French cartoon sparks protests
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Saturday, October 25, 2025 15:43
VIEWED: 11178
PAGE 9 of 11
The title of this thread is "French cartoon sparks protests."
The title of the post above this could be called "Byte's Rant."
I get it that Byte needs to express herself. She needs to be heard.
Could we have a thread dedicated to Byte, her opinions and feelings?
Working title, "YOU PEOPLE ARE SO DUMB I CAN'T STAND YOU ARRRGH" !!
Just a passing thought from Dumb Oonj. -:)
=========================
I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. ~Charles R Swindoll
If I have to react to others all the time, then they own my mind more than I do.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Oh, don't worry, I saw your previous oh so helpful comment about "Oonj: If I put principles before personalities, I can stick to the point instead of always trying to make every conversation about Me."
I just chose not to address it because maybe every now and then I like to actually try to discuss an issue instead of constantly having to defend myself against malicious insinuations. :)
Never does work out that way! So hey, what are you doing here, are you discussing the topic about Mohammed and the artists? I only see one post from you about it, and it was a half post, whereas you have 1 and 1/2 posts about how much of a blowhard I am.
Maybe we can make a thread about Oonjerah's antagonistic relationship with Byte. I'd even promise not to post in it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Dumb Oonj responds to Angry Byte.
My 9/24 post, "Ah shit, I don't wanna debate in here!" is on topic.
My 9/25 post, "Here's what I think of Muslims" is on topic.
My 10/2 post, is about Bytemite.
Byte, I gather you don't like what I said there.
BUT -- I will not address your feelings directly in this thread again.
That would be Off Topic.
I am suggesting we could have a thread about your feelings.
This thread can be about the French cartoon and reactions to that.
"posts about how much of a blowhard I am."
Don't put words in my mouth. I think of you as severely maladapted, but not a blowhard.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Listen. I wasn't the person who made this thread about me. People ASKED me to elaborate on, and defend my opinion on this matter.
When someone necroposts a thread that's been a week since anyone posted in it just to insult me and make more allegations about stuff I've already cleared up, then maybe I'm not actually the aggressor here. I'm allowed to defend myself, and I'm allowed to get a little bit testy.
Win one for objectivity. If you want to debate my opinion on an issue, you address me, not Niki, and say what point I made you take issue with. Including if you just think I'm a self centered brat and don't really want to get into the argument. But whatever you do, be up front about it and OWN it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
The source of violence and abuse is the abuser. Never the victim. Never. As soon as murder is on the table, the victim is in no position to make things worse. The victim in no way brought murder into the conversation. That's all on the killer. You're making the worst kind of false equivalence when you compare tasteless cartoonists and homocidal maniacs who kill over "blasphemy." You and the killers are both dehumanizing the cartoonist if you're gonna sit there and tell me these drawings are in any way the cause of riots and murder.
I pretty much agree with your philosophy here, although I suspect this may be one of those posts where I end up arguing against myself.
You are right in that too many people use someone else's behaviour or actions as an excuse for their own behaviour or actions.
If you believe in free will, then we are all responsible for our behaviour 100%.
Trouble is, do I believe in complete free will? There are fairly significant arguments against it, that so much of our decision making is dependant upon a whole load of things outside of our control, ie how our brain functions, our learned belief system, our temperament, our genes. When you look at all those variables, how much free will do we actually, truly exercise is quite scary. It's why prisons are full or people whose cognitive functions have been impaired by mental health, drug and alcohol use, physical and emotional abuse and trauma.
Strangely then, I believe we are still responsible for our actions, mainly because I cannot see what the alternative is, other than culling large parts of the population or stopping them for breeding. Not really part of my value system.
I believe that both sides had choices regarding their actions, and both bear the responsibility of the results. The cartoonist draws a cartoon full knowing the impact, and in fact hoping for that impact in order to draw attention to the intolerance of fundamentalist Muslims. And Muslims similarily decide on their course of action, to protest violently, peacefully or ignore the cartoon. Neither is responsible for the actions of the other, but both are responsible for their own actions. I think....
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Hey Magons,
Whether or not, or to what degree our individual will is free at any given moment still doesn't imply that one person's violent actions are caused by the non-violent behavior of another person. I think my argument is primarily moral rather than causal, however. I believe that wherever there are functioning fists and feet violence is always an option, but that the urge to violence can always be channeled into some other non-violent form. I believe that the knowledge of what violence is is innate (infants, of course, have a pretty hazy understanding of all things 3-dimentional, so I don't mean we're born with an understanding of what violence is, but once we are developmentally ready to comprehend it, we all of us know perfectly well what it is). True, the habits and norms of one's life can make violent acting out more likely or less, but that's still all on the individual in terms of giving into an urge toward violence, or choosing to forbear.
Now, of course, violence as a direct reaction to violence is sometimes purely instinctual and so the moral accountability for the violence must be laid at the feet of the instigator of the violence. And certainly, when a person is systematically violated again and again over a considerable length of time the psyche can be twisted and personal responsibility is correspondingly mitigated. But when we commit an act of violence in an otherwise non-violent social context, we are the authors of that violence.
