American Consulate Attack in Libya

[Toughy]

I believe we are in agreement Aj............

[Martina]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I don't trust majorities, I don't trust mobs, I don't trust the rich, I don't trust the church, I don't trust the state and I don't trust the powerful.

I love this.

[Ciaran]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I didn't twist anything you said. In fact, I took the most limited reading possible and assume that the statement 'values are not absolute' means just that. Values are not absolute. That means that there is no way to argue that we should prefer, if given a choice, value set A over value set B.



That would be a nonsensical reading of a right to life. It's one of the reasons why many on the American Left (such as it is) rightly object to the characterization of anti-choice partisans as being 'pro-life' because they are not 'pro-life'. What they are is anti-abortion. A consistent pro-life stance can't square itself with support of the death penalty.



Yes, and they were wrong. Not just expressing a different but equally valid set of values. Their values were wrong. In the mid 1930s one of my mother's brothers was lynched. The people who did so *genuinely* believed that my uncle, his father and mother, all his siblings, all his nieces and nephews who had not yet been born, and every single member of his line stretching up and down through the eons, was not *actually* human. Because they were not fully human, their lives were not particularly valuable. Because their lives were not valuable, it was no crime to take his life because a white woman accused him of attacking her because he bumped into her. That wasn't just a cultural peccadillo but a sign of a culture with a bad set of values. Not different bad. Jim Crow was an evil system. Not a regrettable one, not one that I should be glad mostly had only secondary effects on me but an actually evil one. What we have now, imperfect equality as it is, is far and away better than the one my parents were living in from the 1920s until pretty much the time of my birth in the mid-1960s.



Torture *is* wrong. It is wrong on moral grounds, it is wrong on utilitarian grounds and it is wrong on ethical grounds. I'm not opposed to torture because it was my government doing the torturing. I'm not opposed to torture because it was poor and middle-class whites torturing poor non-whites. I'm opposed to torture because it is morally indefensible.

You appear to be conflating the violation of intrinsic values with their not being intrinsic. Are you prepared to argue that because racism is enshrined in the laws of many nations that racism isn't wrong? If you aren't, and it is vanishingly improbable that you are prepared to do so, then by what do you justify preferring to live in a society that is not explicitly racist than one is? By what argument are you prepared to state that American society circa 2012 is a better society than America circa 1942. I *am* prepared to make that argument because there are things that are intrinsically wrong and to violate them means that your society is behaving wrongly. Just because societies break the rules and take some action that is intrinsically wrong doesn't mean that it isn't wrong.

Just because someone breaks into a house to steal the stuff inside and, discovering that the owners are home, kills them, doesn't mean that neither murder nor theft are wrong. In the same way just because Germany slaughtered millions of innocents in adherence to a racially eliminationist philosophy doesn't mean that genocide isn't wrong. What the German people allowed themselves to become was evil. What the German people did during the period of 1932 to 1945 was evil. It wasn't just a cultural practice that we cannot and should not try to judge because trying not to say that the Germans shouldn't have done what they did puts us in very ugly and vile moral territory.

If there are not intrinsic rights and wrongs, things that under almost no (if not absolutely no) circumstances a people should not be allowed to get away with, how do you argue that Britain is a better nation without the Empire or that America is better without Jim Crow? Personal preference? It's better today because now we recognize it is better but it was better then because they thought it was better back then? I knew a whole generation, all deceased now, that would argue strenuously that the America their grandchildren or great-grandchildren live in now is far and away a better one than the one they were born to, all self-interest put aside.

Cheers
Aj

This is a diatribe and clearly written for an audience.

I don't understand your words or theories so won't try to give them an answer and I thank my God for that.

[Martina]

Originally Posted by Ciaran

This is a diatribe and clearly written for an audience.

I don't understand your words or theories so won't try to give them an answer and I thank my God for that.

Charming. Really charming. *shakes head*

[Martina]

This from an article in the Times today:

“An attack on the holy prophet is an attack on the core belief of 1.5 billion Muslims. Therefore, this is something that is unacceptable,” said Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in an address to a religious conference Friday morning in Islamabad.

