To follow up on what I mentioned about the Bill Clinton administration not silencing the Rwandan hate-talk radio even as it was telling the equivalent of Einsatzgruppen where to find the equivalent of Jews to murder because "free speech" here's a piece about what many in Quebec believed might have inspired the white-supremacist mass murderer in Quebec the other day or at least created the milieu which his mind inhabits.
Quebec City’s popular mayor, Régis Labeaume, also appeared to criticize the radio stations. Speaking at an outdoor vigil in memory of the victims Monday evening, he denounced those who “get rich from peddling hatred.”
Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard acknowledged Tuesday that the province has “its demons” and that “xenophobia, racism and exclusion are present here.” But he told reporters that Quebec society is generally open and tolerant.
“Whenever you happen to listen to this trash radio, you hear clearly xenophobic language,” said Mohammed Ali Saidane, who has lived in Quebec for 30 years.
“What I reproach with these media is that they import problems from elsewhere, especially France. We don’t live in ghettos here. It’s not the same as France,” he told the Journal de Quebec newspaper.
“The real danger of this kind of radio is that they play with the line between news, opinion and demagoguery,” said Louis-Philippe Lampron, who teaches human rights law at Laval University.
Being experienced in the two-step that the free-speech absolutist dances whenever someone gets killed as a result of hate-speech, they'll claim that "there's no proof" that hate-talk radio actually lit the fuse that exploded in many deaths. Or, more likely, "there's no link" between the two phenomena. I have come to the conclusion that for these absolutist asses, no amount of causation could be proved that they would admit as evidence, no number of people killed would matter to them - they rarely constitute the kind of people who are at danger of being attacked and killed or having their loved ones attacked and killed. And there's always money to be made from broadcasting hate and defending it. No matter how depraved it is.
Jeff Fillion, one of the best-known hosts, was fired last spring by Bell Media, owner of Energie 98.9 FM, after he ridiculed a prominent local businessman who had publicly grieved his son’s suicide. But soon after, Fillion was back on the air at another station.
“It’s like reality TV,” said Guillaume Verret, a 21-year-old college student and part-time barista as he sat with friends at a Starbucks in suburban Sainte-Foy. “It’s completely stupid and easy. They don’t give you facts. They just give you opinions that provoke people.”
Like reality TV. And, as we're seeing in the ACLU fund-raising campaign in the face of the developing Trump-fascism, they'd claim that "there is no evidence that reality TV ever hurt anyone".
I really hate the lawyers and writers and other liars who promoted the lie that what is said in the mass media, over and over again has no effect on how people act and, it being mass media, that masses of people can't be led to do everything from the foolish, to the bad, to the evil to the mass murdering influenced by the same techniques TV gets big bucks to use to sell people junk between their hate fixes. There's no evidence that they're not a bunch of money grubbing liars and hypocrites who don't care how many people get killed and if it leads to a fascist government in the United States. Pretty much the whole professional scribbling syndicate is in on it, too. With a few exceptions.
Says the asshole who has ALL LIVES MATTERED the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteI really didn't anticipate that you'd break a barrier to being an even bigger asshole than you'd managed to prove yourself to be over the last two days. But you did it. Simps, it's not that I think like the ones who are denying that Black Lives Matter, it is that you do the same thing that they and other Nazi-style thinkers do. You're the one who thinks only the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis matter, which dishonors them as it makes their murder of only a parochial concern instead of a universal concern. You and Norman Podhoretz should get a room together.
DeleteActually, you DO think like those Black Lives Matter deniers. EXACTLY like them.
DeleteKeep digging, pal.
