Sure. If mothers of terrorists often made public pronouncements like her and there was no evidence of batshit craziness before the attack there wouldn’t be a Pit Thread about her.
However.
“Failed mother”? Dafuq? I can see Pitting Tsarnaeva for any nutso opinions of her own that she may have (although given the combination of family trauma and media circus that is currently playing out here, I’m going to give it a while longer before I’m confident that I know what she really says or thinks about anything).
But calling her a “failed mother” because her sons became violent fanatics after reaching adulthood? Really? Are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Cambridge Rindge and Latin School instructors also “failed teachers” on that account? His wrestling coach?
Why exactly are we supposed to believe that it’s a mother’s, or anybody else’s, job to determine the moral choices of an autonomous, fully functioning adult? Or that they deserve to be written off as a “failure” if said adult chooses a wrong path in life?
Geez. I guess we believe in the personal responsibility of the individual right up until we have an opportunity to blame the individual’s mommy, huh?
Yes, a failed mother, for two reasons. One is that she instilled in them a lack of respect for life that they would blow up innocent people and her actions afterwards, seeking to deny or ignore the reality of their behavior. It is the combination of these two factors that lead me to my conclusion. Do you think she is not a failure as a mother? Hell, I think she is a failure as a human being to boot.
You guys are missing a wonderful opportunity here. Let’s just say it involves magellan01’s choices on this board.
Wow. So whenever an adult does something wrong, we can assume that their mother is to blame for having “instilled” something in them that resulted in the wrong behavior? Personal responsibility of the individual be damned?
No, I do not automatically consider Tsarnaeva a “failed” mother, or her husband a “failed” father, or her sons’ teachers “failed” teachers, or her elder son’s widow a “failed” wife, or any other family member or associate a failure simply because her two adult sons voluntarily chose to plan and carry out a heinous crime.
And I had no idea that anybody would think that such blame-shifting was appropriate. Maybe I need to put an official disclaimer on my office door, saying that it is not my job as a faculty member to guarantee that my students do not turn out to be bad people, and that if they do turn out to be bad people I cannot be held responsible for “instilling” badness in them. (I feel guilty enough already just when some of them don’t manage to learn calculus properly, no matter how hard I try and how hard they don’t.)
Not that this sort of blame-shifting might not be convenient in other contexts, though. For example, I might have to hold myself responsible for staying up too late and wasting time on the SDMB, if it hadn’t been shown that it’s my mother’s fault for “instilling” in me an insufficient conscientiousness about sleep schedules. :mad: DAMMIT MOM.
I can only assume that you didn’t understand what I was saying. It is not merely that her sons did what they did. It is that PLUS her protestations afterwards that lead me to my conclusion. So, as I mentioned before, and you for some reason chose to ignore, it’s the combination of the two things. Not just the barbaric actions themselves.
<growly voice>
magellan01! You have **failed **this message board!
No, the son’s are STILL responsible for their shitty actions. But it’s not there is some law of conservation of blame. You can share it.
If she taught them all kinds of crazy shit and praised jihads and that its okay to kill innocents for no good reason and the like, then yes she was a damn shitty mother. And I hope they get her legally for egging the kids on if thats what happened.
Now, if she was pretty much the opposite of that and the son’s still did what they did, then yeah mom’s pretty much blameless and whatcha go do?
Or are you saying those two version of mom are the same quality wise?
Thats just fucking stupid.
Well put.
In all probability every muslim has talked to his or her children about jihad on multiple occasions. I’d need to know more about what they were really discussing before I could attach any significance to this news item.
That her sons did what they did doesn’t make her a “failed mother”. It’s part of a parent’s job to try to teach their kids good morals in childhood, but it is not a parent’s job to ensure that their adult children don’t make bad moral choices on their own.
That she expressed some irrational and/or assholish views in media reports after the bombing also doesn’t make her a “failed mother”. To be somewhat irrational and/or something of an asshole may make you an unpleasant person in some respects, but it doesn’t automatically make you a “failed parent”, any more than it makes you a plagiarist or a bank robber or an Internet troll.
So AFAICT your conclusion is pretty much flat wrong on both counts. You appear to be just indulging in some classically irrational “blame-the-mommy” finger-pointing against a woman who, whatever her personal flaws, has not so far been shown to have any actual responsibility for or complicity in her adult sons’ evil actions.
If Tsarnaeva was actually advocating violence and in fact “egging her kids on” to commit violence, then of course she was a shitty mother, not to mention a horrible human being and probably some kind of criminal accessory to terrorist conspiracy.
