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SXSW Cancels Panels On Harassment Due To Harassment (sxsw.com)
New submitter rMortyH writes: Two panels on online harassment in gaming scheduled for the upcoming South by Southwest festival have been cancelled due to online harassment and threats. According to a statement from SXSW Director Hugh Forrest, "... in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming. ... If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised."
...or they're still under their parent's jurisdiction.
That doesn't have to stop them. Witness Arab teenagers getting themselves killed in an attempt to stab innocent people.
...innocent people.
I was thinking about that the other day.
Suppose two guys get in a fight over a girl and then some third guy who didn't know either the girl or the guys who were fighting ends up getting hurt. That would be unfortunate. I'm very sympathetic to the notion of an innocent bystander. But what if the third guy also knew the girl and the two guys were fighting because he had paid one of them to beat up the other one? Then he's hardly an innocent bystander any more.
And what if it's on the scale of an entire country? What if the citizens of some democratic country are paying their military (via taxes) to support some brutal dictatorship halfway around the world? And maybe there's even a banana republic element to the situation - where it is a small, mostly hereditary ruling class, is the primary beneficiary of the close relationship to the brutal dictatorship (e.g. the Bushes and Clintons with Saudi Arabia) but the ordinary people keep on voting for them anyway.
And then there's the point that, in an interconnected world where 20,000 children a day die of poverty, and where the vast majority of people ignore it and focus on taking a bigger slice of the pie for themselves, very few people can really claim to be completely innocent.
The one area where the notion of an innocent bystander is particularly acute, though, is attempts to dispense justice on some sort of collective racial or ethnic level. If a black person steals a television from a white person and some other random black person is thrown in jail and some other random white person is given a new television, well, that's hardly justice. And yet there are many people who favor discrimination and segregation in Israel and the middle east generally - who believe that people should be discriminated against simply because they weren't born into the right ethnic group - who believe that a person should be excluded from living somewhere simply on the basis of the ethnic group that they were born into.
On one hand, I find myself skeptical that citizens of democracies that use military force to oppress people in other countries can really claim to be "innocent". But, on the other hand, I am sympathetic to the idea the victims of racial and ethnic discrimination can claim to be "innocent", at least in the context of the discrimination that they're facing.