Oh, I see. So as long as there’s no physical violence involved, self-censorship to avoid offending a particular group automatically counts as “respect” rather than cowardice? And is therefore hunky-dory?
That’s an awfully…generous…attitude toward self-censorship. “Hey, if you’re not menaced by physical harm, any amount of craven docility or restraint of free expression to avoid giving offense is entirely ethical! It’s not cowardice, it’s just showing respect!”
Well, I trust this will shut up all those carpers and whiners who constantly complain about “PC run amok”. As long as the people whose offensensitivities you’re pandering to aren’t actually organizing riots, murder, and arson, then bending over backwards to avoid offending them is just “respecting their sensibilities”. Isn’t that nice!
Tell me, Finn, where do, say, death threats fall in terms of your distinction between “giving in to terrorism” and “respecting someone’s sensibilities”? I now know, thanks to you, that if, for example, I pull a controversial volume from my bookstore shelves because I’m afraid of boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, hate mail, cancellation of my lease, and so forth, I’m simply “respecting the sensibilities” of the people who oppose the book.
But if one of those people calls me up and threatens me with bodily harm if I stock that book, am I now morally required to put the volume back on my shelves? Am I “giving in to terrorism” if I don’t? Or do threats of violence not count unless they escalate to actual riots, murder and arson?
I see. So, you base it on ‘lame’(ness), ehe? Then you would be perfectly ok if a theater banned, oh, say the latest M. Moore piece of garbage and used the fact it was ‘lame’ as an excuse…right? And you don’t see the slippery slope opening up at your feet…
Certainly it doesnt. Its their right to self censor…just as its my right to now patronize either of their establishments in the future because I find such censoring here in the US deeply offensive.
Exactly the same. Why, did you think that the issue is simply wanting to stick it to the Muslims or something? If so you really don’t understand the people in this thread that are offended on freedom of speech grounds. Let me say I’d be just as pissed off if Mien Kamphf was self censored…and I find that particular work as deeply offensive a piece of shit as has ever been written.
Let me give you an example. There was a theater here in my home town that refused to show a movie by M. Moore. Its a theater that me and my wife regularly went out to on friday nights because its closest to our house. Since they made that decision I haven’t been back and WON’T go back…even though I find M. Moores movies lame in the extreme, and I find the man himself a pig (among other unflattering things). Do you get it?
Well, you could…but you’d be rather an idiot if you did. And an idiot who seems to be missing the point. I have zero intention of buying this thing. Thats not the point. The point is that these stores are caving in to violence, and letting that dictate what is and isn’t available in their stores. And by doing so they are starting down a slippery slope that (I hope) most Americans find distasteful in the extreme. I hope to hell they both take serious hits in sales due to this.
I have to say I’m glad American’s earlier in our history were made of sterner stuff Bob. I disagree you have to pick your battles on such a fundamental issue…because once you cave on one thing it makes it easier to cave on the next…and the next…and the next. Its why I get so pissed off when the fucking Republican right tries this same stupid crap about pornography or any of their other stupid hot button issues. Adults should be able to choose for themselves what they buy and don’t buy and companies should make even things that some would find offensive so they CAN make those decisions.
Anything else is bowing to pressure and I can promise you that the Muslims aren’t the ONLY wack jobs out there who would use violence to get their way if they thought it would work. Next we’ll have some Christian extremist group that is deeply offended by something else threatening violence to get stores like these to not have this or that item on their shelf, or some fundamentalist political party who doesn’t like what this or that guy is saying and is willing to use violence to get it stopped…
How would you feel about that Bob? Still want to ‘pick your battles’?
Note the crucial word “willingly” in my post. I would be just as upset – no, actually, more upset – if the Government intervened to require the stores to carry the magazine.
Yep. Tell me, would you be willing to put those cartoons on a placard and parade through the streets of any Muslim city? That’s like asking to be dismembered. If you wouldn’t want to risk your life in that manner, why should you ask bookstore employees to risk their lives to sell the cartoons? I’ll decide what I think is worth dying for, thank you very much. And this ain’t it.
Maybe if I felt strongly enough about it. For instance, I like to think that duing the 50’s and early 60’s I would have gone down to the South and marched around with a placard decrying the horrible state of civil rights and asking for equality of blacks and other minorities…and I have no doubt that as a hispanic man I would have been in considerable danger doing so. After all WHITES were killed for doing things like that in the South.
