re the French and Furriners
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Dear Friamers, As we tried to cope with the week’s events this Friday, we found ourselves in disagreement about the degree to which the French, in particular, had endorsed multiculturalism. In that connection, I found myself humming the following passage from the French national anthem: Aux armes, citoyens! The English is … To arms citizens Form your battalions
Whuf! Nick PS Just to further the irony, the daily show (yes, yes, I know) reports that the day after the “Je Suis Charlie” rally for freedom of expression, the French police arrested a blogger for expressing anti semitic sentiments. In short, because of their history with Algeria, I am afraid the French have a problem as profound as our own. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Having been for several years one of the few “French moles” on your forum, I feel obliged to write for the first time. Hi Nick! 1. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker being asked why he wears the peace-sign on his marine-corps uniform, answers “Sir, this shows the ambiguity of human nature”. What you should know is that the key people from Charlie Hebdo were the best political cartoonists in France, a sort of “Pleiades of the Cartoonists”. They promoted anarchy and anticlericalisms and therefore were hated by most of the Establishment. To better express how incongruous the aftermath of their death was I enclose one of the many cartoons I received; it shows a fortune teller predicting to those guys what will happen after their death, and that’s how it goes: the bell of Notre-Dame-de-Paris will ring; the rightists will celebrate your fame, MRS Merkel will march in the street for you… All of this is so unbelievable that all they can do is laugh, laugh, and laugh! What followed the slaughter in Paris, was a combination of bottom up and top down phenomena’s so was very open to irrationality. Those events demonstrated-if needed-how ambiguous the human nature is! 2. As regards the freedom of speech and how it is defended in each of our countries, here again, it is not that simple. After Shoah, and to fight against a rampant anti-Semitism including the negation of the reality of the extermination of the Jews, laws were voted in France against the “Incitement to racial and anti-Semitic hatred”. So Dieudonné, the pseudo humorist but a true professional anti-Semitic activist, is prosecuted not “par le fait du Prince” but for breaching a law. He wrote I am Charlie followed by the name of the killer at the kosher hypermarket. Ambiguity again. I have been wondering many times how the American could live with a fully accepted first Amendment as regards the freedom of speech and the French needed what we call memorial laws. Thanks to Charlie, I discovered why. When it comes to sacred and key national matters, your Medias can practice self-censorships which would be unacceptable in France. I hope not to have been too disturbing for the members of this forum by both my different perspective and by my sort of Parisian English. De : Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] De la part de Nick Thompson Dear Friamers, As we tried to cope with the week’s events this Friday, we found ourselves in disagreement about the degree to which the French, in particular, had endorsed multiculturalism. In that connection, I found myself humming the following passage from the French national anthem: Aux armes, citoyens! The English is … To arms citizens Form your battalions
Whuf! Nick PS Just to further the irony, the daily show (yes, yes, I know) reports that the day after the “Je Suis Charlie” rally for freedom of expression, the French police arrested a blogger for expressing anti semitic sentiments. In short, because of their history with Algeria, I am afraid the French have a problem as profound as our own. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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The New Yorker has a good article about this: http://goo.gl/Hh90a1. Here's a core paragraph.
