Lindy

This is dangerous logic. Incitement is when you incite your FOLLOWERS to violence. If your ENEMIES react to your actions with violence that is not incitement. Was Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard guilty of incitement for drawing a likeness of the Prophet?

Would you call Martin Luther King, Jr. guilty of incitement because Sheriff Bull Connor and the white citizens of Alabama reacted violently to King's demonstrations in 1963? Did MLK's using his right of free speech incite his own assassination? Your logic heads right down that street.

And no, I am not equating Rev. Nitwit Terry Jones with MLK. I am saying that we should look at this legal principle (incitement) for what it is, not just as a way to punish the actions of those we hate. Rev. Jones and his followers are no more representative Christians than the 9/11 terrorists are representative Muslims.

Sure, let's judge what should or should not be protected speech based on the international political consequences. After all, we're only limiting ultra-rightwing asshats. They're such an embarrassment. Don't they just deserve it? They're nothing but a bunch of ultra-rightwing christian zealots anyway.
Then we can start to move the definition of "ultra-rightwing" a little bit to the left. And then a little more. And a little more...
Eventually anyone to the right of Vladimir Ilyich could be considered "ultra right-wing." And we could "fashion limitations" on their speech too. Just like in that Marxist workers' paradise Russia in the 1920s. And the 1930s. 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, etc.
Let's arrest them and send nitwit Jones and all the rest of the Jews --I mean ultra-rightwing christian zealots-- to a nice reeducation camp. Send them away so they are not around to cause us embarrassment or unwanted political consequences. Keep them there for a good long time.

Lindy
First they came for the ultra-rightwing christian zealots and I did not speak out because I was not...

.

roachboy

great lindy. so first i get a facile slippery slope argument and in the second i am given to understand that if you oppose fascist speech you're pol pot.

fine job.

how about you try again.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Jetée

Did the planned "attention-grabbing" stunt even happen? Last I heard (Friday) the entire thing was cancelled, and the faux-church is now looking for a way to sell (used) Qu'rans they bought a week before. Lot of publicity and up-in-arm'ing for not a whole lot of anything that wasn't stupid / obviously vainglorious in the first place.

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Pearl Trade

Terry Jones, with his cunty handlebar mustache, said they would not burn it today or any time in the future.

Full of shit the whole time.

__________________

Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Give me convenience or give me death!

dksuddeth

you still haven't explained how burning a quran is fascist speech but burning a flag is free speech.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

roachboy

i regard burning a quran in this political context as a bit of neo-fascist agit-prop.
i've been pretty clear about the frameworks within which it's status as protected speech is a problem. i've also been clear about the fact that i regard this as a complicated problem, negociating between protected political speech and incitement or the actions like yelling fire in a crowded theater.


so i'm not interested in your metaphysical "how is fish like wombat?" question.

sorry.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

flat5

I'd like to see proof that he even bought 100.

(and how much do they cost?)

dksuddeth

I'm sorry as well, for the only thing I'm left to regard is that you're ridiculous comparison is total hypocrisy, that only in YOUR mind can burning one symbol be unprotected hate speech while the burning of another symbol, despite the potentiality for violent response, isn't incitement at all, but should be considered irrational responses to protected free speech.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

roachboy

that's because you refuse to understand what i'm saying, dk.
and you act as though my posts were statements of solid conviction the way yours are, when the fact of the matter is that there's alot of problems with every aspect of this burning thing.

i even included more than once comments about the complexity i was thinking my way through personally as i wrote some of the posts here that was generated because my personal and political revulsion (vis-a-vis these 20 cretins in gainesville) ran me over concerns about freedom of speech i otherwise take account of.

i think this happens to everyone, one way or another, in one context or another. it certainly happens to you when either of your strict construction hobby horses comes up. at least i acknowledge it. you tend to pretend the world is as you want to see it as being.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ourcrazymodern?

um, guys? I'm firmly convinced (deluded) that we all agree:

The threatened action was a bad idea.
The media hoopla was the major cause of this media event.
The issues involve two things it's impossible to converse politely about.

There's no reason to be rude.

