To add to this, "regular" is an adjective deriving from the Latin word for a "rule". The use of "regular" as meaning "normal" is not universal in English dialects anyway.
Who's talking about appeasement? I'm not saying people shouldn't insult millions of people to avoid being shot by one of a tiny minority of nutters, what I'm saying is that people shouldn't insult millions of people because it's not a nice thing to do.
Plenty of people have criticised Islam and not been shot -- have you ever read a newspaper? The images CH has published in the past do not qualify as criticism or as satire -- they were purely and deliberately antagonistic. They certainly did not deserve to be shot, but they should all have been fired a long time ago.
then, in this case, to all the Celtic fans that they should be much less than proud to allow that kind of behaviour under their ranks
...(which is very different from standing there insulting them to their faces)...
if or as long they haven't show their heaviest rejection to these kind of violent acts.
...(which brings us back to the situation where the majority of Muslims are expected to constantly apologise for things they didn't do, while the majority of white Christians and secularists are not expected to actively condemn the likes of Anders Brevik and Ted Kaczynski for the things they did.)
How can the means to an end be the whole thing? Do you even speak English?
There are multiple tactics to achieve a goal. The whole point of terrorism is that it's a tactic for people who simply do not have the numbers to achieve victory otherwise.
But we should not allow our understanding of what is happening in the criminal's head to prevent us from fully and unequivocally condemning him for the evil of his actions.
I don't have a problem with "unequivocally". I am unequivocal when I say it is a horrendous act with no legitimate excuse. But if we blame them fully, then we are condemning ourselves to history repeating itself. Remember the words of John Donne's poem:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Society exists, and we are molded by the society we grow up in. We can choose to continue to be the type of society that creates these problems, or we can try to be a different type of society.
OK, well a guy got stabbed in Glasgow not so long ago because he called a Celtic fan a "fenian bastard". Is it now OK and even necessary to call every single Celtic fan, most of whom have never stabbed anyone, "fenian bastards"?
Have you looked at the cartoons and the backdrop? Do you remember that megatroll video The Innocence of Muslims? It really offended Muslims, and they were angry about it. CH's response was to post cock-and-calls drawings of Muhammed. I consider that being a dick. It wasn't witty satire or a biting political statement, it was just flipping the bird. It was offensiveness for its own sake. AKA being a dick.
It's not like us westerners live up to our professed ideals of truth, justice and democracy either...
Sure. But I was talking not about people living up to their ideals or not. My point was about the ideals themselves. Our ideals are, as you enumerated, truth, justice and democracy (among other things). Islam's ideals are truth (among the faithful — lying to infidels is perfectly fine), justice (Sharia) and theocracy (the only political order acceptable under Koran).
The meaning of theocracy is debated by scholars of all religions, and the majority view is that theocracy is obtained when individuals live answerable to god. The Catholic church foreswore direct political power at the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and most Muslims reject both the Iranian model of Ayatollahs and the IS notion of an Islamic caliphate in recognition of the corruptibility of humans, particularly those in positions of power. Theocracy is not, therefore, a political order. In fact, true theocracy would be easier to achieve under a democratic political system than a totalitarian one (if a god exists -- I do not personally believe in any) as it is less prone to corruption (but still open to plenty of corruption, as proven every day).
Why "no"? Even if it is "just" a means to an end, it's still the whole point of the tactic. The pIRA wanted Britain to see all of the Irish-descent community as an enemy in order to get them all on side, with a view to encouraging complete withdrawal. ETA's name is a really cunning bit of terrorism - it is the most common word in the Basque language: "and". By taking that name, they guaranteed that anyone speaking Basque would be distrusted by Spanish speakers. They wanted Spain to drive all Basques which would in the long term force a Spanish withdrawal. Yes, they wanted the other side to give up, but the tactic was to do so by getting them to make their own position untenable
For IS, the nature of the conflict is different. While on one hand they wish to encourage withdrawal of foreign military powers from the Middle East, they have a far more pressing goal (and they most likely know that shooting cartoonists won't end military intervention anyway). It is their assertion that their cause is just because it is in the name of Islam. The fact that they represent a tiny minority of Muslims undermines this assertion, so they need to drive more people to their cause if they are to gain legitimacy. And that means engineering a backlash -- and it has to be a serious backlash. Consider Zionism -- even with all the pogroms going on in Europe, most Jews still weren't Zionists. It took the Holocaust to make Zionism a mainstream policy. More recently, the race riots in the US weren't enough to get many African-Americans to take up the offer or resettlement in Liberia or Sierra Leone. The UK's own race riots didn't get our immigrant communities flooding home either, and it's relevant here that much of our settled immigrants are Muslims from Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. The goal of IS's terrorists is not to end a war, it's to start one. They want to goad us into hate.
