Deat by Stoning Sentence Upheld in Nigeria

Amina Lawal, a 30-year old Nigerian woman, has lost an appeal against her sentence of death by stoning (for the crime of adultery, under Shar'ia Islamic law).


Current info., related links, and an appeal for help here:


http://www.mertonai.org/amina/


more detailed background info. available here:


http://www.mertonai.org/amina/amina.asp

B-Man, have any idea just how brutal it would get if men in this culture had to fight over their wives? Okay, so we let the wives follow their noses, and entrust the men to enforce the reproductive pecking order in the clan? Talk about barbaric! One way or another, the vaginas will be divided up (or not), and this is the least bloody way - to nuke it at the roots.


Women up for grabs are the number-one source of male-on-male violence. Married women are the number-one source of cooperative, hard-working males. Put differently, someone is going to die if Man X get's more or less than one woman. The difference between a hot girl and an ugly girl is much smaller than the difference between zero girls and a hundred girls and, fortunately, God made us prone to falling in love with ugly girls.


eLROY

A simple yes or no will suffice, since I couldn't understand your post above.


Thank you.

The most twisted thing of all, would be if they turned their moral code and justice system over to strangers on the Internet. I am not doing the stoning of this woman. I am not sitting on the jury, or in judgement of her in any way! I would say that, yes, I would prefer this woman be stoned over her fate, and the fate of her people, being turned over to strangers on the Internet who pay no price for being wrong.


And so far as not understanding my post, there are many ways for the strong, for instance, to keep women from breeding with the weak. One is to let the women go around tempting men, and then killing whoever goes for it. Another, is to funnel women into a force for good. Apparently, there are no pleasant alternatives. To assume our morals would work in their setting, is to assume a fish can walk on land.


This, in a way, is related to my discussion in Psychology, about how people decide what to "hope" for. In fact, I am "in favor" of this woman, and all her infinite offspring and cousins, living well-fed in glass castles in paradise for all eternity. Are you, Andy, in favor of this woman NOT living in paradise? A simple yes or no will suffice /images/wink.gif


eLROY

Her crime was NOT cheating on her husband because she was UNMARRIED at the time. Her crime was merely bearing a child out of wedlock.

You seem to think that any moral code which the ruling power happens to establish is OK, and that nobody has any business interfering. I say nonsense. Your line of reasoning would also lead to the conclusion that the moral code the Nazis established was OK for Germany, and if they had not attacked countries outside of their own, nobody would have had any business interfering.

I don't know jack about the case, and I would be ashamed of myself if I did. What all your second-guessing implies, is that someone with a brain as big as you or Andy, could outthink 100's of years of the evolution of a moral culture inside of a few minutes. If survival of the fittest culture in the laboratory of history produces one criminal-justice system, and your back-of-the-hand calculation - which includes only the cost to the woman of losing her life and no other costs or benefits - produces another, only an arrogant person would assume that, because his equally-arrogant and remote friend agrees with him, that he must be right and history must be wrong.


The reality is, there is nothing productive that can come of your worrying about this much less interfering. It is not, to my knowledge, as if this woman's plight has been created by some utopian lamebrain like you coming in and designing a doomed system. Rather, I can only assume that, this justice system is some product of a historical evolution in their setting, and that any casual efforts on your part to meddle are equivalent barroom genetic engineering. Are you honestly confident that, by dissolving and undermining their justice system from 1,000 miles away, you can improve their social outcome?


Would you really replace a system of morals with your own judgement or even worse, your feelings? Morals, in fact, are created specifically because people have feelings, which often lead them to socially destructive activities. Are we to introduce a new crime, undermining their legal system itself, by introducing your feelings into the outcome now? What if I am full of hate and want her to die? Do my feelings count? If not, it can only be because feelings are measured against historic moral norms, not vice versa.


eLROY

Either individuals are sovereign, or they are not. You seem to be saying, in this case, that they are not, yet your other posts seem to indicate otherwise. Can you explain the apparent inconsistency?


BR

I asked you a question because I didn't understand your post. I don't see anything sick and bizarre about that.


"To assume our morals would work in their setting, is to assume a fish can walk on land."


