From today's China Post - I first heard this last night at the pub in Kaohsiung. "Beaten to within an inch of his life" was the phrase used. It doesn't say whether there were witnesses or whether anyone intervened, or whether the culprits have been (or will be) caught and sent to trial. Who knows, eh?
According to the police, a 30-year-old Philippine worker was surrounded and beaten by four Taiwanese men on May 16 when he was on his way to work. The police said no one that the worker knows has any resentment against him, so the police suspected that it may have been a random attack.No it's not a "random" attack, the correct word is "opportunistic". If they were using "iron sticks and baseball bats" then they'd have been out specifically looking for Filipinos, or even for anybody who appeared south-east Asian.
Fools: if you want to be regarded as a person, and treated accurately and fairly by others, then you have to extend the same courtesy to others irrespective of their nationality, race or any other markers of collective identity. However, if you want to indulge in nonsense like collective guilt and collective rage and collective identity - then you're fully entitled to share the collective shame from despicable incidents like this.
People who lack the basic intellectual equipment to work with, you know, concepts must be properly understood as monsters and ought therefore to be regarded with the appropriate caution.
The correct word is "hate crime".
ReplyDeleteNo it isn't; there are two essential aspects to this crime. The first was that it was carried out on purpose and was not "random", and although "hate crime" arguably captures this aspect of purposeful action (with the idea of acting on a given hatred, hence "crime"), it is obscured by the primary referent of the word "hate" which is an emotion. Hatred by itself is not a crime (the very idea is nonsensical) and so to speak of "hate crimes" is to further disseminate unreason.
ReplyDeleteThe second essential aspect here is the disintegrated pathway from the concept of "nationalism" to the assault of innocent people. That would be better reflected in a term like "moron assault", rather than "hate crime". Yes - these people who did this should be called "morons" right out loud across the media, on TV, radio, print you name it - so everybody can hear it told like it really is. This will not happen however, because (a) Taiwan's ridiculous "reputation laws", and (b) Taiwan's politicians are also punishing innocent Filipino people on account of "nationalism" - and simply as a means of shielding their own political reputations from the glare of the morons.