Pakistani court sentences man to death for social media post
apnews.com
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A few days back, a man was who went for tourism to a hill station was burnt alive by a mob[1], for purported blasphemy.
Now we are getting evidence of how he was actually a very observant muslim[2], but it's of no consolation for his burnt corpse or his family.
Nothing matters, if someone is pissed at you, they can unleash a mob at you and nothing the law or police can do in front of a violent mob fired up (literally) by religious fervour.
I have a conspiracy, that our economy is so utterly shit that our govt uses such lynchings as a release valve. Hey, inflation biting you? Go kill someone and set them on fire, let that pent up stress out.
In any case, I pray for an escape from this place daily. Terrible economy was bad enough, blasphemy lottery is just the gilding on top.
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[1]: I will not link anything, but if you are morbidly curious, by all means search for "Swat Blasphemy" on twitter and click the media tab.
[2]: https://x.com/Arshadyousafzay/status/1806717907486789805
You are not completely wrong here, I'd speculate that it also plays on two desires that people have: unite around some common enemy (let's say blasphemers/infidels), and feel having power. Mob lynchings give it to them, although I'm not sure if abundance of such events won't drive them for more. The life won't become less shit, but as long as people feel they "fight a good fight", it doesn't matter much to them.
I'm wondering what is the survival strategy in such places.
Pray, and keep your eyes open wide for an opportunity, too.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. Governments around the world spend money, effort and time to distract people from real issues. One of the easiest ways is to show them “those extremely bad people out there” and start or incite clashes and wars. When there’s another enemy that’s created to be worse for our social values or morals, it’s easy to unite people against that and keep them busy with something else.
(I have another conspiracy theory: People who try to blame it on the government try to do so because they want to make the people, or Islam, seem less bad.)
All it takes is one fake [and convincing] social media post saying "Pete ripped out pages of the Quran and spat on them", and an angry mob will show up at Pete's neighbourhood ready to burn his house and family.
I'd worry less if we didn't have precedents of Facebook inciting genocide.
But Biden (or should I saw Blinken, who I guess is the one actually running U.S. foreign policy) continues to prop up the military regime in Pakistan, which tolerates radical Islam and creates a security risk for the entire region. That includes reportedly pressuring the military to get rid of Imran Khan, the first decent leader Pakistan has had in a generation: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/us-pakistan-ukra...
Unlike Iran, they got nuclear weapons, though.
> military regime in Pakistan, which tolerates radical Islam
I can see why one would think that if one readily believes every piece of Islamophobic news/analysis, even when Rawalpindi is routinely subject to attacks by extremists of garden variety.
So why is the US supporting this regime?
This guy just shared a video of people engaging in a hate crime.
Reminds me of China banning sad videos of the elderly, or videos of the poor. Remember, the internet is for cat videos, not feeling sad. Hope this guy is able to escape this verdict.
Marine Le Pen was charged in France for promoting jihadism when she shared a picture of a beheading or some other gorry crime to denounce daesh.
> Marine Le Pen very much needs jihadism for people to vote for her
Are you claiming she's actually promoting jihadism by opposing it?
> no, i'm claiming she's promoting herself by promoting jihadism
You're being really unclear, and the straightforward meaning of what you wrote is certainly untrue.
From what I know about Marine Le Pen, she's almost certainly not "promoting jihadism" (say, as in encouraging people to join ISIS), which is the most straightforward reading.
I think you probably mean she's "promoting jihadism [as a problem]," but that's boringly typical thing for politicians to do. They pretty much always promote themselves as the solution to some problem (that they often also elevate), so people choose to vote for them to solve it. The opposite is also frequently true, where other politicians attempt to play down their opponents' chosen issues in order to promote their own.
Change, simply "is". It's not "good" or "bad" in and of itself. We shouldn't be using it as the basis of an argument for or against some particular thing. We should, instead, argue the specific merits of that particular thing.
Killing people for thought crime is "bad", in my opinion, because the person may not have intended to commit any crime. He might have said, "John should not have torn pages from the quran." And at the same time had no intention of an angry mob descending on John's home to burn John and his family to death. But for a lot of crimes, in the legal codes of many places, it's not necessary to prove "intent".
If you want a lack of thought danger, I'm afraid you'd need a world filled with people who don't think at all.
Consider, your kind of thinking is dangerous...
to someone. (Probably millions of someones.)
So is my kind of thinking.
So is everyone else' kind of thinking.
Does this always hold true, no matter what the majority believes?
Does a death sentence for disrespecting seem like a fair punishment?
Should: Society should respect those with different beliefs. Religions should spread by converting their opponents, not by killing them.
Is: He lives in a country that executes people for blasphemy. Regardless of any "shoulds", that is the reality of the country he lives in.
There's a place for saying, on the one hand, that his country shouldn't be like that, and on the other hand, that there's a place for being wise about the environment you live in.
Morally, Pakistan is wrong here. Pakistan should change.
Practically, you live in the environment (including social and political) you live in, and you usually can't change it much except at the margins. If you act like you live in a different environment, that usually bites you in one way or another.
Consider a different situation. Let's say I walk through a bad part of town with $100 bills visibly hanging out of my pocket. I get mugged. The muggers are morally (and legally) wrong for mugging me. But in a world where muggers exist in the bad part of town, that wasn't very smart of me.
Most people only talk about one aspect of this and ignore the other. They focus on the moral "should" (Pakistan should allow freedom of thought, muggers should stop attacking people), or else they focus on the practical wisdom (don't post stuff that's going to get you in trouble, don't walk down the street with visible money on you). Both are simultaneously true.
Pakistan is morally wrong. They should change. And if you live there, things currently are the way they are, and if you ignore that, you will run into problems.
Would you suggest the Ukrainians fight, or give up? 'Cause I expect you'll say they should give up, and especially you would have said this at the moment of the initial invasion, without knowing how the war will go. Would it have been better for them to be "realists" and give up from the start? I don't think so.
Maybe just refrain from saying anything, when all you have to say is "it's no surprise that Pakistan is repressive". It adds nothing to the conversation, except it might be interpreted as victim blaming. We all know it's no surprise.
> Except, I'm pretty sure this reasoning would prevent people like Ghandi or MLK from ever existing, and that's actively harmful.
That is actually a good point. Such people live in such environments, and choose to go against the environment, knowingly paying the price, in order to try to bring about social change. Such people are outside my comments - they know what they're doing, they know what's going to happen, and they do it anyway for good reason. They have my admiration, not my "you should have known better".
There's one more hole in what I said that you haven't mentioned - inconsistent rules. You can know you're in that kind of environment, say something, and get nailed anyway, because the mob or some prosecutor decides that what you said crosses the line, even though they didn't say that for the last N people who did similar things. In that situation, we're just back at "Pakistan is morally wrong" with nothing the person could do to avoid it.