Recent content by Farther than stars

You don't have to earn freedom of speech. It's a right that already exists naturally. And what secures that freedom is using it, i.e. speaking freely, making sure that the freedom is so ubiquitous that even those in power wouldn't dare take it away from you. If you had to earn that right by...

OK, so I'd never heard of 8chan before today, so I thought what I'd do was, I'd perform a little experiment to see whether or not a cursory review of the website is enough to stereotype it. In my five minutes of quasi-random clicking I found: (1) a White-supremacist page (seriously, literally...

Seriously? Ant-man is going to be a real movie? I thought that was just part of an SNL sketch. (For those of you who are interested, it's the episode hosted by Chris Pratt.)

I suppose the general problem here is what happened during the third wave of feminism: some people within the movement are going to disagree with other people within the movement about the movement's goals and methods. Is Miley Cyrus's twerking debasement for the satisfaction of male viewers or...

You can safely assume that anything I haven't responded to, I accept. That was an exaggeration, to illustrate my analysis, because it applies the same to the act of insulting people. Just because anger and sorrow aren't physical wounds doesn't mean that it's fine to recklessly make...

OK, fair enough. But I also think we're both fairly privileged people in the sense that we've developed a thick skin against criticism, but I do think we should still take into account the feelings of people who don't have a similarly thick skin. Saying that you're willing to be stabbed simply...

Alright, so far I buy it. So do you think atheists should be ridiculed as well?

But the problem exists because xenophobic messages don't distinguish between being Muslim/Arab/etc. and being an extremist. This makes it a lot harder to non-extremist Muslims/ethnic groups to have a decent living in society. And we're not talking about "some individuals", we're talking about...

The problem with xenophobia in France is that it doesn't discriminate very well between various Muslims/Arabs/Persians/North Africans. The criticism against the cartoons isn't that they're punching up at extremists, but that they're painting in such large brushstrokes that innocent people are...

Well, being uncontroversial is in itself not enough to justify an action, if that action is inherently harmful. If we let society dictate what actions, beliefs and statements are just/correct based on what it finds controversial, then we (in the West) would still be living in a totalitarian...

First of all, terminology: I think you mean "anatomic" instead of "genetic", because with the current state of technology it is impossible to change one's gender genetically. And secondly, this isn't a question of "true gender" (a vague, arbitrary and exclusionary criterion) but about how we...

Yes, I am sure. They're all just variations on the same name. The British use the spelling "Muhammad", because this is the spelling used in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India (former British colonies). In most Islamic nations, the name is given to male children in reverence of the "original"...

Yes, public figures get it wrong some of the time and then we criticize them. That's a proportional response to people being wrong, because it's not healthy to blindly support a person's every action. Moreover, I don't think we'd be doing the victims of Charlie Hebdo any justice by turning them...

I think it's just a way of differentiating him from the millions of other Muhammads in the world. Jesus, as a name, doesn't have that problem so much. This presupposes that the creators of South Park are capable of perfectly identifying these "ugly truths" in society, but I don't trust them...

Actually, it's the other way around. The dictionary definition is the broader one and the popular definition is the stricter one. MovieBob is using the popular definition specifically because its meaning has changed to being centered on government. Dictionary definitions may be lame, but it's...