-Are there not any morals that are (or should be) universal? I'm not sitting in judgment of her either; but when we hear of a person about to be stoned for committing adultery, or homicide bombers killing women and children, or "freedom fighters" massacring villagers, or Communists controlling every aspect of peoples' lives for a higher good, are we expected to say, well, that's their morality, we shouldn't impose ours on them?


"I am "in favor" of this woman, and all her infinite offspring and cousins, living well-fed in glass castles in paradise for all eternity. Are you, Andy, in favor of this woman NOT living in paradise? A simple yes or no will suffice"


-Well, the choice is not between paradise and stoning; the choice is between stoning and not stoning. As for the simple yes or no, you got me there, that was a silly request I made.


"I would prefer this woman be stoned over her fate, and the fate of her people, being turned over to strangers on the Internet who pay no price for being wrong."


-What about if it was 10 women; 100; 100,000? What if there was a society whose moral code dictated that all women over age 50 be stoned because, no longer able to get pregnant, they are useless and evil?

. . . M only gets accused of arrogance, and I got sickness and bizarritude?

No conscious person can "establish" anything but an upheaval of a moral code. That is precisely the difference between morals and non-morals, is that morals form spontaneously by the intention of no conscious actor. All Adolf Hitler promised was to in fact cast off the morals of a system of private property, individual rights, and trade, and return to the system of Germanic clans roaming the forest!


In fact, the three sources of human action being basically reason, morals, and instinct, what Adolf Hitler appealed to was mostly instinct - which is the antithesis of morals. Morals are designed to shape non-instinctive behavior, but behavior which no single individual, in a single lifetime, no matter how smart, can come to appreciate the macro or catallactic consequences of.


Let me reiterate, it is precisely the conscious establishment of a social code or system, by appealing to instinct and reason, that must be fought tooth and nail if we are to be saved from barbarism. Human instinct is immoral. Human reason cannot design morals or foresee their consequences. Morals cannot be sold politically, as they are unpopular, often painful "shalt nots," constraining the natural inclinations of human beings.


Don't you understand, M, the difference between a spontaneous order or "cosmos" and a contrivance of human design, or a "taxis?" Do you really think some politician ran on the platform that, for the first time in history, they were going to stone women to death, and he won? Quite the opposite, I think anytime anybody tries to establish, rather than preserve or defend a moral code, Christian morals may obligate me to intervene to save lives from people like Pol Pot.


No ruling power has ever established a moral code. The primary role of government can mainly only be to enforce the private property moral which, along with trade and specialization, preceded all forms of government administration, or interference, by many years. Morals preceded government. Trade preceded government. Justice preceded government. Government is historically a force at odds with morals and the growth of the spontaneous social order.


Don't your realize, M, that governments which have attempted to invent morals - to design utopias in effect - have always failed? Don't you realize that, in the United States, our system of Judaeo-Christian morals, private property, and trade preceded the formation of our central government, and that the government was established only to defend the preexisting moral system, to preserve our non-feudal "anarchy?"


When the feudal aristocracy - which system actually fed more people than the preceding clan or tribe system - began to dissolve in favor or bourgeois trade economies, people living at the time assumed the world would devolve into chaos if an alternative order wasn't planned. The Physiocrats, of course, recognized this wasn't true. But the funny part was that what alternative systems people could sell were even more limited than what they could design, and all such "novel" systems put forth were merely instinctive regressions to tribal or collective values.


But, to be sure, Nazism was a revolt of instinct against morals, and fed by reason in the form of the shortsighted economic doctrine - and all economic doctrines of human design are shortsighted - laid out in Mein Kampf. So when some utopian idealist comes along with the idea of discarding historically-evolved morals for what is in his heart, I can expect the ovens, the high walls, and the starvation of millions, is soon to follow.


Wasn't it Pope Clement who, in fact, read the teachings of the Apostle Paul - which out of a million alternative teachings history had sorted and filtered and delivered to him - to say the Jews should be spared from instinctive hatred and persecution? Didn't history select the teachings of Jesus to be elevated? Has not history elevated, and put its stamp of approval on this stoning? Or was it, in fact, some politician hijacking and perverting existing morals to some new end?


