cmoehle

Feb 10 2006, 09:44 AM

silverfox "Why do we care what extremists or terrorsts think?"

So you think the Terror War is bogus?

cmoehle

Feb 10 2006, 10:54 AM

The implication of "until they want to kill us" says why worry until it's too late. If terrorists are trying to kill us, and we want to kill them first, don't you think it important to know who they are, what they are, what they think? What do you think they will walk up to you and announce I am a terorist and I am going to kill you unless you kill me first?

Full enough context now? Question remains the same.

It amazes me how people come on a forum to discuss opinions and get irritated about doing just that.

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Hirsi Ali:Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.

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Not to give offence would mean not to pursue change. Imagine what Galileo, Voltaire, Paine or Mill would have made of Ian Jack’s argument that one should not depict things that may cause offence. Imagine he’d lived 700 years ago and had said, ‘In principle it’s right to depict the earth orbiting the sun, but imagine the immeasurable insult that the exercise of such a right would cause…’

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Censoring ugly ideas will not make them go away. It is simply a means of abrogating our responsibility for dealing with them. It is only through freedom of expression that we can articulate our disagreements with such people and challenge their ideas.

cascade

Feb 14 2006, 03:15 PM

It's like telling people they are not intelligent enough to sort out lies from the truth.

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...in most countries, including the USA, there is always friction between freedom of the press and religion and governmental and/or popular opinon. Polls taken over long periods of time have regularly shown that many Americans do not want to hear, see — or allow to be heard or seen — matters which to them are anathema. If the Founders had not had the vision and wisdom to insert these in the Constitution, their existence might well be parlous even today....

What Voltaire and I agree on is that we must respect a person's right to hold certain views and speak or print them — not that we have either to respect such views or the person who holds them. (The last derives from "political correctness," which is entirely a different subject.) This process may seem messy, but it usually works well for political and religious democracies. It provides a peaceful arena for propagation, debate, assertion and counterargument, in which the more useful ideas and beliefs usually prevail. And it allows people to change their minds — and religions and governments — according to conditions and argument.

Conversely, dominant elites, governments and religions do not like freedom of the press and religion, unless they have been conditioned to them.