Germany embassy in Sudan stormed

[acosn]

Words only carry the meaning and value you give them.

When you're a child and someone calls you names it used to be common place to be told to grow up and ignore it.

Now apparently it needs to be rendered illegal and punishable under the law.

Words carry meaning because words carry meaning. If your claim were true this conversation would be impossible. Words have history, it is what gives these words meaning, you see what I am saying here?

There are countries around the world that have freedom of speech. Pretty good freedom of speech, even if I disagree with it in some cases. Like france, the country that has allowed deliberately inflammatory cartoons which will cause death, those cartoons were allowed. Despite the fact that teh cost to the state will be fantastic, what with closing down embassies and schools, increasing security, you name it. Yet in those countries it is a crime to deny the holocaust. Within the UK it is a crime to use hate speech, to use language that is likely to cause a breach of the peace, stuff like that.

I mean, hell, It is annoying sometimes. But I have had placards taken away from me based on their language (Fuck these cunts and make them pay was considered to be inflammatory) that that is out here in the United Kingdom. You can have freedom of speech and you can limit those freedoms.

In the United States you can be charged for shouting fire in a crowded theater for no reason. In the past it was a crime in the good old US of A to protest against wars (This was revoked, but you get the idea)

Limiting freedoms does NOT make all of those freedoms worthless. It is a part of our society. Everything we do is limited. We are not free. It is a crime to walk around naked, it is a crime (Out there) to use racial slurs or insight racial hatred. These laws are in place to keep a society civilized and, to be totally honest, are the only reason we live within functioning societies.

So, in closing:

You are wrong.

Words have meaning.

Denying this indicates just how much of an idiot you are. I would devolve into slurs to try and prove a point but I really cannot be bothered. This argument is circular. I fucking hate morons who try and state that language does not have meaning.

I'm not wrong, you just utterly misunderstood what I said.

Words have meaning, but you have to physically give it to them.

Physically and your usage of the word "Give" indicates that there is a concious process in play here. There is not. The moment you look at a word you have read it (Reading is actually the time it takes to comprehend, not the time it takes for your eyes to accept the input). The moment you hear a word it cannot be unheard. Your brain gives these words meaning automatically based on your understanding of the words that you already have.

When a gay person gets called a ****** they do not ponder. They do not think "Huh, he is using a derogatory term with the following conotations" it jumps. It goes strait from ears into comprehension, based on their prior understanding that this is an insult. They do not think "This is an insult". It begins life as an insult and ends life as an insult.

Psychologists do not fully understand the acquistion or language, nor its storage or anything else. We know there are parts of the brain associated with it, that is all. However, this claim that we have to "Give" words meaning is fallacious, the meaning that words have is based on their history. Unless you are inventing new words (And there is a school of thought that if you use a word and the word is understood it constitutes a new word) this is the case. Sure, meanings change (A common, if erronious example, is ****** "But it means a small bundle of sticks, why is that insulting!") but they do so gradually.

You cannot hear an insult and choose for it to no longer be an insult. You can choose how much it affects you. However, unless you are a muslim you cannot understand what an insult to the prophet feels like (As a muslim I cannot) so you cannot cast judgment upon their reaction. Earlier (A few days ago now) I was lsitening to an interview with several muslims in the United Kingdom who were protesting outside of the american embassay against the video. When asked about their reaction, one of them stated that "The connection with the prophet is different from the connection that Christians have with god, it is more emotional, like he is a brother or family member"

Factor this into the debate (Because essentially you are claiming that the people who are getting angry should "Choose" not to be angry). Ignore whether or not you believe the same beliefs but question how you would feel if someone was stating horrendous things about a member of your family or producing cartoons debasing a member of your family.

You would be angry, plain and simple. The insult would jump rationality. Although the video in question was merely the catalyst of the riots, not the cause, this is the reason behind the anger.

tldr;

Words automatically have meaning. You cannot choose whether or not something is insulting, you can simply choose how insulted you are. It is not a logical process. When you consider the emotional relationship that Mulsims have with their prophet you must consider how personal these insults seem.

In short, you are wrong. You do not "Physically" choose the meaning of a word. There is no "Give".