Because just as ordinary chemicals can be mixed to create an explosion, so too can ordinary morals be manipulated to perpetuate an immoral and evil state...


eLROY

Seriously, Andy, taking the cosmic perspective is one of the most dangerous things in history. A good example is when somebody says, in regard to poor people who need to learn to work, "Can we take a man who has spent his life in a wheelchair, put him at the starting line, and expect him to compete in a 100-yard dash?"


The flaw in this thinking is the use of the word "we," as if someone will have have the intelligence, the local information, or the local power, to "put" people at a starting line, or anywhere else. The cosmic perspective is the utopian medical perspective, which assumes their is more we can of than set a broken bone, and count on the cells to heal themselves.


Then, on the other hand, I don't think anybody is actually silly enough to think God bothers himself with such minutia as your urine splashing on the toilet seat. And yet, people think a popular moral majority is capable of managing the living cells of societies on a local and individual basis!


There is, and can be no such thing, as "social justice." And the reason why is very simple and mechanical, though it escapes me just now.


eLROY

Without these shalt nots, the catallaxy would disintegrate, and we would all starve. Shalt nots are what make trade, division of labor, the allocation of capital, and the economization of knowledge in the face of geographic friction feasible. Why? Mainly, because quantities in the natural world don't talk. So the best way to dissipate entropy in the form of variations betweens locations in the universe is to attach quantities to local individuals, who can coordinate activities, in the form of private property.


eLROY

I find it unlikely that a society which counts on the slaughter of thousands of women for its survival could actually exist. Then again, I guess it could somehow resemble some kind of ant colony.


Then again, just as God apparently reintroduced the extinct sabre-tooth tiger several times thoughout history as entropy in the food chain warranted, so too have witch trials of barren widows, in order to free up idle farmland, sprung up multiple independent times in the history of nations with property rights.


So far as suicide bombers, that is nobody's morals, that is a recent contrivance or mutation, not an evolved moral code of any society that has survived. And it will soon be gone. If, however, the Palestinians prevail and procreate, spawning future homicide bombers, who am I to say it would have been better for them to let their entire civilization vanish than to have a few members of the immediate generation vanish?


It is my understanding that individual suicide was, in fact, an evolved moral in the Japanese islands (as well as an instinct, perhaps, in pods of whales). I actually developed a fairly convincing theory as to how this came to be, but I don't remember it off the top of my head. It had something to do with... gosh, I don't remember.


Finally, so far as the society where old people are stoned, I could only assume it would have breakaway sects that let them live. If the ones who let them live didn't starve, they would quickly take over. If this natural variation didn't happen, I would have to assume that if I let them live experimentally, everyone else would starve, or some other unforeseeable consequence remembered by history, but not foreseeable by me, would reemerge.


Oh, supposedy, some migrant eskimos still abandon the old to die. It may be possible that you, Andy, living in a superior economic system, could afford to take these grannies in. But to force them to take them in could have little hope for a good outcome. After all, every person knows he will one day be old himself. People could form into alternative families, or moral pacts...


One more thing. People often assume that the death penalty didn't exist without government, or that without a justice system there would be no killing. But there is plenty of killing without a death penalty. With a death penalty, on balance, there is less. Nor is the occasional conviction of the innocent a reason to throw out capital punishment any more than the occasional doctor error is a reason to throw out medicine.


An eye for an eye wasn't designed, rather it evolved - and persisted, even in the face of people's natural laziness. But killing cultural versus genetic bloodlines in ancient lands is for another post.


eLROY

See, M, talk enough about geographic friction, Germanic clans roaming the forest, catallactic consequences, taxis, non-feudal anarchy,

bourgeois trade economies, Pope Clement, and geographic friction, and you can come to the conclusion that history has elevated, and put its stamp of approval, on this stoning.

So far as homicide bombers being moral, you have to understand from what perspective it could become immoral. If breeding homicide bombers damages the survival chances of their civilization, specifically because neighboring civilizations stamp out all civilizations that send homicide bombers rather people with goods to trade, then it becomes immoral.


