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From Reuters:
A Pakistani counter-terrorism court has sentenced to death a man who allegedly committed blasphemy on Facebook, a government prosecutor said on Sunday, the first time someone has been handed the death penalty for blaspheming on social media.
[...] Shafiq Qureshi, public prosecutor in Bahawalpur, about 500km (300 miles) south of provincial capital Lahore, said Raza was convicted for allegedly making derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammad, his wives and companions.
"An anti terrorism court of Bahawalpur has awarded him the death sentence," Qureshi told Reuters." It is the first ever death sentence in a case that involves social media."
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Pakistan Sentences Man to Death for Blasphemy on Facebook
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There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it
has not yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday June 13 2017, @11:26AM (3 children)
Well holy crap I didn't think you'd do it again but you gave yourself away in the first sentence. I'm sure it works well to easily insulate you from things that uncomfortable. Oh I'm sorry, things that are "bullshit".
That's alright though. I chose to be on the side of history that learns. If you don't want to be I certainly can't force you. And honestly I'll just stop trying to argue too. You kind of derailed it from moment 1 but I liked where it was going anyway so played along. (My point was actually about the identity politics and all that shit resulting in a reaction to the completely insincere acceptance people will claim for Islam because it happens to be politically convenient. Which is a domestic issue)
Oh and sorry for my hearsay [youtube.com]. I was wrong in my recollection of it actually being an American. Rather than this being a tactic taught by Americans. My mistake.
and by the way, the US is compared to every evil of the world because it's one of them whether you want to start believing it 20 years late or not. It's people are great, but so are the people in Pakistan. And Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Having a facade of being more "civilized" because our majority religion happened to become flexible enough to realize crap like the Old Testament is unworkable garbage. By historical chance most likely rather than any inherent superiority I'm sure a lot of people would like to desperately believe is true about America.
By the way the doc cited in the video is actually really good and I feel for these guys. It's also mostly sympathetic to them. Also I recommend Dirty Wars because there's no fucking way I'm investing more energy in this thread when you couldn't do the smallest bit of original research in turn. If you want rampant illegality it's right there for like 1.5 hours (been a year since I saw it, might be 2).
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 13 2017, @12:22PM (2 children)
You don't seem to have learned from it despite your claim to be on the side of learning.
"Most likely"? Maybe you ought to read up on history before speaking in probabilistic terms about things you clearly don't have a clue about. Further, this isn't about some "inherent" property of Americans or a hapless response to an "environment" we have no control over. No one in this thread is arguing that God is sending good souls to be born to the US and bad ones to Pakistan. Nor did the US get all the good rolls and just happens to be better off in so many ways due to blind luck. We are speaking of the systems, including those of religions, not the people. Those can be better and worse, because we made them so!
And the bottom line here is that by the very things you've described as moral problems such as religious nuttery, putting people on death row for frivolous offenses, secretive black ops, and torturing people on the streets, Pakistan is worse on all counts than the US. This brings up the obvious question raised by your argument so far: why bother improving things, if it's all the same? If the US is just as evil for having a quarter the per capita death row inmates as Pakistan, then it'll be just as evil having a sixteenth the Pakistani per capita rate, or four times the rate. Meh. Your worldview is ridiculously broken.
Morality is not a bit you set. Two evil actions aren't equal just because they are both evil. I'm not arguing here that the US is virtuous. Far from it. But when you argue that all evil actions are equivalent, then that's an argument against bothering to change. Why bother listening to "Dirty Wars" or whatever when we're just speaking of stuff that's like jaywalking except maybe the imprisoning and killing innocent people. No big deal, right? We're no more evil no matter how many people we butchered today.
Why do I need original research when your argument came out of the oven horribly broken? This is the typical endgame of such kookery. A staunch insistence that you're right because you finally choose to embrace, for a paragraph or two, some of the rituals and procedures of reasoned argument. But you know, if you had paid attention to my posts way back when, you wouldn't be making this appeal to reason now because you wouldn't need to.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday June 13 2017, @12:43PM (1 child)
Heh. Yeah you got me. I actually want people to see the US like Pakistan for propaganda purposes. Anyway, that was a pretty ungraceful attempt to discredit my statement just because I was honest about my recollection of south/west asian history. You like to do this shit early on in your posts don't you? Alright well again not going to waste more energy on arguing if you're not going to. I will waste energy to get you to expand upon your transparently cowardly murikan mindset by writing posts like this that have the same content density yours do. We can do that if you want. Figures that even on a tech site there's going to be one of you. Critical thinking is officially passe.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 13 2017, @11:03PM
You have already been successful in that task. I'll even expand on my transparently cowardly murikan mindset a bit here to waste more of my time. For example, we spoke of numbers earlier in the thread. I believe that reducing the number of victims of evil is good even when it is far from complete. Second, I believe in the usefulness of accountability. It matters who is doing how much evil rather than some blanket statement that doesn't really apply or matter to anyone. Moral equivalence undermines both these beliefs.
Finally, there are plenty of belief systems, not just religions, that have sanctioned coercion and reality distortion for the purposes of spreading these belief systems. These are thus the most dangerous ideologies one has to deal with since they both encourage forcing people into the ideology and isolate believers from reality. Once they have a taste of power, they are capable of rationalizing any evil. Islam like many religions has a history of such coercion and delusion. But what makes it worse is that this manifests today at the state level (examples: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia) in a way that analogous religious beliefs don't in the Western world, including the US.