{"id":2115,"date":"2005-05-17T16:21:43","date_gmt":"2005-05-17T23:21:43","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-02-21T08:43:35","modified_gmt":"2007-02-21T15:43:35","slug":"manufacturing-consent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/05\/17\/manufacturing-consent\/","title":{"rendered":"Manufacturing Consent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Glenn Reynolds <a href=\"http:\/\/instapundit.com\/archives\/023026.php\">writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>I want to add that I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything immoral about flushing a Koran (or a Bible) down the toilet, assuming you&#8217;ve got a toilet that&#8217;s up to that rather daunting task, and I think it&#8217;s amusing to hear people who usually worry about excessive concern for religious beliefs suddenly taking a different position. Nor do I think that doing so counts as torture, and I think that it debases the meaning of &#8220;torture&#8221; to claim otherwise. If this had happened, it might have been &#8212; indeed, would have been &#8212; impolitic or unwise. But not evil.And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to be willing to apply the same kind of criticism to things like <em>Piss Christ<\/em>, or to explain why offending the sensibilities of one kind of religious believer is &#8220;art&#8221; while doing the same in another context is &#8220;torture.&#8221; If, that is, they want to be taken at all seriously.<\/ul>\n<p>We&#8217;ve been hearing a lot of this, often from self-described &#8220;libertarians&#8221; who pander to the Limbaugh crowd (e.g., Reynolds and Neal Boortz), ever since Abu Ghraib came to light: <em>Why, that&#8217;s no worse than what a lot of these liberal perverts do in their own bedrooms! What&#8217;s the big deal?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>They apparently missed that part in Libertarianism 101 about the critical distinction between activities one finds distasteful and activities one is forced to participate in. Since I always like to help lost sheep, I offer the following handy pocket-sized guide to consent and coercion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Taking a photograph of one&#8217;s own justly acquired religious item in bodily fluids<\/strong>: Highly offensive to many, but no coercion involved. OK from a purely libertarian standpoint.<br \/>\n<strong>Holding, say, a born-again Baptist against her will and forcing her to watch you excrete bodily fluids on the Bible<\/strong>: Offensiveness to anyone but the non-consenting party is morally irrelevant \u00e2\u20ac\u201c after all, rapists don&#8217;t find anything icky about rape. Not OK by any decent standard.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Eating pork<\/strong>: OK.<br \/>\n<strong>Dousing an Orthodox Jew or Muslim with pig blood<\/strong>: Not OK.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Humiliating oneself as part of a <a href=\"http:\/\/mediamatters.org\/items\/200405050003\">fraternity initiation<\/a><\/strong>: OK.<br \/>\n<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/news\/?articleid=2444\">Building nude pyramids at gunpoint<\/a><\/strong>: Not OK.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Smoking cigarettes<\/strong>: OK.<br \/>\n<strong>Tying a suspect to a chair and putting out cigarettes on his flesh<\/strong>: Not OK.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Physical intimacy with a willing adult of the same sex<\/strong>: OK.<br \/>\n<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nyblade.com\/2005\/1-7\/news\/national\/panic.cfm\">Sodomizing a 17-year-old, then shooting him 11 times<\/a><\/strong>: Not OK.<\/p>\n<p>All clear, Glenn?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Glenn Reynolds writes: I want to add that I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything immoral about flushing a Koran (or a Bible) down the toilet, assuming you&#8217;ve got a toilet that&#8217;s up to that rather daunting task, and I think it&#8217;s amusing to hear people who usually worry about excessive concern for religious beliefs suddenly taking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}