In other words we - you and me Andy - are the environment. Our morals are their environment, they must survive in an environment of people who lash out at the random bombing of teenagers out for pizza and dancing. If we let them gain Palestinian statehood through these tactics, we will have, in effect, grown a new moral.


But then we cannot choose to do so, for our own moral code prohibits us making this allowance, doesn't it? And the reason why is because past generations who let homicidal bombers run rampant in their nehgborhoods failed to trade, fell behind and, ultimately, vanished.


eLROY

. . .and going back to talking about check-raises, Ben Hogan, and my medical problems.


I'll leave it for M and Baltimore Ron to elaborate.

Private property is not the kind of moral that anyone would design, or which is even possible in small cooperative tribe, with no division of labor, and no means of "saving" by storage.


My point being that our choice is not between imposing our morals on others, and letting them do as they please. Rather, it is a choice between all morals, and all rebellions against morals.


My purest Christian morals may dictate that I intervene with savages as a missionary. But on a big planet, the stuff starts to flop pretty badly, as we have learned by experimentation.


Blah...


eLROY

You appear to be the one taking the "cosmic" perspective, eLROY.


A woman is soon to be put to death in a most cruel fashion by a band of ignorant bloodthirtsy religious fanatics. I added my signature to the open letter to the President of Nigeria and felt it was the least (and probably most) I could do. Turning one's back on the victims of needless and stupid cruelty is far more of a cold, cosmic perspective than what you ascribe to Andy Fox.


Amazingly, the man she had unmarried sex with was ACQUITTED on similar adultery charges because there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. However she was convicted of fornication (whhich they consider a form of adultery, or vice versa) because she became pregnant. So he walks and she gets stoned to death?

For about the dozenth time, I've tried to read one his longer posts, and for the dozenth time I have no idea what the hell he's talking about.

To assume that eLROY desires to make sense, is to assume that birds can fly underwater, or alternatively, that whales can somehow be forced through the eye of a needle and thereby transformed into minutiarized versions of the same.


What exactly is making sense, then, in the evolutionary sense? It is that which doesn't not make sense, of course, for the one true arbiter is that which has stood the test of time. This alone has the validation of ages stamped upon it, indeliby, and deeply so that one might consider it a branded and essential tempered part of its very being.


Take three Germanic tribes, six catallaxies, four goldfish in a glass bowl, and what have you? That's exactly my point. Just how do we know, or how are we supposed to know, that that which we envision comes from a good funnel?


Given the nature of our thoughts, and how ideas have evolved for individuals as well as for societies, what makes us think that our current ideas are any better than our previous ones? For our future ideas too will become old concepts: parched, blanched, and unworkable. Yet they will live on, as if they were papier mache figures somehow endowed with lives of their own. On and on they will persist, like viruses even, attaching themselves to previously healthy minds and affecting them with gradual thought-illnesses as their persistent influences stake their claims.


What should be a clear mind thus instead becomes a collection of thought-forms, acquired from various sources, and over long periods of time. And thus six goldfish--or was it four, I forgetnow--in a bowl bear no more resemblance to our current trends than would Attlia the Hun at his first birthday party. Yet, if we resist the urge to tamper with evolution, we may find eventually that we are sitting on a great big reef, dangling our legs in the balmy ocean, while the microbes which make up the reef are happy as well. And why shouldn't they be? Aren't they products of evolution too;-)???

Very nice, M. You win the contest prior to its commencement.


John

Paper traders in general are accustomed to linear thinking. They are also experts in delivering soundbites and one-page memos. Condensation is of the essence -- not a bad quality at all, when you think about it.


But don't ask a P.T. to elaborate. A paper trader's attention span is so small that a paragraph has no relation to the previous one. And, if eLROY is any good at paper trading, I'm sure he can even do sentences.


No pun intended.

'Morals preceded government. Trade preceded government. Justice preceded government. Government is historically a force at odds with morals and the growth of the spontaneous social order.'


"it is just and right that the strong should dominate the weak" - thucydides, recounting athenian delegations ultimatum to some independent island they were laying siege to (melos i think), when the locals protested that the athenians werent being fair (about negotiating or something - like if they didnt surrender then all males killed and women and children sold into slavery).


brad

>>


Couldnt have said it better myself. you are too funny!


Pat