Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Sad but true…

Yes, it has occured to me, that although I scolded the “extremist blogger” Eivind Berge for his violent rhetoric in my recent Democracy revisited post, the fact that he did post the things he did and got arrested for it was the reason I even heard of him – and read his blog.

For him it did work: He got plenty of attention and now states that “While my kind of violent rhetoric is legal, it is no longer needed. We are strong enough to fight feminism in more elegant and subtle ways now.”

Yes, Eivind, posting those statements about “killing the cops” really worked out well for you. Sad but true. (Not sad because you got attention, but because of how you got it.) But I do hope this time you will actually practice what you preach.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Democracy revisited

Over the past several weeks, the "extremist blogger" Eivind Berge has gotten a lot of attention in Norwegian media. To those who do not know him, Mr. Berge calls himself a male rights activist (MRA) and anti-feminist, he opposes the "feminist state" and has repeatedly spoken favorably about the use of violence as a political tool - specifically against the police. For this reason, he was arrested and imprisoned for 3 weeks in July.

In the spirit of my own blog post about "true democracy" earlier this year, I have visited Mr. Berge's blog, read some of his work and responded rationally and without hate or anger.

I left the following comment under his "Thoughts about the trial" post:
In my humble opinion, Eivind has expressed several political opinions and rational concerns that are quite legitimate in themselves. But in my eyes, he completely and utterly destroys this legitimacy with his hateful ramblings about killing people.

Killing a police officer does not harm the state, it just kills a person and makes the state want to harm you. Also, it gives them all the legitimacy they could possibly need to do so: The moment you resort to violence, they can treat you ONLY as a dangerous terrorist and not pay any attention to your politics at all. I fail to see how this is supposed to accomplish anything good.

If you're angry about something and want to correct it, what you need to do is convince enough people and the state will correct itself. It can be a slow and painstaking process, but it's the only way I know that really does work.

As Winston Churchill once said it, "Democracy is by far the worst form of government. Except all the others that have been tried."

Democratic fair game

Since I'm writing a lot about democracy lately, let's level the playing field and lay out the ground rules of an open and free democratic debate, for use both on my blog and elsewhere.

In my opinion, we need only two rules:

1. Attacking, challenging or questioning an idea, a concept or a political opinion is always acceptable.

2. Attacking, threatening or discriminating against a person or a group of people is never acceptable.

There you go. It's as simple as that, I say.
But of course, this is an idea or a concept, so anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to say so. ;-)