Oh, dear, I'm going to have to spell it out to you, aren't I. You are a Norman Podhoretz style Jewish Chauvinist insisting that the fact that the Nazi murder of millions of Jews is really all that should ever be focused on when the discussion is the program of industrial murders that the Nazis engaged in. Only one group, the group that you and Podhoretz belongs to matters and there is something wrong with considering that every life the Nazis took is a wrong, every group that they slated for extermination was as much the target of genocide. That the Nazis began with the disabled and that Hitler, three years before the Wannsee Conference laid out the "Final Solution" also told his invading forces that their duty was to wipe out the Polish population is of no legitimate interest and are not to be mentioned AS IF THAT, SOMEHOW MADE THE MURDER OF JEWS OF LESSER IMPORTANCE. Having a very limited range of concern due to the damage that your ego-mania has caused to your ability to care about other people, you figure that thing like moral concern, sympathy, caring are a limited commodity and you, being ego-maniacs, want all of that limited quantity to go to you or, rather, the one and only group you identify YOURSELF with.
DeleteThat's entirely like the racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement which is a product of the emergency of police and other murders of black people and them getting away with it due to the racist corruption of American police, American media and American prosecutors and courts. I NEVER HEARD ANYONE IN THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT WHO MADE THE KIND OF CLAIM YOU AND PODHORETZ OPERATE UNDER THAT ONLY BLACK LIVES MATTER. The "All Lives Matter" slogan is a means of deflecting attention from the crisis of modern forms of lynching by gun, the very same people who say that, generally, are opposed to legal reform that would protect All Lives from guns. Many, perhaps all of them, share with the Nazis the thinking that lives can be ranked on a scale of valuation with their group on the top and other groups lower down. THAT Simps, is exactly the kind of thinking you and Norman Podhoretz insist on being the only allowable kind of thinking. I say that Jewish lives taken by the Nazis are exactly as beyond value as the lives of the most pathetically disabled of the disabled people gassed and burned up by the Nazis. As I proved to you in another of those books you pretended to have read, William Shirer's Berlin Diary, he was already writing about the mass slaughter of the disabled during the period of his book. You, though, seem to have skimmed that out of your damaged mind and soul. If I thought like you do, I'd think that Black Lives taken by the Nazis are of lesser importance than the lives of Jews, I don't, they're equally beyond any scale of valuation, as were the lives taken by German Darwinists in their genocidal campaign in Africa more than a decade before there was the first Nazi.
It is impossible to say I am not influenced by what I read and listen to. If I spend time among scholars, I become much more interested in scholarly pursuits. If I spend time in spiritual reflection, say in a religious community or retreat house, I become much more spiritual. If I spend my time reading dime novels I become convinced the world is a place of violence, human life is cheap, and everyone is out for themselves (or I believe "the West" was "won" by a six-shooter and "gun fights," which is so ahistorical as to be laughable).
ReplyDeleteEtc., etc., etc.
So how is it talk radio, which really has degraded the national discussion about public policy and human rights and civil rights, etc., has no effect on its audience? how does that work?
Worse, in Canada they respond to lies by Fox News by calling them lies. In America, we have to work ourselves into a swivel to even call a white supremacist a "white supremacist." And even then we only apply that label to powerless people who can't fight back, or have no friends in high places to defend them. Interesting that the FBI is concerned with right-wing and white supremacists groups, and they are deadlier than Islamic terrorists, at least to Americans in this country, but we can barely say that they exist. A public figure (Corey Booker? No, but someone similar) on NPR (Keith Ellison? Closer) was talking about the problem of white supremacist groups in America, a problem well documented by the SPLC. But after his comments NPR had to note that Politifact found no evidence to support the man's claim that such groups were a greater danger to American life than ISIS jihadists. For reasons that weren't explain, but: Politifact=authority, and we dare not speak too loudly of American racism, so, well....you know.
How far we have come since Dr. King died and his movement faltered. Or rather, how far we haven't.....
What is even more telling is that the very same people who claim that 24-7 hate talk can't possibly have an effect on peoples' behavior as they sell time to broadcast commercials, commercial and political for the purpose of changing peoples' behavior. It is entirely dishonest, entirely hypocritical.
DeleteI've heard some of the Quebec French language hate-jocks, they're really bad.