You get entirely too caught up in "should". The world does not step to martin's particularly syncopated drumbeat. No one has questioned his free expression, get it through your skull. But people can have opinions about a film's content and governments can disassociate themselves from it for whatever reasons they find appropriate. We're not stupid here, mahtin. People understand what propaganda is and that films can be inflammatory, radical, tasteless, rude, or even simple bad cinema. People will categorize such films appropriately.
repeating that they "disassociated" themselves from it a million times is not gonna make it true that they only did that. in the face of a terror attack, they pointed fingers at american free speech instead of terrorist murderers. its a symptom of what our friend tigerchick calls "the pussification of america". we should never act like it is anything other than magnificent to express your views to everyone, all the time. the point of our lil chats here is to figure out the "oughts", set some normative standards. our government ought not make value judgements on religions opinions, ever. few things are more important.
And yet Bobby Jindal sits there and says "we can't be the stupid party anymore". Well Bobby, get the schools to stop teaching creationism, I expect more from a guy who's degree is in Biology. Random Fact: the actor who portrayed the Marlboro Man for television and print ads died of lung cancer.
Only in your warped mind. Nothing was done to suppress the video. No action was taken against its maker. Not one comment about abridging free speech was made. Actually comments were made that explained to protesting third-worlders that America allows such free expression, just that it was not sponsored or condoned by the government or most American citizens.
you are simply not honest when you claim they said "just" said that it wasnt condoned. they went much, much further than that.
Why is the government making any comment on the speech of its citizens. That isn't the governments role.
They didn't comment on the speech of its citizens, they just offered an opinion of the freely produced film's inflammatory content and disassociated national policy from the free speech of an individual. And it worked. The protests faded away afterwards.
hillary clinton: ""The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." not true. denigration is a form of free speech and we do not deplore it we love it and die for it. "White House has “reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...use-asked-youtube-to-review-anti-muslim-film/ what the fuck is this shit? the white house is asking private citizens to review their films? for what? white house press secretary jay carney: "It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting,” like supa says why is the white house commenting on youtube videos? why are they in the movie review business now?
why do we care if protests fade away or not? we dont care about protests, we like them! we dont like terrorist attacks! two different things. "crude and disgusting video...its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity" - obama at the UN bullshit.
