Outsider wrote:
Ah, the old "he's blaming the victim" cliche.
You know, its funny you should bring this up...
I mean, blaming the victim, thats a bad thing, right? This kind of thing shouldn't be done, right?
But this is exactly what Andrew Meyers was doing to John Kerry, isn't it? His questions can easily be paraphrased as saying "Mr. Kerry, you lost the election in 2004 due to voter fraud: isn't it true that you were in on this fraud and that you are to blame for it?" I mean, really, that IS essentially what Meyers was asking, wasn't it? Isn't that just another example of blaming the victim?
I don't really understand your point. It doesn't matter if Meyers is "blaming the victim" or not. If the police came around your house and tasered you for "blaming the victim," I would oppose that, probably more than I oppose Meyers being tased. I'm not saying I agree with Meyers philosophy or his actions, I'm saying he should have the right to put them forward. Likewise, if somebody posted Meyers arguments on this forum, without the controversy surrounding being tased, I would disagree with them, but I wouldn't have a problem with him posting them.
Anyway, I don't think that the "blaming the victim" cliche is appropriate to the police treatment of Andrew Meyer. I'll borrower from the most recent World Cup again to suggest an alternative example. Remember Zinedine Zidane's famous headbutt to Marco Materazzi? I don't think I'm comparing Meyer to a rape victim being blamed for her own assualt, rather, I'm comparing Meyer to Materazzi, deliberately provoking his opponent into making an error in order to discredit the opponent and benefit his own position.
He was held down by 5 people and tasered. How can that ever be justified?
How do you come to this conclusion? I actually think its exactly the opposite, just as was the case with Zidane and Materazzi. Everybody condemned Zidane's over-reaction resulting in his being discredited (removed from the game just ten minutes before his presense on the field come have made a difference to the outcome in the deciding penalty-kick tie-breaker), but everybody also said his actions were more understandable given that they recognized that Materazzi had knowingly provoked him.
Sure, but everybody agrees that his actions were still wrong, and I think that's the issue here as well. If Meyers just wanted publicity and to make the police look bad, isn't that exactly what he succeeded in doing? Had the police not taken any action at all, wouldn't he have achieved neither of those goals?
Still missing the point, Jeremy. Willfully so? Meyer was clearly prepared to ramble on at length. It was probably just a matter of time before he would have had to have been cut-off one way or the other. I'm saying that was exactly what he was up there to do, to provoke the authorities into cutting him off by dragging him away. If they had let him speak for two minutes, he'd have kept going for four, etc. He was going to go on till he provoked a response from security.
Was 5 people holding him down and tasering him, or arresting him the only viable response to somebody talking for too long? What about cutting his mike, and then just letting Kerry answer the questions - and not arresting him? It seems to me that arresting somebody should be a last resort in cases like that, and tasering people should only occur when somebody is a physical threat to those around them. That's clearly not what occurred here. The first response by the police was to arrest him (or you could say it was the second response, but that's irrelevant, the point is that they had plenty of options and they ignored most of them), and then 5 of them held him down and tasered him. Surely the majority of people are going to think that's going way too far every time it occurs. In Australia recently a number of police have been charged with criminal offences for unnecessarily using capsicum (pepper) spray while on duty. It doesn't matter what those people were doing, it should always be illegal to use excessive force on anybody.
Yes, I have it, I've already read it. Sorry, just kidding.
Not familiar with the book at all. Still, funny that you should bring up Edmund Muskie...
Muskie lost his bid to become the President of the United Stated in '72, in part, they say, because of some attacks by the media, in particular a letter published by a New Hampshire newspaper claiming that Muskie had made some "racist" remarks about French Canadians (descendants of whom are a significant voting block in New Hampshire, the location of a very important early milestone in US presidential campaigns).
It was later discovered by the FBI that the so-called Canuck Letter was in fact forged by the "dirty-tricks" unit of Richard Nixon's campaign staff in order to discredit Muskie, one of his strongest challengers in the upcoming election.
In other words, this example is commentary on your position of how you still think that John Kerry should have to answer every wild accusation, whether credible or not. People can be unfairly harmed even by baseless accusations. That kind of stuff should not be tolerated. You, on the other hand, are saying that bogus accusations should still be allowed and that the accused should still be made to answer to them. If you HAD been allowed to question Edmund Muskie in the '72 election, you probably would have insisted that he explain his comments in the Canuck Letter, even though the entire issue was a fabrication. Okay, maybe you wouldn't have asked Muskie about the Canuck letter, but isn't asking him about HST's stories about South American drugs pretty much the same thing? Not having read the book I can't really know that for certain, but it sounds like they're related. So what, in your opinion, was the upside to Muskie being made to answer for his racist comments in the Canuck Letter?
Surely people want to know about the issues that are being questioned in the media. Giving somebody a right to reply to the accusations against them is more effective than letting everybody speculate about them. I'm not sure how serious Hunter's accusations were, but he's obviously far left compared with Muskie, and hated him for different reasons to Nixon. He spent the whole election campaign travelling with the candidates (especially McGovern) and attributed Muskie's collapse in the polls to Muskie having a serious burnout and to McGovern having by far the best organised and largest contingent of volunteers. He also claims that Muskie focused on getting the endorsements of the top democratic politicians, instead of campaigning at the grass roots and that his treatment of the press meant that they all hated him.
Actually the Canuck letter isn't attributed at being the thing that derailed Muskies campaign, it was the claims that when he gave a press conference about the letter, he openly cried. These claims may not be true, but if not, one would have to suggest that the media disliked him, as Hunter claims. In any event, how he reacted is his responsibility, and obviously at the time of the letter being written, people didn't know it was a fraud, so seeing his response to it would definitely be something people would want to know.
As I was just saying, I don't agree for the above-mentioned reasons. Furthermore, I don't know if I believe you. At the very least, you seem to be harboring a double-standard. From what I've read previously, you seem somewhat intolerant of religious beliefs, and seem to indicate that you don't think that kind of belief should be tolerated. Couldn't those beliefs reasonably be compared to a nutty conspiracy-theory? I mean, Richard Dawkins calls it a delusion, right? So why not call it a conspiracy too? Do you still contend that people should have the right to believe in their conspiracy theories? Even if their beliefs say that they must compell you to live by their religious laws?
I have never, and will never, claim that religion should be banned, or that people shouldn't have a right to be religious. My "belief" is that religion is wrong in its claims about the world, and that it has a negative effect on the world, and that the world would be better off without it. However I would always oppose any attempt to force people to hold particular religious views, including a lack of religion, and I certainly always oppose the physical oppression of religion. People have every right to be religious, just as they every right to be conspiracy nuts. In fact I would agree with you that those two views are essentially the same, as is communism, fascism, racism and any other dogmatic belief. I would gladly defend the rights of anybody to be allowed to hold any of those views, and I would also gladly vocalise my disagreement with those views. Richard Dawkins, and most of the "New Atheists" (Sam Harris may be an exception), share this view.
There has been this ridiculous smear campaign, especially in the US, which you seem to have been taken in by, that the "New Atheists" want to somehow force their beliefs onto other people or ban religion. They are sometimes called "fundamentalists" or "extremists." One only needs to read the works of the "New Atheists" to see that this is clearly not the case. My view on religion is based on the evidence I see of the effects of religion, and if I saw new evidence, I would gladly change my position.
