vijayjohn wrote:That's too bad. I think there's probably a good argument to be made for collective responsibility when it comes to discrimination against Romani people, both in Europe and elsewhere.
How far can this argument go though? Can it justify collective
punishment of Europeans in the same way it is used to justify collective punishment of other groups (I was recently ranting against neo-Stalinists justifying the collective punishment of Crimean Tatars for example).
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I don't think people from Muslim backgrounds have a responsibility to speak out, but it is appreciated when they do.
It is still widely demanded by them, it's not an action decided without outside pressure.
Again, I cannot think any other dominant group except the Germans being forced to feel any degree of responsibility comparable to how non-dominant groups are.
Whether they are more effective in changing minds or not is an independent issue.
It probably is more effective, and it is probably problematic that it is more effective because it plays right in the same nationalist tropes that cause many other problems. It is still not a sense of responsibility that comes solely from within.
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I feel like I have to tell all my non Afghan friends that I am an Afghan and support the LGBT community.
For me, you feeling this way is a sort of violence you are living through, similar to the violence the LGBT community is also facing.
And I really feel strongly about this, because in the few occasions I had the chance to encounter homophobes that would open up and talk about their motivations (and sometimes they even apologised), they always had a variation of the "one of you lot hurt me, and now I cannot stand you all".
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@linguo
Over hear the reaction was pretty standard, and even in my history of sexuality class, most students erased the LGBTness of the targets. Everytime there's a shooting in the US, the reaction is "The shooter must be a mental case because no sane person kills
so many people, and Americans are collectively mental cases for having no gun control".
It's hard to find a piece in that reaction that isn't problematic and flat-out wrong. Mental health stigma is alive and strong over here, for one. Ignorance of the local context also.
And I know I would probably blame gun control in the past as well, but this guy had access to guns as legally as it gets, he was apparently working for private security. Secondly, in Cyprus there's one femmecide (usually of an ex-wife) a month, committed almost invariable with legally own guns (guns that the government forces you to own, because conscription).