“She has done her dash with most Australians who will never forget her comments. Never.”
Culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. Culpability marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible and a randomly occurring event, like earthquakes, for which no human can be held responsible. One formulation of the concept is as follows:
A person is culpable if they cause a negative event and
(1) the act was intentional;
(2) the act and its consequences could have been controlled (i.e., the agent knew the likely consequences, the agent was not coerced, and the agent overcame hurdles to make the event happen); and
(3) the person provided no excuse or justification for the actions.[1]
Culpability descends from the Latin concept of fault (culpa). The concept of culpability is intimately tied up with notions of agency, freedom, and free will. All are commonly held to be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for culpability.
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why is she the tax-funded host of an ABC program?
The usual suspects emerged last week to defend Yassmin Abdel-Magied following the tax-funded Muslim activist’s Anzac Day Facebook slur.
Critics were infringing on Abdel-Magied’s right to free speech, they claimed, seeking to diminish her critics’ own right to free speech. Critics were racist, screeched a few other Abdel-Magied fans.
The most intriguing line, however, was that critics were being mean to someone who is just young and not very sharp. Fairfax’s Jacqueline Maley led this particular argument, writing that while Abdel-Magied’s “ill-considered comments” were “lazily expressed” and “eye-rollingly undergraduate”, they didn’t warrant “institutional bullying from men in government”.
Maley even found support from an unnamed defence force member. “As it was discussed between my colleagues and me, this woman is what, 26?” the ADF member told her. “I was a frickin’ idiot at 26, still am, but luckily nobody listens to my Facebook feeds.”
So we’re in agreement, then. Abdel-Magied is a frickin’ idiot. And she dresses as though she walked into Ken Done’s studio when he’d run out of canvas. But surely the kid’s stupidity isn’t just a reason to discount her Anzac Day outburst. If anything, it’s a sound reason to call into question Abdel-Magied’s absurd political and media prominence.
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why is she the tax-funded host of an ABC program? And why was she invited to be a member of the ABC’s Q&Apanel in February?
That was the show where Abdel-Magied proved her frickin’ idiocy by claiming that Islam was “the most feminist of religions”, a stance only slightly undermined by her subsequent online contact with those feminist hardliners at Hizb ut-Tahrir. “How can I do better in the future inshallah? I am young, and willing to learn, inshallah,” Abdel-Magied wrote. “Trying to do the best with the platform I can, Allah willing.”
Allah and Australian taxpayers.
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why was she invited to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Iftar dinner last year? Why was she at the PM’s table?
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why is she on the Council for Australian-Arab Relations? And why has she previously served as a member of the Australian Multicultural Council, the Federal ANZAC Centenary Commemoration Youth Working Group and the 2014 Youth G20 Summit?
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why did the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sponsor her book tour last year to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Egypt and Sudan? For that matter, why does a frickin’ idiot get a book deal in the first place?
For an idiot, Abdel-Magied sure has a lot of people clamouring for her opinions. Why?
I wanted to vote but it’s facebook and that I do not do.
I don’t believe that Yassmin is unintelligent. She is obviously talented and gifted. She has turned those talents to the service of Islam. That just makes her more dangerous. Is she sincere? I don’t know. Much damage has been done by the sincerely deluded. An old, ugly, foul mouthed harridan will get much less traction than a young, attractive and intelligent female. The only hope is that her mouth will continue to run ahead of her brain and she will be seen for the menace that she is.