The cost of oeace with my next door neighbour is not screaming "My next door neighbour has three testicles and he stinks of Brylcream and sweat" out the window. Is that self-censorship or manners?
When anybody not even excuses, but merely explains rape by the victim's "slut-like" clothing or suggestive behavior, we tend to get (justly) outraged by such blame-the-victim attitude.
Why should attempts to explain murders by the nebulous "being treated like shit" by the victims be treated any different?
The cause of rape and sexual violence against women is a misogynistic culture. Clothing is not an explanation. I am all in favour of discussing modes of dress as a means of not drawing undesired attention, but that must be within a context that clearly states that it is not the woman's fault. If clothing is an "explanation" for rape, you are stating it is the cause, and if it is the cause, then you are stating it's the woman's fault. No -- it's the man's fault. I have been on beaches where women were sunbathing topless, and I didn't rape a single one of them. Surely if there's an such thing as slutty dressing that causes rape, wearing nothing but a thong and oiling your skin then spreading yourself out on the group is "asking for it"...? No.
The cause of rape is rapists. The cause of terrorism is terrorists.
But rapists are made by society, just as terrorists are made by society. Dealing with that root cause isn't about absolving the criminals of their responsibility. We can continue to jail both rapists and terrorists while simultaneously working to remove the circumstances that made them what they are.
Of course, we edited lots of people's cultures when we were their colonial masters, and actually instilled the killing of homosexuals into places that had historically been pretty tolerant. Social engineering often goes badly wrong.
They do so because they don't perceive that they have any better options..
What a load of utter BULLSHIT.
There are ALWAYS better options.
Learn to read. GP said "they don't perceive that they have any better options." "They don't perceive." That is their perception. Their perception is that others perceive them as "human waste". So well done you for proving them right.
If all the publishers decided to publish, that would be the greatest overall benefit for freedom of speech, because it demonstrates they're not afraid of terrorism.
If all the publishers decided to publish, they would all be dicks. Most publishers chose not to publish because unnecessary offense is not a wonderful stand for freedom of speech, it's being a dick. And yes, you are free to be a dick, and people should not shoot you for being a dick. Still doesn't make it OK to be a dick.
You don't get it -- they don't want us to stop printing pictures, they want us to print more pictures. They want us to insult Islam, so that they can continue to call themselves the only true defenders of Islam. Not printing such stuff in many countries isn't about pandering to the minority of extremist nutters -- it's about being polite to the moderates. To suggest otherwise is like saying that giving equal rights to African-Americans was giving in to Black Panthers terrorism.
As for "something should have been done"... well, that way lies the thought police. By definition, someone who has committed no crime is not a criminal. America tried arresting non-criminals before -- ever heard of Camp X-Ray or Abu Graib prison? Neither of those did anything to improve international stability of the safety of American citizens.
A cartoon featuring an important religious or cultural leader has most impact when it is used to make followers of that leader evaluate their actions -- Jesus teabagging the Good Samaritan at Abu Graib would probably be a step too far for many, but as a political statement it would be valid. But Charlie took things too far, when their response to Muslims being offended by the Innocence of Muslims was just to offend them as gratuitously as they could. (I mean, seriously... cock-and-balls drawings of Muhammed? That was unnecessary.) Insults are only safe when there is some degree of equality of power between the two parties, and in recent decades, white western powers have been involved in assassinations, kidnappings, regime changes, military invasion and warrantless unmanned aerial drone strikes in various nominally Muslim countries. As long as we're doing all that, publishing images like that feels a bit like dancing on people's graves.