But then the two scenerios aren’t exactly comparable IMHO. One is actively seeking danger out…while the other is merely not caving into pressure from some loony group.
Lets put this into another context Bob, one from my example above. Say in the 50’s or 60’s a civil rights leader wrote a texts highly critical of how things are in the South. And say that the KKK and other white supremisists groups out there threatened violence if they were published and sold to the general public. Would you feel the same about these stores if they caved into that pressure and refused to sell those books? Would you be excusing their behavior and saying that they had to ‘pick their fights’? Or would you be pissed off that they had caved in?
Is this really such a surprise? I understand that, because of complaints from Muslims, Borders employees have been ordered to place copies of the Koran on the highest shelf above all other books.
Do I really need to post, or would you prefer to simply invent things I’ve said and then debate them? It’ll sure use up a whole lot of straw, but we are at the end of winter…
(Ahem)
No, it does not “automatically” count as anything, but in the vast majority of cases then yes, it’s either an economic or PR decision. On the other hand, when the decision is made due to terrorism, it shows that terrorism works and is effective.
Again, you maybe just want to invent some things and claim that they’re my position?
The fact remains, you drew a false analogy between people who caved in to terrorism, and those who don’t want to offend a particular group. There is a clear and present difference between attempting to be culturally sensitive, and having someone tell you that if you don’t do things their way, they might just kill you.
Is today ‘False Dichotomy Day’ or something? PC is, in many cases, overblown. That doesn’t mean that, in certain cicrumstances, it’s right to respect the feelings of certain groups.
Is this a joke?
Do you not see a difference between giving in to terrorism and not wanting to offend a community? Do you not see a difference between an angry letter and being burned alive? Do you not see a difference between disaproval and public outcry and riots and murders?
The two issues you’re trying to conflate are nothing alike. In one, you have a situation in the free market where people have decided not to put on a show. In another, you have a bunch of terrorists who have cowed anybody who might publish anything they don’t like.
All the silly hypothetical quotes you can think up won’t change that lil’ bitty ol’ fact.
Are you joking again? Where does allowing the threat of violence or death to dictate policy fall?
:rolleyes: Yes, thanks to me.
But, between all that angst and hand wringing, you should’ve noticed that all but one thing you mentioned is not only perfectly legal, but part of a free market. People don’t have to buy from you, and they’re allowed to write letters to you, even mean ones. However, I’d wager that if your landlord attempts to cancel your lease you’d have a strong legal case against him.
Hey, morals aren’t absolute or universal, and you don’t have to feel that your principles are valuable or worth dying for. Nor do you have to feel that it’s bad to be giving terrorists what they want and showing them how easy it is to dictate your actions.
Is a terrorist dictating the policy of your store due to threats of violence of death?
What happens the next time someone finds something objectionable enough to threaten you?
Just to clarify, since I think we’re pretty much on the same page: censorship, even self-censorship is bad and should be avoided. People are perfectly free to do it, and those who are offended by it are perfectly free to take their dollars elsewhere. But when we allow terrorism to dictate policy, we’ve stepped into an entirely different realm. Yes?
If a store manager thought that selling the magazine would be dangerous in her store, I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t carry it, or carried it behind the counter only. I doubt there is much chance that the Borders in the middle of South Dakota would get many death threats.
Second, Borders is being racist in assuming that Muslims in the US are so out of control that carrying this one magazine would present a threat. My town has a lot of Muslims, and there were no threats or riots when the Mercury News printed a photograph of one of the cartoons. There have been protest letters, and opinion pieces on both sides, but nothing outrageous.
I’ll go pick up a copy at our local B&N, and I’ll let you know if I see any raging mobs.
Outstanding question. I differentiate between them like this: In one case you’d be taking a risk to advance a noble cause, racial equality. In the other case you’d be taking a risk just to offend followers of a religion. I’d be more inclined to take a personal risk if I felt that the end was worthy. I don’t care enough about offending Muslims to take such a chance.
Except that many of the cartoons, in a heavy-handed way, were pointing out that Islam is often used to incite/justify violence. The response to that claim… was for hundreds of thousands to say that their religious sensibilites had been offended, so they were going to riot. (I believe there’s a picture of that under ‘irony’ in the O.E.D.)
So it’s not quite as simple as some racists who just love to offend Muslims for the hell of it.
