Is that a joke? You think gays are treated fairly in Afghanistan?
Obama also said “Assad must go”. I don’t see him going anywhere…
I’m hearing this was our base, not theirs. But General John F. Campbell, who served in Afghanistan, is denying that this was ever policy.
purplehorseshoe, I can’t remember the words that were used about the fingernails, I think I blocked them out. The impression I got was that these boys do this damage to themselves in an effort to not react to what is happening to them.
Huh? You think all these children are gay? Or that being raped by a man turns them gay? What possible connection are you seeing, here?
We have no right to interfere in the local customs. We may find them culturally abhorrent, but it is not for us to lecture these people.
Provisions are running low, so I recommend letting the trolls sustain themselves on their own excrement until further notice.
No, I think if the US has no patience for countries (such as Russia), where homosexuality is legal, imagine what the US would do to countries, where homosexual child rape is “part of the culture”.
The US soldiers would certainly NOT be told to tolerate it, that’s for sure.
This just doesn’t sound right in this thread. :smack:
See next quote. Freedom is a Buck O’Five, Mister!
You need to get down to a recruiter, NOW! You’re our Boy!
I have no tolerance for a culture that encourages rape, nor for an individual who labels rape as “custom.”
The idea of turning aside, as a species, as this happens - that is abhorrent to me.
I’m not pretending to be a badass, guyblow.
I’m just saying that my conscience wouldn’t let me just sit there and hear that shit. I’d like to think I would try to stop it from happening. I’m under no illusion that I would be a hero. I’d either end up gutted by the rapists or shipped to a U.S. military prison for shooting said rapists.
Thankfully I’m not in that shitty situation…
OK. So, like I said, what exactly would you do? Outline your plan of attack against an armed facility that you have no jurisdiction over. Don’t tell us that you’d do “something”. Tell us, step by step, what you’d do, Rambo!
I’d rather violate their culture by acting than violate my culture by doing nothing.
You know, there are a lot of objections here, but this seems like a really strange one. You’ve got a rifle. You’re in an urban environment. Find out where the perp usually goes, arrange to get a vantage point from there, zero your rifle to the distance from there to your shooting position, find an excuse to get there a bit before you know the perp will be moving, shoot him, leave.
Of course, this doesn’t change the underlying culture at all, and in addition to drawing a great deal of hellfire on Americans in general and you in specific in no way decreases the odds that someone else will scoop up the kid for their own purposes 5 minutes later, but killing people from surprise when you have access to weapons and relative freedom of movement is a solved problem.
Which, as I understand it, is the point John Mace was trying to make. The collective opinion of the Stalwarts for Moral Action in this thread seems to be that they would (and a hypothetical US soldier should) act to protect the kid(s). So the question isn’t about bringing ‘justice’ to one or more boy-rapers in a culture of boy-raping, it becomes how are you, the hypothetical individual you, gonna intervene in a way that even has a chance at producing a positive outcome?
Putting a bullet through the rapist’s skull doesn’t really help the kid or change the culture. Kidnapping the boy only works if you can get him to a permanent safe place, but now you need accomplices and you or they must retain responsibility for the boy beyond the immediate heroics. And you still haven’t changed the culture or helped the other victims. But you certainly might have helped get a few more GI’s killed (and probably a whole lot more Afghanis; rapists and non-rapists alike). Arresting the officials known or suspected to be perpetrating the sex slavery isn’t logistically feasible or legally justified. So the hypothetical intervention so far has few helpful consequences, and many quite likely dire ones. Because there are no moral vacuums.
So if we absolutely want the boy, and all the other targeted boys (and child brides and whoever else we’re wanting to shield) protected from the same fate, it will take broad and draconian actions from our military to even attempt that. It will require the US to take military control and establish dictatorial US rule over the country.
Anybody think that’s the moral thing to do?
This fucking sucks.
For me, emotionally and morally speaking, my feelings are caught between two immovable moral codes:
a) The U.S. should not be imposing (through the use of force) it’s own sense of “justice” or moral code on other nations.
b) Child rape is wrong. (I can not accept the premise that child rape is “ok” in some circumstances.)
I am glad I am not forced to picked between the two.
Kudos for laying out your plan. But you just said you’d commit premeditated murder, which is a crime at least as bad as rape. And, as xenophon noted, does nothing to help the boy. Again, these boys are being held by officials or the military on a base, not some kid in a living room in Chicago.
The problem of being a powerful armed military is that you still aren’t God and are unfit to act as police, judge, jury, and executioner.
That is why so many wars fought for principled reasons are worse than the crimes which provoked them.
If you mean on some sort of “badness” scale, then sure, whatever. But there’s no connection between condemning nations with anti-gay policies, and what’s happening in Afghanistan, wherein neither the victims nor the perpetrators are specifically homosexuals.
Let’s hope he’s never been a litterbug. 
I’m good with violating their culture. But the point John Mace is making is that one of us, by intervening, might well make a victim’s life even worse than if we’d done nothing. And few of us understand their culture well enough to know when this would or wouldn’t be the case.
I don’t see anyone proposing anything close to a refutation yet. I’d like for there to be a refutation, because like most of us, I’m wired to want to rescue someone who’s having bad shit done to them. But damned if I can come up with anything.
My understanding is that this happened on our base. So, if it’s our base, I assume the men doing the raping were on our base with our permission.
I think it’s very much okay for us to say, “Hey guys, we’ve heard about this custom ya’ll have with forcing sex on young boys. We just need you to know up front, that can’t happen here.”
I mean, what if their culture says it’s okay to force sex on women? Would it be okay for them to then rape our female soldiers and our commanders to tell everyone to look the other way? Or is that different because the boys aren’t Americans?
I’m not suggesting that we have to intervene when and if this happens off of our base, but sorry, our house, our rules. You don’t order our soldiers to ignore this. Fuck, can you imagine the damage that would do?
If it wasn’t our base, you remove our people, you don’t leave them there to have to witness this abuse and be unable to do anything about it out of respect for culture.
Seems more reasonable to me.