Ignorance leads to evil: albinos are being butchered for their body parts in Burundi. Witch doctors are spreading the claim that their body parts are valuable in attracting gold, so stupid and greedy people are killing them and selling off bits and pieces.
Officials have gathered all the albinos in the country into a walled safehouse to protect them, which seems like a short term solution. I say since their number came up in the genetic lottery as cursed in Burundi, offer them asylum and bring them to Minnesota, where their paleness won’t be at all exceptional.
Say…wasn’t an African witch doctor one of Sarah Palin’s heroes? Let’s be sure not to bring them to Alaska, then.
We’re all special in our own ways.
Not always a good thing.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
“Police have established that the limbs, organs and blood of the albinos were smuggled into neighbouring Tanzania and sold to local sorcerers who use them to concoct lucky charms.”
Bloody hell!
(But then again, this puts me in mind of the Vatican, and those magic Jesus-meat communion wafers.)
It occurs to me that if I were a real doctor, the term “witch doctor” would royally piss me off.
Glen Davidson @ #1:
“Everyone is different. No two people are not on fire.”
Sadly, that line may be prophetic. Damn, these people are nuts.
The term “witch doctor” pisses off witches of the Wiccan variety, too.
Why can’t these sick morons use albino rats or rabbits like everyone else?
This is, yet again, completely disgusting. We don’t need this kind of cruelty committed against people, and this is only one of the many reasons not to be a Christian, because you associate yourself with people like this.
Tziedel (@5):
That hadn’t occurred to me, but I can see where it would be so.
Witch Doctors: Pissing Off Witches and Doctors Since the Dark Ages!®
What f**king planet do I live on?
We don’t need this kind of cruelty committed against people, and this is only one of the many reasons not to be a Christian, because you associate yourself with people like this. – Erm, maybe I’m missing something, but what do Burundian witch doctors have to do with Christianity? (Not that I’m denying that astonishingly pointless acts of cruelty have been committed in the name of Christianity in the past – the same, of course, being true of virtually any ideology or philosophy, religious or not, one could name.)
Albinos are dying for the same reason here in South Africa, sadly.
We can help directly by advertising that we will pay top dollar for witch doctor livers, which our kitties want for their din-dins.
Sick and grisly. What warped thinking that albinos can somehow bring gold to the surface.
… Where they’ll freeze solid next month.
Besides, that opens us to accusation of the USA again exploiting the resources of a poor black country.
[Note: tongue-in-cheek for the sarcasm-impaired]
Anyway, teach the controversy.
At least we should be able to bring up the possibility that albino body parts attract gold, and not to be laughed at by the funding agencies when we ask for a grant to study it (here we’ll wait until they die).
Frankly, it’s only because of the persecution of dissenting viewpoints, and censorship, that we still don’t know whether or not albino bodies attract gold. (Cleese, as Basil Fawlty, voice): This is exactly how Nazi Germany began.
Science can only advance so long as questions like whether or not albino body parts attract gold can be raised. An exciting new science is being thwarted in America because of the close-mindedness of scientists. We are going to fall behind Burundi because of the Nazi censors running our courts, the media, and the educational establishment.
And now quite seriously, although the killing part is a substantial difference between ID and witch doctor nonsense, the fact is that just about every “argument” for ID pseudoscience to be taken seriously could be about as readily used to defend the superstition in Burundi.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Superstition + greed doubles your evil.
I think Glen D wins the Internet for today.
Absolute loads of nonsense
In general witch doctors do not exist in Africa. You only have medicine men and witches of which both are part of structural functionalism that holds rather than dissect the social blocks.
Any thing apart from that is ignorance!!!!
So let me get this straight:
Person + Albino Charm + Gold Search = Easy Gold
I don’t get it.
Oh wait,
Albino Charm = Albino Person’s bits + Ooooga Boooga Boooga
Oh. Now I understand. I get it now. :-/
Glen D. has my vote too!
And he’s on the money, the difference between witch doctors using magic to get gold and eating magic jesus meat crackers to commune with the angry sky god is a matter of degrees.
“…the difference between witch doctors using magic to get gold and eating magic jesus meat crackers to commune with the angry sky god is a matter of degrees.”
I see it as a matter of the depressing idiocy that results when otherwise rational adults act like children.
This shocking and disgusting tale
Is (… wait for it)… beyond the pale.
