No means no, guys

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/17/india.beheading.woman.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Powerban!

Was he a juggalo?

He'd been stalking her for three months? He's lucky she waited this long.

Stories like this seem so incredibly unreal to me. Mortal danger is so far removed from my life, particularly the kind of personal, intimate danger implied by rolling directly up on someone and stabbing/decapitating them, that stories like this make me react with incredulity and befuddlement.

I thought you lived in Boston proper?? (My .xls might be years out of date) But
how can you live in a major American city and presume such?

I think he rolled up on HER it sounds like, but the decapitation part stands, yeah.

Was just thinking about this last night for some reason and I think (is this retardedly obv?) that everyone is a killer, they just don't know yet what the trigger will be. I'm sure I'm the last person the party, and the dumbest, on the subject, so YMMV.

uh?

'Everyone is a meat-eater, they just haven't all quit being vegetarians yet'

'Everyone is married, they just don't know yet to whom'

'Everyone is a bus driver, it'll just take some time for all of us to pass the relevant driving test'

Okay, I was being lazy w/ my phrasing. Everyone has the capacity to kill, is that better? Whatevs, I feel like on ILX this will be preaching to the much-more-well-read-on-this-subject-than-I so never mind.

I kill but I'm not a killer

I thought you lived in Boston proper??

Haha just oustide. I've walked by the aftermath of outbursts of violence but it's always been in a sphere removed from my own; either kids messing with other kids or family members messing with each other, etc. The violence I see here more often than not is contained within groups of people who know each other; I am not saying assaults from strangers don't exist but my impression is that statistically speaking it's much more likely around here that you're going to be attacked by someone you know.

At any rate, getting shot by someone isn't nearly as... intimate (for lack of a better word) as decapitation! It's not like you can cut off someone's head from a distance unless you're a videogame character.

It's not the capacity to simply kill that gets me with this woman so much as the capacity to straight up decapitate a dude and go into the streets waving his head around by the hair. (Though Laurel's bringing up an interesting subject, I hope there really are people in here who are knowledgeable re: all that...)

where do u live dan - i feel like ive asked u this before - summerville maybe

ding ding ding

idk i don't think this woman's exhibited a particularly strange capacity for anything. dude crept up on her and tried to attack her while she had a fucking sickle in her hands, in these circumstances it's unsurprising that instinctive self-defence would lead to decapitation.

I don't know, I just have this feeling that when you're threatened, when your nerves are stretched and stretched so much that it starts being normal to be in danger like that, and there's a clearly guilty party like that guy (questions of unknown backstory and cultural relativism etc etc aside), killing the source of the threat just becomes the pragmatic thing to do. Better him than me, y'know, especially since I just want to harvest this grain, and he wants to rape me and hide the body.

DING! YAY!

It's a pity we can't exact similar justice on certain stalkers on ILx...

...and now the abstract has moved to the creepy. Thanks, Marcello.

http://soccerlens.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/alisher-usmanov.jpg

in these circumstances it's unsurprising that instinctive self-defence would lead to decapitation.

Yes, because it's easy to decapitate someone with a sickle.

Yeah, I'm not trying to downplay that this was a desperate act on the woman's part, I don't have some mistaken idea that you can cut through the vertebrae in one swell foop or anything, and there was almost definitely some very messy hacking involved. But I don't think the divide between you or me and someone who could defend with lethal force under certain circumstances is very big.

india is easily the fucking craziest place in the world

pretty sure a sickle would make decapitation relatively easy

o rly? Decapitation reported on Manitoba bus

xpost

At least the woman in India had good reason. She should get the Nobel Prize.

I agree with Laurel that one could easily have a DESIRE to commit extreme violence in angry self-defence. I am not so sure that one would necessarily have the physical ABILITY to realize this desire successfully.

yes really india is the fucking craziest place - not just cause of this decapitation

We need a bit more of this sort of thing in Britain, especially in town centres at night. That'll put "laddism" in its place.

I don't think anyone would blink about this story if the woman had merely stabbed and killed the guy; it's the "chopped off his head and paraded through the streets waving it around" part that I hope everyone can agree is perhaps a tad on the "o_O" side of human experience.

Don't know what o-O means but I say good for her. About time someone stood up and made a non-futile gesture.

