So, like Dutch! (Don’t tell anyone from the Netherlands that Dutch is a sub-Germanic dialect, though. They’ll be very very upset.)
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Well (insert expletive sufficient for reaction to this even more depressing part of this thing maybe @bibliophile20 has one )
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“I’m sorry about all the consequences of my actions that relate to me personally - and that’s it.”
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I know, right?
It’s a truly sad state of affairs when there is no profanity strong enough to express the sheer level of insane and inhumane fuckery.
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The ‘inhumane’ part is what sticks with me. He just doesn’t even seem to comprehend the idea that he caused harm to another human being. I feel like if you tried to explain that to him, it’d be like one of those 80’s movies where no one can see you and it’s just like you’re not there, even though you’re yelling in their face.
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If you get really drunk, then drive over someone in a crosswalk are you more or less responsible for your actions?
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Indeed; its the apparent sociopathic attitude therein that is so deeply disturbing.
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How many people do you have to kill to be a murderer?
Bonus question: Without having previously killed anyone, would that same person be a murderer if he had only seriously thought about murdering someone, but always chickened out because of the consequences?
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No.
But such a person would be quite worrisome if others were aware of his or her desires to intentionally kill someone.
Just as it would be highly alarming if you discover that someone has a penchant for torturing or killing animals; such behavior is a red flag.
I don’t ever advocate the idea of ‘thought crime’; because again, we all have a darker side to our nature, but not all of us choose to act on our destructive impulses.
It’s that conscious choice that separates a decent person from a nefarious one.
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True, but not for the whole of the Netherlands. Strange for such a tiny, tiny country. But don’t mention the latter either, will upset them also.
(And more on topic. Be very careful with mentioning some really racist underflow and/or misogyny. Or deep level patriotism. Also paternalism. Unless you don’t mind to upset people for a good case).
Pulling out the big guns:
Got zol im bentshn mit dray mentshn: eyner zol im haltn, der tsveyter zol im shpaltn un der driter zol im ba’haltn.
God should bless him with three people: one should grab him, the second should stab him and the third should hide him.
There’s also the one that I call the nuclear option, but I don’t have a Yiddish transliteration, but, essentially, “May all of the souls of King Solomon’s mothers-in-law inhabit him.”
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I now feel some ambivalence, knowing that my generation fought for the right to party.
That’s it!
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Here’s a way to put it that I find quite snappy and insightful:
Translation from French: Rape is about violence, not sex. If you’re hit with a shovel, you don’t call it gardening.
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There are sexist and racist people everywhere.There are thieves and criminals everywhere, that doesn’t mean there is a culture of criminality. Calling it a culture is obnoxious because a culture is shared, where as these are all acts that the great majority of society does not do or approve of. Furthermore, calling it a culture deflects individual blame.
For the second part, I think you need provide some justification for that assertion, like statistics or something.
[quote=“bigtrendy, post:94, topic:79377”]
Am I correct in reading your interpretation as rape is an offense against society more than a person? Or, if it offends both, the judgement of society trumps that of the victim making it ok to say “alright, now it’s not a thing that happened anymore.”[/quote]
It’s a subtle aspect of criminal law that offenses to persons are prosecuted in the name of society, not in the name of victims. That’s why a victim dropping their complaint doesn’t in itself cause the extinction of the public action.
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I think Zikzak’s point isn’t getting across, possibly because it wasn’t communicated well. Or possibly I’m don’t understand it either, and it’s just reminding me of something else; but to me, this is not about making excuses for Brock Turner or others like him. They need to face the full consequences of their actions. It’s about exploring why they do these things in the first place.
We like to construct narratives after the fact. If someone commits a crime, we say that they were obviously a monster, not a human like us, not like anyone we know or would associate with. What can you do to make a monster into a human being? Nothing; all you can do is watch them like a hawk and lock them up at the first sign of misbehavior. It exempts us, as a society, from any responsibility for crime or criminals: he was always a rapist, even before he raped anyone. He was probably born a rapist.
The fact is that sometimes people who have never hurt anyone and never given anyone cause to think poorly of them suddenly up and commit horrible crimes. Why? What could have been done to prevent that? How can a smart, apparently pleasant kid like Brock Turner have such a gigantic moral blind spot, to not realize even afterwards that what he did was wrong? What can we do to prevent that from happening again?
Answering those questions requires us to admit that monsters are just people. And that’s scary. We want a strong and clear dividing line between Good People and Bad People, so that you can be sure you’ll never mistake one for the other. But there isn’t one.
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I want to set up a bot to just unlike and relike that comment over and over again. It’s exactly how I feel about his “boo-hoo woe is me” crap worded better than I ever can.
Here are some statistics:
http://thehathorlegacy.com/rape-statistics/
There is nothing surviving that says “n% chance of somebody you know being a rapist” - but the numbers are high enough for the implications to be obvious to most rational people who know more than 5 or 6 people.
Calling it a culture is obnoxious because a culture is shared, where as these are all acts that the great majority of society does not do or approve of.
Actions speak louder than words.
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