The fact that you can't publish a cartoon for fear of anything, is the only proof you need to show why the cartoon needs to be published in the first place.
That does not necessarily follow. If you attack a problem in the wrong way, you can exacerbate it.
Take fat shaming, for example. Fat shamers declare they're doing it for the fat person's own good, but time and again it has been shown that fat shaming undermines overweight people's self-confidence, making it harder for them to lose weight, and actually encouraging weight gain. It doesn't work.
Terrorism does not aim to win a war by force of arms, but rather to polarise society. Terrorism attempts to turn its enemies into its best recruiters, by making them suspicious of everybody in the terrorists social/ethnic/religious group. Fundamentalist Islamic terrorists want us to radicalise Muslims for them. They want us to fear Muslims, to hate Muslims. They want us to attack Islam to drive a wedge between us and moderate Muslims.
If you consider drawing images of Muhammed to be a retaliation against the extremists, then it is one akin to nuking Baghdad just to be sure of getting Saddam Hussein. The depiction of Muhammed is haram, and therefore an affront to a great many Muslims, the vast of whom have no thoughts of reprisals. It is an attack on the whole religion, not just the fundamentalists. It creates that sense of opposition that the terrorists want -- it's tells Muslims that Western society is against them.
Of course, that doesn't mean the killers weren't a bunch of sick b*st*rds... just that we have to be careful not to react in the way they want us to.
Large-scale thermal energy generations requires a heat difference to work, and in effect moves heat from one place to another. The only part of the Earth that isn't likely to be directly affected by global warming is the stuff underneath the crust, but that's already warmer than the atmosphere, so global warming reduces the temperature difference and reduces our ability to generate energy from heat.
Slashdot Mirror
To add to this, "regular" is an adjective deriving from the Latin word for a "rule". The use of "regular" as meaning "normal" is not universal in English dialects anyway.
Who's talking about appeasement? I'm not saying people shouldn't insult millions of people to avoid being shot by one of a tiny minority of nutters, what I'm saying is that people shouldn't insult millions of people because it's not a nice thing to do.
Plenty of people have criticised Islam and not been shot -- have you ever read a newspaper? The images CH has published in the past do not qualify as criticism or as satire -- they were purely and deliberately antagonistic. They certainly did not deserve to be shot, but they should all have been fired a long time ago.
then, in this case, to all the Celtic fans that they should be much less than proud to allow that kind of behaviour under their ranks
...(which is very different from standing there insulting them to their faces)...
if or as long they haven't show their heaviest rejection to these kind of violent acts.
...(which brings us back to the situation where the majority of Muslims are expected to constantly apologise for things they didn't do, while the majority of white Christians and secularists are not expected to actively condemn the likes of Anders Brevik and Ted Kaczynski for the things they did.)
How can the means to an end be the whole thing? Do you even speak English?
There are multiple tactics to achieve a goal. The whole point of terrorism is that it's a tactic for people who simply do not have the numbers to achieve victory otherwise.
No, it's not OK for him to do that. But the fact that me insulting him is the lesser of two evils is no justification for me to do so either.
But we should not allow our understanding of what is happening in the criminal's head to prevent us from fully and unequivocally condemning him for the evil of his actions.
I don't have a problem with "unequivocally". I am unequivocal when I say it is a horrendous act with no legitimate excuse. But if we blame them fully, then we are condemning ourselves to history repeating itself. Remember the words of John Donne's poem:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Society exists, and we are molded by the society we grow up in. We can choose to continue to be the type of society that creates these problems, or we can try to be a different type of society.
OK, well a guy got stabbed in Glasgow not so long ago because he called a Celtic fan a "fenian bastard". Is it now OK and even necessary to call every single Celtic fan, most of whom have never stabbed anyone, "fenian bastards"?
Have you looked at the cartoons and the backdrop? Do you remember that megatroll video The Innocence of Muslims? It really offended Muslims, and they were angry about it. CH's response was to post cock-and-calls drawings of Muhammed. I consider that being a dick. It wasn't witty satire or a biting political statement, it was just flipping the bird. It was offensiveness for its own sake. AKA being a dick.
