The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.
Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments has begun and Afghan women are experiencing the depths of loneliness,” Arefi said.
“Now, no one is standing beside them to save them from Taliban punishments. The international community has chosen to remain silent in the face of these violations of women’s rights.”
Well sure. There is a reason why people die from lung cancer in the tens of thousands cause of smoking while almost no one dies of botulism. If something is only a little bit bad it sticks around if something is very bad it doesn’t. And no surprise the little bad thing ends up killing more than the very bad thing.
I don’t understand what you are actually trying to say. In your response above, I think you are saying that there is no difference between the Taliban adopting an official stoning state policy and religious conservatives pushing regressive policies in bourgeois democracies. I responded to that saying that well there is a difference, that of degree. Now you are responding by saying that that difference does exist but also the less brutal thing is more dangerous. I am confused.
Degree does matter and counterintuitively sometimes something that is less bad at any given point in time is more bad over a long enough timescale.
Botulism is so bad that no one consumes it. Smoking is just a little bit bad each puff. Smoking ends up killing far more.
What the Taliban is doing is so bad that they are going to burn themselves out. What Christianity does is a little bad. Over enough time the little bad adds up to the worse. The Taliban killed around 6,000 people in New York City, Bush and his evangelical friends crusade killed about a million in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Same goes for abortion. Which is going to end up killing more women (keep in mind the population size difference) over the next 40 years the Taliban stoning a few or the Christians causing woman to die is pregnancy complications?
Your analogy with smoking makes no sense because botulism is not a more severe case of smoking. On the other hand, when it comes to legal and institutional sexism, the Taliban also have erected huge barriers to abortion: they are a more extreme version of the same phenomenon. They are doing the same shit Christo-fascists do but also more, like the stonings. Your claim that they are going to burn themselves out is wishful thinking. Like, I share the wish, but I don’t think it’s as sure a thing as you make it out to be