The different treatment accorded to Charlie Hebdo and Dieudonné is, however, built into France’s complex cluster of laws regulating protected speech. These laws are alternately very free and highly restrictive. Right after the French Revolution, France abrogated its old laws making blasphemy a crime—and soCharlie Hebdo’s blasphemous depictions of Muhammad are not a crime. At the same time, France’s press laws, which date to the late nineteenth century, make it a crime to “provoke discrimination, hatred, or violence toward a person or group of persons because of their origin or belonging to a particular ethnicity, nation, race, or religion.” In other words, you can ridicule the prophet, but you cannot incite hatred toward his followers. To take two more examples, the actress Brigitte Bardot was convicted and fined for having written, in 2006, about France’s Muslims, “We are tired of being led around by the nose by this population that is destroying our country.” Meanwhile, the writer Michel Houellebecq (whose new novel was featured in the issue of Charlie Hebdo that came out just before the attack) was brought up on charges, but acquitted, for having said in an interview that Islam “is the stupidest religion.” Bardot was clearly directing hostility toward Muslim people, and was thus found guilty, while Houellebecq was criticizing their religion, which is blasphemous, but not a crime, in France. On Sun Jan 18 2015 at 7:34:19 AM Michel Bloch <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
writes: >Dear Friamers, > >As we tried to cope with the week’s events this Friday, we found >ourselves in disagreement about the degree to which the French, in >particular, had endorsed multiculturalism. In that connection, I found >myself humming the following passage from the French national anthem: > >Aux armes, citoyens! >Formez vos bataillons! >Marchons! Marchons! >Qu'un sang impur >Abreuve nos sillons! > >The English is … > >To arms citizens Form your battalions >March, march >Let impure blood >Water our furrows > >When I visited the French countryside many years ago, there were >billboards with blond babies and messages like “keep france >strong”. Not sure, if I were a brown person, how comfortable I >would feel in a crowd of a million people singing those particular >lyrics. Funny how these little antiquated expressions of solidarity can >get out of hand. > >Whuf! > >Nick > >PS Just to further the irony, the daily show (yes, yes, I know) reports >that the day after the “Je Suis Charlie” rally for freedom of >expression, the French police arrested a blogger for expressing anti >semitic sentiments. In short, because of their history with Algeria, I >am afraid the French have a problem as profound as our own. > >Nicholas S. Thompson >Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology >Clark University >[ http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ >]http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > Nicholas know The Marseillaise has been written and composed in 1792!!! Different context both cultural and political. The idea of modifying or editing the national anthem comes regularly from the fringes (i.e. the version by Serges Gainsburg) but never seriously. I don't see any contradiction between the freedom of expression against concepts and beliefs (such as religions) and the expression of hate speech against people. A concept should be powerful enough to be believable and avoid criticism (or defamation if you are a believer). Expression of hate against individuals can lead to violence. Example of this noticeable difference: On 4 June 2010, the French Minister of the Interior was sentenced by the High Court of Paris, for "breach of non-public insult towards a group of people because of their origin." He said at a political meeting about a supposed person of Arab origin: "It's good to have one of them attending. When there is one, it's okay. But the trouble start when there are many of them." Two weeks later, on 19 June 2010, the anniversary of the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, a dozen American white supremacists, members of neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, gathered at Gettysburg to denounce endangerment of white America by the "black sheep" and "Jewish media" and offer "teach a lesson to monkeys (...) with strings." The police were there to separate anti-supremacist activists present and enable them to exercise their right to free expression. I don't know when was your visit in the French countryside but it may have been during Sarkozy's campaign for the presidential election "pour une France forte" (and indeed white and Catholic). Those billboards where a clear message (I can do the job) to the members of the extreme right party. The problem you are outlining is in my view a global effort (culture?) to refuse diversity and the resulting complexity. Nowadays a "good" politician seems like a CEO. Barer of a one goal only program (so called development). Kind regards, Patrick Dufour 107 College Street South Hadley, MA 01075 ph: 413-538-5569 www.linkedin.com/in/patrickdufour ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Very clarifying, thanks! On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 3:31 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote: The New Yorker has a good article about this: http://goo.gl/Hh90a1. Here's a core paragraph. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Patrick Dufour
On Sun, 2015-01-18 at 12:15 -0500, Patrick Dufour wrote:
