Tragedy and crazy shit going on in Norway NOW!!!

[Bill Blake]

I find Kant's argument a bit obscure. I can see the retribution bit: to leave a crime unpunished is (with a bit of a fudge) to participate in a violation of the categorical imperative. But I don't get the eye for an eye bit.

Also, Kant had some pretty crazy views. Masturbation is worse than suicide? I can't see DaBownca liking that one. (Not sure what sort of punishment Kant thought proportionate to the crime here either!)

I agree. I think Kant’s entire moral philosophy is bunk. But as we’ve been discussing, in part, Spinoza’s ethics is the opposite of Kant’s morality. The former being based on an immanent conception of man and nature and the latter based on an ideal-transcendentalism and judgment (It’s quite interesting how the two go together throughout the entire history of philosophy: idealism and judgment).

This transcendental criteria (the judgment of God), for punishment and retribution based on resentment and bad conscience with no real inquiry into the adequate cause of either actions or how to address them is a problem-to the extent to which it is not considered.

The shooter, the posters in this thread, most of the world, are all one big heap of the same slave morality; all part of the same sad morality; all part of the same sad world. That’s why Spinoza’s ethics, and Nietzsche, influenced by Spinoza, are so important. But we’ve barely begun to conceive it, which is sad, but also exciting: a new world with higher values that are never absolute and always the product of experimentation where joy is the criterion, and can be dumped at any moment if they don’t work (pragmatics). Beyond good and evil and the human all too human.

A guy consumed by fascism shot some people. He’s a good fascist. Now's our chance to be fascist in turn: order and control. Lovely.

[Bill Blake]

Ugh. To be fair though, I don’t like talking bad about Kant. Call it superstition. The man was more brilliant than we’ll ever be. I’ve seen, against his own transcendentalism, amazing things done with his thought, and reading him, in his own thought, something beautiful beyond what most of us will accomplish, or more importantly, what we could ever imagine.

That’s what I love about philosophy: he’s great even if he’s off. He tried to tackle problems in a way that I never will. Never could. None of us are smarter than he was.

[Monny JcIntosh]

I agree. I think Kant’s entire moral philosophy is bunk.

That's not what I said.

[MarkK]

Same reason we don't discuss Haiti or japan or Chile etc....its not a "Hot topic" for DaBownca to dribble on about

FiXED

[MarkK]

One could also make a strong case for adding Germany and Italy to that list too.

Then one would be leaving out the ONLY European country that has a strong, anti-Islam party (the PVV) essentially in control of the government. They are part of a Christian Democrat-Right Liberal-PVV alliance that is running the Netherlands. Luckily, all their stupid initiatives so far have failed.

[martino]

One could also make a strong case for adding Germany and Italy to that list too.

Yeah, but nobody has a progressive view of Italy tho (and rightfully so for the most part).

[martino]

The problem is not a fanatical right. The problem is that classic Western European societies have been shifting to the right as a whole since '89. I've been in Germany since '87. The scary bit isn't that there's a few Neonazi idiots doing their militia thingy somewhere in the boonies, the really scary thing is that all around you everybody is inching to the right, across the board.

Never mind Inching. There dominant collation in Italy is full of card carrying self-proclaimed fascists.

[Detroitbootybass]

Then one would be leaving out the ONLY European country that has a strong, anti-Islam party (the PVV) essentially in control of the government. They are part of a Christian Democrat-Right Liberal-PVV alliance that is running the Netherlands. Luckily, all their stupid initiatives so far have failed.

I didn't know that (but now I do!). When you say they are 'strong', do you mean because they are in control or because they have a large amount of supporters?

[MarkK]

I didn't know that (but now I do!). When you say they are 'strong', do you mean because they are in control or because they have a large amount of supporters?

Its complicated of course. The Netherlands has ALWAYS had coalition governments, usually labor and the Christian Democrats. This is one reason the country is known for compromise, as no one party has ever been dominant (at least nationally).