(I was already planning on burning in Hell…)
But now you won’t have to wait in line.
“But now you won’t have to wait in line.”
“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” [Mark Twain]
Ah… good ‘ol magical thinking. Providing excuses for killing people different from you since… well, since always, it seems.
(This might be stolen from a Jerry Seinfeld bit. And if it isn’t, it should be.)
I bet if you had a line of people waiting for the most horrid thing imaginable, there’d still be one guy pissed off about how long it’s taking.
“What’s going on up there?” [looks at watch, raises arms universal “what the hell?” motion, puts hands on hips and shakes his head] “I haven’t got all day!”
Hey, watch it with your broad brush there. The majority of Alaska doesn’t consult Witch Doctors; there’s plenty of rationalists up here, especially in Fairbanks and Juneau. Anchoragua and the Mat-Su (which is just sorta a big extension of Los Anchorage) is not representative of the half of the state that doesn’t live there.
Plunk them down in Fairbanks – you can’t really even tell gender under all the gear when it gets too nippy. ;)
It sounds like Terry Pratchett’s dwarves, where courtship consists largely of discretely discovering what sex the other person is.
They both believe in magic.
And here it is again with quote tags:
They both believe in magic.
“Erm, maybe I’m missing something, but what do Burundian witch doctors have to do with Christianity?”
And some African Witch Doctors are the stated reason for a successful political career!
Do you still have any albinos up there?
Nader @ 18, you’re kind of missing the point. Innocent people are being hunted down and killed because other people think their body parts are magical. What we call the people doing the hunting and killing is completely irrelevant.
I read an article about this same problem occurring in Tanzania in the NY Times some months ago – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/world/africa/08albino.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=albino%20africa&st=cse&oref=slogin. Absolutely heartbreaking. African albinos have enough problems (being prone to skin cancer means they die young without protective clothing) without having people cut them apart for magic spells.
If anyone knows of a non profit that works to help these people, I’d love to hear about it. My donation budget for the year isn’t exhausted quite yet.
Not a real surprise…sad and indicative of the influence Christian ministry has administered over several centuries…
Not saying the Christian church encourages this nonsense but they do tend to turn a blind eye…especially if a community swears blind that it is a Christian ethos they follow…but just in their own way….
Occurrences of children’s body parts being washed up from the Thames in London has led to the inevitable police investigations which has exposed African witch doctor practice…
These folk arrive in blighty and are sequestered away in their natural communities and consulted by same on a regular basis…seems it has been known about for a while…so not a new phenomena…
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-10033336-details/Exposed:+witch-doctors/article.do
Whatever…result is headless child corpses have been identified as part of sacrifice and ritual practises utilised by African witch doctors…
http://www.missingpersons-ireland.freepress-freespeech.com/indo%20-%20cussack.htm
Erm, maybe I’m missing something, but what do Burundian witch doctors have to do with Christianity?
did you ask Sarah Palin?
seriously, you should go to the source, instead of asking PZ.
Raise your hand if you think you’re morally superior to
the Talibana Burundian witch doctor.Raise your hand if you think you’re morally superior to the Taliban a Burundian witch doctor.
*raises hand*
do i have to defend that in any way?
What good is something that attracts gold anyway? It’s not like gold has feet and a shovel and could do anything about it. The gold would just have to stay put in the ground and experience melancholic longing.
Sigh. We’ve heard this one before. The “No True Witch Doctor” fallacy. Real witch doctors would never traffic in human body parts from murdered victims. Right, and creos don’t believe in primitive mythology.
Say…wasn’t an African witch doctor one of Sarah Palin’s heroes? Let’s be sure not to bring them to Alaska, then.
No, Palin has been pallin’ around with a witch-hunter, which is the very antithesis of a witch-doctor. Bill Maher has been making the same mistake with this “witch-doctor” business as well. Did you here this from him PZ?
It is exactly the same thing as a witch-doctor. It’s someone who believes in witches and extorts money with threats and fear, and does horrible things to people he believes have supernatural powers.
Sometimes I feel like we’re all living in a John Brunner novel.
Albinos have it pretty bad in all of Africa except, for some odd reason, Cameroon. Mind you, as a previous poster noted, being an albino in the tropics is hard, what with early death from skin cancer and all.