Don't know what o-O means but I say good for her. About time someone stood up and made a non-futile gesture.

― A. FIND MISSING LINK B. PUT IT TOGETHER C. BANG! (Marcello Carlin), Friday, October 17, 2008 9:57 AM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark

yah fuck these guys

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/images/startrek-borg.jpg

maybe the man offered to give her head and she misunderstood

it's rather important when you approach a girl, to keep a cool head on.

http://tinyurl.com/5gr9xs

1) I don't care, decapitation is ALWAYS shocking. 2) Parading a head while soaked is fucking weird. There's some kinda mental flip here beyond simple self defense.

Oh, I missed this:

I don't think anyone would blink about this story if the woman had merely stabbed and killed the guy; it's the "chopped off his head and paraded through the streets waving it around" part that I hope everyone can agree is perhaps a tad on the "o_O" side of human experience.

― Like sicking a little bit of water into my mouth (HI DERE), Friday, October 17, 2008 2:55 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

"soaked in blood" that should say

Meanwhile in Britain...

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/salome-john-baptist-head.jpg

Chu, you are always so innocently deadpan!

Has anyone experienced the frustration and stress and fear and bittenress of being stalked and threatened for a significant period of time, with no recourse or help from anywhere? OK I haven't but it must suck.

on the decapitation specifically...this is the third "paraded the head around" story in the last few months (greyhound bus psycho, guy in greece). i recognize the statistical insignificance of that and the uselessness of anecdotes. otoh, i don't remember hearing about any decapitations for years and years. so even though i know this could just be a factor of instant worldwide media, which turns any bad thing anywhere into instant news everywhere. but i can't help wondering what effect the widespread publicity given to al qaeda/jihadist beheadings in the last 7 years has had in terms of planting it somewhere in our brains as something that happens. not that exposure to violent ideas necessarily encourages violence, but that maybe the particular forms violence takes can be influenced?

anyway. this is at least the least disturbing beheading story of the year.

(hmm messed up some syntax there. but you get the idea.)

Yeah, I actually think this one is kind of awesome. It seems sort of like a big "Don't fuck with me" sign in a society where I'm guessing women have somewhat limited recourse against these sorts of things.

http://imovies4you.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/bandit-queen.jpg

cutting off someones head and parading it around a village is imo never ok

yeah i think we have to throw caution to the wind and just make a stand on that

Perhaps all the people who are in favour of what the woman did are also in favour of capital punishment.

But perhaps not, because there is one difference - what she did was a practical action, which stopped her from being assaulted, whereas legal capital punishment is retrospective and does not serve to prevent a crime that is about to take place.

you are misunderstanding my use of the word "we," dude (hint: it does not mean "ILX")

>> but because mr. cool is psychoanalyzing across cultures and situations with weird assurance here.

So otm, I mean you can talk abt the "gendered components" until you're blue in the face, but why ignore the cultural? Let's see, before we project our modern American values of sanity onto a non-urbanized village society, aside from Chinnamasta can we count the number of goddesses that specifically carry SCYTHES as part of their iconography? I'm counting Amba, Kali, Tara, other aspects of Durga, and I'm sure there are some Tantric ones I'm forgetting...furthermore, how many myths are there, such as in the case of Mahishasura, where these goddesses had to sever the heads of the demons they were combating, to ensure that they were dead (mere stabbing didn't work!)? If the people you're praying to are decapitating would it seem that barbaric to you to do so?

Also horesehoe thru her Jaipur anecdotes is so right: men there can and do get away with a lot more, and sadly, the woman frequently IS still blamed in Indian villages (not cities) of being "impure" or guilty of attracting undue attention. Furthermore, I hate to conjecture like this, but if she HAD "paraded" the head around I wouldn't doubt that the guy was alone in harassing her, without any of his bros by his side in past circumstances. Not that this is a good way of practicing deterrence, but in a way if it can scare others, why not? The woman was also being BITTEN on her face and neck like a VAMPIRE had attacked her - why are we all forgetting that - and she had been targeted by him for months...and now it's debatable whether there was any "parading" in the first place

When you're growing up in a culture in which the only powerful images of femininity to you are warrior goddesses, and you're being raped, assaulted, attacked and bitten, how rationally and in a "don't-want-to-appear-sociopathic-to-my-Western-audiences!" way are you going to react? Whoa, hope I ddn't go off the barbarism charts!

