Right or wrong, it's rape



  • Because more things make us say WTF than just code.

    [quote user="Wikipedia"]Shri Gaur's educational qualification is BA. LL.B. He is cabinet minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party-governed Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, as home minister he is responsible for law and order. ... In June 2014, after the 2014 Badaun gang rape, he said: "This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong".[/quote]

    Anyone else up for a little armchair activism?



  • Of course it's always wrong, but I think he's poorly explaining something known to people who study things like sadism.  When certain behaviors, like say raping women or torturing animals, goes unpunished or even cheered on by the perp's social circles (whether that's literally friends or just coworkers in a slaughter house) over some amount of time the behavior becomes "accepted".  Every person who observes and says nothing becomes inured to it and it becomes like no big thang.  Temple Grandin wrote about this in one of her books where she describes her work to improve the humane conditions at slaughter plants.  It literally is a case of "when good men do nothing, evil will prevail".  


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @jetcitywoman said:

    It literally is a case of "when good men do nothing, evil will prevail".
    And, more to the point, the large majority of people who aren't particularly good or evil by nature will start to think that evil actions are acceptable, which causes a lot more trouble…



  •  You can't judge somebody by a sentence taken totally out of context. When a politician's saying is reported in a newspaper, you can be sure that said politican indeed uttered those words, not necessarily in the same order, withing the space of 5 minutes.

     Journalists are not called "hacks" for nothing.



  • @levbor said:

     You can't judge somebody by a sentence taken totally out of context. When a politician's saying is reported in a newspaper, you can be sure that said politican indeed uttered those words, not necessarily in the same order, withing the space of 5 minutes.

     Journalists are not called "hacks" for nothing.

    When a politician doesn't know his words are going to be quoted, he's an incompetent fool.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I don't normally follow news out of India, but it does seem like a bone fide rape culture, from stuff I've seen over the last few months.

    Right or wrong, colonialism brought Sir Charles Napier to India:

    @Sir Charles Napier said:
    Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

    Too bad that didn't make more of an impression.



  •  Sir Charles Napier also said :

    The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed.

     and

    the human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear

     and

    so perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another

     

    Seems to have been a template for governments everywhere. 



  • @flabdablet said:

    Because more things make us say WTF than just code.

    [quote user="Wikipedia"]Shri Gaur's educational qualification is BA. LL.B. He is cabinet minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party-governed Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, as home minister he is responsible for law and order. ... In June 2014, after the 2014 Badaun gang rape, he said: "This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong".

    Anyone else up for a little armchair activism?[/quote]

    Allow me to interject a paraphrase of what I'm pretty sure he probably meant.

    "[Rape] is a societal crime. Society depends on men and women; sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong."

    ...the point being, a society is a culture of norms, which can be either incremental or detrimental habits. An entire society can come to adopt something wrong as a cultural norm; in such cases, the problem is systemic and the whole society needs to be pressured strongly to change. Singling out and flogging individuals won't have a systemic effect if the society at large still doesn't find their crime to have been particularly objectionable; it just pressures individuals to avoid punishment by avoiding getting caught.

    That said, I'm not defending his original statement. It was badly worded and, on top of that, poorly conceived (you don't just make a statement like that, even if it's carefully worded; a politician has to anticipate the inevitable quoting out of context and misinterpreting). When saying something like that, you have to reason your way into it and then conclude in a way that's not going to be twisted into something you didn't mean to say. Sometimes you even attempt to let the reasoning do all the talking and avoid stating the conclusion altogether, leaving your audience to draw it for themselves.



  • @anotherusername said:

    in such cases, the problem is systemic and the whole society needs to be pressured strongly to change.
    Here's the first paragraph of the document that the Avaaz campaign I linked to aims to persuade the PM of India to endorse:
    1. Educate for Equality:
    We will implement comprehensive, well-funded and long-term public education programmes to end the culture of gender-based discrimination and violence. These will include: SMS, radio and TV public service campaigns, accessible lesson plans for schools, modules for training teachers and to train professionals such as doctors and lawyers. To this end we will reach men, women, boys and girls in both urban and rural areas.
    There's a law enforcement and economic wish list in there as well, but the education bit is front and centre. It reads like the kind of thing drafted in-country by people who understand what needs to be done.



  • After reading a bit more, I'm pretty sure he did mean what I was formerly pretty sure he did not mean. I retract my original statement, which seems to have been wishful thinking on my part. You're correct, a systemic approach would require both widespread re-education from the ground up and a proper legal approach, reforming the law where necessary and then actually enforcing it.



  • @anotherusername said:

    would require both widespread re-education from the ground up
     

    And at least two generations allowing for the old ideas to be forgotten.



  • @dhromed said:

    @anotherusername said:

    would require both widespread re-education from the ground up
     

    And at least two generations allowing for the old ideas to be forgotten.


    And fighting the large groups of people that are organizing themselves to fight the "decadence of society" and "stop the government brainwashing" to go back to the good old times.

    Related.



  • @dhromed said:

    @anotherusername said:

    would require both widespread re-education from the ground up
     

    And at least two generations allowing for the old ideas to be forgotten.

     

     I've gotten deeply immersed in dog rescue in Spain - and it's a similar problem.  A particular type of hunting dog called a galgo is indiscriminately bred there and destroyed by the tens of thousands every year.  The really bad part are the traditions that are held up as reasons why it's acceptable to destroy them in horrible ways like hanging slowly, thrown down wells, set on fire, raped (!), stick jammed in the mouth, legs broken or tied and then abandoned....  basically anything a sadistic and creative mind can think up has been documented happening to these dogs.  We are doing everything we can to rescue the survivors and get them the hell out of the country, but also trying to help change the mentality/culture.  Education of the young is most critical but it's very difficult to counter a mentality that's held up by close family and respected authorities in the community.  It takes more than a few generations.

    Another similarity is the gender issues in both cases.  Spain is a very macho society and they don't take well to female outsiders telling them what to do.  Just like male Indians don't like females telling them what to do.  Since the victims in India are female, and the victims in Spain are animals which happen to be statistically primarily championed by females...  having your voice heard is exceedingly difficult.  

     



  •  There was no such custom in Mahabharata. Kunti was very much living after her husband Pandu died. The custom of Sati was praticed by very few groups of people pre-British rule. Also this person was responsible for bringing an end to that custom.

     @boomzilla said:

    I don't normally follow news out of India, but it does seem like a bone fide rape culture, from stuff I've seen over the last few months.

    Right or wrong, colonialism brought Sir Charles Napier to India:

    @Sir Charles Napier said:
    Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

    Too bad that didn't make more of an impression.

     

     



  • As somebody who allegedly lives closer to the event that triggered this campaign than most of us, how do you rate the chances of two million digital petitioners having any effect on Modi one way or the other?


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