Mr. Ashraf called on the United Nations and international community to formulate a law outlawing hate speech across the world. “Blasphemy of the kind witnessed in this case is nothing short of hate speech, equal to the worst kind of anti-Semitism or other kind of bigotry,” he said.

Surely he knows better.

Hate speech is defined in terms of inciting violence AGAINST the party being maligned. The people causing violence in this case are the folks who are the targets of the offensive speech.

Speaking as a high school teacher, there is an element of immaturity to this that boggles my mind. Someone hurt me deeply, so I beat them up. Please put them in jail, not me. What someone said made me feel a really strong feeling. A REALLY strong one. My behavior after that is no longer my responsibility, but theirs.

A young (tres hip) Muslim man was on NPR yesterday talking about how he couldn't believe people were taking the bait. He understood the video as bait. And he was upset at the naivete of folks who just grabbed it.

Bait or not. Intended to offend not. It did not incite violence AGAINST Muslims.

GOD, this makes me grateful for the Constitution.

HEAR me, Ciaran and others whose comments make ME feel labeled as a jingoistic American. I am so god damned proud of my Constitution. SO GRATEFUL for the U.S. Constitution.

Understand that?

Edited to add: I know that a lot of the anger with the U.S. and other western countries stems from the historical relationships we have imposed on the region -- as subaltern states. They have not had the power to affect us, and our decisions have had ruinous effects on some of the nations there -- for generations.

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by Ciaran

This is a diatribe and clearly written for an audience.

I don't understand your words or theories so won't try to give them an answer and I thank my God for that.

I would argue that your post is clearly designed and written for a specific audience too.

However, I don't buy the justification you give for not understanding the value of Aj's message or postulations or theoretical application. You then go on and say that you 'thank your God for that'.

In the very arrogance you prize for the perception you percieve about your own brand of aristocracy, I do believe that sets of behaviors like yours deserve a closer inspection.

To me, your set of views illustrate the time immemorial struggle for power.


I do not find your brand of engagement useful; however, sets of behaviors exemplified in your approach seemingly share a type of relationship that are present in local, regional, national and international disputes over resources and percieved power.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Martina

This from an article in the Times today:
Surely he knows better.

Hate speech is defined in terms of inciting violence AGAINST the party being maligned. The people causing violence in this case are the folks who are the targets of the offensive speech.

I was thinking about this walking the dog this morning. Imagine, if you will, if black people in America had spent *just* the years between 1900 and 1990 going on a rampage and breaking things every time something offensive was said to us or about us. Just in the last 90 years and *just* in the USA. Can you imagine? Black people have had to develop a pretty hard outer shell because I am here to tell you that the first *half* of my life incredibly racist things were just part of everyday American discourse. From the restaurant chain Sambo to the the rantings of Rush Limbaugh, hardly a day would go by when I wouldn't hear something or see some imagine denigrating of blacks.

By my mid-twenties, I had learned two things: 1) I can't make people not look down upon me because of the color of my skin and 2) I can't stop people who hold racist sentiments from speaking their mind.

From there, I recognized that to save my sanity and to give my son a fighting chance to save his sanity, I had to learn to hold my head up high and not give racists the satisfaction of responding how they expect me to respond. The expected response from me, as a black woman, is to freak out, start moving my head back and forth, yelling and carrying on. That way the racist can look at me and say "see, this is how 'they' always act. No self-control." I confound them because I don't lose my temper and I outsmart them and nothing--no thing--makes a racist squirm more than to be bested by someone who he or she thinks they are superior to. Perhaps I shouldn't enjoy their discomfort as much as I do but I do and so be it.

Speaking as a high school teacher, there is an element of immaturity to this that boggles my mind. Someone hurt me deeply, so I beat them up. Please put them in jail, not me. What someone said made me feel a really strong feeling. A REALLY strong one. My behavior after that is no longer my responsibility, but theirs.

This is why I have taken the stand I have about this issue. First, we say "well, you know what, we'll do that. You can't say anything against the Prophet or portray him in any manner that would not be acceptable to the *most* restrictive Islamic sects". The next day the demand will be that you can't show any art, play any music or publish any book that might give offense to this or that sectarian group. So suddenly, at the behest of this or that religious group that nude sculptures or women in diaphanous gowns be covered up in the name of modesty. The day after that, it will be that you can't speak out against religiously inspired bigotry be that against racial, ethnic, religious or sexual minorities.

