And yet Americans are the masters of Political Correctness!
You're joking. Just in my own lifetime that title would have gone to the USSR, the Third Reich, or what we used to call Red China. Our media abound with "heretical" articles about global warming and other politically correct issues, and even about political correctness itself.
Once again, I feel that flag burning is a stark overreaction. Burning a country's flag for what an independent newspaper did is immature. That would be equivalent to say, a person gets fired from a job, then that person goes and burns that company's building down.
Good grief dude! A flag is just a frelling
symbol. At least here, people who burn flags as a political statement
provide their own and get them for two bucks at Wal-Mart. (Made in China of course.) They're not even destroying somebody else's property. Burning a flag is "symbolic speech." It's nothing at all like destroying someone's home or business. Get a grip! Complaining about somebody burning your flag is like complaining about somebody spitting on your bible. Sure you get to be angry and you can even yell at them and call them nasty names, but when that's all over you just have to let it go.
My ethics are completely about me.
Deep down inside you are a Mesolithic pack-social creature like all of us. Your ethics are about the good of the pack because you cannot survive without them. We have successfully stretched our definition of "pack" to include ever-larger communities. But regardless of how far along a person is in that social evolution that we call "civilization," everyone has the instinct to trust and care about his pack. Only sociopaths lack it and I'm pretty sure you're not a sociopath.
Therefore your ethics are almost certainly about your community and are not egocentric.
Which is why people with a value system different from mine will be subjected by me to my value system rather than their own or that of the "greater good".
That's the problem with the Golden Rule. We need to do unto others as they would have done unto themselves, not as we would have done unto ourselves.
The greater good could involve decisions and judgments that I am not prepared to take, compromises I am unwilling to make. All I can go on is my personal meter of right and wrong. Its why I can't play the system.
And of course that's the problem with the civilization-updated redefinition of the Golden Rule. What if treating another person the way he wants to be treated conflicts with your own standard of how you want to be treated? What if a fundamentalist Christian
literally cannot be comfortable and content if anyone living within a thousand miles of him is openly gay? What if it is a violation of his religion to not constantly proselytize it to others, even if the proselytism makes them miserable? I'm struggling to come up with an example that doesn't bash religion... Okay, what if an immigrant from the Philippines finds dog meat to be the absolute tastiest food in the world and he is miserable without it, and furthermore he gains the respect of his fellows by being able to serve dog meat at the church picnic, but the smell of dog meat makes everyone else in the city throw up and the mere awareness of it makes them weep?
Who gets to decide these conflicts? You can't just say, "I always do what I think is right." That's not the way communities work.
I'm applying freedom of expression as a statute. Who exactly has freedom of expression?
I think this is the post about the priests disrupting the funeral of a gay soldier. As far as I'm concerned, if you hold a funeral in a public place like a cemetery, then the rules of expression in public places prevail. No hate speech if it's not a Nazi rally, no shouting if it's not a bunch of kids acting crazy, but a peaceful expression should be allowed. If it's inside a church then the churches can make their own rules.
Next time a redneck priest dies, get all of your gay friends to dress up in their most outlandish outfits and go attend his funeral. America is just so not about decorum.
