Danish Politician Convicted of Racism For Offending Muslims

[Elok]

I think he will never say that again (and remain in politics).

I'm talking about the drunk person in post 128, not the politician.

[Bereta_Eder]

I'm talking about the drunk person in post 128, not the politician.

I'm talking about the same person.
I think that one would have a few beers before completely forgeting his political position and enganging in rhetoric that not only is judged completely unacceptable in the society he lives in but the people there are so adamant that they saw fit to engrave their dissaproval into law.

[Elok]

Ah, I thought you were talking about penalizing private citizens for rude tweets. My mistake.

[Bereta_Eder]

They are too if there are racist/hate inducing tweets.
As said, the only difference is the speed of responce (if there's going to be any at all which in that case I doubt)

[Aeson]

Are you saying you should have been fined $1000 instead of being banned? ... cause I'm ok with that if you are ...

[Bereta_Eder]

The racism in the russian thread was rampant.
I believe I have rendered this site a service since it has now taken the... danish approach. (of actual penalties)

[Imran Siddiqui]

TI should add that the nature of the stigma attached is entirely different; your spouse finding out you were unfaithful is very different from the dogpile that happens every time anyone says something offensive.

Even in the nineties when the moralistic wing of the GOP was much stronger, I remember they had to really push to keep the Lewinsky thing going, and they could only do it by holding up the thin pretense that it was really somehow about perjury.

You must live in a very different reality. The Lewinsky thing was CONSTANTLY in the news - the media couldn't help themselves. The GOP's massive error was to use it to attempt to push impeachment. If they had simply let all that come out and then done some sort of symbolic censor, it wouldn't have spectacularly rebounded on them as it did.

In addition please look at the scandal going on with Josh Duggars being found out to be a user of Ashley Madison.

People are much much much more likely to get away with saying something offensive than they are by affair. People actually still resign from office for affairs after all.

And yet the same thing happens to, for example, that pizza parlor answering a purely hypothetical question about hypothetical cheap-ass gay people having their weddings catered with pizza. It was a complete non-issue, but they still got swamped by angry ****wits. IIRC they also got a certain amount of financial support from conservative well-wishers--but they still shut down their business. That's ridiculous.

Can it go too far, yes. I'm not going to defend every action - but the fight against bigotry against the LGBT community has been massive effective. I mean gay people can get married!! In 2015!! It's stunning - but it was because of that groundwork to stigmatize offensive beliefs and words against LGBT individuals. Is it going slightly overboard. Yes, overall the benefits more than outweigh these current costs.

[Imran Siddiqui]

People in this country didn't change their minds on gay marriage because of endless liberal tut-tutting; they changed as the result of concerted efforts to portray gay people as normal, healthy and sympathetic.

People always tend to whitewash movements. It leads some morons today trying to claim MLK was a conservative, rather than the Christian socialist he was. It leads some to kind of play down that Stonewall was a riot that started a movement. The gay marriage debate changed because of two strands - one is hey, someone you know who is 'normal' may be gay; the other is fighting back against people who were bigoted against gay people and making sure that they knew that slurs and bigoted comments were not acceptable (aka, the fight against the word '***'). And it wasn't tut-tutting, it was a concerted effort to define what is and what is not acceptable to publicly state.

[Elok]

The Josh Duggar thing AFAICT is a hypocrisy issue; we get great pleasure from exposing hypocrisy, I think largely because it allows us to effectively celebrate our own lack of morals while still appearing to hold the moral high ground. Vaguely related to the giddy thrill we get from smacking social transgressors on Twitter and pretending our scolding somehow makes us analogous to people standing up to beatings and imprisonment in the Sixties. At any rate, Duggar was apparently some sort of half-assed celebrity, not a random person. A random person who says something dumb and racist can still catch it hot from strangers who wouldn't give a damn about his sexual affairs.

Of course Lewinsky was in the news--it was salacious as all get out. But almost nobody who was not hardcore GOP honestly thought he should suffer any official penalty for it; it was his personal shame, not a public concern. If he'd called for persecution of minorities--well, there he most certainly should have faced retaliation, because of the politician rule.

Decreeing something not acceptable only works when you have the majority, or at least a sizable plurality, on your side already. If it were not, anyone could do it. Trying to repress things which the majority is not already against tends to backfire. Hence the word "feminism," IIRC, is not terribly popular right now, because a lot of people have learned to associate it with the likes of Jezebel.com, "mansplaining," "slut-shaming," and so on. There was a poll not long ago that showed the word itself has become unpopular, even as people stand by things like equal pay which aren't especially controversial. Can't find the stupid thing, though. I think it's been less than a year.

EDIT: Here it is. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3094917.html Longer ago than I thought. Tempus fugit.

[Imran Siddiqui]

At any rate, Duggar was apparently some sort of half-assed celebrity, not a random person. A random person who says something dumb and racist can still catch it hot from strangers who wouldn't give a damn about his sexual affairs.

So was the politician in the OP, a half-assed celebrity. I find plenty of random people who are more ostracized from the local community for weird things they do sexually (or not even weird, a mainline Protestant church that a co-worker attended basically turned their back on a pillar of that community who had the nerve to get a divorce) than for saying dumb and racist ****.