Once you start to give in on this matter, you tend to have to continue to give in on it. How could you not? If I can't say X because it might offend the sectarians of this or that religion, then by what justification can I say Y because it might *also* give offense? I can't see how. "Well, in the case of X you are saying something offensive to a religious group that was born of out disdain for this group but in the case of Y you are defending an oppressed group against bigotry" seems a fairly weak place upon which to stand. If I've learned nothing else about bigotry (not just racism but bigotry) is that the vast majority of bigots likely do not see themselves as bigots.

If I had a dollar for each time I've heard some variant of "I'm not racist but..." or "I'm not sexist but..." or "I'm not anti-gay but..." I'd have enough money that I would only have to pay in taxes what Mittens has to pay. The people who are posting pictures of the White House lawn covered in watermelons, or Obama's face on the body of a chimp, or now hanging chairs in effigy don't think they are racists. Todd Akin doesn't think his 'legitimate rape' comments are sexist. Fred Phelps doesn't think he's a bigot for being anti-gay. Terry Jones doesn't think he's being a bigot in his rabid anti-Muslim tirades. Rush Limbaugh doesn't think he was being sexist calling Sandra Fluke a slut.

So when we stand up and speak out against Akin, or Phelps or Jones or Limbaugh or any one else who is advocating bigotry, we are unlikely to hear them say "oh well, that's different". Instead, they will argue that we are on the wrong side of the issue from God, or they will argue that we are being anti-American, or anti-Christian, or anti-straight but they will *not* agree that they are in the wrong. So if we decide that a mob in Pakistan should dictate what is acceptable and unacceptable public utterance is in London or San Francisco or anywhere else, what do we say when the *next* thing some other mob, perhaps closer to home, demands that no longer should it be spoken that being against gay rights is bigotry? That we will heed the words of an angry crowd on the other side of the globe but ignore the words of those closer to home even though, truth be told, the positions of the crowd outside the embassy in Islamabad and that of customers outside of Chik-fil-a are pretty close at least as far as it concerns homosexuals.



Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Ciaran

This is a diatribe and clearly written for an audience.

I don't understand your words or theories so won't try to give them an answer and I thank my God for that.

All writing that isn't in a diary or journal is written for an audience. As a now long-deceased English scientist once observed "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view to be of any service." I would amend that for these circumstances to say that it is very odd that someone would not see that all public writing must be intended for an audience if it is to be of any service.

Are you saying that when you post on a thread you aren't writing to communicate something to the other participants? That seems a very strange way to write. You speak as if writing in order that one's words would be read is a bad thing.

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

We all write for an audience, and it is best to know ones audience if one is to communicate thoughts. Just an observation.
We in the US don't do things the way Briton does, we had that war long ago.

[Kobi]

This is not good news.


NEW YORK (Reuters) - As Muslim countries reverberate with fierce protests over a film mocking the Prophet Mohammad, an ad equating Islamic jihad with savagery is due to appear next week in 10 New York City subway stations despite transit officials' efforts to block it.

The city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority had refused the ads, citing a policy against demeaning language. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is behind the ad campaign, then sued and won a favorable ruling from a U.S. judge in Manhattan.

According to court documents, the ad reads: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel/Defeat Jihad."

MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said the ads would be displayed starting on Monday, but he could not say at which stations.

"Our hands are tied. The MTA is subject to a court ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard," said Donovan.

In July, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that the ad was protected speech. While agreeing with the MTA that the ad was "demeaning a group of people based on religion," Engelmayer ruled that the group was entitled to the "highest level of protection under the First Amendment."

The American Freedom Defense Initiative gained notoriety when it opposed creation of a Muslim community center near the site of the Twin Towers, which were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/ads-critici...232906064.html

[Corkey]

I wish these groups would grow the F up.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Corkey

I wish these groups would grow the F up.

Could you wish a little harder? Im beginning to believe the Mayan calender coming to an end on Dec 21st.


