WillowTree
Diamond Member
- Sep 15, 2008
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Well, snowflake ain't the same either!hMy curiosity got the best of me, so I dug through my college papers and I looked up the various references I cited. It took a few minutes, but I found the document, and fortunately, it's now even available electronically. [1] It was, based on what I found, a dude named Finch who, in 1887, uttered the first phrasing of the missive by saying, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” Not quite as eloquently put as your (perhaps others' too) paraphrasing, but close enough that Finch deserves the credit for coining the turn of phrase.I thin
First of all, let me say "nice OP." It's rare that members bother to compose something original that's also coherent and cogent.
The Terrorists want people to divide up into religious divisions. OBL wanted his attack on the US to foster this divide. To radicalize his own Muslim terrorists and to radicalize Christians and Jews. It appears he has accomplished that goal.
The more we give in to the desire to "round them up," the more OBL and ISIS philosophies to separate us along religious lines is working. The more we look at terrorism as a social movement, where an economic underclass with no hope in their home countries lashes out against the system (royalty in Saudi Arabia, moderate imams in Shia countries), the more we are leaving ourselves open to attack.
Neither approach is bullet proof. No pun intended. I think you have to protect the border, screen people relentlessly, and actually target people who are likely Muslims. Limits will need to be placed on their freedoms --- not limits to worship, but limits to move in our free society. As Bentham famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, their right to swing their arms ends at the tip of my nose.
Socially we have to really pressure Muslim countries to create opportunity for their underclass. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, etc. Even if we have to spend money to do it, I'd spend there and here. Bombing them is counterproductive and distracts us from our own country. Although I'm sure Bill Kristol would love it.OBL wanted his attack on the US to foster this divide. To radicalize his own Muslim terrorists and to radicalize Christians and Jews. It appears he has accomplished that goal.
I don't know if that was OBL's goal; thus I won't go so far as declare a causal relationship between his actions and the state of discord that pervades many Westerners' hearts and minds with regard to Islam and its adherents. I agree that both Muslims and non-Muslims seem to be considerably more radical (less rational) than they have been been since, perhaps, the Crusades.
I think you have to protect the border, screen people relentlessly, and actually target people who are likely Muslims.
I'd concur with you had you written "extremists" or "radicals." Indeed, I'd have ticked "agree" on your OP but for that one word. That someone merely is Muslim is not problematic. That one harbors hatred toward non-Muslims and is willing to act violently as a result is the problem. I have plenty of tolerance for Muslims and the Islamic faith system. I have zero tolerance for manifestations of violence as a means to foment outcomes that one cannot (or thinks one cannot) achieve via the political processes wherever one finds oneself, regardless of the theistic belief system to which one adheres. IRA, ETA, ISIS, etc., they're all the same to me: violent extremists.
Limits will need to be placed on their freedoms --- not limits to worship, but limits to move in our free society. As Bentham famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, their right to swing their arms ends at the tip of my nose.
To the extent that the emboldened text reflects accurately the nature your acquiescence to limits on one of what is surely among the very few "God given" freedoms bestowed on all mobile creatures, I agree with you.
Aside:
I don't recall Bentham as being the originator of the rather famous phrasing you noted, though the principle of it is unquestionably found in Bentham's discussion of utilitarianism in The Principles of Morals and Legislation. In that text, Bentham declared that the correct moral principle “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question,” and he had understood “happiness” in terms of those “sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”
The earliest phrasing that I know of and that resembles the adage as you've paraphrased it is from the late 1800s by a dude whose name escapes me, but that I could probably choose were I given a list of options.
I'm sorry I don't recall more than that. That bit of minutia is something I can recall having come across in my readings, of all things, about the history of prohibition (one of the many things I had to research and write a paper about in my History of American Economics class, but that was some 40 odd years ago, so I'm not surprised I don't recall the detail any better than I do), and while the concept obviously struck me as germane, the guy who offered the noted phrasing and precisely when didn't. It thus didn't register as something I'd someday have use for knowing. I just don't think I would have forgotten were it Bentham. (FWIW, I performed a cursory check to find a Bentham work in which he offered the saying you note -- because everything Bentham said/wrote predated the late 1800s. I couldn't find any.)
Who knows, however? Last weekend I found myself playing charades for the first in "God knows how long." Perhaps I'll find myself in a shortly upcoming weekend playing Trivial Pursuit and wish I did know who said it? LOL
Socially we have to really pressure Muslim countries to create opportunity for their underclass. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, etc. Even if we have to spend money to do it, I'd spend there and here.
"Pressure" probably won't have much of a positive impact. Helping them, including as you note with monetary support for a variety of initiatives, more likely will.
I think it was a Supreme Court justice in a dissent who attributed it to Bentham, I'll have to look it up. Maybe Holmes.
Note:
- Would that I had had such a thing as the Internet when I was in college and graduate school....Indeed with the fulsomeness afforded by the Internet, it's, to my way of thinking, downright shameful that the expectations foisted upon students (high school students and undergraduate collegians) seem less demanding than they were in my day when one had to spend long hours in the "stacks" and thumbing through countless pages to gather information for research papers and argumentative essays. Hell, an equivalent tool to "CTRL+F" would have been a great boon, to say nothing of having the aid of a powerful search engine like Google, Bing and others.
Nicely done. I guess if I'd have had the internet in college and graduate school I'd have done what most people do when they have the Sum Total of All Human Knowledge at their fingertips: Watch videos of cute kittens.
PS I think the current overuse of the term "fulsome" is grating. I think people mean "robust" and are misusing a word that doesn't (or anyway didn't) mean what they think it means.
