Karnal wrote on Jan 29
th, 2015 at 1:13pm:
Soren wrote on Jan 29
th, 2015 at 7:55am:
Karnal wrote on Jan 28
th, 2015 at 10:02pm:
Soren wrote on Jan 28
th, 2015 at 9:49pm:
polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 28
th, 2015 at 9:27pm:
FD will parrot that same quote tirelessly for the next 12 months - without once stopping to think about what they actually mean by "freedom".
What DO they mean? That their belief about Mohammed sets a limit to what I am allowed to think or say about Mohammed.
Well, they can stick that up their jumper.
Just because you have a set of beliefs about Mohammed does not curtail my right to have and to express a completely different set of beliefs about him. Your freedom to say what you think or believe does not trump mine in any way, not even one of us is offended.
That's freedom of thought and expression.
Your freedom to say what you think resides upon your knowledge. If you endlessly parrot the same thing for 14 years, you’re in danger of being read as a boring old boy without much to say.
Sir Reggie, of course, would be proud.
Which, of course, is neither here nor there as far as freedom of thought and expression are concerned.
Not exactly. Freedom of expression is a response to the Scientific Revolution. The godfathers of the Enlightenment weren't proposing free speech as a strategy to release a Pandora's Box of lies, propaganda and mass delusion. They advocated free speech to make society
more rational, not less.
Freud, as you may know, was most disheartened with the trajectory of Western reason towards the end of his life, as was George Orwell. For Freud, it was the rise of Nazism. For Orwell, it was the spread of Stalinism. The ideas of both thinkers were hijacked by the propaganda industry they warned us against.
Free speech is not about an endless tirade of abuse, or a constantly repeated litany of lies. The scientific method free speech is allied with is about the construction of truth. Truth is not a product as such, but a process. Free speech is a dialogue. One-way proclamations are not free speech, they're totalitarian. The broadcast mass media is one of the most effective tools of social control. The medium is the message. Freud warned us of this long before Marshall McLuhan.
Freedom of speech requires freedom of thought. Talking out of your arse is not free speech.
Mind you, it does produce a lovely strain of stool - as every schoolboy knows.
As always, you start well and then veer into incoherence. Islam is where pre-Reformation, pre-Scientific Revolution Christianity was (an never mind pre-Enlightenment).
The dialogue, as the Charlie massacre shows, is not happening. You say 'the pen is mightier than the sword", they shoot you dead. Islam is a pre-modern religion, untouched by reformation, science, enlightenment. Not only untouched but actively, diligently, determinedly against these "phenomenologies of the spirit'.
Islam lives in a completely different mental and intellectual world. It is not possible to accept the literal truth of the Koran and to be a fully functional member of a Western liberal, secular society - see Danish cartoons, Rushdie, Charlie, and the daily screaming protests against freedom of expression in the Islamic world.
Islam does not deserve either respect or special treatment simply because it has managed to resist Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, secularisation and every other development that has led to modernity and its self-concious self-examination, post-modernity and whatever it is you call what came after that (sense).
The main point. The Muslim/Islamic mental and psychic landscape is completely unmapped by Freud, Orwell, McLuhan. They all come as part of the development of the Western intellectual and psychic trajectory.
Islam is not part of that. Killing people over cartoons demonstrates that. In the Western framework of thinking, only psychopaths or other mentally disturbed people will kill you for a joke. Muslims are not psychopaths. They are Muslims. But they will kill you for a joke
So you riff on the mass media and comparison to the West - which DID go through not only Reformation and the scientific revolution but Enlightenment as well - is stupid and ignorant, so irrelevant.
You’ve argued in the past that, when it comes to the Muselman, all bets are off. The rule of law, rthe rght to fair trial, the presumption of innocence, actual facts...
If our tradition is at all relevant, shurely it can hold up against a religion like Islam.
From what I’ve seen, however, your enemy is faceless. For you, this isn’t really about Islam, which merely stands in for your always absolutely never ever barbarian at the gates. As you said recently, you only stumbled upon Islam in 2001.
For you, this is all about abandoning the Enlightenment tradition itself. The "enemy" is merely a convenient tool in this agenda, albeit a central one.
You’ll never own up to this, but anyone who reads even a little of what you write here knows it.
Rich tapestry, innit, old boy.
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