Albinos are considered bad luck or even not human, and may suffer infanticide. In Cameroon, they seem to be more accepted, and I saw many of them when I visited in the South. (I have read that there a few of them in the North). I’ve rarely seen them in other parts of Africa.
Sometimes it’s hard to be albino
Giving all your blood to just one man
You’ll have bad luck
So he’ll have good luck
Doing things that you don’t understand
But his friends love him and forgive him
Even though it’s hard to understand
Why they believe him
And are proud of him
‘Cause after all he’s just a man
Run from that man
Give him no arms to cling to
Avoid the harm you’ll come to
When men have gold lust only
Run from that man
And tell the world about him
Keep saving all the lives you can
From that bad man
amazing what type of thing humans will do in some situations, i always felt it was barbaric to kill a rhino for its horn but seems that some will kill anything for gain so the poor rhino actually becomes unexceptional.
#15 glen davidson.
I am ready to propose to the next ID’er i meet that aeronautical engineers should also be taught the ‘angel lift’ theory on the basis that big metal objects with people in just cannot go up (things can only go down, right?), its impossible, its got nothing to do with air pressure, plane shape and speed, instead they are carried by angels from A to B.
teach the controversy.
Instead of spending trillions in Iraq we should be teaching critical thinking in Africa!!!!! Hey, maybe that’s what we should be doing in Iraq also?
“Instead of spending trillions in Iraq we should be teaching critical thinking in Africa!!!!! Hey, maybe that’s what we should be doing in Iraq also?”
Kind of arrogant to assert that Americans can teach that to anyone when evidence suggests that we need someone to teach us first.
Just on an anthropological note:
Witch doctor is now generally derided and the word “shaman” is considered more accurate. This isn’t making any kind of point, it’s purely academic.
My old roommate was from West Africa and although he was educated in the US and currently works as a financial analyst at a Fortune 500 company (closer to the top of the list than the bottom).
He actually believes there are people in Africa who can cure AIDS using arcane shamanistic powers, yet he is also a Christian.
To be clear, I’ve met critical thinkers from Africa too and would never paint a demographic with a broad brush.
However when I tried to reason with him on that point, and pointed out that these people never have their claims verified by their victims, he argued simply that it was not something I could understand with science.
@Craig # 47
IAWTC.
“he argued simply that it was not something I could understand with science.
And I would retort that since the discussion is about the causality of a shaman’s actions and their results, then they absolutely can be studied by the science. As a matter of fact, that’s where science makes its bread and butter – cause and effect.
But I understand the difficulty. Blinders go up, ears go deaf, …you might as well argue with a wall.
Glen D #15 wrote:
Yeah, you can pretty much lump religious arguments along with the pseudoscientific arguments when it comes to “ways of knowing” which go beyond science. That leaves us with intuition, faith, authority, anecdote, testimonials, and “ancient wisdom.” Whether this method leads a person to believe in a vague and refined God which only works its magic through natural means — or primitive and superstitious shamans who work their magic through albino body parts — turns into a subjective matter of culture, chance, and taste. Evidence, schmevidence. You have to take that leap of faith!
I was once accused of cultural and religious insensitivity for saying that there was no such thing as the “Evil Eye.” How dare I refuse to respect the religious beliefs of indigenous non-western people? How could I reject, out of hand, the personal experiences of so many? Blah, blah, blah.
Ironically, I had been, at the time, lamenting the murders of African “witches” accused of causing AIDs through the Evil Eye. It seems that the twin behemoths of Spirituality and Non-western Ways can beat down not only modern medicine, but the enlightenment viewpoint that witchhunts are a bad thing.
Personally, I think it’s about time those filthy albinoes got the hacking they deserve.
Next…the Swedes!
Holy cow! That’s horrible!
Apparently there’s a Tanzania Albino Society, which is under the Tanzania Federation for Disabled People Organization. I haven’t found a website for it yet.
As horribly stupid as the magic dead albino story is, it isn’t that much different from what happens in the USA.
In times past, at Salem during the height of American theocracy, 25 people were hung for witchcraft. Followed by a few Unitarians and Quakers for heresy.
It is now against the law to hunt down witches and kill them. But millions believe that witches and satan worshippers still roam the land doing whatever they do. These same people also believe that demons haunt us everyday and possess people. They can be exorcized, a ceremony that occasionally kills the victim
The fundie kooks no longer engage in wholesale murder of those they regard as heretics, satan worshippers, and witches. Without the laws and law enforcement against it, you can bet they would soon be back to business as usual, spiritual warfare with guns, ropes, and knives.
