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Democrat Drops MN State House Run After Tweeting 'ISIS Isn't Necessarily Evil' (startribune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dan Kimmel, who works for U.S. Bank in its technology and operations section, dropped out of the race for a Minnesota House seat after unleashing a firestorm of criticism. The controversy erupted after Kimmel tweeted, "ISIS isn't necessarily evil. It is made up of people doing what they think is best for their community. Violence is not the answer, though." The tweet rapidly led to harsh criticism on twitter and spread from there. The DFL Party Chair issued a statement saying that Kimmel's "views have no place in our party. On behalf of the Minnesota DFL, I strongly condemn his comments. ..." The House Minority Leader for the DFL called for Kimmel to end his campaign. Kimmel issued a written apology and withdrew from the race.
Well the 1A protects you from the law, not public opinion. He voluntarily resigned.
Another circumstance where the court of public opinion rules political correctness to be a greater virtue than the first amendment.
Because the first amendment is supposed to prevent people from judging political candidates based in part on what they say?
Well no. He was able to speak his mind. Now he's dealing with the consequences of not pandering to morons
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Huh? Did he get arrested over this? Or was this just a case of a politician saying something that caused the electorate to decide not to vote for him? I wasn't aware the first amendment was able to protect you from that.
Maybe you were modded down for false equivalency.
Another person who doesn't understand the first amendment. The first amendment says that the government can't mess with your free expression. They can't put you in jail because you say something they don't like, they can't shut down a news paper for reporting on things they don't want, and so on. It does NOT say that people have to listen to whatever you say, like it, and not respond in any way.
This guy didn't have his rights violated at all: He said something extremely stupid, and people then used their first amendment rights to express that he's a jackass. His political party decided that because he'd pissed off lots of voters, they weren't interested in supporting them. They aren't required to support anyone, the choose the candidates they like. He realized he'd fucked up, and had no chance of wining, and so withdrew.
Nothing improper here. You seem to think that the first amendment should mean speech without consequence. Of course that doesn't work without infringing on the rights of others. If you say something I don't like, I have to be free to say I don't like you for it, or my freedom of speech is being infringed upon. I have to be free to refuse to talk to you, do business with you, etc or my freedom of association is being infringed upon.
What's politically correct about pointing out that ISIS are a bunch of murderous selfish thugs that qualify as 'evil' by almost any definition of the word, and mocking the fuckwit that claimed otherwise?
I think perhaps the real issue here is that he's grossly under educated on a subject and he opened his ignorance hole on the subject. Because (so far) murdering 10,000 non-combatant Men, Women and children for not following Islam is totally just trying to protect their community, right?
Disclaimer: There is an application of sarcasm here. Please read carefully.
I agree with you about violence. But on evil, he's right of course, but as a politician he's a fool to have imagined a cerebral point about moral relativism wouldn't be misinterpreted by the people at large, or misrepresented by his enemies as support for ISIS.
ISIS are evil by my definition of evil, and I'd gladly see them all hang. By their definition of evil, I'm evil, and they'd gladly see me hang. So, I bomb them, and they abduct and decapitate me.
I still think I'm right - I'm not saying that I think there's any moral equivalence between me and them. But I'm able to see that they have exactly the reverse position, and thus that in their minds, they're not just not evil, but even rigtheously good.
Saying "ISIS aren't evil" as a shorthand for all that is not likely to get people's votes. Hell, even saying all that is likely to piss off people who see the world in simplistic black and white (as I believe the majority do).
It seems like he was actually trying to be PC. He reflexively put out a PC-type spin on a tense situation to try to look wise.
Honestly all this does is serve to prove that the people running for any office are some of the absolute dumbest people in our society. Because smart people don't want to have anything at all to do with it because you have to deal with the general population and that is the largest collection of dumb there is.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Except for the religion which says Death to the Infidels... then those who don't use violence are wrong. Those evil moderates.
There is a reason why there seems to be a common theme amoungst the daily occurrence of violence. Psychedelic drugs and Islam.
So I got down modded for pointing out religious righteousness. Fuck you, whoever you are; probably a evangelical Christian.
Yep, the evangelical Christians are deadly.
