Man charged for 'liking' photo of murdered French teacher
rfi.fr
rfi.fr
The problem remains as who defines what is intolerant. But in this case I think the argument is sound. This like was clearly endorsement. And the act was inexcusable no matter how offended anyone can be in their religion.
The trouble is deciding who gets to wield that force
Also, vote!
I.e. who's wielding power and over whom are they wielding it.
Whoever is wielding the force is the one gets to wield it. We can have a more civilized society by strictly limiting the wield the force by limiting opportunity to weild it by clear defined individual rights.
We’re going to have to be doing more of this.
Either we have to treat socially undeveloped nations like a star trek, noninterferance and isolation until some bar is passed, or we have to police opinions. You can’t have peace and a considerable population that does not support some of the basic values of your society. If change doesn’t come this sort of thing is going to keep happening until the people fear it enough to start turning it into state sponsored ethnic violence.
It is a much more difficult solution than being blindly tolerant or blindly racist, you have to walk a very fine line of being specifically intolerant of certain ideas, expressions, and actions.
The whole point of political discussions is pointing out the intolerances of your opponents without using physical violence.
I think that 99% of people are intolerant. The 1% being, of course, those that agree with me on everything.
Intolerance refers specifically to those people who fight for their views with means outside of civil discourse, i.e. violence and intimidation (1), thus destroying the possibility of civil discourse.
Deciding who these people are really isn't a hard problem in practice; a democratic society would have no problem with it.
(1) Yes, intimidation can be "just words".
Is it really? Then I suppose war is terrorism, and the military is a terrorist organization.
If you respond that the definition only applies to non-state actors, I have to ask: why does the state get a free pass to do the same thing? Not legally or practically, but ethically. Why?
Accusing a whole group of racism and guilt based on skin color? Intolerant.
Want to close the borders? That's intolerant of those who want to enter.
Drawing disrespectful cartoons you know will cause backlash and division? Intolerant.
Boycotting a country or business because they endorse said cartoons? Also intolerant.
This is no surprise to anyone who knows how the French law evolved in recent years. A NGO even wrote that legislation in France was more repressive than in Turkey (the law texts, not the legal application).
There's been several times where the people who've gone on to do attacks were known to whatever the national security services were but hadn't been caught actually planning the thing. It's the kind of law that'd be great in a world where government is and could be guaranteed to always be run by angels and saints but is absolutely untenable in the real world.
As far as I know, that was struck down in 2017 as unconstitutional though.
Several knives and other weapons were found at his home, prosecutor Frederic Chevallier.
The man denied being radicalised, Chevallier added."
Don't forget that the more deadly attacks recently have just been using vehicles to run people down. No special guns necessary to go on a killing spree.
I've got a hammer, a hacksaw, and a few utility knives and that's just for work on a 550 square foot condo and a car, and that's before getting into any of the kitchen stuff.
It does two things - offends people (you have no right to not be offended, and this is a good thing), and, broadcasts a signal that this is not someone you want to be involved with, not someone you want to hire, and someone who authorities can keep an eye on. Letting such people out themselves seems to be more beneficial then letting them lurk in polite society.
It's not like they are arrest everyone who liked this photo. Just this one particular person who showed a pattern of behavior that advocates murder.
Removing them from society is the best course of action, which is what France seems to try to do right now.
Regardless, I just can’t bring myself to accept the idea that clicking a thumbs up emoji can send you to prison. I don’t care how bad the picture is. That doesn’t sit right.
I don't like the concept either, but short of deporting them wholesale, there's little other possibilities if you wish to live in a society tomorrow.
This is a dog whistle. There appears to be an implication that only immigrants or minorities need to be charged for their speech and that only immigrants or minorities can be radicalized. I completely reject that kind of racist, xenophobic nonsense.
This is also incredibly shortsighted. Who decides what is severe enough to justify charges? What if your ideas are deemed too harmful? It’s the most elementary freedom of speech argument.
No, but you can't deport citizens, and you can deport foreigners. There's no point in dealing with trouble makers if you can just avoid them.
> Who decides what is severe enough to justify charges? What if your ideas are deemed too harmful?
Those are good points, and I don't have the answers. I'm not suggesting actual policy, I'm saying that you can't ignore them or "agree to disagree" with them and keep a free and open society. You have to choose, and I value society more than being nice to every person on earth.
Free speech, or no free speech?
So yes, blasphemy is protected while expression involving violence or religion is more limited.
In the USA, people are routinely arrested for the same kind of thing, although usually by the FBI, and only after they've made concrete plans for their attacks. But just look at the kidnapping story from last week, and you'll recall that the FBI had already infiltrated and been watching that group for months.
How do you think the FBI decided to infiltrate them? Do you think it was because they just guessed randomly? No, it obviously was because the FBI had monitored their group on social media, and seen that they were liking and commenting violent content.