The crux burning here, to me, is that inarguables are constructed internally & our ability to listen to others when they disagree is a valuable skill leading to an increased understanding. Neither the preacher nor the muslims who rioted elsewhere possess it. But I believe we do.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

dksuddeth

roach, simply put, you're full of it. there is no difference. NONE. no matter how you try to explain it or differentiate it, you're full of it. your colors are showing.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

roachboy

if i thought the matter were so simple i wouldn't have wasted my time writing what i wrote.
i think your viewpoint simplistic.
if you want a debate, try another tack.
if not, i have plenty of other things to do. i'm a busy boy.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

noodle

I drove past all this yesterday.
It was hoopla. I didn't want to, but I was listening to the stupid TomTom lady.
There were people everywhere.
And a gun checkpoint to get into where the media people were.
We just ended up pissed that it took us longer to get out out of Gainesville.
This was at about 5:45 pm.
It was stupid.
People yelling at each other and making a scene.

__________________

Lindy

OK, I'll try again. This is not rocket science. It is neither facile or slippery. You fail to understand the simple distinction between a provocation (which this is) and an incitement (which this is not.)
MLK's actions in the sixties were a provocation, intended to provoke an overreaction by his opponents. It worked just as he planned. But they were not an incitement. Nothing slippery about that. Simple historical fact.
Hitler's speeches excoriating the Jews in the 1930s were an incitement, because they drove his followers, not his opponents.

If you want to oppose fascist speech by throwing the fascists in the slammer, not for what they do, but for what they think, what they say, or who they are, yes, you are pol pot.

Yeah, let's get our own bully-boys out to bust up the other guy's get togethers. Worked for the Nazis in the early 1930s. Do we really want that to get started here? By the way, I think we'd all really like to know just what exactly you mean by "total suppression?"

roachboy, you are blinded by your own hate.

Lindy
First they came for the ultra-rightwing christian zealots and I did not speak out because I was not...

roachboy

well, i shall certainly undertake a period of profound soul-searching. knowing that my posts can be chopped up and presented to look as though i am saying things i'm not saying...gee, what thinking person wouldn't retreat to the mountain?


first the distinction incitement/provocation--yes there is this distinction. given the interpol announcement of last wednesday that jones' action would have prompted more "terrorist" attacks on the united states, going forward would seem to me to move out of the space of protected speech and into that of public safety.
but i thought it more fun to push at incitement because for the argument to work, you'd have to position terry jones as a "terrorist".
which would mean that you'd have to be thinking rather than being merely pedantic.
good luck with that.



second, because of the public safety concerns, i would have expected legal action would have been taken and that ultimately it would have turned into a legal battle that would have been really problematic and would in all likelihood have turned terry jones into some right-wing martyr of free speech if the ultra-right political estabishment could stomach making a martyr out of a racist who doesnt try to pretend he isnt one.

and i was aware of the tensions within my own position on that. but to know that you'd have had to move beyond cherry-picking. but that's not how you roll.



third, as for the facile conclusion that i am "blinded by my own hate" i would say that given the way you butchered my positions that you doth protest too much.

and context matters. for the posts to make sense, context matters. but butchering is so easy.

your "position"" appears to be that it's a problem to suppress fascism because it deprives fascists of the "right" to be fascist.

so i have a problem with racism.
ooo that must make me a bad person.

so i have a problem with fascism.
oooo that must make me a bad person.

i feel just terrible about that.

and i assume that you as a racist and a fascist will sleep better now knowing that your speech rights are no longer threatened by posts from pol pot on a message board.

any idiot can play this game, lindy dear.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cimarron29414

rb -

I don't think the Interpol warning can be used in your argument, and here's why: it forces one to accept that people willing to blow up U.S. interests are waiting for a reason to do so - and that one wacko preacher burning a Koran is what will set them over the edge.

I believe anyone willing to blow up U.S. interests already have enough reasons and are simply working through the logistics in order to make that happen.

Therefore, this is no more of an incitement fear than U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan or Britney and Madonna kissing in lingerie on T.V.

I'll give you that it may have caused people to protest and those protests may escalate to rioting, rioting to the burning of U.S. interests. But incitement to "terrorism" seems a stretch.

Another observation: typically, there is a group of like-minded people on this board who rally together and post in support of a position. That group does not seem to exist surrounding the position you've taken. I'm not picking a fight, I just find that curious.

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

Ourcrazymodern?