And this isn’t the only incident of the sort. For instance, people who live in Europe who have come out against the treatment of women in some Islamic societies have faced very real terrorist threats, and actions. It isn’t just smoke and mirrors, sound and fury.
In many ways, we’re in a culture war right now, and we’re sending the message that the way to make us do things is to threaten us with violence. Rather than to stand firm and say that Islamic societies have the right to live by Islamic laws, and Western socieities have the right to live by Western laws, we’re giving ground inch by inch. Inches add up to feet, add up to miles. And it is very difficult to get back that ground once we’ve lost it. Right now, for example, it’s much less likely that people will stand up to Islamic terrorism over how Islam is portrayed, criticized, etc… And I don’t see that changing in the near future, do you? (Do you think that The Satanic Verses would be published today?)
Can you imagine what would happen if, tomorrow, the US announced that it would start negotiating with terrorists, and that anybody who kidnapped an American citizen stood to get their demands answered?
And I agree with you…to a point. But the thing is Bob that we are making a personal choice based on our own feelings about the subject. Taking a step back though, OTHERS have the right to make the same kinds of personal choices…this is the core of free speech. So, what you and I might find a ‘noble’ cause, others may not see that way (and I can pretty much guarentee you that if you and I were transported back to the 50’s/60’s there would be plenty of folks who felt quite offended by our choice)…and vice versa.
There are some folks who don’t care one way or the other about abortion for instance (like you don’t care to offend Muslims…or to rephrase that more accurately you don’t care to disconfort Muslims by bringing up things some of them would not like to think too deeply about, which IMHO has at least a core of truth to it as far as these stupid comics go), while there are others that are fanatic on both sides of the issue. If a book store though caves into one or the other sides fanatisim and chooses not to sell a book on a controversial issue…then that opens the door to eventually ANY group using the same tactics to discourage a company from selling something they find offensive. Eventually you know they will get around to a subject you DO care about…but by then it may be too late to reverse the trend…IMHO it gets easier to do this the more often you cave. Then we will go from companies self censoring themselves to basically censorship via whoever is willing to do enough violence.
You can’t think that this is a good thing…can you?
Indeed I do. But apparently unlike you, I can also see a very broad middle ground between them.
You claimed that self-censorship is just “respecting someone’s sensibilities”, unless it’s due to fear of riots, murder, and arson. And that’s ridiculous.
That is, you’re trying to whitewash self-censorship as benign “cultural sensitivity”, except in the cases where the self-censorship is inspired by concerns about actual terrorism.
However, plenty of self-censorship is produced neither by cultural sensitivity nor by fears of terrorist violence, but simply by fears of other kinds of negative consequences for oneself, like losing money or respect. There’s nothing admirable or courageous about that.
In fact, as I noted in my first post, it’s arguably more cowardly to change one’s policies from fear of non-violent consequences, since non-violent consequences are less harmful than violent ones.
To paraphrase Walt Kelly, "Quivering with courage, the bookstore removed the literature from the shelves."
I guess the moral of the story is, if you don’t like something you see in a store, don’t complain to the manager, don’t write a letter to the owner, don’t picket the entrance, don’t appeal to higher standards or expect them to take the moral high ground for the good of all society. Instead, make it clear to the store that they will be burned down, blown up, the employees shot, and worse, if they don’t do what you want.
What ‘middle ground’, exactly, is there between not doing something because someone threatens your life and not doing something because of a business/moral decision?
What’s even more ridiculous is that you’re making up things and trying to claim I said them, when the actual post is less than a dozen posts up-thread. Here it is, again, in ‘soundbyte’ form.
Want to debate in good faith and with intellectual honesty, or would you prefer to just make up a few more positions and claim that I hold them? I mean, whatever’s easier for you…
Erunh? So businesses aren’t supposed to be concerned about losing money, or their public image? You would expect your local Christian bookstore to sell a copy of the Satanic Bible?
Businesses will cater to their clientel. Often, these decisions will piss some people off. You can always take your dollars elsewhere, as well as letting that business know why you’re doing so. That might even change policy. And, sometimes, that policy really is wrong. And sometimes it’s just that business catering to its market.
But the line is drawn when someone is acting not out of financial or personal motivations, but to appease terrorists.
You could argue it, but I think it’d be rather silly.