BTW, the Theothuglican VP nominee, Palin is a member of the lunatic fringe spiritual warfare brigades. We’ve advanced socially compared to the Africans but it is a thin line that separates us from them.
Plus we have magic god crackers that can repel the evil ones. I read about it in a novel or two about vampires.
It has been mentioned how similar the witch-craft/evil eye magical thinking is to its Western world variety of creationism or the various brands of christianity.
I think that this is just a different,barely veiled by first world cultural exposure, expression of a common trait in homo sapiens,we humans are still magical thinkers,lean to irrationality and are not at all so far removed from our animal ancestors as we like to think.
That does it. I’m leaving the human race to go and live as a bonobo.
Horrifying. There’s a boy in my son’s class who is an albino of African ancestry, and on the autistic spectrum to boot. I shudder to contemplate what fate might have befallen that wonderful, sweet, interesting child in Africa.
I’m still waiting for the sheep to look up.
“Some fishermen also use the parts to bait large fish they think have gold in their bellies.”
Fact: Large fish have gold in their bellies.
Fact: The body parts of humans with albinism attract gold.
You’d be an idiot not to murder albinos and use their organs as bait!
Sigh. How many logical fallacies can people string together before their minds implode?
And also, if albinos attract gold, how come all albinos aren’t rich?
“”Just because of their skin colour, they are being hunted on the grounds that have a commercial value in the eyes of some people…”
That sounds familiar.
Posted by: Buffybot @ 55
“That does it. I’m leaving the human race to go and live as a bonobo.”
Bonobos get eaten as bush meat.
Has the ‘sex with a virgin as cure for HIV’ meme made it to Africa yet?
I’m pretty sure the “sex with a virgin as cure for HIV” meme originated in Africa.
Okay, so as part of my 2012 presidential campaign (it’s the first I’ll be qualified for, and YES… there IS a reason it’s also the year the Mayan calander ends…) I’ll push for a bounty on all shamans, psychics, and witch-doctors. If that were to fail, I simply pull out the “Presidential Pardon”– I promise to pardon anyone convicted of crimes against any shaman, psychic, or witch-doctor. Also, any woman involved with a man who has been convicted more than once of physical violence against her will be pardoned of any charges involved in his murder or attempted murder.
I’ll be the greatest, wait, no…
I’ll be an entertaining sideshow (like Palin)!
Yes, I know that definitions get fuzzy, and intentions get scrambled. I’m just sayin’, ya know?
How much for a skull?
Surely it’s more economical (and far less grisly) to hire an albino to do your fishing for you. He remains whole and alive and you don’t have to keep buying albino bits every time you head to your secret spot (which I’m sure gets rather pricey after a while.) Added bonus: you get to sit on your ass while he/she does the fishing.
Also, any chance there’s some documentation of gold-filled fish being caught? Hello? Anyone?
I’ve fished a fair bit in my life and the most interesting things I’ve found in a catch were a baby sea turtle’s shell in a snook, a still live flying fish in a dolphin/dorado, a working Bic lighter in another, and a friend’s broken off jig in a grouper.
The ida one of the posters at the top had is actually worth considering:
tell Africa that Europeans and Americans will pay for witch doctor body parts. Teaching them that tourists will pay more for viewing and photo-safariing their wildlife than anyone had paid for animal body parts has relieved much pressure from endangered species.
Ergo, why would it not work the other way around? I’m against the death penalty. This is economy, who cares about penalty when a worthless excuse for an ape can be removed from where he’s most dangerous, get some desperately needed money to African villages, and give the rest of the world some interesting exhibits for exhibitions on superstition?
Topics like this one make me very cynical. Cynicism is the new pragmatism I declare.
Fox’s Restatement of Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently advanced superstition is indistinguishable from insanity.”
… which can be further restated as:
“Any sufficiently advanced religion is indistinguishable from mental illness.”
Having read somewhere (might have been in ‘The Worm in The Bud’ that it was a common 19th century English belief that sex with a virgin cured syphilis, I’ve often wondered if the current African belief that it can cure AIDS is actually a distortion of something that went over with the European missionaries.
What f**king planet do I live on?
One on which the most cognitively advanced species isn’t very.
