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View Full Version : why are some societies comparatively "free", while others are chronically oppressed?

Fedor Emelianenko
May 17, 2007, 06:56 PM
How is it that a muslim girl can be dragged from her home, beaten, stripped naked, and then stoned to death infront of a crowd of people and no one helps her, not even her own family?

How can someone living in India, who looks and acts exactly like his neighbours, be considered untouchable where he can't even own property or work certain jobs?

How come we don't have this problem?
Neo-Nietzschean
May 17, 2007, 06:59 PM
Who's "we?"
Fedor Emelianenko
May 17, 2007, 07:02 PM
Who's "we?"the west
unrealist42
May 17, 2007, 07:56 PM
We do have this problem.
We just keep it all hush hush.
Fedor Emelianenko
May 17, 2007, 07:58 PM
We do have this problem.
We just keep it all hush hush.we still have stonings :confused:
unrealist42
May 17, 2007, 08:22 PM
Like I said, its all hush hush.
Draconis
May 17, 2007, 08:37 PM
It's done more subtly, certainly not in front of a crowd.
xunzian
May 17, 2007, 10:05 PM
History is progressive, but not equally so.

Mencius argued that people cannot feed their minds when they cannot feed their bellies, that people cannot improve their lives if they fear for their lives.

The passage is much more eloquent than my poor paraphrasing, but I think that it hits at the truth of the situation: our material conditions determines our mental condition. For a variety of reasons, the West has attained an unprecidented amount of material wealth. This level of luxury alienates us from the brutal place that this world can be.

I think that is a good thing, but why are the other place brutal? Because they are impoverished.
premjan
May 18, 2007, 01:55 AM
Liberalism stems from prosperity.
Gracchus
May 18, 2007, 11:08 AM
How is it that a muslim girl can be dragged from her home, beaten, stripped naked, and then stoned to death infront of a crowd of people and no one helps her, not even her own family?

How can someone living in India, who looks and acts exactly like his neighbours, be considered untouchable where he can't even own property or work certain jobs?

I would recommend you read "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" by Philip Zimbardo. Or read the fictional work, "The Ox-Bow Incident", by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, which is shorter, though not quite as explicit.

How come we don't have this problem?

A screaming woman is dragged into a building in broad daylight, raped, and murdered. There are scores of onlookers but no one intervenes. No one even calls the police. That happened recently in the good ol' US of A. And it wasn't even a hundred years ago that lynching a nigger was a common Saturday Night Social down in Dixie. Germans not directly involved in the Holocaust looked the other way and refused to see what was right in front of them. There was no protest after Sand Creek or Wounded Knee.

Heroism, or even decency in defiance of peer pressure, is the exception. That is why it is remarkable.

:wave: