Hard News: These things we must now change
268 Responses
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Sigh, just like Judaism, there is no Muslim pope - they have a tradition of scholarly treatments of their religious books, Rabbis argue about the Talmud, Imams argue about the Quran - they don't all agree - there are no absolute religious authorities in the sense that the Pope is.
So all you're doing is picking the views that confirm your world view, it's a bit like deciding that white supremacists represent all white people when we all know they are a tiny but dangerous minority (as equally are ISIS and Al Qaeda )
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We all got indoctrinated with the hero archetype as kids…
And we all out grew them... well most of us.
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Straw men aside, an interesting new angle has emerged: mimetic theory, applied as masking to manipulate the media: "journalists often need to stop and talk about what does and doesn’t matter, in order to keep from perpetuating even more harm. But in an age where ironic memetic rhetoric frequently distorts reality in ways that then become reality, that’s extremely hard to do." https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Ask yourself: did they issue a condemnation of those who did the Charlie Hebdo massacre? I didn’t notice any such. If there was none, why let them off the moral hook?
The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand and various local leaders strongly and explicitly condemned the Charlie Hebdo attack, yes. Maybe you could stop posting these idle reckons and go and read something. I’m not going to provide a platform for this.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Im thinking back wondering when the race to the bottom kicked off. Sometime round the early to mid 80's I guessing. There are just some people in the media who need to be put out of a job Garner, Plunket and Hosking are at the top of the list AFAIC. Tho' they are only the public face and they seem to have friends in high places. TVNZ and RNZ boards are littered with people who adhere to rotten ideologies and questionable ethics from what I hear. Is it too late to stop the rot? And if they were put out and left to their own devices would they just fester and erupt somewhere else?
The deregulation of radio & TV was formally done at the end of the 1980s, when TVNZ was converted to an SOE. Several years later, RNZ's commercial stations (most notably the ZB Network) were sold off on the cheap. What's needed now is to dust off the 1986 Royal Commission on Broadcasting and to update it for the online age, along the lines of the Leveson & Finkelstein Inquiries.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Well duh! What would expect the a leading member of extremist and terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to say?
Quite.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
I cannot see how any sane person in the west would tolerate islam when they know the followers have been instructed to kill them by the top religious authority in Islam.
And then we have Pompeo and Pence - Pompeo's latest theocratic idiocy
Pompeo says God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47670717
I feel so much better and safer.. -
nzlemming, in reply to
FFS Dennis, do you have to turn this blog into a repository for your idle reckons, just because you're bored on a Sunday?
I just skip over any posts from either of them. Saves my blood pressure.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
I'd prefer you to be part of the solution, Russell. It may seem as if some local leaders condemning islam-produced massacres is sufficient, but what of those who don't? True, islam lacks an overall moral authority in person on the global stage, because it defers to that of the prophet who issued the instruction to kill unbelievers in the Koran.
Denial and suppression can't be part of our solution. That just allows the problem to continue to fester. We all need to get behind a solution. That means identifying the problem accurately, so we have a sound basis upon which to proceed.
These people in the online community the shooter bonded with form a sub-culture with belief system and ideology. Ideologies persevere. Worse, they replicate in human minds via contagion & like-mindedness. If you read that Vox essay I linked you to, you'll see that the group has assimilated mimetics and is using it for strategy and tactics. Fronting as simple-minded bigots is a deliberate ruse to minimise our perception of their threat. We need to stop kidding ourselves that Arendt's banality of evil explains them: our opponent is clever, not just lethal.
We can disempower them by eliminating the causal basis of their motivation. Solving the problem seems possible on a dual basis: reducing immigration to a level that no longer operates as a threat, and rendering the prophet's instruction non-lethal by means of global conference of clerics.
I'd like us to agree to recommend this solution to our political leaders, so that representative democracy can process it. If parliament agrees, then our foreign minister has a consensual mandate to call for a global conference of Islamic leaders, and conduct diplomacy to encourage it. I'd like to see him suggest that they form a consensus in favour of peaceful coexistence for the Islamic faithful. That would enhance the moral authority of those Islamic leaders who already advocate a non-violent Islamic ethic. The conference could issue an interpretation that the prophet's directive applied only to that time and place, not everywhere forever.
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Sacha, in reply to
Jeez dude, read the room.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Jeez dude, read the room.
Quite. There’s an element of basic human decency in the wake of an atrocity that seems to have escaped Dennis. Accordingly, he can fuck off.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
So many words but what are you really saying?
