Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
I get quite annoyed by people trying to clamp down on freedom of speech, I live in the UK, and we are getting more and more strict on it with the race
hate laws, and our country executing warrants on holocaust deniers, even when that is not illegal here.
My personal view is let the racists/bigots/idiots have their say. If their ideas are as ridiculous as we are told, then this should be painfully
obvious to any listener, and it will be simple for people from the mainstream to debunk their ideas.
Anon, why are you waiting to be told their views are "ridiculous"? Surely you must have heard these arguments yourself and come to a similar
conclusion?
Also, the people from the mainstream (and the not-so mainstream) regularly "debunk" their ideas, but that doesn't stop them. Bigotry is illogical
and doesn't make sense as it's based on ridiculous generalisations; arguments such as one race is somehow 'less' than another. How does this work?
It's like the stereotypical 'dumb 'n-word''. If blacks are really stupid as a race, then why are there blacks a hell of a lot smarter than me, a
white man? Surely,
all white men would be smarter than
all black men if this division was on racial lines? What racists really mean is
that
some blacks are really stupid. However, some whites are really #ing stupid too, a lot dumber than some incredibly smart black men which
undermines their argument of a superior white race somewhat.
If
all Muslims are terrorists, why aren't there suicide bombings on the hour, every hour, every day of the week in every city in the world?
Surely they'd be have to have a queueing system to get a chance to bomb the non-Muslim population? What bigots mean is
some Muslims are
terrorists but when I consider that I grew-up fearful of
Christian IRA terrorists and was actually in the centre of Manchester when the IRA
flattened a lot of it 12 years ago, it makes me wonder why their argument is so selective and skewed against Muslims. Don't other terrorists count or
something? Isn't there a score sheet for white terrorists?
Similarly, if the banking conspiracy is a
Jewish cabal, surely this means that
all Jews are in on it then? How likely is that? All the
Jewish population in the world on a sinister scheme to rob the goyim clean! What kind of organisational structure would that entail? How efficient
must that enormous cabal be? This gets adjusted to 'of course, not all the Jews, just some of the them, the ones that do blah, blah, blah or work for
blah, blah, blah'. So although it's not all the Jews that are apparently in on it, it's somehow a
Jewish conspiracy.
I've said this before, but most of the banking elite are also white men over 50 years of age. So, why not prejudice against
all the
middle-aged white men in the world?
Yet bigotry is
built on false logic like all this. The flaws in racist 'logic' can be pointed out time-and-again but if someone doesn't want
to face up to that, they never will and therefore it's going to be continually perpetuated.
I appreciate the sentiment behind 'giving them rope to hang themselves with' if their arguments are ridiculous, but, after so much of it, it's
getting frankly tedious.
[edit on 6-10-2008 by Merriman Weir]