^^This idiot can't. Sniping at each other in reaction to each other's thoughtless sniping has some similarity to burning & rioting. Speaking your mind is supposed to be less actionable.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

roachboy

cimmaron--for what it's worth i actually in meat-space struggled a bit with this question, trying to find a way to balance my visceral revulsion over what these people wanted to do against free speech considerations. and i'm not sure i found a balance. but i'm ok with that---it's part of a process of trying to figure out a position.

the ambient conditions that made the question difficult are easy to name but hard to imagine doing anything about at an individual level: that the populist right since the end of the bush period has shifted into what i regard, and can argue for as being, neo-fascism and that this shift has gone largely unnamed in the dominant ideological system. i see this as a Problem, and a particularly american problem. if you look at comparable movements in western europe, like the french front national, you find that they're named for what they are and that this naming presents real problems for the parties getting traction. front national candidates have only once got more than 5% in a national election and that moment prompted a significant political backlash. i fail to understand why it is that the **same** ideology (with "american" substituted for "french") passes as mainstream conservatism in the states.

i attribute this to the passivity of the center/left and to the effects of far too long a period of conservative ascendancy. the right has managed to shift popular notions of "balance" into a space that naming what the populist right is can be taken as a abrogation of their prerogatives.

i see this as dangerous. and i don't believe the united states system is self-correcting. i would point to two terms of george w. bush and the war in iraq as proof.

second: the particular action terry jones proposed i found deeply, personally offensive. i found it offensive in itself and doubly so in the context of yet another mounting wave of conservative-inspired anti-muslim sentiment. this affects people i love directly. it is hard to treat this as some abstract Problem and play what i regard as stupid high-school debate team games around this issue for that reason.

i keep hoping that people will snap out of some stupor and reject the legitimacy of such actions and do something to prevent them---truth be told although i would have had little problem with a group breaking up the jones' action forcibly, i would have preferred to have seen massive counter-demonstrations that ringed it around and showed its marginality and that this sort of thing is simply unacceptable politically and ethically, and done so in a peaceful manner.

and i would have expected that fox news would show footage cut in a way parallel to how leni reifenstahl cut the crowd sequences in "triumph of the will" to produce the opposite effect.

so this was a difficult issue for me as a human being.
it's because it's difficult that i don't feel inclined to indulge stupid counters and cheap red-baiting as a response.
or maybe i'm just getting sick of debating politics here.
i haven't figured that out quite yet.

====

addendum:
riots in kashmir left 13 dead because of these people.
demonstrations in afghanistan left 3 dead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...lled-quran-row

but i guess folk are ok with that. after all, its important that american neo-fascists are free to be as foul as they want to be. and besides, the dead are just crazy brown people far away. so who cares?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cimarron29414

rb-

I share a similar personal reaction to Jones' actions. I also feel an urgency of "Somebody - ANYBODY - do something to keep this from being the face of America that Islam sees!" Especially, when this is definitely not the face of America. I also must concede that these actions almost universally fall at the feet of conservatives. Love thy neighbor be damned.

I think most of the anger I feel regarding this event is the media coverage. Stupid people do stupid symbolic things in this country all the time. Why the media picks this up and runs with it 24/7 (I'm talking to you Foxnews) just shows "there's good money in controversy," regardless of the damage it causes. One small man doing one small act is undeserving of this exposure.

I really want this guy's congregation, his neighbors, family, or his regional society to squash this. In my fantasy solution, I see him lighting the lighter and everyone in the crowd throwing a water balloon at him - something which exposes the ridiculous act he proposes with an equally ridiculous act....turning his twisted carnival-show behavior into a universal response of STFU through humiliation.

Where I get nervous is if the "anybody" discouraging his speech is a government entity. You and I will agree we have different levels of trust in our government, and while I would like to trust them to suppress stuff like this and still let you and me rally/protest other things - it feels like a pandora's box. To bolster your case, I would probably point to the evidence of the Dutch cartoonist. In that event there seems to be evidence to support incitement, especially since this pastor is capable of seeing that that act caused death and destruction. Perhaps, that would be enough to justify "state" reaction. I'll have to chew on that...

Anyway, I can tell you've struggled with this since you don't typically take such a finite or absolute approach at solutions.

OurCrazyModern -

???

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

Ourcrazymodern?

I've just been trying to point out that with so much agreement around about the major issue, it's silly to take offense at how we express our convergent thinking. My last post was to follow (^^) from roachboy's, but I was too slow composing. The idiot is me.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Cimarron29414

Oh! Well, it's not to late to edit it and make me look less of an idiot.

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

roachboy

well, it was early in the morning and i had just been called pol pot again.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Tully Mars

I think I agree with you 100%.

