kaffy_r | aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

This law is the biggest piece of shit I have ever read about. I saw it before this but the guy quoted in this article really takes the cake. I love how because women aren't allowed to get an education and are therefore illiterate which means they can't support the family financially they have to have sex. I've got an idea! How bout instead of leaving them illiterate you allow little girls to go to school? How about you give your daughters more respect than your cows? F@ckin' @ssh@le.

I think he is a bit unclear on the concept of "democracy" and how that plays out in real life.

I'd like it if he personally was never allowed to have sex with anyone. Because here in America we call such men sexual predators, rapists and wait for it............ wrong!

Thank you for the humble reminder I live in a great country with tons of privilege despite its flaws.

Sing it, sister!

One of the things that truly enrages me about this guy is this: the very fact that he tries to rationalize the law to questioners reveals his own understanding that it's inherently wrong. Someone who completely believed in it - presumably because it came from god - would simply say "I don't have to explain it to you; it's god's law." This guy hems and haws about it. Yeah, he believes men and women aren't equal, but somewhere down deep inside him, he knows that it's crap, that his faith doesn't back him up.

And that's how it is with a great many "faith-backed" laws with unfairness or bigotry at their core. The people who support this kind of unjust law, and claim holy backing of the laws, know somewhere in their hearts that a) god supports no such thing and b)that it is, in fact, wrong. (For instance, substitute pro-slavery Christian ministers of the 1800s, pre-Civil War, for Afghani imams, and you have the same thing.)

Bless you my child, for you are absolutely, 100 percent ... wait for it ... right!!!!!

I see it a bit differently (what a surprise, eh?). I see it as a failure of governments that turn out to function in the all-too-typical "Democracy == 'Let's kill Frank and split up his stuff'" way. Democracy (either representative or direct) is not enough. There are a lot of other more crucial characteristics that outline places I'd want to live. --MMB

Mizz: Maybe you lay too much value on the label of "democracy". It was a democracy that sentenced Socrates to death, too. --MMB

Gee I dunno I guess I like to think Democracy like all things has evolved with the times especially that length of time. 400B.C. was quite a while back ago.
I'm sure "democracy's" meaning varies from place to place and yet demoting women to being the sex slaves of their husbands seems just a tab bit archaic even for me.

Maybe you do not place enough value on the label

And really in my mind this goes well beyond just democracy and is really more of a human rights issue.

All I'm saying his that if you speak or think the word "democracy" with some sort of magical Humpty-Dumpty-esque pile of attached meanings you'll get blindsided when something like this happens. Democracy strictly means majority vote rules. Period. Any other meaning you assign is mythology.

That said: If you take anything I wrote as in any way approving of what the Afghani law is, I suggest you take a break and examine your presuppositions.

Socrates might have suggested that the oligarchs of Athens were less interested in demos than thanatos.

This country does indeed have its many flaws, but in point of fact its constitution is admirably free of theocracy of the type that I referenced in the post.

Ok, failing to parse the message. Are we referencing Afghanistan here? Because honey, I have news for you; it's not a democracy. Are we referencing this country? Can we define the "all-too-typical 'Democracy'"? The 'let's kill Frank and split up his stuff'? Because right now, I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what it has to do with the price of potatoes.

Tell you what; let's you and I have a long discussion about it over a cup of coffee (and, unfortunately, probably over the phone lines. Distance sucks, neh?) We have pretty much diametrically opposed views about the nature of democracy, and perhaps about a lot of other things, but I think perhaps we can agree that a theocracy which treats women as this law does, is not a good thing.

Kathy -- I don't see how what you've written in any way contradicts, or indeed relates, to anything I've written. My point was about a flaw in "democracy". And beyond that, a flaw in the unsupported belief that "democracy" as such always yields correct results and is inherently to be fostered everywhere willy-nilly; and my I-think-substantiated opinion that use of the word as some sort of shibboleth is fraught with perilous error. Not a word about the US Constitution or theocracy anywhere in any of what I wrote. I'd think that someone as bothered by CA Prop 8 as you have been would get my meaning pretty clearly. But maybe not.

Happy Easter, anyway. --MMB

I think the idea of believing that the strictly technical denotation of democracy is all democracy is, is to make the world a little more dim for yourself.

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."
(C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawntreader)

You think "democracy" means what you want it to mean. "Democracy" has a very specific meaning: some fraction of the population votes, and the majority decision is imposed by force (with the acquiescence of the ones whos vote did not carry).

That's /it/. Everything else is idealism plopped on top that really has other labels. There are a lot of great qualities of our way of life here in the West. But "democracy" (where it applies) is only a very small piece of the quilt.

If you want to live your life with some fuzzy bunny definition that lumps all the good stuff under that label, go for it, but you're deliberately drinking Kool-Aid to so do. My quarrel is not with you, nor am I arguing in favor of the law in Afghanistan. I am greatly puzzled by the thinking that would be entailed by anyone concluding otherwise.

--MMB

Ah, my friend, you underestimate the strength of language evolution. And fuzzy bunnies.

You're very diplomatic, Ms Kaffyr. Were someone to act like this on my LJ, I'd suggest that he or she remove his or her lure from the water and speed the motor up a little, or find a new lake.

Poll: Is there anyone here who didn't pass civics class? Who doesn't understand that when over half of the population is disenfranchised due to its type of personal plumbing, a governmental unit cannot be considered a democracy?

Edited 2009-04-13 04:45 (UTC)

And I think not keeping precision when thinking about government is just like handing whiskey and car keys to teenagers. --MMB

Balls. Kindly refer to Lincoln on "if you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" Cordially, you are full of shit, my dear. Good evening.

Cordially, you are being a troll, my dear. Good grief.

Good evening to you, too, Dr.

Did the women of Athens vote? Did the women of our own country vote before a constitutional amendment passed? General suffrage is a separate matter from "democracy"--and as it happens, one of the things I was talking about APPROVINGLY when I mentioned how important other things than "democracy" *are*.

Jeeziss, I'm not ADVOCATING what happened. I give up, though. Clearly I'm not fit company here. Pity, that.

And good night. Kathy, feel free to delete any comments that are at all not fuzzy bunny enough. --MMB

Kathy, feel free to delete any comments posted by those so paranoid as to feel they must always post anonymously.
--Robert Jackson Berlien

Bob, I don't bother to log into LJ because Kathy and I would probably get into even more go-'rounds than we do if I did.

--Michael M. Butler, surprised at how Bob is mindreading

Answer to question 1: No. Question 2: No.

The point is that ya didn't have to come off so damned fannishly snotty. You were abrupt as hell, and when you "suggested" to mizzlaurajean that she "reexamine her presuppositions," you were using the old "Why isn't everyone as learned and brilliant as I am? Go get an education, you lout!" ploy. In other words, it ain't whatcha said that riled folk, it was the way ya said it.

Well, thanks for the feedback. Much is lost in this medium. The presuppositions I was asking Mizz to reexamine were about /me/, not about anything else. To some extent I was mindreading as well, of course.

It is, as she later wrote, /precisely a civil right issue, not a democracy issue/.

I apologize for my irritability and my unsociable utterance to Kathy _in print_, where it sat like a turd on your carpet.

The rest is silence.

--MMB

Sweetie, you can make me so mad, and put so many damned grey hairs on my head (thank god for L'Oreal), but I still love you. I think perhaps the estimable BB has the right of it. Let us all now agree that bunnies are fuzzy, stupid laws are stupid fucking laws, and that civil discourse is still an art to be cherished, and one only slightly below friendship.

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

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