> I don't see any contradiction between the freedom of expression against > concepts and beliefs (such as religions) and the expression of hate speech > against people. A concept should be powerful enough to be believable and > avoid criticism (or defamation if you are a believer). Expression of hate > against individuals can lead to violence. Was the fatwā to assassinate Salman Rushdie not intent to do harm? Is he the one to blame for that violence? Why is whether something could result in violence a relevant distinction? People go postal for all sorts of reasons. Why should the rules of discourse be influenced by that? If I could choose among, say, working in a dangerous environment that had a high probability of giving me cancer, being in bottomless debt, being unemployed for a long time, or getting beat up, there's a fair chance I'd opt for the beating. Why are people afraid more of violence from racist hoodlums, criminals, and terrorists than, say, poverty traps or lack of health care? Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Mikegolf
On Sun, 2015-01-18 at 08:30 +0100, Michel Bloch wrote:
> When it comes to sacred and key national matters, your Medias can > practice self-censorships which would be unacceptable in France. Is it an important distinction whether it is the force of government or the force of sponsors, if sponsors are sufficiently powerful? (I'm thinking of Bill Maher's exit from ABC after 9/11.) Laws can at least be changed, in principle. Should gross misrepresentations of reality be acceptable if there is reason to think the misrepresentation can do public harm? The U.S. has a Food and Drug Administration to prevent dangerous or untested products from misrepresented as safe. How different is that from, say, having laws that prohibit denialism of climate change? Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ, Thanks for calling the New Yorker text to my attention. It seems to be making one of the distinctions that I was groping toward in my comments to Michel. But there’s another. Let’s imagine that you lived in a frontier town out on the Prairies – Little House on the Prairie stuff. I think these issues would be clear because whenever you spoke, it would be clear who you might insulting. It’s when we scale things up, that the issue begins to be confusing. It’s one thing to tell a reasonable man not to give offense to particular people; it’s quite another to tell him not to give office to anybody. I keep thinking I am going to get to some wisdom on this thing, but it eludes me. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott The New Yorker has a good article about this: http://goo.gl/Hh90a1. Here's a core paragraph. On Sun Jan 18 2015 at 7:34:19 AM Michel Bloch <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Mikegolf
Michel, Bonjour! Bienvenu! Wonderful comments here, and thanks for the cartoon. I particularly love that the owl has hands but the soothsayer has talons. I agree with everything you say. Your De Tocqueville nailed us. When you are out there on the frontier with tornados, and blizzards, and rattle snakes and [justifiably] hostile Indians, you have to stick together, and you instinctively avoid inessential provocation. As I understand it, in our law, freedom of speech is bounded at “Crying fire in a crowded theatre.” I think there may be some sort of Reasonable Man test to be applied here. For instance, let it be the case that I dislike my female neighbor, an elderly lady who lives across the street and is unkind to my cats when they wander over there. Let us say that a paranoid derelict comes to my door and I speculate with him (entirely hypothetically, of course) that she might be a witch. If he subsequently does her harm, am I not responsible? I think the Reasonable Man test is something like: you become responsible for the occcurance of Y if you perform X and if a Reasonable Man would conclude that Y is a forseeable consequence of X. I have a feeling that this is what the Pope was trying to get at. I suppose that one might say, if we jail all the paranoids, then my irresponsibility can never be a problem. Then the rest of us can conduct our lives as if we never need censor our speech. Oh, well, perhaps we have to also put into preventative detention all angry spouses, grumpy teenages, sporting enthusiasts etc. etc. Something is definitely screwy here. I wish I could figure it out. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Michel Bloch Having been for several years one of the few “French moles” on your forum, I feel obliged to write for the first time. Hi Nick! 1. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker being asked why he wears the peace-sign on his marine-corps uniform, answers “Sir, this shows the ambiguity of human nature”. What you should know is that the key people from Charlie Hebdo were the best political cartoonists in France, a sort of “Pleiades of the Cartoonists”. They promoted anarchy and anticlericalisms and therefore were hated by most of the Establishment. To better express how incongruous the aftermath of their death was I enclose one of the many cartoons I received; it shows a fortune teller predicting to those guys what will happen after their death, and that’s how it goes: the bell of Notre-Dame-de-Paris will ring; the rightists will celebrate your fame, MRS Merkel will march in the street for you… All of this is so unbelievable that all they can do is laugh, laugh, and laugh! What followed the slaughter in Paris, was a combination of bottom up and top down phenomena’s so was very open to irrationality. Those events demonstrated-if needed-how ambiguous the human nature is! 2. As regards the freedom of speech and how it is defended in each of our countries, here again, it is not that simple. After Shoah, and to fight against a rampant anti-Semitism including the negation of the reality of the extermination of