Who characterized them as heroes? The CBC?
Boyle’s explanation as to why they decided to have children while in captivity.
Well, you know. Time was a wastin’.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they weren’t exactly suffering while held captive? Did the Tals decide that the Boyles were mooching off them too much and kick them out?
You know, half Arab! Like Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia.
Having children while in captivity doesnt strike me as all that weird. The descendents of slaves would not be here if being held captive was enough to dry up eggs, sperm, and libido. Plus, being pregnant provides relief from menustration.
They seem like dumb people and they certaintly are selfish for intentionally having kids under those circumstances. But people fuck in the worst of times.Big whoop.
I know. They only had one of their kids, after all. It’s not like they were all killed or anything!
They weren’t just “in captivity,” they were hostages, and under threat of death if their captors’ demands weren’t met.
Boyle has revealed that his wife had not three, but four, children while they were in captivity, and said the Haqqanis murdered his infant daughter. It’s not clear when that happened but certainly the youngest child, who is two months old, was conceived after the murder. To deliberately bring children into such circumstances (and Boyle says they did so because they wanted a large family) when they are under clear threat of death is beyond appalling.
Sure – they speak both Canadian and American.
I think that’s a most apt characterization. The rest is commentary.
(Emphasis added)
You have got to be fucking joking.
Please tell me what exactly is the “approved” way of acting during a multi-year captivity in a foreign land which is at war with you, with minimal facilities, loads of free time and little access to contraception. And after a while no hope and expectation of escape or release?
A woman getting raped in her own free country based on what she is wearing is nothing like westerners getting taken hostage in a hostile country that they were "pilgraming "through in an attempt to cozy up to terrorists.
If you don’t think they bear any culpibility for their ordeal you are an idiot.
I’m fairly certain Alessan was being sarcastic. The couple strikes me as incredibly stupid, but being stupid isn’t an excuse to hold people hostage. I also think Joshua Boyle may be have very tragically believed his connections to his former wife’s family were stronger and more powerful than they actually were.
Yeah, I heard the rushing air all the way over in Elections.
You’ve never heard of anal or oral sex or mutual masturbation? The average teenager knows more about having sex without pregnancy.
It would be one thing if they were having sex and but trying to prevent pregnancy (even by the rhythm method or coitus interruptus) and had an accident, but Boyle says they were deliberately trying to bring children into a situation where their lives were at risk.
You’re a fucking idiot.
Well, ok I’ll admit to being whooshed if that’s the case. And no, no matter how stupid they were they didn’t deserve what happened to them. But their stupidity sure racheted up the tragedies.
Agreed, especially how flippant he was about it:
Yeah. They don’t even seem to think of the children as people. They’re just an object they wanted to have. The idea that maybe they’d be raising their children in a horrible environment and the harm they’d be doing to them didn’t enter their mind.
Having kids is not something you do just to make yourself feel good. You are bringing a new life into the world, and you have a responsibility to that life.
I could have a kid right now, but I know I’m in no place (mentally in my case) to raise one. So I don’t. My sister is not in a financial place to have kids, so she doesn’t. Granted, she has access to drugs that those guys didn’t. So if it was accidental, I’d be okay with it. But it wasn’t.
They chose to have kids. They chose to bring lives into the world because of their selfish desire to have kids, not because they thought they’d be making a good life for their kids.
All that said, their incredulity about Trump being president was nice. It’s nice to remember what it was like when that seemed impossible.
Agree about the Trump thing. That was pretty funny.
While I obviously agree in this specific case, the way you kind of broadened the argument makes me realize it’s perhaps a slippery slope. Personally, I have four kids from two marriages, and all four pregnancies were fully paid for by Medicaid, and all four kids (ranging from five to 17 years old) were on Medicaid their whole lives until just a couple months ago. To some people, maybe a lot of people, that would also make me someone who shouldn’t have had kids.
Then there are people on the opposite side who might say if I feel that it was irresponsible for this couple to have kids, what about the hundreds of millions of parents in the developing world who have kids despite living on less than two dollars a day, with little to no access to medical care, schooling, or electricity and indoor plumbing? Should the global poor just voluntarily eugenicize themselves, or be judged harshly for not doing so?
But I just think this is a special case. They did not have any kind of freedom of movement, they did not have an extended family or kinship group of other people in the same predicament. Their future was uncertain: they might be released or just killed. They had no real way to even attempt to improve their circumstances. That’s an unusual enough, and dire enough, situation that I hold to my view that it was irresponsible.
Culpability is not zero-sum. The fact that they were idiots doen’t excuse their captors one whit - all it does is make it easier for us to tell ourselves it can’t happen to us.