some bigot across the sea did. They murdered innocent people of their own free choice.
Further a bigoted jackass might take this post that Q is a function solely of the people of the area, and again that is false. US and Russian involvement where extremely extensive contributing acts to the nature of the area.
You are falling into the same trap as several other posters in this thread. Saying Jones has some guilt does absolutely nothing to reduce the level of guilt of the killers. His guilt is additional to theirs.
He is guilty because he chose an action that he knew would incite an existing group to kill. The action wasn’t necessary or vital to his or another’s health and well being, it was a tantrum that was designed to cause the existing group of people in Afghanistan to kill innocents. He did it so he could point to the dead and say “See, (all) Muslims are like that.” He wanted to support his bigoted view of all Muslims by pointing to the actions of a dozen or so.
Again, if you know an action you take will cause someone to kill someone else, and you don’t need to take that action, taking it incurs some level of guilt.
Another hypothetical. The Joker says, “I have snipers around town. Anyone seen wearing a jester’s cap will have a person around them shot in the face, at random.” You’re a free person. Would you wear a jester’s cap around town? You weren’t planning to, but would purchase one just to defy the Joker?
Trying not to get killed?
Let me get this straight we’re supposed to give up our rights, because evil murdering dark ages wastes of flesh wish to blackmail us out of them?
Fuck them. If they burnt a copy a of the The Social Contract, and I responded with a beheading of an innocent, who would be a 100% responsible for the murder?
Can you say I wouldn’t be 100% responsible? If the responsibility in this case would fail complete on me, then why are these subhuman murdering savages any different?
Is it because they worship an evil delusion from the dark ages when people where too stupid to know any better? Who’s choice is that?
Again I’d like add my speech isn’t directed at Islam, but just the extremist form of it.