The PVV (Party for Freedom, lol) is relatively new, and is dominated by a single, charismatic (yet non-threatening in terms of his looks and speech style) leader named Geert Wilders. The party has mostly a single purpose, opposition to any more Muslim immigration into NL and strict laws on use of the Dutch language, elimination of dual nationality, etc. In the last election, the labor party (PvdA) did terribly, while the right-leaning Liberals VVD (not lowercase liberal) won the most votes. While the PvdA and the Christian Democrats (CDA) could have formed a government in theory, they did not due to a lot of bitterness over the mission to Afghanistan (which brought the last Dutch government down). The VVD and CDA (a logical coalition) did not have enough votes in parliament to form a government, so they turned to the PVV (16% of the vote, with 24 out of 150 seats), which added just enough to form a government.

One of the many screwed up things about this arrangement, is that the PVV is not officially in the government, but simply has agreed to vote with the VVD and CDA. They do not have to supply any ministers (they have no one with experience anyways) and can bring down this agreement at anytime, causing more instability. Hope this makes some sense.

[Detroitbootybass]

Its complicated of course. The Netherlands has ALWAYS had coalition governments, usually labor and the Christian Democrats. This is one reason the country is known for compromise, as no one party has ever been dominant (at least nationally).

The PVV (Party for Freedom, lol) is relatively new, and is dominated by a single, charismatic (yet non-threatening in terms of his looks and speech style) leader named Geert Wilders. The party has mostly a single purpose, opposition to any more Muslim immigration into NL and strict laws on use of the Dutch language, elimination of dual nationality, etc. In the last election, the labor party (PvdA) did terribly, while the right-leaning Liberals VVD (not lowercase liberal) won the most votes. While the PvdA and the Christian Democrats (CDA) could have formed a government in theory, they did not due to a lot of bitterness over the mission to Afghanistan (which brought the last Dutch government down). The VVD and CDA (a logical coalition) did not have enough votes in parliament to form a government, so they turned to the PVV (16% of the vote, with 24 out of 150 seats), which added just enough to form a government.

One of the many screwed up things about this arrangement, is that the PVV is not officially in the government, but simply has agreed to vote with the VVD and CDA. They do not have to supply any ministers (they have no one with experience anyways) and can bring down this agreement at anytime, causing more instability. Hope this makes some sense.

Thanks!



So does the PVV demand certain legislation to keep them happy and within the coalition? Or does their mere presence just spook the other two coalition members and give the feeling of walking on thin ice?

[House]

I find Kant's argument a bit obscure. I can see the retribution bit: to leave a crime unpunished is (with a bit of a fudge) to participate in a violation of the categorical imperative. But I don't get the eye for an eye bit.

Also, Kant had some pretty crazy views. Masturbation is worse than suicide? I can't see DaBownca liking that one. (Not sure what sort of punishment Kant thought proportionate to the crime here either!)

I think its because after you masturbate you wish you were dead for being such a loser.

I am not deep enough into philosophy to argue the merits, I leave that to smarter cats than myself. However, I do realize that their are some arguments out there that justify state sanctioned death. It would be interesting to read arguments on the eye for an eye part.

[Martin Red]

Not familiar with those instances but if the took the lives of innocents yes they should.... it isn't about ressurection.... a person who willingly commits mass murder has no place among humans.

You're on the internet, make yourself familiar. Tell you what, i'll help you out as this threads pretty much mellon headed now anyway.

Why I mentioned Ressurection ?, if there was a death penalty in the UK, those men wouldn't have been released from prison, they would be no more, they would cease to be, they would be X irish men, they would be dead. Cause would be state murder.

[Bill Blake]

That's not what I said.

I edited my initial “but I would go further” so as not to seem in any way confrontational.

But to go further, I would just say that morality, all of it is bunk.

You gonna tell me what you think of the mind/body problem in Whitehead or not?

You’re like a bad date. Stood up or late.

[Bill Blake]

I think its because after you masturbate you wish you were dead for being such a loser.

I am not deep enough into philosophy to argue the merits, I leave that to smarter cats than myself. However, I do realize that their are some arguments out there that justify state sanctioned death. It would be interesting to read arguments on the eye for an eye part.