Plus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_teasing

Eve teasing is a euphemism used in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan for sexual harassment or molestation of women by men. Considered a growing problem throughout the subcontinent, eve teasing ranges in severity from sexually suggestive remarks to outright groping. Some guidebooks to the region warn female tourists that eve teasing may be avoided by wearing conservative clothing, though eve teasing is reported both by Indian women and by conservatively-dressed foreign women.

In recent years the Indian government has made some efforts to round up eve teasers. The deployment of plainclothed female police officers for the purpose has been particularly effective ([1] ) The death of a female student (Sarika Shah [2]) in Chennai in 1998, caused by Eve teasing, brought some tough laws to counter the problem in South India. After this case, there has been about half-a-dozen reports of suicide that have been attributed to pressures caused by Eve Teasing. Many other cases go unreported for fear of reprisals and exposure to public shame.

you are misunderstanding my use of the word "we," dude (hint: it does not mean "ILX")

― nabisco, Friday, October 17, 2008 5:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

who then society - i shouldnt speculate or be curious abt this womans mental health because i should be dedicating all my powers towards doing something important - in that case 1st step get off ilx immediately!

zing set up^

i guess i've already played all the other cards; i'll add this about the jaipur anecdote: i am indian american and was wearing loose indian clothing when the ass-slapping happened. that was one of many incidents and probably not the most egregious one. (no one tried to rape us; i'm not suggesting an equivalence between my experience and this woman's). it was my (again, totally anecdotal) observation that indian women got a lot more shit + harrassment than white female tourists did and that it was just a feature of their daily lives.

Sickle i meant, not scythe. Scythe is so European Death!

You weren't "speculating" or "being curious," ya jackass -- you were convinced that she was "completely insane" while reasonable people argued back that who knows, anything's possible, but it doesn't exactly seem necessary here. People don't pretend you were on the opposite side of an argument from less than an hour ago.

Ok, done now.

I'm not pro-capital punishment, but I think the idea behind it as a deterrent is that it's meant to deter rational actors, not crazy people. I mean, for all but the most compulsive and delusional criminals, there's usually something that can get them to stop, at least temporarily; many serial killers have stopped for years, even decades, if they think they're at risk of being caught.

It's true that there are a certain number of crazy people (or people made crazy by a particular situation) that are going to do their thing no matter what. But I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that there's a certain amount of crime that can be deterred by something, because some of the people perpetrating it are rational (if amoral) actors who don't want more than a certain amount of risk to themselves. That's an entirely different argument than ascribing deterrence to a particular thing, whether it's capital punishment, women who defend themselves more often & more violently, or whatever.

Maybe it's not so much an issue of whether the men in the village are deterred, as whether the women start to think of violent self-defense as a real possibility.

u cannot call me a jackass and just be done - and besides you havent even touched on the inanity of yr importantness of tasks at hand scale

and i am quite certain anyone who parades a human head around in public is insane - sorry if i used a reasonable person word like speculate

btw turns out she prolly didn't actually parade the head around btw see second version of article supra

u cannot call me a jackass and just be done

Uh actually he can, are you new to the internets? This is the classic "insult-ditch" strategem.

obv the entire argument is predicated on the assertions in the 1st article - and the second one is just her denying it

no dan nabsico is a reasonable person he wouldnt do that

but she's obviously crazy so why should we believe her denials anyway

I mean she sounds completely batshit

hey guys what is going on in this thread

lol

"I did not carry around a head! That's a lie!"
"Then what is that in your hand?"
"... Ah, um... a papaya?"

this thread should have been locked after dan perry's eminently reasonable post about how this incident reveals some sad things that need to be addressed, if only for my own mental health.

"He tried to rape me and I hit back with the grass-cutting weapon to save my honour,"

lots of crazy/not crazy info there - certainly more than say someone carrying a severed head around would give you

i mean the thread should have been locked for my own mental health, not that sexual harrassment in India or ignorance about mental health should end for my own mental health.