Of course Lewinsky was in the news--it was salacious as all get out. But almost nobody who was not hardcore GOP honestly thought he should suffer any official penalty for it; it was his personal shame, not a public concern.

Well yes, exactly. We're talking here about shame and the role of shame in society.

Decreeing something not acceptable only works when you have the majority, or at least a sizable plurality, on your side already. If it were not, anyone could do it. Trying to repress things which the majority is not already against tends to backfire. Hence the word "feminism," IIRC, is not terribly popular right now, because a lot of people have learned to associate it with the likes of Jezebel.com, "mansplaining," "slut-shaming," and so on. There was a poll not long ago that showed the word itself has become unpopular, even as people stand by things like equal pay which aren't especially controversial. Can't find the stupid thing, though. I think it's been less than a year.

But yet, even when you have a minority, you can still change the conversation. Even in the midst of the backfire. Look at Black Lives Matter, who are changing the conversation even as Progressives blast them for interrupting Sanders' rallies. And, of course, even with the backlash, there is a counter-backlash. Feminism being the obvious one - where people are reclaiming it as a positive and the notion of taking anyone seriously who uses the term 'feminazi', as ole Rush Limbaugh did, doesn't happen.

Mansplaining and slut-shaming are still things, FWIW. And are important things. Slut-shaming especially - and especially there a difference is being slowly but surely felt.

Besides, it isn't only the left that decrees acceptability - the right wing loves to couch itself in Patriotically Correct outrage language from time to time.

[Elok]

I don't believe in the right of anyone, from left or right, to deliberately decree acceptability. It's a cowardly attempt to coerce using social pressure, and has no good effect on thoughts, words or actions in the long term. Of course the Right uses it; they used it for a whole generation, and before them it was someone else. At present the Left is growing stronger, and therefore gaining the power to deploy the same obnoxious tactics in the "right" cause. They haven't learned the lesson that the Right lost influence in part because the tactic inevitably makes you look like a giant knob to everyone except yourself. The figure of the conservative politician as a moralizing fraud played a powerful role in their downfall. You know what I do when I see "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on FB? I ignore it, the same way I ignore MUSLIMS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA and MEXICANS TAKE OUR JOBS and THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT HATES WOMEN. I think pretty much everybody else who is not a diehard progressive does the same thing. Yelling slogans is not how you persuade people.

[Imran Siddiqui]

We have always attempted to coerce using social pressure. Since the beginning of the "grand experiment" in the US. It's part and parcel of free speech rights. When the government decides to get out of proscribing speech, it falls to society to police what is and is not acceptable. And here's the thing, the entire "the left is using the same tactics as the right did, which caused it to fall" is nothing more than complete nonsense - the left has been using social pressure since the black civil rights movement and prior. Speaking of yelling slogans - "We shall overcome"? If you think only diehard progressives are aware of BLM movement, then you simply aren't paying attention to what is happening out there. You've basically wrapped yourself in a cocoon of epistemic closure.

[My Hubby Loves Civ]

They haven't learned the lesson that the Right lost influence in part because the tactic inevitably makes you look like a giant knob to everyone except yourself. The figure of the conservative politician as a moralizing fraud played a powerful role in their downfall.

Interesting perspective. I honestly, never thought about that possibility.

Yelling slogans is not how you persuade people.

I have to agree with you here. It focuses on the division rather than the unity.

Edit Add: MLK movement worked so well because it was more about unifying rather than division.

[Imran Siddiqui]

There is also the question of "the right's downfall"? I mean I can't be the only one that notices that the GOP controls the Senate, the House of Representatives and the majority of state governorships and state legislatures, right?

[Elok]

Everyone exists in a cocoon of epistemic closure. Welcome to the internet age. Social policing has always existed, yes--as have theft, prostitution and deceit. It's an alternative to the far more difficult task of everybody acting like a grownup and learning to coexist in a truly pluralistic society. I don't honestly believe it will ever stop, but I'm going to grump anyways just to hear myself grump. Nowadays it is more strident, more vicious, and yet paradoxically less effective, because the proliferation of information channels allows everyone to essentially live in his or her own worldview bubble. If you're a social conservative, you can now get news from SoCon stations, read SoCon blogs, talk on SoCon forums with SoCons from across the country, and basically live out your whole life with no exposure to alternative worldviews except maybe on Facebook and at Thanksgiving. Ditto for liberals, libertarians, war hawks, vaccine skeptics, and so on. At the same time, people move around more, so actual community bonds are more rare--but virtual community bonds can form rapidly, and somebody offending the group's values in Oregon can have people POed in Manhattan an hour later. But that Oregon offender has his own little bubble backing him up, so the ostracism has less effect than it might have in the old days when everyone had to live together in real-world community space. Of course that same real world community kept everybody much more on the same page than now. Which was not all good, but not all bad either. In the long run, I expect the problem to be exacerbated as what middle ground exists continues to atrophy.

As for BLM making a big long-term difference, how'd that Occupy Movement work out for ya? Don't get me wrong, I'm "aware" of it. I just ignore it, because it doesn't affect me directly enough to drag me out of my inertia (not proud of this, just being honest) and it's powerless to change the roots of the problem. I think the whole thing largely exists to give protesters the illusion of agency. But I think that of most protesters.