Sure. But I was talking not about people living up to their ideals or not. My point was about the ideals themselves. Our ideals are, as you enumerated, truth, justice and democracy (among other things). Islam's ideals are truth (among the faithful — lying to infidels is perfectly fine), justice (Sharia) and theocracy (the only political order acceptable under Koran).
The meaning of theocracy is debated by scholars of all religions, and the majority view is that theocracy is obtained when individuals live answerable to god. The Catholic church foreswore direct political power at the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and most Muslims reject both the Iranian model of Ayatollahs and the IS notion of an Islamic caliphate in recognition of the corruptibility of humans, particularly those in positions of power. Theocracy is not, therefore, a political order. In fact, true theocracy would be easier to achieve under a democratic political system than a totalitarian one (if a god exists -- I do not personally believe in any) as it is less prone to corruption (but still open to plenty of corruption, as proven every day).
Why "no"? Even if it is "just" a means to an end, it's still the whole point of the tactic. The pIRA wanted Britain to see all of the Irish-descent community as an enemy in order to get them all on side, with a view to encouraging complete withdrawal. ETA's name is a really cunning bit of terrorism - it is the most common word in the Basque language: "and". By taking that name, they guaranteed that anyone speaking Basque would be distrusted by Spanish speakers. They wanted Spain to drive all Basques which would in the long term force a Spanish withdrawal. Yes, they wanted the other side to give up, but the tactic was to do so by getting them to make their own position untenable
For IS, the nature of the conflict is different. While on one hand they wish to encourage withdrawal of foreign military powers from the Middle East, they have a far more pressing goal (and they most likely know that shooting cartoonists won't end military intervention anyway). It is their assertion that their cause is just because it is in the name of Islam. The fact that they represent a tiny minority of Muslims undermines this assertion, so they need to drive more people to their cause if they are to gain legitimacy. And that means engineering a backlash -- and it has to be a serious backlash. Consider Zionism -- even with all the pogroms going on in Europe, most Jews still weren't Zionists. It took the Holocaust to make Zionism a mainstream policy. More recently, the race riots in the US weren't enough to get many African-Americans to take up the offer or resettlement in Liberia or Sierra Leone. The UK's own race riots didn't get our immigrant communities flooding home either, and it's relevant here that much of our settled immigrants are Muslims from Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. The goal of IS's terrorists is not to end a war, it's to start one. They want to goad us into hate.
The cost of oeace with my next door neighbour is not screaming "My next door neighbour has three testicles and he stinks of Brylcream and sweat" out the window. Is that self-censorship or manners?
When anybody not even excuses, but merely explains rape by the victim's "slut-like" clothing or suggestive behavior, we tend to get (justly) outraged by such blame-the-victim attitude.
Why should attempts to explain murders by the nebulous "being treated like shit" by the victims be treated any different?
The cause of rape and sexual violence against women is a misogynistic culture. Clothing is not an explanation. I am all in favour of discussing modes of dress as a means of not drawing undesired attention, but that must be within a context that clearly states that it is not the woman's fault. If clothing is an "explanation" for rape, you are stating it is the cause, and if it is the cause, then you are stating it's the woman's fault. No -- it's the man's fault. I have been on beaches where women were sunbathing topless, and I didn't rape a single one of them. Surely if there's an such thing as slutty dressing that causes rape, wearing nothing but a thong and oiling your skin then spreading yourself out on the group is "asking for it"...? No.
The cause of rape is rapists. The cause of terrorism is terrorists.
But rapists are made by society, just as terrorists are made by society. Dealing with that root cause isn't about absolving the criminals of their responsibility. We can continue to jail both rapists and terrorists while simultaneously working to remove the circumstances that made them what they are.
Of course, we edited lots of people's cultures when we were their colonial masters, and actually instilled the killing of homosexuals into places that had historically been pretty tolerant. Social engineering often goes badly wrong.
It's not like us westerners live up to our professed ideals of truth, justice and democracy either...