Ha ha ha, given that Kant was never married and I don’t know of anything of a sexual life, there’s no telling how harry is palms were…or how the sheep next door faired.

[MarkK]

Thanks!



So does the PVV demand certain legislation to keep them happy and within the coalition? Or does their mere presence just spook the other two coalition members and give the feeling of walking on thin ice?

Both. Most of the legislation has been about major financial cuts. The ban on headscarves has not been brought up.

[bomb cola]

Ha ha ha, given that Kant was never married and I don’t know of anything of a sexual life, there’s no telling how harry is palms were…or how the sheep next door faired.

Tell us more about philosopher's sex lives. It's fascinating.

[DaBownca]

You're on the internet, make yourself familiar. Tell you what, i'll help you out as this threads pretty much mellon headed now anyway.

Why I mentioned Ressurection ?, if there was a death penalty in the UK, those men wouldn't have been released from prison, they would be no more, they would cease to be, they would be X irish men, they would be dead. Cause would be state murder.

Has nothing to do with what I said. If you are going to take me to task at least read what I wrote


Meanwhile......
OSLO, Norway -- Restrained by a police harness, the Norwegian man who confessed to killing 69 people at an island youth camp reconstructed his actions for police in a secret daylong trip back to the crime scene.

Police said Sunday they took Anders Behring Breivik back to the island of Utoya for a Saturday hearing about the July 22 terror attacks, when Breivik shot the victims dead on the lake island near Oslo after killing another eight people in the capital with a bomb.

The 32-year-old described the killings in close detail during an eight-hour tour on the island with up to a dozen police, prosecutor Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told a press conference in Oslo.

The hearing took place amid a massive security operation that aimed to avoid escape attempts by Breivik and protect him against potential avengers.

Breivik walked roughly the same route as the one he took during the shooting spree and explained what happened with as little interference as possible from police, Hjort Kraby said.

The entire hearing was filmed by police and may later be used in court, he added.

Video images of the reconstruction published by Norwegian daily VG show Breivik arriving at Utoya with the same ferry he used to get to the island last month. Breivik wore a bulletproof vest and a harness connected to a leash over a red T-shirt and jeans as he casually led police around the island.

The heavy-built killer is seen pointing out locations along the way and simulating shots into the water, where panicked teenagers dove in to try to escape from him.

"The suspect showed he wasn't emotionally unaffected by being back at Utoya ... but didn't show any remorse," Hjort Kraby told reporters. "He has been questioned for around 50 hours about this, and he has always been calm, detailed and collaborative, and that was also the case on Utoya."


The hearing been arranged to avoid the need for a reconstruction in the midst of the trial and to make Breivik remember more details, Hjort Kraby said.

The prosecutor also confirmed Norwegian media reports that police received several phone calls during the terror attack that were probably from Breivik himself, but wouldn't say how police had reacted to the calls.

According to Norwegian daily Aftenposten, Breivik offered to surrender several times and asked police to call him back, but they didn't.

Norwegian media also reported that Breivik may have filmed parts of the massacre himself. Hjort Kraby said Sunday that a video camera had been discussed during the hearing on Utoya, but declined to elaborate.

Prosecutors have previously told The Associated Press that Breivik owns a video camera that they are still trying to locate, but have dismissed reports they received witness statements about Breivik filming on Utoya.

Breivik's lawyer has said he has admitted to the terror attacks, but denies criminal guilt because he believes the massacre was necessary to save Norway and Europe from Muslims and punish politicians who have embraced multiculturalism.

Initial speculation suggested others were involved in the terror attacks, but prosecutors and police have said they are fairly certain that Breivik planned and committed them on his own.

Breivik faces up to 21 years in prison if he is convicted on terrorism charges, but an alternative custody arrangement – if he is still considered a danger to the public – could keep him behind bars indefinitely.

He's facing 21 years ......thats not even 6 months per person he MURDERED

[MarkK]

Chuck, I am not sure why the outrage over the way Norway chooses to punish its criminals. The crime rate seems very low, all things considered.