Of course, there is a long history in dominator culture of this basic understanding of the nature of violence being intentionally perverted and occulted. In dominator culture the harm visited on anyone by the dominator is understood to have been "caused" by the victim. After all, the dominator is merely acting according to his nature: to dominate. It's an extraordinary and very subversive distortion of reality. But all my training and my experience tells me that it is a distortion and a bringer of great suffering to all who live under its sway.
The rioters, such as they are, have embraced dominator culture. In their culture there are non-violent things which they feel a moral requirement to violate. A cartoon defames the Prophet? Something must be done! An example made! The blasphemers threated or attacked! But these actions are the children of the dominator culture internalized by the individuals committing the violence, NOT the cartoonists.
Even if the cartoonists WANT a violent reaction, they are helpless to make that happen if the rioters are not willing. The cartoonists truly have no power to make the violence happen and therefore cannot be held responsible. They are wholly dependant on the will of others to bring about any violence. And they have no power to shape or direct that violence once it occurs. The rioters and/or assassins, on the other hand, have every opportunity to shape and direct the violence as they see fit.
It's a tragic reflection on the state of the rioters psyches and our own if we imagine that the rioters are so utterly without conscious agency that their violence was caused by a cartoonist drawing a single cartoon in a magazine. The cartoonist who imagines he was the architect of the rioters' violence is like the king in The Little Prince who claims to order the sun to rise every morning. That is, they're both mistaken about the nature of causality and imagine they have agency where they in fact have none.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Whether or not, or to what degree our individual will is free at any given moment still doesn't imply that one person's violent actions are caused by the non-violent behavior of another person.
agreed
Quote:
I think my argument is primarily moral rather than causal, however. I believe that wherever there are functioning fists and feet violence is always an option, but that the urge to violence can always be channeled into some other non-violent form. I believe that the knowledge of what violence is is innate (infants, of course, have a pretty hazy understanding of all things 3-dimentional, so I don't mean we're born with an understanding of what violence is, but once we are developmentally ready to comprehend it, we all of us know perfectly well what it is). True, the habits and norms of one's life can make violent acting out more likely or less, but that's still all on the individual in terms of giving into an urge toward violence, or choosing to forbear.
Yeasss... I think I pretty much agree, with the qualifier that some people have less capacity to choose other options than other people. I think the choice is still in there somewhere, but that some brains are more trained to resort to violence than others. I don't actually think this is the case with the rioters, and agree with your paragraph below.
Quote:
Now, of course, violence as a direct reaction to violence is sometimes purely instinctual and so the moral accountability for the violence must be laid at the feet of the instigator of the violence. And certainly, when a person is systematically violated again and again over a considerable length of time the psyche can be twisted and personal responsibility is correspondingly mitigated. But when we commit an act of violence in an otherwise non-violent social context, we are the authors of that violence.
Quote:
Of course, there is a long history in dominator culture of this basic understanding of the nature of violence being intentionally perverted and occulted. In dominator culture the harm visited on anyone by the dominator is understood to have been "caused" by the victim. After all, the dominator is merely acting according to his nature: to dominate. It's an extraordinary and very subversive distortion of reality. But all my training and my experience tells me that it is a distortion and a bringer of great suffering to all who live under its sway.
The rioters, such as they are, have embraced dominator culture. In their culture there are non-violent things which they feel a moral requirement to violate. A cartoon defames the Prophet? Something must be done! An example made! The blasphemers threated or attacked! But these actions are the children of the dominator culture internalized by the individuals committing the violence, NOT the cartoonists.
I've never heard the phrase 'dominator culture; but what you are saying makes sense to me. I think that we live in a culture dominated (sic) by such thinking - or at least it is prevalent.
Quote:
Even if the cartoonists WANT a violent reaction, they are helpless to make that happen if the rioters are not willing. The cartoonists truly have no power to make the violence happen and therefore cannot be held responsible. They are wholly dependant on the will of others to bring about any violence. And they have no power to shape or direct that violence once it occurs. The rioters and/or assassins, on the other hand, have every opportunity to shape and direct the violence as they see fit.
It's a tragic reflection on the state of the rioters psyches and our own if we imagine that the rioters are so utterly without conscious agency that their violence was caused by a cartoonist drawing a single cartoon in a magazine. The cartoonist who imagines he was the architect of the rioters' violence is like the king in The Little Prince who claims to order the sun to rise every morning. That is, they're both mNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
And we're back to how this compares to blaming the rape victim.
Let's break this down.
The argument (simplified) that has so INFLAMED me is this: "these artists are comparable to rape victims/ victims of abuse. If I blame the artists for having a role in increased middle eastern violence, it is like saying that rape victims asked for it."
Up to now I have refused to address this, not because I can't refute it, but because it is, simply, a very flawed argument. Before I dismissed this the first time around I called it a red herring, an ad hominem, and a false analogy. The false analogy is the most logically egregious part of this (and related to the red-herring), so I'll address that.