PARIS (Reuters) - A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a California-made video depicting him as a lecherous fool.

The drawings in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the paper's Paris offices after the issue hit news stands.

It featured several caricatures of the Prophet showing him naked in what the publishers said was an attempt to poke fun at the furor over the film. One, entitled "Mohammad: a star is born", depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government, which had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons, said it was shutting embassies and schools in 20 countries as a precaution on Friday, when protests sometimes break out after Muslim prayers.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby called the drawings outrageous but said those who were offended by them should "use peaceful means to express their firm rejection".

Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called an act of "aggression" against Mohammad but urged Muslims not to fall into a trap intended to "derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West".

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/french-week...075449808.html

[Martina]

Here is "The Satanic Video" by BILL KELLER

I was just gonna take out quotes, but I like the whole thing. I highlighted points that I thought were especially good.

THE alchemy of modern media works with amazing speed. Start with a cheesy anti-Muslim video that resembles a bad trailer for a Sacha Baron Cohen comedy. It becomes YouTube fuel for protest across the Islamic world and a pretext for killing American diplomats. That angry spasm begets an inflammatory Newsweek cover, “MUSLIM RAGE,” which in turn inspires a Twitter hashtag that reduces the whole episode to a running joke:

“There’s no prayer room in this nightclub. #MuslimRage.”

“You lose your nephew at the airport but you can’t yell his name because it’s JIHAD. #MuslimRage.”

From provocation to trauma to lampoon in a few short news cycles. It’s over in a week, forgotten in two. Now back to Snooki and Honey Boo Boo.

Except, of course, it’s far from over. It moves temporarily off-screen, and then it is back: the Pakistani retailer accused last week of “blasphemy” because he refused to close his shops during a protest against the video; France locking down diplomatic outposts in about 20 countries because a Paris satirical newspaper has published new caricatures of the prophet.

It’s not really over for Salman Rushdie, whose new memoir recounts a decade under a clerical death sentence for the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” That fatwa, if not precisely the starting point in our modern confrontation with Islamic extremism, was a major landmark. The fatwa was dropped in 1998 and Rushdie is out of hiding, but he is still careful. His book tour for “Joseph Anton” (entitled for the pseudonym he used in his clandestine life) won’t be taking him to Islamabad or Cairo.

Rushdie grew up in a secular Muslim family, the son of an Islam scholar. His relationship to Islam was academic, then literary, before it became excruciatingly personal. His memoir is not a handbook on how America should deal with the Muslim world. But he brings to that subject a certain moral authority and the wisdom of an unusually motivated thinker. I invited him to help me draw some lessons from the stormy Arab Summer.

The first and most important thing Rushdie will tell you is, it’s not about religion. Not then, not now.

When the founding zealot of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his Rushdie death warrant in 1989, the imam was not defending the faith; he was trying to regenerate enthusiasm for his regime, sapped by eight years of unsuccessful war with Iraq. Likewise, Muslim clerics in London saw the fatwa against a British Indian novelist as an opportunity to arouse British Muslims, who until that point were largely unstirred by sectarian politics. “This case was a way for the mosque to assert a kind of primacy over the community,” the novelist said the other day. “I think something similar is going on now.”

It’s pretty clear that the protests against that inane video were not spontaneous. Antisecular and anti-American zealots, beginning with a Cairo TV personality whose station is financed by Saudi fundamentalists, seized on the video as a way to mobilize pressure on the start-up governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The new governments condemned the violence and called in police to protect American diplomatic outposts, but not before a good bit of nervous wobbling.

(One of the principal goals of the extremists, I was reminded by experts at Human Rights First, who follow the region vigilantly, is to pressure these transitional governments to enact and enforce strict laws against blasphemy. These laws can then be used to purge secularists and moderates.)

Like the fanatics in the Middle East and North Africa, our homegrown hatemongers have an interest in making this out to be a great clash of faiths. The Islamophobes — the fringe demagogues behind the Koran-burning parties and that tawdry video, the more numerous (mainly right-wing Republican) defenders against the imaginary encroachment of Islamic law on our domestic freedom — are easily debunked. But this is the closest thing we have to a socially acceptable form of bigotry. And their rants feed the anti-American opportunists.