Look at how they went on multiple murderous rampages over Piss Christ. They're STILL tossing gay men off rooftops, stoning rape victims for besmirching their family honor, cutting the hands off thieves, hijacking airliners and killing thousands, taking an entire school of children hostage then massacring them, recruiting 12-year-olds to conduct suicide bombings, beheading entire groups of non-believers.
And then there are the morons who use the events of a thousand years ago to excuse the barbaric actions of today's Christians.
I tell you, Christians are evil.
Oh yes I'm sure ISIS believe themselves to be fighting for god and all sorts of good things especially when they're hooked on Captagon. But what they are fighting for is an islamic caliphate where they see themselves as the warriors who brought this caliphate into being entrenched firmly at the top, and everyone else their slaves paying tribute in goods and women. While this is not necessarily evil if you happen to be in charge of this caliphate, it certainly is evil to today's current social order. While the western system is far from perfect it attempts to reward individual effort and permit individual expression. I for one am not prepared to see this situation change and if I have to be called "extremist" for this view by ignorant fools then so be it. It's easy to say there's no absolutes and no black and white, but in war you only get to pick one side or the other.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Modern ethics understands that the means are what's important - not the ends."
Then modern ethics - read "liberal" values - are full of shit. The means might be important but the end is far more so unless its trivia like a kids egg and spoon race. The whole "he played fair but lost, what a good chap" ethos fails miserably in war if by playing fair you and your whole family end up dead.
"Violence has only one place - in response to unprovoked aggression"
So you think terrorists should be allowed to commit an act before they're captured or killed then?
"An eye for an eye' will leave the whole world blind."
Spare us the hackneyed Ghandi quotes. He sure as hell was no Plato, never mind Aristotle.
These crazy people must be rooted out and dealt with.
They aren't crazy. You're failing to understand their motivations, which means you're failing to combat those motivations. Escalating the "kill a few, create a thousand" strategy of fighting terrorists will have predictable results, and maybe the next dead civilian will be someone you care about. We've tried stupid reactionary wars. It was called the Bush administration, and it got us where we are today. Lets try being smarter about it instead of doubling-down on stupid.
This first amendment gives him the right to tweet whatever he wants. It gives the rest of us the right to say we don't approve! The right to vote gives the rest of us the right to make it clear to him he might as well not bother standing for election.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You know, sooner or later people might get it through their heads that using Twitter is a strategy for fools.
You have two choices with Twitter: either you tweet some meaningless groupthink post, guaranteed not to offend anyone, OR you post something that offends someone, somewhere. And if you offend enough people, suddenly your life and career are in tatters when the Internet mob turns on you.
You'd think that enough peoples' lives have been ruined by thoughtless tweets that the lesson would have been learned. But it seems there's always another fool just waiting to make an example of him/herself.
Thank you for defending us against that straw man. Delightful of you to drag your personal conflicts into this discussion. No one is claiming that ISIS are not bad people, the point is that we should not become bad people ourselves in response. Our brains are wired to be irrational towards people we perceive as enemies (as your post demonstrates ably). We dehumanize them, we exaggerate their bad qualities, ignore the good, and so justify any malicious act against them.
In terms of human suffering, Paris was a drop in the ocean, and probably outweighed by deaths in Syria both in recent history and as a result of these retaliatory airstrikes. Interventionist policies are increasingly difficult to justify, and bombing hasn't seemed to do anything except provide welfare for munitions manufacturers.
To a rational person, this is a complicated situation. For the hawkish politician it's a great time for a power grab -- for some reason there's a tendency to want to fight fascism with fascism. By surrendering your reason to violent instinct you aid those who wish to control you, and work to spread suffering -- no matter who the villains-of-the-day happen to be. It's also not particularly Christ-like.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Careful injection reason into these type of conversations. See, the fact is, these people are sub human and evil and there is no reason behind it. /end sarcasm
While we continue to ignore the reasons that people join with these monsters, we will only ever add more monsters. It's as simple as that. We can't fight terrorism by fighting the symptoms alone, we must also fight the cause.