I noticed a news article this morning quoting some Iranian politician stating the reason they were suddenly asking for 500k to release the poor girl they're holding as a spy was because of the Quran burning issue.

Dumb ass people do dumb ass things... how or why that becomes news is beyond me. But some poor chick is sitting in Iranian jail right now in part due to this BS.

---------- Post added at 12:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:06 PM ----------

I kind of know how you feel. I got called a "nigger" early one morning and it really started my day off wrong. I kept think "Damn, really? Because I don't even tan well."

__________________
I used to drink to drown my sorrows, but the damned things have learned how to swim- Frida Kahlo

Vice President Starkizzer Fan Club

roachboy

cimmaron--i agree with you about the problem of the soft media coverage. and comrade terry was able to play the retro-media game all too well. for this sort of thing not to be so easy you'd have to have a dominant media in the context of which journalism rather than advertising sales was paramount.

i would prefer a press that in the main simply laughed at conservatives like pastor terry. or ignored him because he's so obviously a self-promoting moron that there's no reason to give him press. i would imagine alot of sane conservatives would prefer that too, because in the end its they who get associated with him. in fact, you'd think most people would prefer that. so how did it come to pass that the situation is so otherwise?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lindy

Yeah, I noticed that too. And don't pick a fight with an idealogue. You'll just get transmogrified into a racist and a fascist for your trouble.

You must be exceptionally perceptive. I'm nearly 34 years old, and no one else has ever noticed. That I was a racist. A fascist. Or an idiot. They usually notice my tits.
Be that as it may, I will again ask just what you meant by the "total suppression" of the Rev. Nitwit Jones' congregation? Put it in whatever "context" that you want. In roachboy's best of all possible worlds do racists, fascists, and nitwit stupid folk have no rights at all?

Lindy
First they came for the ultra-rightwing christian zealots and I did not speak out because I was not...

roachboy

i'm bored with you, lindy dear.

your pal,

pol pot

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Wes Mantooth

Freedom isn't always easy. Think about it, it's nothing to support freedom of speech when the expression is something you agree with, the real challenge lies in being able to support those same rights for those you despise...and it isn't always easy but I don't see how the right could survive otherwise.

I don't really like slippery slope arguments either but I do think it applies to some extent here. If we support outlawing controversial expressions how can we then complain and demand our rights be supported when the political winds shift and suddenly our own ideologies are controversial and unpopular?

__________________

Cimarron29414

rb-

I believe the decline of our free press was born on the day CNN started. If I recall, they were the first 24/7 news agency. The need to create 24 hours worth of news every day is the overwhelming drive. I didn't use "create" by accident. The media can no longer make the distinction between "events" and "news" because they have too much time to fill. Frankly, there isn't really enough going on (even on the planet) to fill 24 hours of news on a channel.

Hence, the dawn of the opinion shows on those channels. One hour of dissecting the limited news and describing how we should all react to that news -followed by another hour of dissection by a different person. Of course, these opinion people also justify why this event is important enough to us to become news - enter Terry Jones.

In my opinion, this 24/7 news phenomenon is when the "duty" of reporting the news for T.V. (but you only have a half hour so pick the important stuff) morphed into an "opportunity" to make money by tuning the news to maximize profit.

I think I could tie the recent dysfunction of our federal government back to this as well, but I don't think I need to. I think we can all agree that the media plays an overwhelming role in the Federal government's behavior.

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

roachboy

24/7 cable "news" is a problem, maybe the driver, certainly *a* driver.
the tabloidization of news, the rise of infotainment, is also linked strongly to the rupert murdoch mode of operation, which didn't spring into being full-blown from his head with faux news. and of course the generalization of an utterly commercial ideology which overrode older quaint practices like journalistic integrity. and the rise of the net with the accompanying financial pressures on newspapers. which did the thing that capitalism in the real world does, which is to concentrate. ownership of papers on the one hand, centralization of infotainment in wire services and such on the other. that was one of the many problems with the fraudulent 2000 election, really: beneath the apparent diversity of networks it turned out that everyone was buying exit poll data from the same firm. so the same mistake turned up everywhere. bad for bidness, dontcha know. because political legitimacy is a commodity too these days. that great logic of everything being a commodity---it works wonders. there's no way to really withdraw consent, but there's also no way to actually exercise it. so there's an authoritarian information system that committed to generating and maintaining different types of churn amongst audiences. or something. movement is conflated with political freedom. if you believe in markets and all that capitalist nonsense, you have no perspective from which to say anything. you just notice that something strange has happened. because you have no critical viewpoint on the commodity form. it's nature. this is why i am not a libertarian. well that and ayn rand. dreadful writer. but i digress.