Is this really all that different? This person had already been on their watchlist for clearly some time.
When you only have a limited range of reacting to to something (like, retweet, comment) a lot of complex reactions often get lumped together.
As they say, if you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all.
I'm dismayed I need to spell this out.
But what determines whether what I am "saying" is or is not "good" in the context of a "like"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
edit: downvoted to hell, predictably. Everyone loves freedoms, unless they are of something they dislike
I'm not totally comfortable with this because it creates a situation in which people may be compelled to speak or reproduce the speech of others for the supposed benefit to society.
This is a very interesting perspective I will continue to consider.
Sometimes it is important to make people uncomfortable in the name of progress. Sometimes people take advantage of that to be trolls. The two are inseparable and to a generic outside observer indistinguishable.
But the real reason for freedom of speech is purely to preserve individual liberty and remove any value judgement on the part of society. The only time it is ok to limit speech is when it poses a risk of real harm to others.
> Several knives and other weapons were found at his home, prosecutor Frederic Chevallier.
Spare me. This has nothing to do with the technicalities of free speech. A right incidentally that Islamists who cut peoples heads off don't accept.
It is certainly rational to arrest someone for screaming they are about to kill rather than waiting for them to go through with it.
Was there another story?
> It is certainly rational to arrest
> someone for screaming they are
> about to kill
> Several knives and other weapons were found at his home, prosecutor Frederic Chevallier.
I'm all for free speech and I understand slippery slopes and don't approve of thought policing. My reading of this article is that they had sufficient evidence to arrest him, technicalities and legalities aside.
Thought exercise - could you construct a hypothetical situation where you/he should be arrested? Clearly there is some line, some combination of evidence and circumstance which would allow justify an arrest and search.
And if they are mistaken for doing this and discover they overreacted I'm sure some lawyer will be glad to sue the French government on these technicalities and ensure heads would roll. ;)
Tell this to all the gay and trans people who are very much killed in the streets in places like the US. (I'm not saying Christians do all the violence against lgbtq people or that all Christians are complicit in said violence. I'm just pointing out that the parent's claim that Christians don't do this any more is not correct.)
For an example of actual blasphemy that riled up a lot of Christians in the US, see Serrano's Piss Christ. Although to the best of my knowledge nobody was killed because of it.
Not all of these fit the bill, but it's a place to start your further research.
Did you make it up? Because that’s an extremely serious charge, and shouldn’t be made lightly. You cause more animosity and tension when you spread narratives that convince people that certain groups are out to murder them, and this can escalate into real violence.
The problem is not religion, it's that some fundamentalists who are not right in the head use it as an excuse to commit horrifying acts.
Yes, sure. Religion is super personal, it doesn't automatically mean you believe every word of a text. There may be some that demand that, but it's a broad spectrum that definitely admits looser interpretations.
It's the same with the Quran, the Torah, the Bardo Thodol. Religious text tend to have a lot of allegories and ambiguous texts that are ripe for different interpretations...
And someone who is religious could always easily claim that god may be perfect and omniscient but men are fallible and that the text has been imperfectly re transcribed over time (the oldest copy of the complete Bible, the Codex Vaticanus is from the 4th century for example).
But then again, I don't think in absolutes and that's why I'm an agnostic... I don't find any religion likely but I can't claim to know everything and be completely sure that there is no god, or entity or whatever.
Then of course you have quotes like "The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low and he exalts.”... It's not like any religion is completely self-consistent.
Islam is worse because it claims the Quran is the literal word of God. That doesn't really allow for the reinterpretation gymnastics that Christians can do, because they at least acknowledge their book is written by man.
Freedom, liberty have limits. The limits are cultural and ruled by law. In France, the freedom of speech must respect individuals and allows to mock ideas and ideologies. And religions are ideologies.
If people feel offended when their ideas are criticized or mocked, they are not supposed to kill: they have to adapt, or if in doubt they are personally attacked, they can address a tribunal to settle the case.
Liking a murder is not an opinion or a speech, it is personally attacking the victim and his relatives.
"Clearly Islam, if followed to the letter, is incompatible with the modern world (...) Hell, nor is Christianity, if taken literally."
Not sure about this: all religions have specificities and different reference texts. Of course christians and muslims are humans, and humans kill when reaching extreme conditions. However christians are in violation of their texts when killing.
Not in Islam: muslims are in line with their prophet life (hadith "who leaves the Religion, kill him!") and Koran, a book written by God himself. Koran is quite a bloody book describing severe rules, xenophobia for non-muslims, slaughters, slavery, explicitly allowing wife-beating... And being written by God, not a word can be challenged by moderates to stop extremists: they would just put themselves in the blasphemy list for being murdered.
Some muslims try to unlock Islam from these deadlocks. However it usually brings them to harsh times, a lifetime in jail in the best case (Raif Badawi), or being murdered (Mahmoud Mohammed Taha).