As long as people feel they have no other resource but to join with these people, these terrorists will always have numbers. What makes someone willing to sacrifice their life for a cause? Desperation? Determination? What exactly is it?
It's a fight for survival. Our troops enlist and give up their lives to help our way of life survive. Yet we want to pretend some of the enemy doesn't do this for the exact same reason?
I guess I'm naive to think that a lot of these people are doing this for more reasons that to just straight up murder people. It's like saying all elisted troops are well adjusted people who just want to do the right thing. That's patently false.
Well duh, you're only supposed to judge them by how much money they can scrounge together.
If we judged politicians by their words or actions, both Trump and Hillary would be in jail (and poor Bernie would be sedated in a looneybin somewhere).
Factually incorrect.
Reality calling. It would like to remind you of:
the Lord's Resistance Army? Christian
abortion clinic bombings? Evangelical Christian
Muslim villages massacred in northern India? Nationalist Hindus
and others.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I'm glad you know all 1-2 some billion Christians on earth and countless billions throughout history are all assholes because your ex-wife was an asshole.
I guess all the Christian missionaries and religious throughout the world that are feeding and clothing the poorest of the poor should pick up their bags, go home, and be much better people as secular atheists, so they can contribute something meaningful to the world like your shitpost Slashdot comments.
" religion like any other dogma is what leads to the extremists views"
And Christian extremist views are, what, advocating for different things, the verb being 'advocate', not 'engage', as in 'engage in violence'?
Christian - inspired violence is so rare as be not merely exceptional, but aberrant. Christians are, sadly, humans, and do engage in violence, but such violence is rarely in the name of their faith. Most other organized religions are also largely non violent, and like Christianity are so because that is a core tenet of their theologies.
"Then all others are wrong and if they don't accept it they must be punished in some way."
Christians believe and teach that such punishment is for their God to exact. Most other religions seem to believe similarly, where they preach punishment at all - some do not.
There is, however, one religion that teaches violence against all non believers, and even against their own who are insufficiently devout. This religion is, sadly, alone against the world. Sadly, because it will cause great suffering to defeat them.
And you know the name of this religion. Play games, engage in logic puzzles, minimize and excuse it all you want, it is so. To not call them by their name and for what they are is to permit them to continue to kill and oppress.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Third: I cringe watching how those stupid terrorists are killing our open society "by proxy" -- the dirty job being taken up by all you right-wing nutjobs. Go get a life. Go to Syria or Irak and enjoy your phantasies.
The right wingers just want to go kill the stupid terrorists. It's the left wingers who won't "let a good disaster to go to waste" (taking away rights) and actively seek such disasters when no options present themselves (growing ISIS via inaction).
But virtually every Christian condemns abortion clinic bombings, where a terrifying number of global Muslims support terror, Sharia theocracy, death for apostates, punishment for homosexual activity, the abolition of freedom of expression in the name of suppressing images they find offensive, etc.
See: http://www.pewresearch.org/fac... , http://www.pewforum.org/2013/0... , and virtually any other similar survey.
Of the hundreds of abortion clinic bombings, I've only been able to find one which resulted in a fatality. It's almost as if the bombers were carefully trying to avoid human fatalities. Which makes sense since their whole rationale for doing it was to stop what they perceive as widespread murder of unborn children. i.e. They did it because they value life; their definition of life just happens to be a superset of yours. They only resorted to bombings and arson to in their view stop a greater violence (buildings and equipment being less valuable than lives), the opposite of your implication.
The lone exception was the bombing carried out by Eric Rudolph. You may know him better as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, so clearly he had no qualms about using indiscriminate violence in support of his beliefs. (There have been several shootings of abortion clinic workers. But shootings are targeted, not indiscriminate like bombings.)
California proposal to legalize killing gays hard to stop
Actually, this is a good example of the strength of a true democracy and even a civil society. The title of the article is quite misleading. The California attorney general cannot prevent the proposal writer from proceeding to the signature gathering stage. That's good, i.e., that ideas, even the crazy ones, can be stomped out by a single person. At that point, no one (including those that are anti-gay) will sign his petition, and it will die. This is exactly how the system should work.
We can only dream that such a scenario would be possible in ISIS or even most moderate Muslim countries.