so everything is about advertising delivery and it seems that on the opposite tip local television infotainment delivery systems have long been about that with their if-it-bleeds-it-leads approach to pretty much everything. i remember living in the endless beige nightmare of southern new jersey and working in philadelphia for a while. when i would get home, local tv news would be on and it would busily frame philly as a war zone and i had just come from there and it didn't seem like much of a war zone but hey what did i know i was merely living and working in the place in a way that was not about the creation of dramatic story arcs that open up space for teasers and keep viewers glued to their couches both waiting to hear more and congratulating themselves on their good sense and credit rating which converge on their suburban living rooms, both real and imagined.

another element maybe is the "lessons" that the thatcher/reagan reactionaries took from vietnam. well there were two, yes: no draft and pool the press. so control infotainment flows because remember the war in everyone's living room. of course the conservative "lesson" in this respect is insane in that it presupposes that the war in vietnam was somehow legitimate and what accounts for the massive dissent was (a) yucky images on tv and (b) the draft. as it turns out, they mighta been right about (b). actually now i think about it, the other thing that the right learned was to change the nature of repression and try to steer away from on-camera confrontations between the state and citizens during things like protests. so control of information. like those fabulous private corporations do it. to hell with this public's right to know stuff. that's just bad business. and besides, as long as people keep buying stuff we know the system is working. and politics is just another commodity. democracy is the fact of churn. and this is a little view of how authoritarian infotainment streams operate. note how meaningless the state/private distinction is in it all. it's always been meaningless. that's another reason i'm not a libertarian. well that and ayn rand. but i digress.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lindy

I know. As a TFP officially branded racist and fascist I was guilty of espousing the long held racist and fascist belief the even the least of us and the worst of us have rights.
In your dreams.
My condescending and patronizing pal ("lindy dear," indeed) apparently didn't like the idea that a mere woman would take exception to one of his rants.
And I'm still curious just what is meant by "total suppression" of Rev. Nitwit Jones' congregation. Perhaps someone else would care to hazard a guess?

Lindy

ring

Buried under an avalanche of Lucky Charms cereal?
That seems reasonable to me.

Cimarron29414

I meant to add this earlier:

So I spoke to my best friend specifically about this issue and the NYC Mosque. He's a Turk, whose father is Turkish millitary - so his view is going to be rather secular, if that makes any sense.

His take on this was basically: this guy is a troll. While he finds it disrespectful and against the golden rule, what's one going to do? He went on to say 1.5 billion people are muslim, and this guy takes the 1.5 percent of those people who are extremists and casts that cloud upon all 1.5B. He was going to take the high road and not cast this guy's cloud upon the rest of Christians.

As for the mosque, his take was "don't build it": He thought it was picking a fight, not building a bridge.

While he and I discuss religion and politics all the time, we rarely discuss religion in politics.

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

Cimarron29414

So, it seems this thread must be resurrected. The preacher in question, Jones, may very well be banned from travel to Britian. It seems the Interior Minister may not allow him to enter their country.

Pastor Who Threatened to Burn Koran Might Be Barred From Entering U.K. - FoxNews.com

While I stick to the assertion that this man has the right to be an idiot, I am also gleeful that some negative consequences will come of it. What I find interesting about this, is that he is being banned for threatening to burn the koran, not actually burning it.

So, it seems, he achieved all the attention he wanted and, in his mind, will also get the "martyrdom status of being banned from Britian over a free speech issue" - and he didn't actually perform the act. Having witnessed the my fair share of street preacher antics over the years, I can't help but wonder whether he ever intended on following through, or whether the buildup was the stunt?

__________________
Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

thedoc

H. Q. wrote:
Let's say I'm Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or a patriot) and someone burns a copy of the Bible (or the Torah, or the Koran, or the flag).
Unless the copy burned is MY copy, how is this my concern?

-

To most sane and rational people it shouldn't be, but to some who are more fanatic everything about their belief is sacred and they demand that everyone else show respect for it even though they disrespect the religion of others. I had actually thought of gathering a bunch of Bibles and burning them in protest of this churches plans. _________________


FYI I spoke to my pastor and we agreed that burning was the proper way to dispose of old, worn out Bibles, but I wasn't going to tell the press that.