Hi John Daysh,
"Liberal societies police incitement, recruitment, training, financing, and violence, not belief systems or theological lineage.
Internal theological disputes do not solve the evidentiary problem. Once the state decides which religious interpretations are acceptable and which justify surveillance, it has crossed from policing conduct into policing belief."

What happens when religious texts incite and preach hate and discriminate against others?
Should liberal societies not police the source of the conflict, or at least expose it?
Will religious leaders not stay true to the word of their religion, regardless of whether it incites and promotes hate, intolerance, discrimination, violence or not?

If liberal societies allow these religious texts and the conflicts they cause, are the societies really liberal or just pretending?

When those beliefs become Bondi, don't we have an obligation to police them? My personal opinion is that religions texts contain aspects of both good and bad.

Usually perpetrators of these attacks end up killed during their rampage, but this time we caught one alive, and we all watched what he did in footage, no need to wait for a court to find him guilty.

I don't want to wait a year for some court to tell us nothing...

Why can't we just offer some deal that he spill the beans right now, today, live broadcast confession, tell us all exactly why you did it, exactly how it came to pulling the trigger and face life imprisonment or keep your secrets and face a public firing squad instead.

mhaze said-

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=10712#373686
"intelligence failure does not validate collective punishment"
This isn't collective punishment.

Answer- Yes I agree. Denial of a reward isn't usually considered a punishment.

In this case migration of Muslim's to Australia doesn't pass the common sense test. It would be good if Muslim's could be left alone to their own territory but stability requires that sane nations control the oil. So a compromise is necessary.

Hopefully we can find an alternative to reliance on Middle Eastern Oil. Sadly those that are sane aren't always the strongest. We need to create some sanity sometimes at the cost of other attributes. We are heading into a period of insanity, be careful what you wish for.

Europe and the West is a source of soft power inspiration in the world, not perfect, of course it's necessary that inspiration is achievable. I believe that Catholic European Subsidiarity Aristocracy is superior to Asian Authoritarian Rotating Officials Sovereignty. Many more successful Asian nations have moved past the authoritarian rotating officials model, to a Confucist model of "the family nation" (that Marxist's would probably label as evil patriarchism).

The repeated prisoner's dilemma with randomness can be a good model to understand geo-politics. The Chinese don't play "tit for tat" very well, and have been killing their citizen's for monolithic politics, creating citizen drones, for thousands of years, hard rather than soft negotiating tactics, avoiding learning the benefits of long term relationships. While killing your enemies does have it's advantages, it doesn't allow multiple social experiments to be tested, and reduces opportunities for development. Perhaps it's time for the homeless Chinese diaspora, settled in various parts of the world, to take back their territories. Maybe we should return to the territories of ancient China during the warring states period (Zhan, Yan, Qin, Wei, Qi, Han, Chu) many of the people being thrown off the castle walls to crystalise their gains.

Despite the Chinese diaspora being spread to the four winds, through Chinese authoritarianism, currently in the form of Marxism, some western people believe that their political authoritarianism is something to aspire to

Armchair Critic,

Apologies for the delayed reply. I have a nasty habit of responding to the least sincere first.

//They ARE based upon past experiences… therefore call it collective guilt or whatever...//

The problem is that once guilt is presumed at the group level, evidence no longer functions as a safeguard - it becomes something individuals need to produce to escape suspicion. That's the inversion of the rule of law.

//I say guilty until proven innocent, not innocent until proven guilty.//

The presumption of innocence isn't a sentimental nicety, it exists because states are bad at predicting who will commit future violence and very good at abusing predictive power once it's granted.

Every system that has adopted "guilty until proven innocent" has eventually applied it far beyond its original target.

//Based on what we've already seen in other western countries…//

Invoking outcomes elsewhere doesn't justify abandoning first principles here. If "other countries" are the standard, then the question is which policies reduced violence without dismantling civil rights. That requires specificity, not generalisation across countries.

//What happens when religious texts incite hate?//

Liberal societies already address this: through laws on incitement, threats, recruitment, financing, and conspiracy. What they don't do is criminalise texts, adjudicate theology, or surveil belief systems. The moment the state decides which interpretations are acceptable, it ceases to be neutral and becomes an arbiter of conscience.

That's confessional governance, not liberalism.

//When those beliefs become Bondi, don't we have an obligation to police them?//

Beliefs don't "become" attacks. People do. Policing belief rather than conduct guarantees overreach while missing actual threats.

//Why not a live confession… or a public firing squad?//

This would abandon the last remaining constraint entirely. Coerced confessions and extrajudicial killing aren't methods of truth-finding, they're methods for terror. They produce false information, legitimise vengeance, and destroy any remaining claim to moral authority.

At this point the disagreement is no longer about Islam, immigration, or security effectiveness. It's about whether fear justifies discarding due process, individual rights, and the rule of law.

That choice doesn't protect liberal society. It ends it.

I don't like "Poppers Intolerant Tolerance", and believe that good fences make good neighbours. Of course it also depends on how intolerance and tolerance is defined. I don't believe cultures should tolerate their own annihilation- if that is what Popper wants us to tolerate, I'm going to reject him, in spite of his other contributions to science. Of course other philosophers also lost the plot such as Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the talk of Palestinian protests on one side and the ISIS flag on the other, it raises the question. Are Palestinian protests being run by ISIS, or is ISIS being influenced by Palestinian's? And what is the role of the Woke Marxist's that are closely involved in the protests, and what about the many Labor and Green's party members marching??

About the absolute nonsense of gun control in relation to the terrorism on Bondi Beach. What if Jewish citizens had been armed, as people are permitted to be in countries without draconian gun laws like Australia's? What if they had been permitted a couple of armed guards?

I'll tell you. The terrorists would have been dead. More, if not all, Jewish Australians at the event would be alive.

In countries where citizens are permitted to carry arms, deaths of innocents by rogue shooters are reduced by 53%. Waiting for police to show up reduces deaths by only 35%.

An armed citizenry is an asset: a safeguard.

Australians governments prove time and time again that they cannot defend us. Worse, they won't allow us to defend ourselves.