the Jews, laws were voted in France against the “Incitement to racial and anti-Semitic hatred”. So Dieudonné, the pseudo humorist but a true professional anti-Semitic activist, is prosecuted not “par le fait du Prince” but for breaching a law. He wrote I am Charlie followed by the name of the killer at the kosher hypermarket. Ambiguity again. I have been wondering many times how the American could live with a fully accepted first Amendment as regards the freedom of speech and the French needed what we call memorial laws. Thanks to Charlie, I discovered why. When it comes to sacred and key national matters, your Medias can practice self-censorships which would be unacceptable in France. I hope not to have been too disturbing for the members of this forum by both my different perspective and by my sort of Parisian English. De : Friam [[hidden email]] De la part de Nick Thompson Dear Friamers, As we tried to cope with the week’s events this Friday, we found ourselves in disagreement about the degree to which the French, in particular, had endorsed multiculturalism. In that connection, I found myself humming the following passage from the French national anthem: Aux armes, citoyens! The English is … To arms citizens Form your battalions
Whuf! Nick PS Just to further the irony, the daily show (yes, yes, I know) reports that the day after the “Je Suis Charlie” rally for freedom of expression, the French police arrested a blogger for expressing anti semitic sentiments. In short, because of their history with Algeria, I am afraid the French have a problem as profound as our own. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ Abbott quoted the New Yorker:
> In other words, you can ridicule the prophet, but you cannot incite > hatred toward his followers. To take two more examples, the actress > Brigitte Bardot was convicted and fined for having written, in 2006, > about France’s Muslims, “We are tired of being led around by the nose > by this population that is destroying our country.” Meanwhile, the > writer Michel Houellebecq (whose new novel was featured in the issue > of Charlie Hebdo that came out just before the attack) was brought up > on charges, but acquitted, for having said in an interview that Islam > “is the stupidest religion.” Bardot was clearly directing hostility > toward Muslim people, and was thus found guilty, while Houellebecq was > criticizing their religion, which is blasphemous, but not a crime, in > France. > This makes me think of historian Ian Morris... That war is good because it puts violence in the hands of governments, rather than in individuals. In doing so, it greatly reduces it as rules and technology, etc. need to be created for its use. (Of course, governments do not necessarily do this because it is a good thing, but just because they need to keep power.) And the legal distinction above seems like it can only be about maintaining order. Free speech is all fine and good in principle, but don't think for a second it means any thing in practice in particular cases. Another pacification tactic.. Get it out of your system and then put it away. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: [EXTERNAL] re the French and Furriners
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In reply to this post by Mikegolf
<base href="x-msg://314/">
On Jan 18, 2015, at 12:30 AM, Michel Bloch wrote:
In real life, when he was a LtCol in the Air Force and hospital administrator setting up the Cam Ranh Bay hospital (think China Beach TV series), my father-in-law wore a piece symbol on a leather necklace under his fatigue blouse. I inherited that piece
and it has two sides - one that looks like an ordinary peace symbol and, when you flipped it over, the side that looks like a B-52 bomber. Ambiguity again.
The hospital commander in military hospitals is always a doctor who relegates non-medical tasks to the administrator. My father-in-law worked with a flight surgeon who had been a fighter pilot in the Korean conflict and WWII. This gentleman would fly
with aircraft on bombing runs in the morning and perform surgery on wounded in the afternoon. Yet more ambiguity.
Human nature includes the ability to compartmentalize different thoughts and feelings to specific environments/domains/situations. What we do and feel is based on our experiences and the similarity of the current situation to past situations more than
on rational comparisons and analysis. Dan Ariely gets into this in _Predictably_Irrational_ and _The_Upside_of_Irrationality_.
My grandmother was irrational but I could predict that irrationality. She was Dutch and German, born on the border early in the last century. Her parents ran a basement restaurant catering to commercial sailors in Hamburg in the '20s. The early Nazi
party local set up shop in the building up above, which caused much of the restaurant's business to avoid the location. Soon the business was so bad that their banker, a Jew, foreclosed on them. My grandmother expressed hatred for both Nazis and Jews as
groups. Yet she married two different Nazis and saved her Jewish employer millions in taxes. I could then predict that when she worked for an Hispanic builder in Texas she would express hatred for "Mexicans" yet save him hundreds of thousands of dollars
in taxes. Again, the ambiguity of relationships dating back to an early experience - conventional bigotry with respect to the group but faithful work for the individual.
I postulate that Dieudonné reacted to a robbery/murder/terrorism injustice in earlier life rather than the exact situation more in line with his anti-Semitism.
Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084
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