Lothar wrote:callmeslick wrote:A peaceful people shouldn't be provokative, IMHO, and those who ARE, to my mind, are 'over the top'.
You're pretty provocative in this forum sometimes.
It's a form of protected speech. And it should be. You can't incite violence directly, but you can say things that people find deeply offensive.
Yes Lothar, slick has been a little provocative here and so have I, but most people here wouldn't grab a gun and shoot you in response to an insult, although I'm quite sure some may have thought about it when things got really heated.
Plus, speech here is also moderated,
and deleted, if those insults get too personal, so in a way, we DON'T have total free speech on this forum.
Yes, we have free and protected speech in America and we treasure it. We also abuse it too. We can all freely say whatever nasty crap about anyone else we want, damned be the consequences. I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore. The internet has mechanized and amplified bullying into a new form of degradation. That said, it doesn't mean people should throw decorum out the window and deliberately sow disrespect towards others because they don't like their culture or their religion. IMHO, the ONLY reason these morons in Texas performed this little drawing stunt was to raise someone's hackles just to get a violent rise out of them. It was bait. And the fake surprise and fearful whining at actually being targeted by some crazy Islamists, was nothing but a bunch of theatrics for the cameras. Boo hoo.
Which brings another question. Should people be deliberately wielding free speech as a weapon when we already know the target(s) WILL use a weapon in response? When it affects us personally, or when it gets others involved? And you'll notice that it took a
public police officer, not one of those bully, probably armed idiot contestants, to bring down those 2 shooters. They put the life of a cop on the line, who wasn't even participating in the contest,
at risk, all for their little provocative and hateful free speech contest. That's free speech gone too far.
We can blame Islam for their violent behavior, but America needs to look in the mirror and reflect on our own actions a little, because most of this hatred towards the U.S. by Islamist extremism is due to our own foreign policy and military actions over the decades since white Europeans and Americans either colonized or meddled in the Middle East or in Muslim culture. I'm quite sure if a foreign country started meddling in our own country, we would take extreme, and very violent, exception. Personally, I don't like Islam. It's repressive towards women and it's still living in the past. It needs to grow up, like Christianity mostly did, which WILL take time. But there are LOTS of others on this planet that follow Islam, and to get into a snit fight over whether their religion should be wiped out or not will only bring us endless Holy War. Is that what we want, because that's what we'll get. There is NO violent solution or winners in this Holy War, only endless misery and death for everyone, until both sides grow up.
ThunderBunny wrote:Vander wrote:This looks to me like a bunch of people being dicks.
So I guess you can murder someone for being offensive.
Happens all the time, now and in our own recent past. Just ask any black or gay person. The attackers always see their victims as an offense to "something".
