Maybe because the world kind of sucks right now for a great many people and posting nothing but stories about happy fun things for the middle class isn’t exactly constructive and helpful. Good on BB for actually trying to talk about issues that matter to the world, and to many of us here.
But please, go back to burying your head in the sand as the world burns around you. I’m sure it won’t turn to glass above you.
“You’ve managed to kill just about everyone else, but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target!”
I know this is cynical, and that very well an opposite might happen, could happen, won’t happen…, but I wonder if the woman will be punished unfairly (harder) because with this act she also challenged the old-fashioned way of doing things; that is arranged marriage and rule of parents over their children’s future.
Like, in Pakistan they might also punish her unfairly because she’s a woman (just by itself) and for being one who challenged the rule of men by trying to murder one.
Ugh.
Plus the promise of decades of repeated rape. And forced pregnancy. And beatings. Etc.
This was a tragedy, for many reasons including the unintended deaths. But she would have been thoroughly justified in killing all those who were culpable in arranging her enslavement.
In Pakistan and some neighboring countries, if you as a male, throw acid onto your sister in order to disfigure or kill her when she’s suspected of sexual immorality, you’ll have a better than 50/50 chance of being commended by the community. And practically no chance of being charged with a crime, as long as you’re outside of any big cities.
So, Pakistan doesn’t have its priorities worked out when it comes to treating the sexes fairly.
If chinchillas ran congress they’d probably pass all these laws favoring dirt baths and cool, dark places. They’d discriminate against condors even though they’re almost extinct, which would be like so fucked up.
If refrigerators controlled the media we’d never hear about the virtues of canned goods.
What’s the actually point you’re attempting to make here?
Do you know how long it took to get that “mostly”? Jeebus.
This is just my 2¢. I don’t know if it’s entirely right, but here’s what I believe.
In general I reject essentialism, so I do not believe any subgroup of humanity is more suitable than any other to dominate the rest. Domination itself is the problem. Since anarchism is probably not possible, only a government representing diversity of circumstances, experiences and cognitive perspectives can approach fair governance.
That said, the patriarchy, like all subgroups who hold power for a long time, become so entrenched that to its defenders, restoring balance looks like attack and they fight the loss of their dominant position. Because they’ve enjoyed privlage for so long, many of the status quo’s defenders cannot conceive that they don’t deserve their domination, and so they claim to be the victim when their dominance is eroded by the restoration of balance. They most often base their claim to dominance on their own ideas of essentialism, such as notions of a superior gender or race. This is why I so categorically reject essentialism.
FTFY
The first duty of the slave is to kill the master. However, doing so doesn’t absolve the slave of the moral duty not to kill other slaves. Even so, killing doesn’t solve human rights abuses, and it usually augments them.
That said, only Sith deal in absolutes. Even my deontological ethics admits this is a complex situation that requires first and foremost starting from a place of compassion.
And their sons. And fathers.
If “they were raised like this” is a valid defense on the individual level, it applies to all levels.
It’s not that simple “they’re raised like that.” It’s that women involved are able to exert less control and agency over their lives in patriarchal societies. That doesn’t mean they don’t bear responsibility, it means they have much less power over situations like this then men do. The society (and ours, and all societies, frankly) are built to benefit men and put them in positions of power over women.
And yet they tell their sons to rape women of different faiths, or to come back with their shield or on it, or dismiss their daughter’s complaints or actively rat them out (and homosexual sons) to male relatives. All situations where passive resistance and subversion would be quite possible, yet too many go the extra mile to keep the status quo.
Not wanting to get on any watch lists here, but what ever they used must have been an impressive toxin. Diluted from one glass ?250mL into at least enough for 27 people (6.75litres if everyone gets 250mL) and still powerful enough to render everyone unconscious and kill more than half of the group?
Interestingly, that comes from the source of most of the stereotypes about Spartans, a non-Spartan Greek-cum-Roman biographer, writing centuries after the Spartan’s embellished accomplishments, for a Roman audience, making it more than a little suspect.
amazing the things people get up to when you force them into a situation where they may be legally denied food,clothing, and shelter or even killed for not obeying a spouse they did not choose.
Let’s say you’re dealing with, on average, 60kg humans. Your LD50 threshold in 1000X/(250 * 60 * 30), or 450 mg/kg. It’s certainly lower than that in reality, because you’re mixing it in with milk, not filling the glass with it entirely, so let’s say about 20% of the glass was the poison. Now your LD50 threshold is 90mg/kg when ingested.
Now, there’s plenty of shit out there that’s way, way more toxic than that. The LD50 of Botulinum toxin, for instance, is measured in nanograms per kilogram. But getting that stuff is going to be a tad of a challenge. Also, keep in mind that you’re going to be limited by not just toxicity but also the level at which the poison becomes detectable. You could poison someone by feeding them 120g of acetaminophen, but the cause of death just might be recorded as blunt force trauma, from when you hit them over the head to make them swallow the entire bottle of pills.
Instead, let’s look at industrial pesticides! Methomyl, for example, is a cholinesterase inhibitor, with measured LD50 in rats of 12-48 mg/kg. The symptoms don’t match, alas – it’s more likely to headaches, nausea, and seizures than unconsciousness.
On the other hand, there’s EPN. There’s a huge diversity across subjects in its toxicity: Oral LD50 was 33-42mg/kg for male rats but only 14mg/kg for female rats. On the other hand, all dogs survived 20mg/kg, but all died at 45mg/kg. And that one does cause loss of consciousness.
Or you could look at aldicarb, which is another contestant for the “stupidly toxic” award. Oral LD50 in humans is estimated to be under 5mg/kg, and it has just a slight sulphurous odour. LD50 in rats was measured to be 650-930 micrograms per kg.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, there is a dearth of data on how these toxins taste to humans, but odour is pretty closely associated with taste, since we mostly perceive flavour, which is a combination of the two.
Hope that helps!
yes, you’re right. it’s all the mothers. always the mothers. Let’s burn all the mothers, because they made this world such a shitty horrible place. /s
Not only that, refusing to engage is dangerous for women.
Indeed. These are structures not of their own building (and this includes many of the men and boys who primarily benefit from patriarchal societies). Just NOT participating has consequences for individuals. This is true in any society and in some cases, the consequences can be relatively light. In others, it can be death. Most times it’s somewhere between the extremes, but individuals aren’t just individuals (shut up, Margaret Thatcher, no one cares if you think society doesn’t exist). We exist within structures that grant us choices and some people have more choices than others.
Blaming the mothers for structures that they did not themselves create, that actively works to limit their choices in life, saying that they have the same responsibility as the husbands, fathers, or institutions that reinforce male dominance makes little to no sense in that context.
Approaches to developing world human rights abuses seem to fall mainly into one of three categories.
Figure out which groups in the culture can be blamed while doing nothing to actually help but making the blamer feel better about looking down their noses at other cultures.
Actually try to figure out how to support victims of oppression without treating their entire culture like a problem from which they must be “saved”.
Neo-colonial intervention to try and stuff their society into a box of the colonizer’s choosing.
I see a lot of the first on the left and a lot of the third on the right, but I don’t see a lot of the second. I honestly don’t understand why. I want to believe that people genuinely want to help.
