There's no "god" in the constitution.

What states like Saudi Arabia or Iran do in their law should simply not be accepted.

Even Turkey was officially secular until at least recently.

Which constitution? There's no "the" constitution, it's just as valid to say that there's no free speech in the constitution because, frankly, having free speech in constitution in just as rare as having god in constitution.

I'd agree that it would be nice that if it was differently, but saying "shouldn't be accepted" is just like wishing for a pony, it has no connection to reality - we simply don't get a say in such matters, and I'd bet dollars to pennies that a magical totally fair democratic vote in those countries would prove that the average voter there definitely supports prohibiting blasphemy and restricting speech to do so.

It's ridiculous to simply unilaterally declare that your moral system is more valid than someone else's, and forcing your constitution on some other place is just as reasonable as someone else wanting to replace your constitution with theirs.

"It's ridiculous to simply unilaterally declare that your moral system is more valid than someone else's".

Well my moral system is that I can do exactly that.

If morality is relative, then your opinion that I shouldn't do this isn't any better than my opinion that I should do this.

So I am just going to go ahead and do that.

What, are you going to call me immoral? YOU are the one who believes in moral relativism.

I agree with that. Once we accept the false premise that "all are the same" we'll let the most intolerant and the most backward win. And accepting the complaints of those "offended" is giving up to the real and destructive backwardness.

Too many people take our current state for granted. It is actually the result of the centuries of the fight against the backwardness (especially religious). If we give up we'll lose what we've already and with a lot of fight achieved.

We have to offend the superstitious and those that want to protect the backwardness, otherwise we're doing it wrong, and we'll lose so much we can't even imagine.

We have what we have today in spite of the religious texts not because of tbem. Otherwise there would still be more burnings at the stake and beheadings. Not to mention the treatment of the women.

We should never forget that, and we should act. It's getting critical again.

That being said, what about North Korea?

If literal concentration camps or starving literal millions of people to death aren't sufficient to bring real action, is it realistic to believe that free speech of all things will be the reason because of which we will start to topple regimes that we consider immoral?

If we can achieve a consensus sufficient for action on regimes who kill and torture people just because, then it might be appropriate to consider stopping (as opposed to just criticizing) regimes that simply repress people not following an arbitrary social code of conduct.

North Korea SHOULD be toppled, in an ideal world.

The problem, though, is that when you go around toppling regimes, millions end up dead, when before only 10s of thousands were being killed by the secret police.

So yes, if I could wave a magic wand and give human rights to the entire North Korean population, with no negative side effects, I'd do it.

But we don't have that magic wand, and we have to balance the good that we'd be doing by fixing North Korea, with the bad that'd be done through the millions that would end up dead.

North Korea offered peace many times. It's the U.S that doesn't want to accept it. See my other post. The U.S. goal simply isn't to reduce the chance of a war and it's even less to improve the state of the people there (or anywhere actually). "Bringing democracy" when the U.S. politicians say it always mean something else as it would be naively expected. Best observed on recent Iraq and Syria examples.

The U.S has a huge history of the direct organization of toppling the regimes only on the principle "they don't do what we want them to do." Therefore, Saudi Arabia, one of the most intolerant places on the Earth "are the friends" and the dictators are somewhere else. And these "friends" thanks to that "friendly" support magnificently exported their mind-boggling intolerance all around the world. And some circles bend over backwards to teach us that "it's good so."

I don't care if NK has offered peace or not. I care that they send their own people to death camps.

If I could topple NK overnight and get rid of the death camps I would do so.

My opinion on Saudi Arabia is the same. That dictatorship should be toppled as well, hopefully by their own population.

North Korea is the biggest straw-man imaginable(1). We should worry what is happening in our own lands. North Koreanism is spreading nowhere, the intolerance "as written" in the "holly" books (yes in all of them believed by the superstitious as such) is, through the world, as we speak.

Historically, most of the thinking world already once managed to see the mentioned books as the stories which aren't to be taken seriously. The superstition is fighting back now thanks significantly to our forgetting what is it actually about. Not caring for the intolerant being "offended" is our moral duty.

1) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-idUSKCN...

North Korea "has long sought a peace treaty with the United States and other parties in the 1950-53 Korean War, as well as an end to military exercises by South Korea and the United States, which has about 28,500 troops based in South Korea." The U.S. rejects the peace talks every time.