But it’s the rationale of bigoted assholes and that needs to be pointed out.
Or girls being shot in the face for going to school. Or kidnapped and raped, for the same sin.
Are there no cultural elements you believe are so bad other countries should lean heavily on the countries practising them? Do you think other countries should normalize their relationship with North Korea? I mean, I’m sure the people westerners interact with there would also say “The people I know don’t agree with the regime, but they accept it.”
My personal opinion is that the oppressive Saudi laws are sufficiently bad that we should express our displeasure by limiting our interactions with them. The US doesn’t do that, in fact it does the exact opposite.
Please do not use us others to defend the Ibn Saud.
Correct.
How very convenient that it’s the culture of the powerful we are supposed to accept, and not that of the people they oppress. It’s nothing more than an attempt to excuse tyranny and blame the victims.
You are using the same reasoning as the kind of people who try to defend the enslavement of black people in the Old South, demanding that we “respect” the slaver’s culture. But not that of the slaves.
She isn’t threatened execution. That’s not the law. The law is that she will get lashing. Though not at all good, it is not execution. It is extremists who are shouting execution: people no worse than our own right wing extremists.
They are not oppressing anyone if you consider the people’s beliefs whom you are considering as the ‘oppressed.’ The woman agree with sharia law, for the most part, and accept their status. All an Arab women has to do is to leave the country and live in a ME country with less strict laws. She’s still a Muslim living an Islamic life, but she is not subject to total sharia law as she would be in Saudi.
You are suggesting that strict sharia law is not the ‘culture’ of the women in Saudi, but it is. The woman in the picture can leave the country. No one is going to stop her.
If her husband or father allows her to leave, of course.
You are joking? Right?
This is a meta joke about how a right on, middle class, kumbaya, white privilege, woman would think.
I have a maid and a nanny, I demand feminist rights, and my husband Adrian MUST share all child care evenly.
But female oppression, genital mutilation, sharia law, that’s culture.
Hey, I have a culture too.
It says that another culture that doesn’t let a woman have the same rights as a man, and won’t let her leave unless the man that owns her gives permission, is wrong.
Now, whose culture are you going to argue with?
Trick question.
Mine, because it sounds a hell of a lot like yours.
Self hating, right on liberal caricature.
Wow, you sound like some right winger telling American liberals “America love it or leave it”. No, slavish obedience to the powerful is not a moral obligation of everyone who lives in the borders of a particular nation.
Clearly we invaded the wrong country in 2003. We should have made up a pretext to invade Saudi Arabia and taken their oil instead.
Remind me what oil we took in 2003?
None, since the Iraqis kept blowing up their own pipelines to stop us. asterion should have said "tried to take".
I get it now. We didn’t steal their oil because they blew up every rig and expended every ounce of oil. Otherwise we would’ve, sure thing. And boy, how 2003 U.S. oil prices reflected such failure.
No, they blew up the pipelines, repeatedly. Those are very long and effectively impossible to guard.
And yes, stealing the oil or money from it was a major reason we went there, and we didn’t even really bother much pretending otherwise until we failed and suddenly oh no, we never meant to steal it. Bush was even boasting about how much profit the US would make from the attack beforehand.
Ahmed Zewail was an American citizen whose Nobel Prize-worthy work was done at Caltech.
As to this, it’s nonsense for exactly the same reason Donald Trump’s claims that the USA SHOULD have stolen the oil are nonsense; you can’t do that. You cannot simply remove the oil reserves and magically transplant them across the sea. They have to be withdrawn with oil rigs and such over many years. There was no plan to “steal the oil,” nor could there have been. Only Trumpists believe such absurdities.
Wow, so they did expend every ounce of oil and left nothing for us (U.S.) to steal. And we admitted it beforehand. Wow, what idiots.
Geeze, everyone takes it so literally.
This amuses me, for some reason.
Personally, I see Jane Smythe’s persona (I have my doubts regarding its sincerity) as more of a Stockholm-Syndrome victim, rather than a political partisan.