If Bobby Jewhater McPhee ran a movie theatre and decided not to show Schindler’s List, I’d be annoyed and think he was a moron, but he’d be following his personal beliefs. If Suzy Christlover Smith decided that she didn’t want any erotica in her bookstore because she was in a very religious neighberhood and might lose sales, I’d choose another bookstore to buy my softcore porn from.
That’s the beauty of a free market.
Porn for those who want porn, bibles for those who want bibles.
But that all changes when the decision is made in front of the barrel of a gun. That’s where the free market breaks down, and terrorism rules.
So while I don’t agree with the theatre’s choice to pull the show because they thought it was offensive, it is a very poor comparison with someone’s reaction to organized terroristic violence.
If you want to debate the limits and proper uses of free speech, demographics, marketing, and such, that’s a seperate debate. This is specifically about what the reaction to terrorist threats should be, and the two issues shouldn’t be conflated.
On preview: Musicat, exactly. There are certain avenues someone has in a free society, and we can legitimately debate and disagree on them. But all that ends when violence enters the picture.
I know I’m jumping in a bit late, with this, but I want to second that these two examples are not equal.
More to the point, I don’t believe that there’s any reason to believe that not carrying this issue of the magazine, which is printing these cartoons, will offer any protection to those people working in the stores. After all, we’re talking about violence, which when it happened, was directed (among other places) against the embassy of a different country than that which contained the newspaper which printed the cartoons. If you’re assuming an equality of risk between carrying this issue of the magazine, and walking through downtown Tehran with a placard with all the cartoons on it, you should recognize that simply being from the same country where these cartoons have been published is more than enough to justify violence against you.
The problem I have is that this is an instance of a chain changing their planned behavior because of a perception of a threat of violence. To use an analogy from recent history: When AQ bombed Madrid and the gov’t fell, a lot of people in the States felt that they were giving in to terrorist demands. I disagreed then, and still do. Prior to the bombing the incumbent gov’t was shown as being expected to lose it majority, there were a lot of Spanish voters who were planning on voting, already, in the way that would seem to reward AQ’s strike. They should not be expected to have changed their vote because of AQ’s strike. Even if that meant that they were offering an appearance of going along with the desires of terrorists.
Borders and Waldenbooks, however, have a long-standing decision to carry this magazine. And are refusing to carry the one issue under a perceived threat of violence. I think this is a very different thing, and is caving to terrorist demands.
Good, then we are pretty much on the same page. However, this quote is significantly different from what you said in your first reply to me, before your “self-censorship is bad” clarification. That was when you claimed that self-censorship is just “respecting someone’s sensibilities”, unless it’s inspired by fear of terrorism.
I don’t see why. I think the question of how one makes a choice between principle and fear of non-violent consequences is quite relevant to the question of how one makes a choice between principle and fear of violent consequences.
The thing I took issue with, and still take issue with, is that you implied that people should write ‘similar’ letters. The capitalistic drive to appeal to one’s market is not the same thing as letting terrorists dictate what you can and can not do.
The difference, and the distinction, is violence, or to put a finer point on it, terrorism. And once you start letting terrorists get what they want, it sets a very, very dangerous example.
How one makes a decision when their life isn’t being threatened is not the same situation as how one makes a distinction when their life is being threatened. And I see no reason to conflate the two situations.
Well, yes. (though I wouldn’t, as I support the right of bookstores to carry offensive material.) What does this have to do with threats of physical violence?Right now Borders is sending the message that death threats are an effective means of private censorship.
Re Boblibdem’s point, I think this is a very important matter, one worth a little risk. And it is a very little risk–I don’t think anybody is actually going to kill a Borders employee over the magazine.
Honestly if Muslims don’t want people to stereotype them as intolerant and violent, they should stop getting their undies in a bunch over stupid shit like these cartoons. First, anyone who would get upset over cartoons is an idiot. Second, even if they do get upset they should learn new ways of expressing their outrage. Christians managed to protest a dung-splattered Mary without resort to violence.
Of course it isn’t a good thing. But I think every action should be weighed in terms of cost/benefit and risk. I just don’t see where printing silly cartoons is worth risking anyone’s skin over. Put yourself in the bookstore management’s spot- would you want to risk your employees’ lives over it? And how would you feel if an angry crowd of Muslims torched your store and hurt your employees? Threaten my right to express important thoughts and I’ll fight it. But I don’t see the point to fight for the right to be offensive. You’re a smart fellow and make good points. But I’d rather save my energy for more important things to make a stand for.