Rushdie acknowledges that there are characteristics of Islamic culture that make it tinder for the inciters: an emphasis on honor and shame, and in recent decades a paranoiac sense of the world conspiring against them. We can argue who is more culpable — the hostile West, the sponsors, the appeasers, the fanatics themselves — but Islam has been particularly susceptible to the rise of identity politics, Rushdie says. “You define yourself by what offends you. You define yourself by what outrages you.”

But blaming Islamic culture dismisses the Muslim majorities who are not enraged, let alone violent, and it leads to a kind of surrender: Oh, it’s just the Muslims, nothing to be done. I detect a whiff of this cultural fatalism in Mitt Romney’s patronizing remarks about the superiority of Israeli culture and the backwardness of Palestinian culture. That would explain his assertion, on that other notorious video, that an accommodation with the Palestinians is “almost unthinkable.” That’s a strangely defeatist line of thought for a man who professes to be an optimist and a problem-solver.

Romney and Rushdie are a little more in tune when it comes to mollifying the tender feelings of irate Muslims.

In his new book, Rushdie recounts being urged by the British authorities who were protecting him to “lower the temperature” by issuing a statement that could be taken for an apology. He does so. It fills him almost immediately with regret, and the attacks on him are unabated. He “had taken the weak position and was therefore treated as a weakling,” he writes.

Of the current confrontation, he says, “I think it’s very important that we hold our ground. It’s very important to say, ‘We live like this.’ ” Rushdie made his post-fatwa life in America in part because he reveres the freedoms, including the freedom, not so protected in other Western democracies, to say hateful, racist, blasphemous things.

“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them,” he told me. “They go underground. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”

And so he would have liked a more robust White House defense of the rights that made the noxious video possible.

“It’s not for the American government to regret what American citizens do. They should just say, ‘This is not our affair and the [violent] response is completely inappropriate.’ ”

I would cut the diplomats a little more slack when they are trying to defuse an explosive situation. But I agree that the administration pushed up against the line that separates prudence from weakness. And the White House request that Google consider taking down the anti-Muslim video, however gentle the nudge, was a mistake.

By far the bigger mistake, though, would be to write off the aftermath of the Arab Spring as a lost cause.

It is fairly astounding to hear conservatives who were once eager to invade Iraq — ostensibly to plant freedom in the region — now giving up so quickly on fledgling democracies that might actually be won over without 10 bloody years of occupation. Or lamenting our abandonment of that great stabilizing autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Or insisting that we bully and blackmail the new governments to conform to our expectations.

These transition governments present an opportunity. Fortifying the democratic elements in the post-Arab Spring nation-building, without discrediting them as American stooges, is a delicate business. The best argument we have is not our aid money, though that plays a part. It is the choice between two futures, between building or failing to build a rule of law, an infrastructure of rights, and an atmosphere of tolerance. One future looks something like Turkey, prospering, essentially secular and influential. The other future looks a lot like Pakistan, a land of fear and woe.

We can’t shape the Islamic world to our specifications. But if we throw up our hands, if we pull back, we now have a more vivid picture of what will fill the void.

[dreadgeek]

The whole thing, in all of its magnificence, is posted here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...red-value.html

The parts I wanted to highlight, largely without comment excepting that all emphasis is mine, are below but the whole thing is worth reading.

It is solipsistic, if not narcissistic, to imagine that—because the culturally-specific features of contemporary American liberalism (that, after all, in our own history was long in the making and is still not fully accomplished) derive from certain Protestant Western European traditions—this is therefore the only context in which such values can be firmly rooted. By pretending to "understand" the illiberal attitude of what he imagines the protesters' mindset must be, Fish simultaneously privileges the American, Protestant and Western traditions (in that order) and implicitly dismisses all others as belonging to different experiences that cannot produce an adherence to values such as free speech.

Modernity may have originated in the West, but it no longer belongs exclusively to the West. Almost all existing societies participate in and help shape it. A few decades ago, Partha Chatterjee suggested that for the postcolonial world, modernity was always and inevitably "a derivative discourse," that would invariably be defined in the West. With the rise of numerous postcolonial powers, that argument looks harder to defend.