The biggest problem is the central premise, "these artists are comparable to rape victims/ victims of abuse." The comparison made is that the artists have provoked Muslim violence against them the same way a rape victim provokes an attack by wearing skimpy clothing, or the way a child provokes a parents wrath by violating arbitrary rules. Which is to say, not at all, for the rape victim or child, the violence is entirely the fault of the attacker.
First of all. While after some consideration I'm willing to concede that some of the artists are victims or have been in the past, I also say that we have to evaluate each artist/Muslim incident on a case by case - sometimes nothing happens to the artists.
Secondly, the girl in her skimpy outfit and the child have a reasonable expectation that their actions should not result in a horrible random attack on their person. However, when the artists made these cartoons, and when the guy overdubbed his movie to be anti-Islam, this was done with an expressed purpose: to show that some Muslims are violent.
Mission accomplished.
But this second part defeats the argument - neither the rape victim nor the abused child intends to be attacked. When Trevon Martin walks down the street in a hoodie, ideally he should not have reason to suppose he might be shot by George Zimmerman.
In this case, the artists wanted more attacks, and possibly even attacks on themselves, to make a point. You call it courageous - perhaps it is, but it is also misguided. And because of that we can't argue that the artists had no role in the outcome of these events. They may be victims, depending on how personally the backlash affected them, but they certainly aren't innocent in this, and wanted a specific negative outcome.
It's a rather manipulative tactic, very close to a frame up or the wounded gazelle gambit, and if you see other people doing it in other situations, if I were you, I'd seriously question their likeability or motives. Just because someone else is guilty of something doesn't mean that anything that gets them in trouble for it is entirely moral or honest. While it's true that this violence wouldn't have happened if the protestors weren't willing, it's also true true that they're willing because of violence the west has done to them. In this view, these cartoons are just the proverbial last straw, the spark to the tinder fire, they're an escalation in an already on-going and volatile conflict, as opposed to a single self-contained instance where we can immediately spot the aggressors.
In short this argument simply does not WORK. It does not inspire me to re-examine some double standard I have or some such, rather it insinuates that, in your words, believing as I do is immoral, possibly cowardly, pro-rapist, pro-abuse, etc., and that I do not understand the implications of fear, anger, and/or violence. If I have seemed unreasonable, it is because of this. As for blaming the victim. While blaming a victim might be insensitive, it is not in itself necessarily illogical or immoral, if the victim in question had a role in their own problems, or if they have a role in some greater misfortune at play.
I do hold these artists somewhat accountable for what has happened, and I think their choices reflect poorly o
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Nailed it. And yes, some brains ARE more trained to resort to violence than others...those who live in a violent country ruled by Mullahs who demand that violence being a perfect example.
I believe that both sides had choices regarding their actions, and both bear the responsibility of the results. The cartoonist draws a cartoon full knowing the impact, and in fact hoping for that impact in order to draw attention to the intolerance of fundamentalist Muslims. And Muslims similarily decide on their course of action, to protest violently, peacefully or ignore the cartoon. Neither is responsible for the actions of the other, but both are responsible for their own actions. I think....
....some people have less capacity to choose other options than other people. I think the choice is still in there somewhere, but that some brains are more trained to resort to violence than others.Quote:
That does not take into account a religion which has been perverted into believing any depiction of the prophet--whatsoever--is blasphemy. The rulers of that religion...quite familiar with inciting violence and with very long-standing knowledge that what they say will be obeyed by some without question...in many ways do the thinking for their followers. Not many, in reality; most do not obey the call for violence, but some always do.
It's a tragic reflection on the state of the rioters psyches and our own if we imagine that the rioters are so utterly without conscious agency that their violence was caused by a cartoonist drawing a single cartoon in a magazine.
Sort of like our anti-abortionists, who believe they are acting in defense of THEIR religion (as they view it). We live in about as different a culture as is possible and put much weight on individual decisions and individual responsibility, yet those people act irresponsibly violent. Put in a culture such as Afghanistan or those like them, and you have multiple people acting out, not just one or two.
I should give up; I already know it's impossible for us in the states to grasp any number of things: that violence is a daily way of life over there; that religion rules to an extent of which we cannot conceive; that there are those who know exactly how to manipulate to achieve the outcome they want. This debate keeps putting things in context WE can understand, so an expectation of understanding such a different culture is probably a waste of time.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
that violence is a daily way of life over there; that religion rules to an extent of which we cannot conceive; that there are those who know exactly how to manipulate to achieve the outcome they want.
I agree with this. I do not think this excuses this, and I know that many Muslims don't respond to the call of violence and that there was actually outcry in these nations against the violent protests. The violent protestors are very clearly bad actors.
But I can't help but see people seeming to deliberately try to stir them up as bad actors as well - to me it seems almost like bullying someone with an attitude problem, and mocking them when they predictably act out, or taking advantage of what is a very bad situation for the people of the middle east for profit and amusement.
Muslims in the middle east are so poor and voiceless in general that I can't really see them as being the abusive power in their relationship to western countries and citizens. I see it the over way around - we're abusing them, and they have limited options how they can make a statement back.
I suppose, as I said to HK, that perhaps it doesn't matter who we blame. But I do wish people wouldn't tar me as some kind of pro-victimization monster just because I have a different perspective.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME