no, i would not say that most secular socialist-democratic countries in west/northern europe have as much ideology as socialist states, or america. the state and the identity of the nation (or patriotism) are really not a big part of everyday life. nor are religion, or any sort of binding identity. sure, they are based on a lot of political theory and historical thinking. but that doesn't mean the 'nature' of life or atmosphere in those countries is inherently ideological. most people in the aforementioned states just want the government to provide a basic level of services, and then to get on with their life. that's not an ideological existence, per se, no more than any sort of lived-experience is 'ideological'... in which case the term loses all meaning. that's approaching the state that althusser spoke of when he speaks about 'interpellation', which is far more philosophical and epistemic than any sort of political system.
Crap. I was silently disagreeing with you, but then a trip to the social networks shows me all the trendy hashtags about "Murica" united and in solidarity with Egypt. I got into an argument yesterday with someone who was going on about how great America is "because of our freedom" (he had a rhotacism, though, so... "fweedom"). Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to be jaded.Uzique The Lesser wrote:
i do think americans have a general tendency or proclivity to get enrapt by rhetoric and news-headlines about 'freedom' and 'democracy'. either they're taking the middle-eastern happenings in a very naive and hopeful light, or they are genuinely bought-in to the idea that any form of 'democracy' is automatically 'better' (read: it's not). i read a very interesting piece about the chinese deputy-PM or something the other day in which he made a very strong argument against this false western belief that the only way to 'progress' or move forward is to become a democracy. very convincing. americans do tend to have this automatic response to any news of 'democracy' that is must therefore be 'for the best' (see: the whole justification for the terrible iraq-afghan fuckup; "well at least they have democracy now!!!")
to be fair the standard of thought and opinion on social networks is universally fucking retarded no matter what country you're logging in from.
whereas myspace represented the viral spreading of fashion 'trends' through the internet, facebook represents the intellectual trend, the activist-fad, the 'like' bandwagon. it's facile. everyone who takes to facebook to actually voice their opinions or brandish their political sleeve is a fucking moron.
whereas myspace represented the viral spreading of fashion 'trends' through the internet, facebook represents the intellectual trend, the activist-fad, the 'like' bandwagon. it's facile. everyone who takes to facebook to actually voice their opinions or brandish their political sleeve is a fucking moron.
The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jailJay wrote:
Video Gamer Arrested, Jailed Over Sarcastic Comments Online
How are you liking that freedom? It comes with a side of *cough BULLSHIT*.
8 Celebrities Arrested for Obscenity (and What It Was They Said or Did)
Oh yeah, and you could look up things like TSA abuse of power and the IRS being unreasonably vindictive if you weren't "nice" to them. But we're a freedom utopia, right?
Apparently its no longer safe to be sarcastic on the internet.... I wonder what they're going to do with the thousands of people who've admitted to fake murders on reddit. lol
They're going to have to take a loan out of taxpayers' wallets just to afford all the new prisons when they incarcerate three quarters of our population.Spearhead wrote:
Apparently its no longer safe to be sarcastic on the internet.... I wonder what they're going to do with the thousands of people who've admitted to fake murders on reddit. lol
i remember when you guys tried to make out the UK was some sort of tyrannical regime because we gave a guy that made a racist remark in front of like 200,000 people a 3 week community service term.
Yes, but it's still stupid.
never going to resolve the arguments for/against 'the enshrinement of total free speech' vs. 'keeping the public peace'.
most europeans, with our history, have no problem considering inciting racial hatred or violence a crime.
most europeans, with our history, have no problem considering inciting racial hatred or violence a crime.
But it is funny when an American brings up our freedom as a general HA GOTCHA statement when we have nonsense like what I mentioned going on.
if funny means hypocritical and deluded... yes. 'freedom'.
The problem is, if we arrested every person who incited racial hatred, or racial violence, you'd probably have to lock up half the country, especially the south. Of course Europe does not have the same levels of racism, at the time of the Civil War the slave population was at least 40 percent of the entire south and was larger than the non-slave population in several southern states. Having the government step in to punish "inciting racial hatred" on a case by case is a laughably impossible task.Uzique The Lesser wrote:
never going to resolve the arguments for/against 'the enshrinement of total free speech' vs. 'keeping the public peace'.
most europeans, with our history, have no problem considering inciting racial hatred or violence a crime.
What newbie posted has far more to do with the 9/11/NSA/paranoid security state losing all touch with reality. Its an entirely different issue.
Last edited by Spearhead (2013-07-05 03:18:40)
no it's not because our people getting arrested on social media as a result of inciting violence/hate speech is part of the same parcel of post-9/11 laws and 'crackdowns'. all policing of the internet and 'digital terrorism' is all completely new after 9/11 or the london attacks. it's really hard to pick apart and separate 'post-terrorism' and contemporary internet policing.
also the government don't punish it on a 'case by case' basis. every time this comes up you americans act like our government are policing our every sentence. they don't. the only time someone has got in trouble with the law for race hatred or some form of slander/libel is when they say something that becomes 'of public concern', which i think formally requires that they have least 500 followers and a large number of official police complaints filed before the authorities will even bother looking at it. and even then, it's minor. again: the worst that has happened here is someone got a 3 month rap for outraging literally THE ENTIRE NATION's football fans, who were worked up over a black player having a heart attack on the pitch. that is the absolute worst. the police don't act on anything by a 'case by case' basis. if anything, they reluctantly come in to arbitrate public outrage when people take to public spaces to incite racial hatred/violence.
also the government don't punish it on a 'case by case' basis. every time this comes up you americans act like our government are policing our every sentence. they don't. the only time someone has got in trouble with the law for race hatred or some form of slander/libel is when they say something that becomes 'of public concern', which i think formally requires that they have least 500 followers and a large number of official police complaints filed before the authorities will even bother looking at it. and even then, it's minor. again: the worst that has happened here is someone got a 3 month rap for outraging literally THE ENTIRE NATION's football fans, who were worked up over a black player having a heart attack on the pitch. that is the absolute worst. the police don't act on anything by a 'case by case' basis. if anything, they reluctantly come in to arbitrate public outrage when people take to public spaces to incite racial hatred/violence.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-05 04:52:02)
I could see it coming when I was in grade school and got in trouble for having an innocuous gun-shaped key chain or if I drew a gun on the corner of a piece of paper during a break. If I was going to school now, I'd probably have been sent to Guantanamo Bay.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57405 … ist-tweet/Uzique The Lesser wrote:
no it's not because our people getting arrested on social media as a result of inciting violence/hate speech is part of the same parcel of post-9/11 laws and 'crackdowns'. all policing of the internet and 'digital terrorism' is all completely new after 9/11 or the london attacks. it's really hard to pick apart and separate 'post-terrorism' and contemporary internet policing.
I guess its just a cultural difference. No one would give a shit in America. To us it is incredibly weird that you would even bother with some loser posting shit on a social media site, for the purpose of preventing violence. Again, it probably has to do with the fact that we have more minorities, more racism, more segregation, bigger and more numerous race riots etc. etc. Not that it's anything to brag about. If anything we just shame and humiliate offensive people, like Paula Deen. Its just not that big of a deal.
Last edited by Spearhead (2013-07-05 05:37:33)
yes, well done. the SINGLE case of a person seeing jail time that i referred to IN TWO POSTS CONSECUTIVELY. he got 56 days, and likely only served 3-4 weeks of that time. the one case of someone seeing jail time. did you read my posts? do you read my posts? go read my posts. i guess brits never bother shaming and humiliating people. we just get the thought-police to lock them up. all those thousands of people. all those tweets that send people to jail. or wait, the one single case where a guy saw a few weeks because of a national outrage. he saw jail time because he offended hundreds of thousands of people and said something like "i'm glad that black cunt is dead" and "haha, monkey dead", just as the entire nation's football fans were watching the guy die on the pitch. it affronted enough people to get the police to come in and have a word with the guy. the american police don't intervene to take someone aside when they cause consternation in the public? oh really? please tell me more. again: the single isolated case, which was criticized enough in its own right, and generated lots of debate about policing cyber-space. but you americans will refer to it like its the everyday precedent. boring.
also weren't paula deen's remarks in private? and came to the surface? this guy (above) was causing a public disturbance. the whole legal debate and grey-area centres around whether or not people with large public presences on twitter/social media are posting in a 'public' place, i.e. offending thousands of people by posting their remarks in a public domain. it seems quite different. the real debate, in legal terms, is whether tweeting racist abuse with the n-word is the same as going up to a black person's face and calling them it, face to face. that's where the law is stuck - on that technicality. paula deen admitting she used racial slurs "in the past" is not the same scenario. maybe if paula deen had said an outwardly and gratuitously racist thing on tv, in front of hundreds of thousands of people, directed personally at a black person/victim... then it would be equivalent. but it's not. so: shit example.
like i said. we have laws to protect the public realm from racist or provocative behaviour. it keeps the peace. it's that versus the complete enthronement of freedom of speech, i.e. a person's right to express a view, however uneducated. we prefer for our 'public sphere' to be reasoned, educated, and constructive. it's a simple difference. no one is better than the other; each has pros and cons. you're welcome to be a racist in the UK. there are political parties and extremist groups that hit the streets and protest and make their views known, perfectly legally, with police protection, week in, week out. we do not stifle dissent. what we punish is people being outwardly racist or inciting hatred to no end. i.e. idiots and criminals. i have no problem with it.
also america has "more minorities"? i don't know where you get this stuff from. you may have a slightly higher percentage of immigrants, but european societies are just as multicultural. we are living in a state of affairs where we have just decolonized globe-spanning empires. we're not white monocultures. british and european cities are rich in racial and cultural mixes. we just approach the law a different way. france has arabic/muslim riots all the time, because of perceived discrimination and injustice, out in the outer-city banlieues. i don't really think you know much about the world outside of america.
also weren't paula deen's remarks in private? and came to the surface? this guy (above) was causing a public disturbance. the whole legal debate and grey-area centres around whether or not people with large public presences on twitter/social media are posting in a 'public' place, i.e. offending thousands of people by posting their remarks in a public domain. it seems quite different. the real debate, in legal terms, is whether tweeting racist abuse with the n-word is the same as going up to a black person's face and calling them it, face to face. that's where the law is stuck - on that technicality. paula deen admitting she used racial slurs "in the past" is not the same scenario. maybe if paula deen had said an outwardly and gratuitously racist thing on tv, in front of hundreds of thousands of people, directed personally at a black person/victim... then it would be equivalent. but it's not. so: shit example.
like i said. we have laws to protect the public realm from racist or provocative behaviour. it keeps the peace. it's that versus the complete enthronement of freedom of speech, i.e. a person's right to express a view, however uneducated. we prefer for our 'public sphere' to be reasoned, educated, and constructive. it's a simple difference. no one is better than the other; each has pros and cons. you're welcome to be a racist in the UK. there are political parties and extremist groups that hit the streets and protest and make their views known, perfectly legally, with police protection, week in, week out. we do not stifle dissent. what we punish is people being outwardly racist or inciting hatred to no end. i.e. idiots and criminals. i have no problem with it.
also america has "more minorities"? i don't know where you get this stuff from. you may have a slightly higher percentage of immigrants, but european societies are just as multicultural. we are living in a state of affairs where we have just decolonized globe-spanning empires. we're not white monocultures. british and european cities are rich in racial and cultural mixes. we just approach the law a different way. france has arabic/muslim riots all the time, because of perceived discrimination and injustice, out in the outer-city banlieues. i don't really think you know much about the world outside of america.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-05 06:10:16)
Uzique The Lesser wrote:
i remember when you guys tried to make out the UK was some sort of tyrannical regime because we gave a guy that made a racist remark in front of like 200,000 people a 3 week community service term.
i like how i explicitly mentioned this one extreme case twice immediately before spearhead made his stupid ass fucking post, where he linked it like he was making some "point" and pointing out an egregious example.Uzique The Lesser wrote:
again: the worst that has happened here is someone got a 3 month rap for outraging literally THE ENTIRE NATION's football fans, who were worked up over a black player having a heart attack on the pitch. that is the absolute worst. the police don't act on anything by a 'case by case' basis. if anything, they reluctantly come in to arbitrate public outrage when people take to public spaces to incite racial hatred/violence.
or maybe you were "joking around" and being silly again?
Actually, I stayed in a hotel in the Arab part of Paris for a couple days when I was there some years ago. I'm well aware that Europe has its fair share of minorities as well as race riots. But no, it doesn't even come close to the US. Sorry.