Obviously there are going to be significant differences in the ways in which modernity and liberalism take root in different societies. Even among societies emerging from the Protestant Western tradition, American free-speech rights are uniquely permissive. Canada bans hate speech. Britain has official secrets, prior restraint, anti-blasphemy and notoriously lax libel laws. Numerous countries in Western Europe have made it a serious crime to question the historicity of the Holocaust.

Given these variations within societies emerging directly from the Western Protestant Reformation—all of which can still be called liberal societies that value and protect free speech—it should be obvious that globally there will be even greater variations. It's wrong to think that the essential values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and so forth, only be grounded in Western traditions. These are universal values because there is something innate to modern humanity that strives to realize the essence of these freedoms, whatever culturally-specific variations may occur.

Here I'm going to make a brief comment. The things we term *human* rights really are universal. These are not 'Western' rights and while I am not as well-traveled or well-read as I might otherwise like to be, I have a hard time believing that too many people, given the choice, would prefer to have to look over their shoulder lest some secret police come knocking at the door because of an overheard remark. To take one example, the flow of people appears to be *out* of North Korea and not *into* it. I suspect that part of why people aren't bursting down the gates to get in to the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is that, alongside the lack of food, is the lack of freedom where the least overheard word might spell the camp for oneself and one's family as well as tainting one's lineage down two or three generations.

In an effort to be open-minded gone terribly wrong, Fish forecloses the idea that other cultures and traditions, specifically the Islamic and Arab ones, can inform and secure freedom of speech and, implicitly, other liberal values. A quick survey of freedom of speech around the world suggests he is wrong about the unique ability societies rooted in the Protestant Reformation to embody these values. They have already spread far and wide. There is no reason to think that the Arab or Islamic worlds, or any other major cultural block in the modern world, is somehow uniquely immune them.

Cheers
Aj

[Martina]

I was reading an article cited in the article Dreadgeek is quoting from. Not Stanley Fish's, but one they describe as admirably summing up the psychology of the protesters.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that that writer agreed with Rushdie's point about how the protesters construct their identity:

Soon you have a subculture: a sub-community whose very cohesion is based almost exclusively on shared grievance. Then you have an identity that has nothing to say about itself; an identity that holds an entirely impoverished position: that to be defiantly angry is to be.

Frankly, Muslims should find that prospect nothing short of catastrophic. It renders Islamic identity entirely hollow. All pride, all opposition, no substance. ''Like the Incredible Hulk,'' observes Abdal Hakim Murad, a prominent British Islamic scholar, ''ineffectual until provoked.''

On the way home I was listening on the radio to the PBS news broadcast and was so happy to hear that Syrians are using these events to disarm some of the militias. And to bring them more under the rule of law. That is a wonderful turn of events. I wish the press were covering more of that story. Maybe Newsweek will be forced to after the twitter responders showed them up re their Muslim Rage cover.

I am going to go read the Fish article. I shudder after that review of it.

One of my college professors had Fish as his dissertation advisor at Johns Hopkins back in the day. We all read Surprised by Sin (about Milton), Self-Consuming Artifacts, and Is There a Text in this Class. Even then, before he was a college administrator and later a public intellectual, it was clear Fish was carried away with the idea of the community of interpreters creating reality. Great literary theory. Interesting philosophy. Not a world view.

I agree with Dreadgeek and the article she cites. There are universal values based on what is good and healthy for human beings. For example, torture is bad, and eating nutritious food is good. Those are pretty universal.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press may not be the most essential values, but they protect us from us from having to endure serious human rights violations. Iran today has used the youtube video as an excuse to limit its people's access to google. Exactly what some people are saying is the motivation behind the protests. The film is an excuse to clamp down on secular influences.

I was thinking of Foxconn thing -- the workers rioting in the Chinese factory that makes, among other things, Apple products. It's just INSANE that we don't know what is happening on a day to day basis in those factories. This stuff could happen in a second in the United States. In a second -- if we didn't have our First Amendment rights. Did anyone see that report about the Microsoft data barns in Quincy, Oregon. Also in the Times.

