Har!

JC: “There are contradictions in both directions, and such a categorization obscures more than it clarifies.”

Does this help any?

Gee.

I kinda thought that in defense of the criminalization of speech, you would offer as an example a criminilization of speech. Instead you tell me that the Matthew Shepard atrocity resulted in the kind of stimatization and cultural rejection of homophobia that you find so unlikely and hence requiring the State to police attitudes.

No wonder your sentence was so damn vague. If it were clear, it would demolish your case.

What on earth are you prattling on about? That makes no sense to me. “…remove homophobia from the proper vocabulary….” I don’t have a clue what you are trying to say. What the hell happened to all that Marxist precision in language?

That’s religious bigotry, actionable under Canadian law.

The state, as thinkers back to Machiavelli conclude, as such, is defined by what is excluded from the narrative. We don’t “Defend” rape. This is what is so ugly about torture becoming an issue of “debate” since to even debate it is like debating rape. My point is that there are plenty of “free speech” issues that are not proper elements of political discourse, more akin to fire in a crowded theatre.

I don’t believe that jailing holocaust deniers, cartoonists, etc. is proper. I do believe that if there is consensus that speech is genuinely racist, as oppsoed to merely provocative, that the state has a responsibility, along with civil society to neutralize that speech. Examples include when the state of Wyoming, no liberal bastion, made an effort to remove homophobia from the proper vocabulary after the murder of Matthew Sheppard, a young gay man.

Again, to reitterate, I’m not in favor of jailing or punishing racists. I’m in favor of discrediting them.

jcummings has the moral sense of Ingrid Newkirk.

Me, I stand with true liberals like Antonin Scalia who says that although he abhors flag-buring, the flag-burner is expressing a political idea and is therefor protected from the State.

and Totalitarianism was a concept invented by Arrend, etc. in order to conflate Marx and Heidegger as philosophers of totality (which both were in different senses), thus to claim any politics basedo n the totality, or universal, is inherently authoritarian, whereas politics based on the particular is inherently democratic. There are contradictions in both directions, and such a categorization obscures more than it clarifies.

To put it more simply, do you have a problem with the state prosecuting child pornography?

Oh how familiar this concept sounds, primarily found in totalitarian societies throughout history.

But for something reason, I doubt JC has been taught unbiased history, so he is understandably venerable to repeating it, as he does here verbally in an endless string of clueless and, quite frankly nauseatingly scary, string of comments showing a fetish for ’state power’ over peoples ‘democratic’ freedoms.

But all done for the good of ‘the people’, of course. Ask in totalitarian.

You really need to Chomsky and me in defense of free expression.

“I’m not in favor of jailing racists.” Somehow that does not sound all that convincing.

I think that is taking things a little far, to say the least. I’m not for jailing racists. I’m for using state power to neutralize them in the public eye, through which means other than imprisonment could suffice.

I myself use “Luv,” which I may have picked up on one of my trips to the UK. Who knows?! But it’s a casual form of address, it’s unisexual. And so far, it seems to have offended no one (that I’m aware of).

As for sweetie - - - sure beats “my friend”!

Didja notice that most of those who get offended at minor “slights” are usualy those who are the most P.C. and thus, the most (oh dread) judgmental

Wij zijn het ermee eens en we zijn allemaal opgelucht!

I do believe the pundits do not generally comprehend the power Hillary and Bill have right now. As Beckey infers, it is power of a negative sort–the power to disrupt and to impede. I would say that given the stakes they would be unlikely to use that sort of power, but they surely are not averse to leveraging it. And, worse, that is the central motif of her campaign the last 6 weeks.

Her comments yesterday about Obama being no appeaser are the first apparent turn away from the anti-Obama campaign. The question is: is it the beginning of her campaign for VP?