This is a posting about “Freedom of Speech”. It will use some current events that are “offensive”. My position on them is NOT the subject of the posting. (In fact, I rarely care at all about emotionally overloaded issues. What usually interests me is the intellectual vacuousness of the arguments over what is, to me, mostly nothing. Welcome to the unemotive Aspe world…) So please don’t go trying to “project” some kind of “position” on me. I’m neither pro, nor anti, whatever it is folks will immagine.
The Point
Right there in the title. When people are “offended” by some symbol or other, that is an emotional state that they create inside their own head and for their own idiosyncratic reasons. It is neither rational, nor reasonable, to make any law, ruling, or policy based on “offense”.
The basic problem is that anyone can be offended by anything. The choice over which offense to elevate to a law, ruling, or policy then becomes a political football. It has no foundation in reason. No foundation in fact.
Yet we in the U.S.A. are busy getting all wrapped around the axle over various “offense” crimes. BTW, this is also why I find “Hate Speech” and “Hate Crimes” of all sorts absurd. How many crimes are committed from a pleasant warm and fuzzy point of view? Tacking “hate” on the front is only for the purpose of political elevation of some injured parties ahead of others. Does it really matter if a person was killed by a party that hated them, or just wanted them dispassionately dead? Does the emotion of someone change the degree of the crime? Frankly, I’d find the dispassionate sociopath killing a dozen folks more of a concern than one guy who hated another.
So with that said, some examples of, IMHO, the stupidity of making policy based on emotional state.
get all your flaggy triggers here boys and girls:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/...ed-in-the-mind-of-the-offended/#comment-62727
The Point
Right there in the title. When people are “offended” by some symbol or other, that is an emotional state that they create inside their own head and for their own idiosyncratic reasons. It is neither rational, nor reasonable, to make any law, ruling, or policy based on “offense”.
The basic problem is that anyone can be offended by anything. The choice over which offense to elevate to a law, ruling, or policy then becomes a political football. It has no foundation in reason. No foundation in fact.
Yet we in the U.S.A. are busy getting all wrapped around the axle over various “offense” crimes. BTW, this is also why I find “Hate Speech” and “Hate Crimes” of all sorts absurd. How many crimes are committed from a pleasant warm and fuzzy point of view? Tacking “hate” on the front is only for the purpose of political elevation of some injured parties ahead of others. Does it really matter if a person was killed by a party that hated them, or just wanted them dispassionately dead? Does the emotion of someone change the degree of the crime? Frankly, I’d find the dispassionate sociopath killing a dozen folks more of a concern than one guy who hated another.
So with that said, some examples of, IMHO, the stupidity of making policy based on emotional state.
get all your flaggy triggers here boys and girls:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/...ed-in-the-mind-of-the-offended/#comment-62727