[MarkK]

Amid Rise of Multiculturalism, Dutch Confront Their Questions of Identity
By STEVEN ERLANGER

AMSTERDAM — Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who admitted to mass killings last month, was obsessed with Islam and had high praise for the Netherlands, an important test case in the resurgence of the anti-immigrant right in northern Europe.

The sometimes violent European backlash against Islam and its challenge to national values can be said to have started here, in a country born from Europe’s religious wars. After a decade of growing public anger, an aggressively anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim politician, Geert Wilders, leads the third-largest party, which keeps the government in power.

In Slotervaart, a majority immigrant neighborhood in southwestern Amsterdam, Maria Kuhlman and her friends watched Muslim families stroll by on a Ramadan afternoon, some of the men in robes and beards, the women wearing headscarves. A large blond woman shouted, “Go Wilders!”

Mr. Wilders’ Freedom Party, which combines racist language with calls for more social spending, won 15.5 percent of the vote in June 2010. He was recently acquitted of charges of hate speech for comparing the Koran to “Mein Kampf” and calling mosques “palaces of hatred.” He wants all immigrants and their children deported and warns of the supposed Muslim plot to create “Eurabia.” He declined repeated interview requests.

While many Dutch recoil at his language, he touches on real fears. “Sometimes I’m afraid of Islam,” Ms. Kuhlman said. “They’re taking over the neighborhood and they’re very strong. I don’t love Wilders. He’s a pig, but he says what many people think.”

Now, after Norway, the Dutch are taking stock. The killings frightened everyone, said Kathleen Ferrier, a Christian Democrat legislator born in Surinam, who had objected to her party joining a Wilders-supported government. “Norway makes it clear how much Dutch society is living on the edge of its nerves,” she said. “Wilders says hateful things and no one objects. We have freedom of speech, but you also have to be responsible for the effect of your words.”

Taboos about discussing ethnicity and race — founded in shame about delivering Dutch Jews to the Nazis — are long gone.

Ms. Kuhlman has lived in the Slotervaart neighborhood for 36 years but says, “I no longer feel at home.” Built in the 1950s, Slotervaart is now about 60 percent immigrants or their children, most from Morocco or Turkey. Crime rates are high, especially among the second generation.

She remembered sunbathing topless on her balcony in the 1980s. “It’s inconceivable now,” she said. “Now my next-door neighbor doesn’t even greet me in the hallway, he can’t look at me, and it’s been 28 years,” Ms. Kuhlman said.

Then she laughed bitterly. “He doesn’t work; I work. I work all shifts. I pay taxes. I work for them!”

Willem Stuyter, nursing a beer, broke in. “It’s already too late,” he said. “In 10 years this will be a Muslim state.”

Mr. Wilders is the political inheritor of two more flamboyant and intellectual figures — Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who both spoke about the dangers of Islam to Dutch civic culture. Both warned of homophobia, anti-Semitism and suppression of women, and both were killed — Mr. Fortuyn in 2002 by an animal-rights activist and Mr. van Gogh in 2004 by a Dutch Muslim who shot him, tried to cut off his head and attached a note to his body with a knife.

The brutal murder of Mr. van Gogh after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was a turning point, giving a focus to social unease and anxiety about immigration, multiculturalism and Muslims.

If part of the Dutch anxiety is about identity, there are similar concerns among Muslims here. There are two parallel sets of identity crises, said Ahmed Marcouch, 42, son of an illiterate Moroccan immigrant and now a Labor member of Parliament. Most Muslims came from poor, less educated parts of Morocco and eastern Turkey, and clung to traditional values and the mosque as bulwarks against a secular society that promoted individualism, gender equality and gay rights.

“They didn’t speak Dutch, they didn’t know Holland, and they saw the sexual revolution, feminism and youth anarchism as a provocation, as part of a decadent society,” Mr. Marcouch said. He remembers his father saying with contempt, “Women are the bosses here.”