<edit> I see Russell has found a solution, too
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Sacha, in reply to
Thank you
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andin, in reply to
+1
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If only it were possible to slap an egg on someone's head over the internet.
No, Dennis, the sensible approach is not to punish the victims and expect the violent white supremacism to stop if only ALL OF ISLAM makes a change to a textual interpretation.
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From Russell's original post:
I think the members of the Free Speech Coalition need to seriously examine what they became part of after they assembled to defend the “rights” of the nakedly racist Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern last year. Their pathetic rally in Aotea Square (which was promoted in advance by the National Front) was principally a fan club for Tommy Robinson, a violent Islamophobe with an extensive criminal record; more speakers railed against “sharia law” than fettered speech.
The coalition had multiple opportunities to repudiate what their rally became, and they didn’t take them.
So let's update that. What has the "Free Speech Coalition" done since?
The Chief Censor has made a ruling on the terrorist's manifesto. I personally think the ruling is questionable, perhaps a step too far (on possession, not promotion, and on the document, not the video), but reasonable people can disagree about that. The FSC has sent out multiple tweets condemning the decision, along with multiple retweets along similar lines. Fair enough: that's a legitimate issue of free speech.
But the FSC has not managed ONE single tweet about the massacre itself. They tweeted on March 14, the day before, and then nothing for 10 days. Not even free thoughts and free prayers. Now suddenly they are back in action, with an issue that they DO want to talk about. (Of course there are perfectly good reasons for being offline. In which case a simple explanation or apology might be expected. There isn't one).
I'm no fancy philosopher or lawyer, but I would have thought that 50 voices silenced was worth something, if you care about free speech. They were exercising free speech by praying. They aren't exercising it any more, on account of being dead.
Perhaps the Chief Censor's ban could be overturned. Maybe subject to judicial review. Maybe a change of heart, when time has passed.
But the dead will not be subject to judicial review. They don't get their rights back. Their free speech is gone forever.
If anybody had any doubt about the priorities of the so-called "Free Speech Coalition", they can have none now.
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andin, in reply to
The FSC has sent out multiple tweets condemning the decision, along with multiple retweets
I dont go out of my way to look for that shit but still, I see a lot of white opinion, supremacist and others, trying to walk dialogue back from what is one of the obvious endpoints of their rhetoric. Radicalization of an unstable individual who goes on a murder rampage.The willful ignorance I cant stand, is becoming an everyday occurrence. I just wonder where it will all lead, not a place where resolutions will be found thats for sure. Or maybe just NSW on a global scale.
And the more these people are sidelined, the more vitriolic they become, all while trying to hide that of course, by pretending disappointment. Its fucking sick. -
For those who were concerned that Christchurch was being singled out unfairly for having unduly high numbers of racist knuckledraggers, here's an interesting Newsroom piece by Steve Deane dealing with his experience of neofascist skinheads in Petone as a child and adolescent...: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/03/25/504416/growing-up-with-skinheads
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Sacha, in reply to
Their free speech is gone forever.
If anybody had any doubt about the priorities of the so-called "Free Speech Coalition", they can have none now.
Yes, and any of their fellow travellers. It's clear whose 'rights' they are all fighting so hard for. There is no 'debate' to be had when the hidden aim of one side is the death of the other.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
I applaud your final sentence. A corollary might be that there is no synthesis to be had when the explicit aim of one view is the proscription of the other.
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There are some views I will never have synthesis with, and will shut them down everywhere I encounter them by all means available. The free speech I saw in the gunman's video as I tried as fast as I could to find YouTube's report mechanism is something no one needs to hear or see and I have regretted seeing it since then.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
by all means available.
Where available=legal I assume.What I mean by that is , up to , but not including, taking the law into your own hands.
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Why do you feel the need to ask that?
Edit: No, on second thoughts, I don't want to know.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
Because there may be some who would misconstrue what you said as the "good- guy- with- a- gun" argument.I am sure that you and I agree that there is no place for that in this country. So it is good to make that explicit.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Given my earlier post that I approve of the gun ban wholeheartedly, they would have to be a moron. Quite aside from the fact that the good-guy-with-gun meme is not about suppressing freedom of hate speech, it's usually about shooting someone in self defense or the defense of others. Which is, in fact, understandable in the context that it happens. But it's not something we need in place of sensible firearm control.
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