From: muh@physics1 (Yury M. Mukharsky)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.soviet
Subject: Re: Shafarevich and National Academy
Date: 6 Sep 1992 06:54:48 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: physics1.berkeley.edu

>
>*Police* organizations in America estimate that 25% of Ameriican women
>are victims of domestic violence that is bad enough to require law enforcement
>intervention. This is the *largest* cause of serious injury to women,

Is that true? You mean every 4-th woman here is beaten by her husband?
You probably know better but it just seems unbelivable to me. Well,
I do not closely know all strata of American society, but from maybe
100 Americans I do not know any one whom I can imagine beating or beiing
beaten. 

Also this example just show that definition of Holocaust is unapplicable
here, I do not know how it was 20-30 years ago, but from same police
report it looks, like society (police) IS defending women from individuals.

>
>If someone is not regarded by society as being a full human member of that
>society, but rather an object with diminished capacity for human feelings,
>rational thought, creative impulses and etc, then members of that society
>who otherwise consider themselves against "cruelty" and who are normally
>capable of "kind" and "humanistic" behavior then have implicit permission
>to beat, torture, imprison, rape, burn, and otherwise kill said individual.

That is not true. I consider most people in asylums as people with
diminishing capacity for rational thought ... I can name couple of
other groups. That does not gives me internal permision to do any of
those acts to them. I think that this is important. Apparently most
people think about some other people as about lesser kind (implied
difference may vary). That is, was and will be. The education (I actually
mean not "obrazovanie" but "vospitanie") probably should supress that
(i'm not sure), but it definetely should much more supress any impulse
to violence.

>How do you think it feels for me to look in the newspapers every day and
>read about another five year old girl found raped and dead in a garbage
>can? What about when my mother called the police when my father was

Sorry, but I can not help being sarcastic here. Do you really mean
that every day at least one youngster is raped and killed. Am I 
really that bad informed? Or you just keep reading one newspaper
all the time?

>Ultimately every atrocity is committed by an "individual." To me, when
>the Republican Party sends out a message that they have the right to
>suggest that my deciding to have an intellectual career is ruining
>the "family values" of the nation, then they are sending out the message
>that women are not full human beings with the natural right to dignity
>and self-determination. So they are implicitly condoing, aiding and abetting

Well, I may well be misinformed there, but I do not think they will
say this even if they think it. They would probably say that you will
be better off if you stick to motherhood, than to intellectual career
and it is not proved that they are wrong, but if you decided for career, go
ahead. It is like difference between banning banjee jumping and not
encouraging it.

Yury

Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.soviet