Salman Rushdie attacked onstage at New York event | Hacker News Reader

Salman Rushdie attacked onstage at New York event

theguardian.com

47 pointsiiv8 comments

While sentiment against Rushdie had probably cooled off in the years since The Satanic Verses, you only have to be caught off-guard once. And after the decades, I'm more surprised Rushdie hasn't been attacked sooner. The combination of caution and just plain luck required to avoid any major incident for 34 years is impressive.

Hope it's not too serious.

Edit: I just saw that he was stabbed in the neck and he was airlifted to a hospital.

Also, I can no longer do date math apparently

Duplicate

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32439956

(51 comments)

It's terrible, but it was one of those things that was going to attract some nut eventually.

If what you write annoys people enough that they want you dead, at least you know there was some fundamental truth in your writing, as and it rubbed some major league a-holes the wrong way.

That's stupidly wrong. I am not saying that this is the case here, but when Hitler wrote about the Jews, if people were annoyed (to the point of attempted murder) about it, it does not mean he had "some fundamental truth" in it.

> I am not saying that this is the case here, but when Hitler wrote about the Jews,

Afaik, Hitler wasn't attacked for what he wrote, per se. I'm not sure this invalidates the point.

These people that attack authors must have been disturbed enough, by being exposed to concepts they find distasteful, that they lash out. They attempt to transfer their inability to cope, with what they imagine the book will do to others, to the author in a misguided attempt to diminish their own pain and/or to gain notoriety for doing so, on other people's behalf.

Before your dive headfirst into proving Godwin's Law, will you catch yourself up and pick up on some subtlety.

Nobody cared too much what Hitler wrote, when he wrote it, he was just another right wing crank writing hateful stuff. His actions, rather than his writing are what he's judged on mostly.

Rushdie fundamental truth was that it was alright to write about a religious figure in a work of fiction, and that's why he has every intolerant nutcase looking to do him harm for a few decades.

[edited out since this is a duplicate post]

In the most general form, ideologies which include an orthodoxy-heresy dichotomy in assemblage out-compete those which don't. The development of orthodoxy itself was a quantum leap in the progression of human thought, and it contributed to both the spread of early Christianity as well as the hatred toward it in (late)-antiquity as its adherents were perceived to be annoyingly self-righteous.

Orthodoxy-containing ideologies characteristically participate in a hegemonic form reality building. But, basing ethical judgements about a particular ideology singularly on whether or not it contains an orthodoxy-heresy component is a poor measure. There are better arguments than, "I'm against the orthodoxy" or "this person is a heretic."

Instead, I maintain that ethical judgements of ideologies should be based on their material outcomes, though this often overlaps with judgements involving the grounding of what makes someone an adherent or heretic, the material benefits granted to adherents of the orthodoxy, and punishments to which heretics are subjected.

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