Not even remotely close.wikipedia wrote:
UK 2001 census
White British 50,366,497 85.67%
White (other) 3,096,169 5.27%
Indian 1,053,411 1.8%
Pakistani 977,285 1.6%
White Irish 691,232 1.2%
Mixed race 677,117 1.2%
Black Caribbean 565,876 1.0%
Black African 485,277 0.8%
Bangladeshi 283,063 0.5%
Other Asian (non-Chinese) 247,644 0.4%
Chinese 247,403 0.4%
Other 230,615 0.4%
Black (others) 97,585 0.2%
United States
Non-Hispanic White or European American 196,817,552 63.7 %
Hispanic or Latino 50,477,594 16.4 %
Black or African American 38,929,319 12.6 %
Asian American 14,674,252 4.8 %
cont'd
the "arab part" of paris?
and yes, i said you may have more as a percentage/total figure, but that's because you also have borders (with mexico, and nearby latin america, whereas we only are near more white-europeans), and also because of the huge historical fact of slavery and actually importing minorities. i never denied the numbers were different - that is obvious. what i said is that european cities and 'cultural life' have plenty of multiculturalism - enough for it not to make a fucking difference, any way. you're making out that the freedom of speech thing is somehow related to the fact you are a 'racial' society, so it's imperative that you keep speech free (?) or somehow drawing some relation between the law/attitude and the make-up of your society. patent bullshit: a) when the constitution was being drawn up, nobody gave a fuck about minorities, and america was majority-white and patrician-elite, anyway; b) my original point, that european societies (and cities in particular) are more than multicultural enough for there to be a negligible difference in policymaking. our laws are not 'suited' to a 'non-multicultural' environment. both of our legislations basically address the same state of affairs: a multicultural society where people from all over the world (or an ex-empire, more specifically) are free to congregate and settle. the percentage difference doesn't really change anything.
people don't 'care more' here because there are 'less' minorities. that's just a completely nonsensical point.
can you make a point?
and yes, i said you may have more as a percentage/total figure, but that's because you also have borders (with mexico, and nearby latin america, whereas we only are near more white-europeans), and also because of the huge historical fact of slavery and actually importing minorities. i never denied the numbers were different - that is obvious. what i said is that european cities and 'cultural life' have plenty of multiculturalism - enough for it not to make a fucking difference, any way. you're making out that the freedom of speech thing is somehow related to the fact you are a 'racial' society, so it's imperative that you keep speech free (?) or somehow drawing some relation between the law/attitude and the make-up of your society. patent bullshit: a) when the constitution was being drawn up, nobody gave a fuck about minorities, and america was majority-white and patrician-elite, anyway; b) my original point, that european societies (and cities in particular) are more than multicultural enough for there to be a negligible difference in policymaking. our laws are not 'suited' to a 'non-multicultural' environment. both of our legislations basically address the same state of affairs: a multicultural society where people from all over the world (or an ex-empire, more specifically) are free to congregate and settle. the percentage difference doesn't really change anything.
people don't 'care more' here because there are 'less' minorities. that's just a completely nonsensical point.
can you make a point?
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-05 06:35:41)
that kid makes most d&st posters look inadequate.
Cool story article. Photographer mobbed, lives to tell the tale.
Muslim bortherhood logic: Complaining about freedom being taken away from you when thats exactly what you were intent on doing to others.
An older Muslim tried to get him to stop spraying the door. That's when the shit hit the fan.
You forgot to mention the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world. Also that the government is contractually obligated to keep the prisons at 90% capacityunnamednewbie13 wrote:
The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jailJay wrote:
Video Gamer Arrested, Jailed Over Sarcastic Comments Online
How are you liking that freedom? It comes with a side of *cough BULLSHIT*.
8 Celebrities Arrested for Obscenity (and What It Was They Said or Did)
Oh yeah, and you could look up things like TSA abuse of power and the IRS being unreasonably vindictive if you weren't "nice" to them. But we're a freedom utopia, right?
FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!
Last edited by Stubbee (2013-08-18 08:24:28)
The US economy is a giant Ponzi scheme. And 'to big to fail' is code speak for 'niahnahniahniahnah 99 percenters'