So far, though, we have absolutely no evidence that she did anything of the sort. Which is why magellan01 is full of shit in pre-emptively declaring her to be a “failed mother” without knowing what kind of mother she actually was.
What the hell are people thinking? Look, if you raise two, not just one, but TWO sons who think it may be justified to blow up innocent people, you are an utter failure as a parent. Both parents here failed spectacularly.
Anyways, fuck that bitch. She thought America would keep her sons safe, or whatever? She lived here, she speaks English, WTF? She never saw the six o’clock news? She didn’t think there’s bad people everywhere?
She knew her kids, at least the older one, had issues. So what, she leaves them here and leaves the country? Oh, well I guess her legal responsibility was over once they turned 18, so she washed her hands of them. Now she’s bawlin about America, boo-hoo, her sons, boo-hoo. If she cared so much about her sons she would not have left them but taken them with her. What normal parent separates the family this way? And for what? It would be unthinkable to most parents to leave their family behind.
Personally, I think she instigated the whole thing and its all crocodile tears. Her comments are not consistent with being sad that she raised killers. Her comments reflect ANGER that we dared to call them terrorists, which, they are (were :)).
She cries like she’s a victim, she’s a monster.
:dubious: Oh, so having just one son who murders innocent people gets you off the hook for utter parenting failure? Well, that’s good news for the mothers of, say, Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik, isn’t it?
But wait! It so happens that neither McVeigh nor Breivik had a brother at all! Perhaps if the parents of either of them had gone on to have another son, the second son would have been persuaded to join in the terrorist killings, and the mother in question would also have qualified as “an utter failure as a parent”.
The message is clear: Mothers, insure yourselves against utter parenting failure by NEVER HAVING MORE THAN ONE SON in the first place.
[QUOTE=OldnCrinkly]
Personally, I think she instigated the whole thing and its all crocodile tears.
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If Tsarnaeva did indeed “instigate the whole thing”, then she’s a cold-blooded terrorist who’s committed a heinous crime, plain and simple, and parenting failure is arguably the least of her problems.
But it’s customary to base such an assessment on stuff like, you know, actual evidence of criminal conduct.
This shit gets old. In all discussions of this nature. Whenever some random jackass does (or appears to have done) something bad of course people are gonna talk about how bad it was or if it was really bad or what the punishment should be.
You did notice the word IF in my post right? Do you know what IF means?
I think anybody here with a brain is willing to admit to possibilty that she wasn’t a terrorist training mom. But its kinda not looking particularly good for her now. At the very least June Cleaver she was not.
Nobody here is advocating actually hanging her from the nearest tree right now without some investigation to get the facts.
But you stupid assed shtick of " my retarded point of her not being a bad mom is valid because she might not actually be one because all the facts aren’t in yet" is just assinine.
And for that matter, if the facts aren’t in yet why are you even hear discussing it as your premise seems to be we can’t discuss these things till they are?
I feel so sorry for the poor failed mothers of magellan and billfish.
Also, for the failed mother of this piece of printer paper that gave me a paper cut half an hour ago.
This is some deeply stupid shit here, partner. How about this, lets first drop all this persuaded to join bullshit. Does it matter whose idea it was? No, of course not, that is irrelevant. They both did it. Both of them together. Why? Because their parents did not instill in either of them that murdering innocent people is wrong. Neither one of them passed on the opportunity. Don’t let the younger one off so easy. Also, nice bit of sexism you have going on here. I said both parents were failures, why do you assume its only the mother?
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If Tsarnaeva did indeed “instigate the whole thing”, then she’s a cold-blooded terrorist who’s committed a heinous crime, plain and simple, and parenting failure is arguably the least of her problems.
[/QUOTE]
I will disagree with this. I am a mother. I consider that to be the most important role in my life, with wife being a very distant second. Here, in America, we don’t (shouldn’t) leave it to society to take care of our family. Becoming a parent comes with a huge responsibility. If any of my children ever think its cool to become murderers it would be my greatest failure. I believe most non-shitty parents would endure endless hardship smilingly if doing so were necessary to prevent their children being inhuman monsters.
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But it’s customary to base such an assessment on stuff like, you know, actual evidence of criminal conduct.
[/QUOTE]
{looks around}No, I’m right, this is the pit. I think you’re looking for a courtroom, find a GPS to help. Perhaps it might also aid you in finding a clue?
Alternatively, perhaps it is just a coincidence that two young men, both raised by the same parents, both become sadistic killers. Perhaps their upbringing has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Is that your theory? I think that is not probable.
Of course it’s not at all accurate.
Newcomer is a mental defective who thinks that The Mossad was behind/associated with 9/11.
Your poor failed mother who didn’t instill empathy nor critical thinking skills in you.