First, a citizens group initiated a legal challenge over pollution from some of nearly 40 giant diesel generators that Microsoft’s facility — near an elementary school — is allowed to use for backup power.

Then came a showdown late last year between the utility and Microsoft, whose hardball tactics shocked some local officials.

In an attempt to erase a $210,000 penalty the utility said the company owed for overestimating its power use, Microsoft proceeded to simply waste millions of watts of electricity, records show. Then it threatened to continue burning power in what it acknowledged was an “unnecessarily wasteful” way until the fine was substantially cut, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

“For a company of that size and that nature, and with all the ‘green’ things they advertised to me, that was an insult,” said Randall Allred, a utility commissioner and local farmer.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the episode was “a one-time event that was quickly resolved.”

Internet-based industries have honed a reputation for sleek, clean convenience based on the magic they deliver to screens everywhere. At the heart of every Internet enterprise are data centers, which have become more sprawling and ubiquitous as the amount of stored information explodes, sprouting in community after community.

But the Microsoft experience in Quincy shows that when these Internet factories come to town, they can feel a bit more like old-time manufacturing than modern magic.

I guess one could argue that Western Europe is still free enough and safe enough (safer even) with some limitations on speech. But it's still hard to speak back to power in Europe. It's harder than it is here. The EU has regulation to protect folks (as should the U.S.), but if something is wrong that is in the best interest of the elites, good luck with that. Also, EU privacy laws may protect ordinary people from data mining using facial recognition software, but they also keep the halls of power pretty private and unapproachable.

In any case, we AREN'T Europe. As the article from the Daily Beast points out, the West is not monolithic. And freedom of speech and the press protect us from abuses like the ones attempted by Microsoft. They weren't that afraid of the regulators, I'd bet, but they sure are afraid of public opinion. Anyway, sorry for the rambling. I am getting to be an old crank. I can hear it in my tone.

Actually, not done yet. Also from that Daily Beast article Dreadgeek cited --

There are deep traditions of pluralism within Islamic theology and Arab culture. Moreover, there is no tradition of mob protests associated with insults against Islam or the Prophet Mohammed. This mob reaction to perceived insults is not "traditional," but rather grounded in a concatenation of circumstances, new interpretations of religion, and emergent political ideologies that developed during the 20th century.

Fish should know that. Anyway, if Fish's article is correctly characterized, then it is just a more sophisticated instance of throwing up one's hands and saying, "Oh, it’s just the Muslims, nothing to be done."

[Martina]

So typical of a literary critic to create some unnecessary construct and treat it as if it were real. I am talking about this:

. . . if you think that your religion is just an add-on to your essential personhood, like the political party you belong to or the football team you root for.

That is the view of religion we inherited from John Locke and other “accommodationist” Protestants, Protestants who entered into a bargain with the state: allow us freedom of worship, don’t meddle in our affairs and we won’t meddle in civic matters or attempt to make public institutions reflect theological doctrines. . . . .

Those who buy into this division of labor and authority will themselves be bifurcated entities. In their private lives they will live out the commands of their religion to the fullest. In their public lives — their lives as citizens — they will relax their religious convictions and display a tolerance they may not feel in their heart of hearts. We give witness to this dual identity when we declare, in fidelity to the First Amendment, “I hate and reject what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

People have been writing that kind of crap about modernity, well, since modernity. We are not bifurcated entities. Dual identities. *RME* Stanley, there is a discipline out there called psychology -- and I don't mean Freud. You might check into it. People in the modern world are people -- primates. To the extent that we are more disconnected from ourselves and each other, it's because our lives under Capitalism make it harder for us to live in the kinds of groups that we do best in. Why can't he -- and others -- talk about behavior and history and not create these ridiculous constructs out of thin air?

I liked this from one of the readers' comments after the article:

The discussion of free speech, while excellent, presupposes a context free of drones, bombs, invasions, rapes, murdered children, violated sovereignty, torture, illegal and unending detention, etc. etc.

And this reader's comment on Fish goes well with the Daily Beast article:

There seems to be an assumption by just about everyone that what those "foreigners" believe is different from what goes on here.