They do so because they don't perceive that they have any better options. .
What a load of utter BULLSHIT.
There are ALWAYS better options.
Learn to read. GP said "they don't perceive that they have any better options." "They don't perceive." That is their perception. Their perception is that others perceive them as "human waste". So well done you for proving them right.
If all the publishers decided to publish, that would be the greatest overall benefit for freedom of speech, because it demonstrates they're not afraid of terrorism.
If all the publishers decided to publish, they would all be dicks. Most publishers chose not to publish because unnecessary offense is not a wonderful stand for freedom of speech, it's being a dick. And yes, you are free to be a dick, and people should not shoot you for being a dick. Still doesn't make it OK to be a dick.
You don't get it -- they don't want us to stop printing pictures, they want us to print more pictures. They want us to insult Islam, so that they can continue to call themselves the only true defenders of Islam. Not printing such stuff in many countries isn't about pandering to the minority of extremist nutters -- it's about being polite to the moderates. To suggest otherwise is like saying that giving equal rights to African-Americans was giving in to Black Panthers terrorism.
As for "something should have been done"... well, that way lies the thought police. By definition, someone who has committed no crime is not a criminal. America tried arresting non-criminals before -- ever heard of Camp X-Ray or Abu Graib prison? Neither of those did anything to improve international stability of the safety of American citizens.
A cartoon featuring an important religious or cultural leader has most impact when it is used to make followers of that leader evaluate their actions -- Jesus teabagging the Good Samaritan at Abu Graib would probably be a step too far for many, but as a political statement it would be valid. But Charlie took things too far, when their response to Muslims being offended by the Innocence of Muslims was just to offend them as gratuitously as they could. (I mean, seriously... cock-and-balls drawings of Muhammed? That was unnecessary.) Insults are only safe when there is some degree of equality of power between the two parties, and in recent decades, white western powers have been involved in assassinations, kidnappings, regime changes, military invasion and warrantless unmanned aerial drone strikes in various nominally Muslim countries. As long as we're doing all that, publishing images like that feels a bit like dancing on people's graves.
The fact that you can't publish a cartoon for fear of anything, is the only proof you need to show why the cartoon needs to be published in the first place.
That does not necessarily follow. If you attack a problem in the wrong way, you can exacerbate it.
Take fat shaming, for example. Fat shamers declare they're doing it for the fat person's own good, but time and again it has been shown that fat shaming undermines overweight people's self-confidence, making it harder for them to lose weight, and actually encouraging weight gain. It doesn't work.
Terrorism does not aim to win a war by force of arms, but rather to polarise society. Terrorism attempts to turn its enemies into its best recruiters, by making them suspicious of everybody in the terrorists social/ethnic/religious group. Fundamentalist Islamic terrorists want us to radicalise Muslims for them. They want us to fear Muslims, to hate Muslims. They want us to attack Islam to drive a wedge between us and moderate Muslims.
If you consider drawing images of Muhammed to be a retaliation against the extremists, then it is one akin to nuking Baghdad just to be sure of getting Saddam Hussein. The depiction of Muhammed is haram, and therefore an affront to a great many Muslims, the vast of whom have no thoughts of reprisals. It is an attack on the whole religion, not just the fundamentalists. It creates that sense of opposition that the terrorists want -- it's tells Muslims that Western society is against them.
Of course, that doesn't mean the killers weren't a bunch of sick b*st*rds... just that we have to be careful not to react in the way they want us to.
Spraying sulphur in the atmosphere in a warmed up Earth? Are they trying to recreate Hell?
Large-scale thermal energy generations requires a heat difference to work, and in effect moves heat from one place to another. The only part of the Earth that isn't likely to be directly affected by global warming is the stuff underneath the crust, but that's already warmer than the atmosphere, so global warming reduces the temperature difference and reduces our ability to generate energy from heat.
How much? (It's always fun to make easy money off a bigot.)
Do you know what's proven even more effective in other countries? Gun control.
Meanwhile, armed response is not immediate, and for a suicidal spree killer, suicide-by-cop is a perfectly acceptable endpoint.