It’s sort of like leaving your wallet in your convertible with the top down. It’s still wrong for someone to take it, it’s still theft, but you’re a complete idiot to be that careless and expect to get away with it.
This distinction is one that often comes up when someone writes advice for young women going off to college on how to be careful at parties to avoid becoming a victim of sexual assault. Inevitably, from certain corners will come the complaint that this is “blaming the victim”. Advising people to be careful, and specifically describing ways to effect caution, is not “blame”.
nobody’s “excusing” their captors. at most, we’re saying this isn’t so much “you shouldn’t have been dressed like that,” it’s more like “you shouldn’t have gone up to that crocodile and jammed your thumb up its butthole.”
Then you picked a shitty way to express it with your “shouldn’t have dressed like that” comment. No one is excusing the captors behavior and you have conflated two differing situations in an attempt to white-knight these idiots.
Just so I’m understanding you correctly, you do think these people are heroes, right?
Exactly. My husband and I could not afford children until I was in my late 30s. This is why we have only one child. We also did every test possible to make sure he was healthy, because we knew the risks of an older mother. After we had him, we knew the risks went up even further if we had a baby when I was 40, plus, we had enough trouble casing a toddler then, we didn’t want to be chasing one when we were middle-aged. So we have one child. We always knew that if we really desperately wanted a bigger family, we could adopt older children, but so far, one has been enough.
We were extremely careful with birth control, and that turned out to be a very good call. We got pregnant practically on the first try.
I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, but isn’t it sexist? Doesn’t she have agency? She’s a modern Western woman married to a Western man, and was not raised in a conservative religious sect. I can’t see any reason why she would not be able to equally make decisions within the marriage.
They’re victims of their captors, and the infant that was killed was also a victim of their captors. But the infant (and the other children) were also victims of their parents’ choice to conceive them in a very dangerous environment. (Regarding the rape, that apparently took place early in their captivity and so wasn’t the cause of the younger children’s conception.) So whatever you think of their captors, the parents bear some blame for the situation of their children.
I’ve gone into some dicey parts of the world where I could potentially have been taken hostage. (Nothing as bad as Afghanistan, though.) If I had, I would accept the fact that my decisions played a part of that. One thing I can reliably say could not possibly happen to me is to decide to have children in the circumstances these people were in.
Wait, what makes that article spam? The fact that he wrote it?
I don’t think the price for stupidity should be captivity and rape or whatever other horrible things they suffered, but I do want to say every interview I’ve read with Boyle makes him sound like an insufferable douche in love with his own martyrdom.
Also, one of those articles specifically stated that the wife was permitted to home-educate the boys, which contradicts a claim here that they didn’t try to educate their children. The article was all about how proud they were that their kids were reasonably well educated considering the circumstances.
His post time was his last activity. It’s vanishingly rare that someone comes back. If there was any interest in having a discussion here, he would have hung around for a response for at least a few minutes.
I’m with running coach. Odds are good the poster is just searching message boards for threads discussing Joshua Boyle and promoting his/her blog. It’s not the only possibility, but it is the most likely.