This is actually incorrect. Decades worth of study into language and the search for the meme (the actual one, not internet memes) turned up absolutely nothing that suggest words carry meaning beyond what you project onto them.

Ergo, words are worth what you put into them. When you're a kid and someone insults you what did your parents tell you? Grow up. You're only insulted and offended because you consent to being so.

Very interesting. I mean, your ascertation that words have no meaning despite what meaning we give them. Factually incorrect, unless you believe that the meaning behind words is learned through conditioning. A theory which is out of date considering that conditioning is simply not fast enough when you consider the rate at which language is learned by infants.

So, once you have debunked that, everything else just collapses. Personally I am more convinced by Vygotsky (sp?) and his theories on the acquisition of language. If you hold his model to be true, you claims immediately collapse.

When you consider language to be in constant evolution, with words being given the collective meaning of our societies through the language we use, a theory which holds a lot of weight because without it all communication would be impossible (If we do not have a shared understanding of a word, the word is meaningless)... You know what?

Finally, once you factor in society, it is not "You" who is giving meaning to words, but your entire society and the history of your society. This debate is totally and utterly off topic from the original thread and utterly pointless.

I tire of this.

This is an internet argument. You are a faux internet intellectual who is refusing to budge on an elementary fact, understood by anyone with even a grade school understanding of psychology or linguistics. You believe what you believe, I know this to be factually incorrect. But you will not budge. Accepting that words have meaning would damage your argument that people who are being gravely insulted should simply grow up. To quote Ian Hislop...

"It's so obvious I am not even going to bother."

Good day to you.

Petty insults? How quaint.

Words do not carry any inherent value. You cannot distill them down to their base most form and find some sort of linguistic building blocks- for the same reason that a symbol that we recognize well in the west like the red cross doesn't translate so well into eastern society. To say nothing of words and phrases that simply do not translate. Humans have tried for decades to find the meme and it doesn't work.

What this means is that people are only offended because they let themselves be offended.

To reiterate for the, what, third time, the only value words can carry is whatever broken understanding of them you yourself project onto them. Society does not dictate what words mean. That's the same sort of meta-sociology they discovered doesn't work because human society is inherently complex. Try as they may, humans don't like being categorized and pigeonholed. But then you'd have us believe that society is perfect, orderly, and leaning more toward the static than the dynamic. Which is of course completely false, but when you can go to two different parts of the same city and generate two completely different results from the same basic phrases you suddenly realize, "Oh, words only carry the meaning people place on them."

And your insistence that this is some how "fact" is highly unscientific. We're talking about an inroad between linguistics, psychology, anthropology and sociology, and if you've followed that at all you'd recognize just how blindingly fast stances and opinions change in those disciplines (well, psychology has it's hard and soft side but the rest not so much when you're occupying almost exclusively theoretical territory.)

And so, to bring it all back home, yes, they're offended. Yes, knowing their history this is understandable.

That also doesn't excuse the other side of their history, let alone their actions. If they want to be offended, that in itself is fine, but to resort to barbaric acts of violence and effectively acting like adult children is inexcusable.

 

[PinkiePyro]

here's my two bits on the whole situation

the Youtube video while indeed offensive was not per say a spark that started a blaze,

That area of the world as of recent events has been unstable and everyone there has been on edge
now not all muslums are jerks or anything But there are extremest groups who pretty think the US and its allies should be destroyed now on their own they cant really do to much but now they are using the youtube video to rile up all the on-edge groups to basically attack all the various embassys they don't like.

Right now the strategy seems to be to calm the majority of the mob, but I feel that seems to be failing (as they are moving on to non-us embassys)

and we cant exactly do what is done to control normal sized riots, crowd dispersal and arresting the leaders.(riots are kind of like a human version of a stampede, the majority acting on an instinctual mob mentality with a few jerks provoking and leading the whole thing)

so I feel the best strategy is to remove any at risk diplomats whose embassys may be targeted, removing them would reduce deaths/attacks and the attackers will eventually calm down and disperse on their own

 

[Spinozaad]

When I read some of these comments, I can't help but smile at the implicit logic.

"They're evil and murderous, let's murder the shit out of them; for peace!"

He who fights with monsters...