What about the Archbishops & Cardinals who insist that we must outlaw gay marriage? How is that different from the mullahs? Or the clergy who refuse communion to catholics who don't vote the way they want them to?

John Kennedy would have been condemned by today's Catholic hierarchy for the speech he gave in 1960.

I'm afraid the Locke point of view that informed our Bill of Rights isn't just out of sync with the Muslim world. It is no longer operative in the USA.

I guess Fish was being arrogant about Western Civilization, but it was a backhanded kind of arrogance. And it was patronizing to Muslims, I agree.

He is romanticizing religious Muslims AND treating them as if they were less complex than we are, a point made in the Daily Beast article.

Here's Fish:

In their eyes, a religion that confines itself to the heart and chapel, and is thus exercised intermittently while the day’s business gets done, is no religion at all. True religion does not relax its hold when you leave the house of worship; it commands your allegiance at all times and in all places. And the “you” whose allegiance it commands is not divided into a public “you” and a private “you”; it is the same at home as it is when abroad in the world.

and his last paragraph -- about people in the West:

But that means that protecting the marketplace by refusing to set limits on what can enter it is the highest value we affirm, and we affirm it no matter what truths might be vilified and what falsehoods might get themselves accepted. We have decided that the potential unhappy consequences of a strong free speech regime must be tolerated because the principle is more important than preventing any harm it might permit. We should not be surprised, however, if others in the world — most others, in fact — disagree, not because they are blind and ignorant but because they worship God and truth rather than the First Amendment, which not only keeps God and truth at arm’s length but regards them with a deep suspicion.

Is he not saying that we Capitalists are placing the marketplace of ideas and the wealth that has created for us above truth? Is he saying that if we prioritize freedom of speech, we almost stop caring whether truth or falsehood prevails? The current Pope cold have said that.

From a comment:

Stanley Fish as usual defending outrageous conservatism with a calm faux reasonableness. He could handily defend the inquisition too I'm sure.

[ruffryder]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Could you wish a little harder? Im beginning to believe the Mayan calender coming to an end on Dec 21st.

These tensions in other countries have been fueled by the U.S. weaking the Islamic revolution. I can't help but think it's only gonna get worse and not better. We have Iran now testing their missles and wanting to aim them at Israel and wipe them out. Iran claims to have long range drones that will sink Israel and other mideastern countries and they are telling everyone about it. God help us all.

"Iran has warned that if its nuclear facilities are attacked, it would plant as many as 5,000 mines in the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and cut off the flow of one-fifth of the world’s oil.

But the United States has vowed to keep the Gulf open — and is now conducting a massive ship mine-sweeping exercise there through tomorrow. The Gulf is a few hundred miles from where Iran test-fired its anti-ship missiles.

Gen. Ali Fadavi of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said yesterday that the test proved Iran could sink a “big target” in less than a minute, according to Iran’s official Fars news agency.

He also said Iran is closely monitoring 64 US vessels in the region, including 20 engaged in the mine-sweeping exercise, along with British, French, Japanese and Emirates ships.

Another Revolutionary Guard official, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said the new “Shahed 129” drone could be armed with “bombs and missiles” and has a range of 1,250 miles.

Hajizadeh said on Sunday that if war broke out between Iran and Israel, “it will turn into World War III” as other nations are drawn into it. He said Iran would target US bases in the event of an Israeli attack.

Obama alluded to the threatened cutoff of oil when he told the United Nations, “Make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained. It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations and the stability of the global economy.”

War jitters helped drive up the price of oil on the world market about 1 percent yesterday before falling back.

Obama blasted Iran for helping to keep Syria’s bloody regime in power and refusing to cooperate fully with UN arms inspectors.

“Time and again, it has failed to take the opportunity to demonstrate that its nuclear program is peaceful, and to meet its obligations to the United Nations,’’ he said.

The remarks set the stage for Ahmadinejad’s annual anti-US, anti-Israel UN tirade today.

Outside the Warwick hotel, where he’s staying, about 50 protesters chanted “Ahmadinejad is a terrorist” and “we want Ahmadinejad out of the US now, now, now.” "

http://www.nypost.com