Their children, fluent in Dutch but not readily accepted, were even more at risk. A significant number, he concedes, turned to crime. They had their own identity problems, Mr. Marcouch said, asking: “Who am I? Where am I really from? Can I be Dutch?” He described his own son, 22, discussing these questions with his 10-year-old sister. “They won’t recognize you as a full citizen,” his son told her.

At the same time, Mr. Marcouch said, Dutch politicians were promoting economic integration — language training, job training. “They didn’t understand the importance of religious identity among the immigrants,” he said. They dismissed it as backward even as they failed to understand the anger a growing immigrant population was creating. “The fear,” he said, “is on both sides.”

Some, like Rob Riemen, director of the Nexus Institute, a research organization, think that Mr. Wilders represents a new fascism, using Islam as the scapegoat for every ill. “Wilders was a key source of inspiration for Breivik,” Mr. Riemen said. “But the Dutch don’t want to acknowledge that we see fascism in the face of Wilders. To call him a populist is to disguise what is really going on.”

Social democracy has lost its way and become too tied to materialism and the market, Mr. Riemen said. “And history teaches us that fascism pops up when social democracy loses its compass.”

But others argue that analogies to fascism overstate the weakness of Dutch society and the appeal of the far right. Paul Nieuwenburg of Leiden University says that many issues are jumbled together in the growing revulsion against immigration: fear of “Islam,” as if it were monolithic; of terrorism; of globalization; of joblessness; of the growing influence of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels; of austerity; of the perils to the euro and the Dutch budget of Greek, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish and now Italian debt; of juvenile criminality, especially among youth from Morocco and the Antilles.

“There is a growing protest vote,” Mr. Nieuwenburg said. “People feel let down by the traditional parties.” And the traditional parties, reacting to the rise of Wilders, have all fled from the language of multiculturalism. “The taboos are gone, and now you’re suspect if you say anything positive about multiculturalism,” said Henk Overbeek, a political scientist at VU University.

The Labor Party thought it would win the 2010 elections by fielding Job Cohen, a former mayor of Amsterdam who was a champion of multiculturalism. Mr. Cohen now takes a less accommodating tone, speaking of the problems of immigration, dislocation and juvenile crime to the native population. “They feel they have moved without moving,” he said. “They live in the same house as 30 years ago, but the environment has changed.”

Mr. Cohen calls the government’s reliance on Mr. Wilders “the worst possible solution, because it gives him a lot of influence without responsibility.”

But Eddie Dekker, 38, who works for a delivery company, thinks that Mr. Wilders is doing just fine. “He’s saying what many people think and don’t want to say,” Mr. Dekker said. “I don’t agree with everything, but 70 percent of what he says is what I’ve thought for the last 20 years.”

Muslims in Europe are not going to leave, Mr. Marcouch said. Pointing to the Arab Spring, he said: “Muslims need to reach out to the others and say, ‘Freedom is our common value, and we must all fight for it and defend it.’ ”

In the United States, citizenship once granted is never questioned, said Mr. Overbeek of VU University. “But in Europe it’s never quite established, no matter how long you’ve been here. Here it’s still, ‘When did you get here, and when are you going back?’ ”

East of Amsterdam, in Almere, the youngest city in the Netherlands, 30 percent voted for Mr. Wilders.

Shopping in the city center, Raihsa Sahinoer, 24, born here of Surinamese immigrants, was not surprised. “Wilders says we all have to go back even if we were born here,” she said. “It’s not only about Muslims, it’s about colored people, too.”

She lives as the Dutch do, she said. “But they tell us if you’re colored, you’re not Dutch.” Does she feel Dutch? “No,” she said, then paused, then asked: “What is Dutch?”

[DaBownca]

Chuck, I am not sure why the outrage over the way Norway chooses to punish its criminals. The crime rate seems very low, all things considered.

Why do you insist on misreading what I say? I am outraged over THIS murderer. Do not read into it anymore than that please.

[MarkK]

Why do you insist on misreading what I say? I am outraged over THIS murderer. Do not read into it anymore than that please.

Everyone is outraged over these murders. However, I don't see how they can suddenly apply different rules to this guy than to other criminals.