Why don’t you tell that to the two witch doctors we have as Members of Parliament? I’m sure they would be delighted to hear that them wearing inflated goat bladders on their heads in Parliament is merely a fashion statement.
There are just so many things wrong with this. Not only do people have to be relatively stupid, ignorant, gullible, insane etc in order to believe in it but they also have to be seriously evil to act on it (which also covers the dishonest ones who don’t really believe but still perpetuate the idea and perpetrate the crimes). The latter is of course the most damning thing – as with the myth over raping a virgin to be rid of HIV (which has led to baby girls being assaulted by male family members, eg an uncle).
Firstly, were the gold-attractant idea to be true, albinos (in full possession of all their own body parts) would be caked with gold and filthy rich such that they could afford zillions of bodyguards and/or be running the country. The fact that they aren’t ought to make at least some people notice the idea can’t be true.
Secondly, unless the people involved were already unremittingly evil, the ethical way to behave would be to treat their local albino as a renewable resource – carefully keeping it healthy and harvesting hair and nail clippings (or even the occasional drop of blood).
Thirdly, even if the witch-doctor/shaman has explicitly demanded the heart or liver or some other body part which will ensure people have to kill the albinos (or anyone else) he wants killed, there’s still the fact that those willing to act on the idea have never seen it work (ie under any sort of conditions away from the witch-doctor being able to pull a fast one with a piece of pre-palmed gold).
They’ve all utterly failed even to check that: (a) it doesn’t work at all (ie they’ve never seen any non-cheats succeed with such a talisman); (b) it works equally well (ie not at all other than by placebo!) with or without witch-doctor ooga-booga; (c) it works equally well with non-fatal cast-off pieces of albino; (d) it works equally well with non-albinos.
NB The placebo effect as it applies to gold-attraction or similar is: (a) about behaving as if you were lucky (eg bothering to look carefully for gold in the first place) and (b) misattributing any good luck you have naturally in your life to the talisman while disregarding, minimising the significance of or selectively forgetting the bad things.
I think witch doctor is a pretty cool guy, eh says “Ooh ee, ooh ahh ahh, ting tang, walla walla bing bang” and doesn’t afraid of anything.
“do i have to defend that in any way?” – Ichthyic
Not from me. Martin Amis famously asked a British audience to raise their hands if they thought they were morally superior to the Taliban. About a third of the audience raised their hands. His point was that modern liberalism has worked itself into a frenzy of impotent relativism.
I guess the ultimate questions is: where does manifest destiny end, and relativist enfeeblement begin? And is there actually room between them?
Typical!
You always go after the worst exemplars of the witchdoctor community!
Srsly, many witchdoctors are reasonable and rational and pay albinos to voluntarily have their limbs amputated. Some are even happy to just collect sweat and hair- and nailclippings.
But do you care?! Noooooo. Typical militant Westerner, only focusing on the few crazies that go around killing the occasional albino. And anyway, we’ve been doing it since time immemorial, so you really can’t come here and try to impose your bigoted views on us. It works, dammit!
But we poor witchdoctors are such an easy target. You wouldn’t dare do this to $cientology!
I hear that the buttock skin and uvulae of investment-bank executives are powerful talismans against bankruptcy. (Just a rumor, you understand. We don’t want to promote bad behavior among the neighbors of investment bankers. And talismans don’t work. Really.)
Of course I think I’m morally superior – because I do think about morals rationally and objectively (as well as about other things). I didn’t just unthinkingly inherit someone else’s morality (as many humans do). If I genuinely thought some other morality was better I would have adopted that as my morality instead.
The only people who would be answering “no” would be the non-thinkers, including those who are hopelessly insecure to the point of dishonesty (daren’t own up to what they think), and those who are inclined to be immoral – and even many of those would probably answer “yes”!
SEF #77 wrote:
No, I think Amis’ results are generalizable, and reflect a cultural reluctance to “judge” other people — especially other people of other cultures.
In addition to guilt over colonialism, there seems to be a populist taboo against claiming to be “morally better” than someone else. It sounds arrogant. Even fundamentalist Christians like to stress that they’re “no better” than other people — they’re just “forgiven.” They’re also quick to insist that the credit for moral superiority comes from God, so they’re the opposite of arrogant.
Sili #75 wrote:
Plus he hasn’t studied shaman scholarship in depth, and can’t say anything about how absurd any of the beliefs are till he reads lots and lots of anthropology!
