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 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michel Bloch Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2015 12:31 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] re the French and Furriners 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 thats 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 phenomenas 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. Amicalement Michel BLoch 33146370193 www.mountvernon.fr <http://www.mountvernon.fr/> De : Friam [mailto:[email protected]] De la part de Nick Thompson Envoyé : dimanche 18 janvier 2015 01:59 À : Friam Objet : [FRIAM] re the French and Furriners Dear Friamers, As we tried to cope with the weeks 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/
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