Does a papaya grow in India?

shit I think I meant mango

Haha of course I'm "done," dude, you're not arguing from a consistent position or doing anything much other than repeating certain claims without justification ... I mean, there doesn't seem much point. I think you're being stubbornly super-wrong to an extent that's no longer worth arguing with, but whatever, that's okay.

i am not going to bother reading this entire thing but basically i am picking up that we cannot have prejudice against enthuiastic decapitators because they may very well be sane?? is that it

you know i think everyone can agree that lots needs to be done to protect people from being treated horribly by other people

the reason we are talking abt this incident is because something somewhat strange happened

that is also otm

"He tried to rape me and I hit back with the grass-cutting weapon to save my honour,"

I just wanted to point out that there is actually nothing the slightest bit crazy in this sentence. I can't tell from jhos's post whether he was making this point or not.

wtf nabisco find me one thing argument i made that wasnt basically i think this parading of heads is insane and horrible

god forbid some woman goes into some sort of sexual-trauma PTSD fugue state and wreak some double-reverse gorgon-style vengeance, but i wouldn't go so far as to qualify her state of mind as "sane"

I apologize for even beginning to argue with anyone on a thread that mostly calls for continual restatement of stuff most of us would probably agree on.

p.s. i don't imagine a "grass cutting weapon" is a close-quarters type of weapon

http://www.yagya.in/durga10.jpg

look even the sickle has an EYE so it can see what it's doing

http://www.funmunch.com/events/durga_puja/wallpapers/durga_puja_wallpapers_5_800x600.jpg

i am not going to bother reading this entire thing but basically i am picking up that we cannot have prejudice against enthuiastic decapitators because they may very well be sane?? is that it

haha not really

one side: This is really horrible. How do you roll through town waving around a head?

the other side: This is really horrible. At least she took down that rapist hardcore DAMMMNNN

The friction between the second halves of those statements caused this thread, with a spectrum of thought cascading between them that largely dissipated when a second report claiming the first report to be bogus came out, at which point it turned into "lol fake" vs "SHE LYIN', JUDGE JUDY!"

Also, said "grass cutting weapon" was a sickle, which by definition is a close-quarters weapon in that you can't really reach past the length of your arm with it.

(yes my post is grossly reductionist, I am not c/p-ing the whole thread for elmo)

Even if she did walk some distance with the head, which is all you could conclude even from the first article, she could just as easily have done so in a state of shock. There word "parades" never comes up except in the sensationalist headline, nor does it ever say that she waved the head or shoved it in peoples' faces or gloated or anything like that. The headline also doesn't mention the fact that she was defending herself against rape, and it was that kind of framing of the issue that pissed me off in the first place.

I mean it's true that we're talking about this "because something strange happened," but it's also true that we're talking about this because a newswriter and a headline writer figured out how to hone in on what would get us talking about this rather than what was necessarily most important and/or true.

Original article basically = Crazy Bitch Parades Bloody Head Around WTF?

Which is the article's fault, not any ILXor's

^^^^^ I agree with this as well, which is why I kept talking in terms of "how do you stop this" rather than "is she crazy".

we have about a dozen sentences to parse here, many of them translated.

lol

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/82/Blow-Up_DVD.jpg/200px-Blow-Up_DVD.jpg

can ilx admit to itself that its titillated by the bizarre nature of this case

???

hey jhosea sorry for making you the target of my library-madness-induced indignant anger before.

aw im sorry too im sure i was at least twice as offensive

its important to me that we figure out who is right here

― max, Friday, 17 October 2008 18:52 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― Carrie Bradshaw Layfield (The stickman from the hilarious 'xkcd' comics), Friday, October 17, 2008 4:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

that said i think i p much agree w/lauren here, even tho i am a misogynist pig - there's nothing wrong with just being a lil delighted by this on a visceral level, like when yr timothy mcveighs are executed - doesn't accomplish anything but it feels good to think abt~

car means car, Ken?

like when yr timothy mcveighs are executed - doesn't accomplish anything but it feels good to think abt~

Well, catharsis is an accomplishment, yes? Providing relief to the victim?

An 11-year-old girl was set on fire by a relative in India's northern city of Jaipur for wearing lipstick and being "inappropriately dressed", media reports said today.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/indian-girl-set-ablaze-for-wearing-lipstick--reports-20081019-53s7.html

Wonder if the world will ever get word of what happened to her. I hope she's okay.

To this woman I say, "You go girl!"

― cameron carr