(by the way, congratulations on being mentioned in the latest Reports of the National Center for Science Education — yes, on page 14, the writer talks about a Pharyngula “commenter named Sili” in an article on the Proteomics debacle. You’re famous now.)
But see, these aren’t real religions and are just crazy people. I mean, they don’t even believe that a cracker turns into the body of Jesus when the priest says the magic words.
Given the current financial crisis, I’d say that’s likely to work as well as albino parts (and has the added advantage of reducing the number of investment bankers).
@KatingKate
Yes, the sex with a virgin myth has made it to South Africa, where it has wreaked havoc in the most tragic ways. I was going to do a presentation on it for an Anthropology class I was taking, but it was to horrific for me to go on. Look at the research of Leclerc-Madlala at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in South Africa. Very disturbing stuff.
#74 and #77
I don’t know this Martin Amis story, so I could be missing something, but the fact that a crowd of people in the Western world don’t unanimously assert their own moral superiority over others doesn’t “prove” they are moral relativists. Perhaps Martin Amis should simply have asked whether his audience believed the Taliban were morally wrong. Had he asked his question in Sarah Palin’s church (as amusing as that is to imagine), he’d have probably got a full house of hand waving in that place of unshakeable moral certainty, a result that would as troubling to me as the one that he got clearly was to him.
Over the Taliban? Honestly, if someone doesn’t think they are morally superior to the Taliban they have serious problems.
In what way do you regard insecurity (both natural human and culturally learned) and dishonesty, which lead to reluctance to go against peer pressure, as non-generalised?! I wasn’t denying the phenomenon, merely explaining its cause. The vast majority of people are relatively unthinking, apparently very insecure (eg always requiring approval from others) and habitually dishonest (in little ways right up to the bigger ones).
:spews Earl Grey and digestives all over laptop:
Thank you, Sastra.
I think …
And here I hoped I’d gotten those damn 15 minutes out of the way in Moscow twelve years ago. Damn Warhol and his unreliable profecies.
And all that for just being the first to shoot my mouth off and throwing around accusations.
I wonder why we call witch doctors for priests.. they are all witch doctors; Say it like it is!
Um, hold on here.
Alex wrote:
Person + Albino Charm + Gold Search = Easy Gold
Aren’t we in the far superior northern hemisphere in the middle of an epic economic meltdown because of the formula
Person + Unaffordable Crazy-ass Mortgage + Mortgage Risk Derivatives + Credit Default Swaps + Gold Search = Easy Gold
Just asking. And not that I’m siding with or against our Noble African Nations Brethren.
ming
I’ve lurked for a while, but I have to post this:
http://www.parentofachildwithalbinism.com/new-posts/tanzania-ignorance-is-deadly/
It’s about an effort to get the government there to stop this before anyone else dies in the name of superstitious bullshit. They want to have 10,000 signitures on their petition to the Tanzanian government in the next few days before it’s presented. Perhaps this blog’s readers can use their poll-skewing power to make that happen…
SEF #84 wrote:
In that case, I misunderstood you. When you explained that “the only people who would be answering “no” (to Amis’ question on whether they are morally superior to the Taliban) would be the non-thinkers, including those who are hopelessly insecure to the point of dishonesty (daren’t own up to what they think)” it sounded to me like that was a rather pathological, small set.
No, I didn’t mean a small set (though I reserve the right to consider them pathological!). Perhaps it’s the US-UK language mismatch thing again – specifically the deliberate understatement for comic effect which, along with sarcasm, is quite common round here.
I agree that I didn’t make it clear that the group I had outlined would therefore be the majority rather than the minority, eg by adding an explicit tag of “- so nearly everyone then” onto the end of the relevant clause. I think I would have had to restructure the already overly long sentence to accomodate that. However, the points which should have led you to notice I regarded it as a majority had been made explicitly in other posts by me only a little earlier (I think). So at that time I was thinking it was obvious, whereas it probably isn’t obvious out of context.
#83
If a roomful of people can’t agree that the Taliban are morally wrong, then that’s evidence of serious problems. If they aren’t so willing to say that they feel personally morally superior to them — particularly in response to a snap question — all that might mean is that they want to think harder about what they might be doing were they to have been living in Afghanistan for the past twenty years or so, and whether they’d behave any better.