Post-Purchase Deity Evaluation Form

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Is ita around? This makes no sense - as in 'how could anyone believe this was true?'

Yanagiryuken is master of Daitouryu-aikido. He uses mysterious 'chi'power (first video), he claims to be undefeated in 200 bouts because of his force-like non contact power. He's finally defeated (second video). Hilarious!

Yeah, in the first video, he "defeats" all these opponents without even touching them. In the second video he gets his ass kicked.

Link to Digg story: [link]

Link to the two videos: [link]

“Oh, good, my dog found the chainsaw.”

"Blue punch buggy!"

You know, I am glad the NYTimes is doing so much coverage on Africa and the sex slave trade worldwide.

But damn it's depressing to think about all the children out there in sexual slavery or just targets for abuse without any cultural restraint against it.

Why the humans gotta suck so much?

Whatever traces of cultural relativism I've had are now fully erased and I'm back to inalienable human rights enforced at the point of a gun (if necessary).

Humans from earth. Always with the disapointment.

Just looked at the regional weather radar--looks like this storm is going to completely avoid the northern 'burbs up here!

Really? Ice storm here, big time.

tommy, that guy is insane. I'm not entirely sure why he bothered going ahead with that fight--I'm smirking at the allegations that he promised to close his school if defeated and that the promise has now been deleted from his website.

Awful head day today. Migraines with and without pain. Stupid stupid stupid.

Whatever traces of cultural relativism I've had are now fully erased and I'm back to inalienable human rights enforced at the point of a gun (if necessary).

Not necessary though. At least not in that article -- people want to change it and they're wildly poor and powerless to do so. Police need to be funded so they don't have to charge crime victims for investigations (and be less susceptible to bribes from perpatrators). Women need to be economically important so they'll be more valuable... t insert 'go team micro loans' schpiel here

People need to not be powerless. Women need some status. Its the same problem again and again and again.

At least not in that article -- people want to change it and they're wildly poor and powerless to do so.

Yeah, but there are all those other articles where people sell their kids off to the brothels in Bangkok, or slave labor for fishermen elsewhere in Africa, or the production of chocolate, or rugs.

There's a lot of child slavery in the world.

People need to not be powerless

The power wielded against people is not just the exploitive gov't, but often their own cultural practices.

The Society estimates that there are 8,000 girl-slaves — slaves in the fullest sense of the term — in West Africa today. These girls are hierodulic slaves, combining the roles of agricultural slave, domestic slave, temple slave and sex slave.

Originally offered as human sacrifice to ensure success in war, these girls are the helpless victims of a traditional form of slavery which has survived intact since the pre-colonial era. These slaves live in villages just a half-day’s journey inland from the very coast from which slaves were once shipped to the Americas.

Taken from their mothers from the age of four, these girls work from dawn to dusk in the fields. From the age of five they are beaten with canes or with specially-made wire whips. They are raped from as young as eight years old. Their masters, the voodoo priests, claim the traditional right of masters since the dawn of history to free sexual access to the slaves, and the girls are beaten into submission if they refuse.

Many instances of common cultural practices which are abominations:

Traditional servile concubinage takes different forms, but usually involves either the selling of a girl-child or a young woman by her parents or clan into concubinage, or the transfer of a woman as property to another man on the death of her husband.

In the Kingdom of Nepal, this occurred in a traditional form, such as the badinis and helambus, where the girl-children had to be offered by the serfs as servile concubines to their feudal or royal overlords. Following the overthrow of the Ranas, these traditional forms of servile child concubinage have degenerated into a commercial industry in the cities.

The tradition of servile marriage still exists in Ethiopia, where it is common for a man to assault and defile an underage girl against her will. Once the girl is assaulted and defiled, the man goes to her father and demands the girl as his wife. The father and the girl have no option but to agree: if they refuse, no other man will marry the girl.

This tradition of servile marriage was recently highlighted by a girl who had been kidnapped by a man and his gang, who intended to defile her. She escaped and murdered her pursuer. The case highlighted the plight of girls who, after experiencing the trauma of the assault, must spend the remainder of their lives as the servile wives of their assaulter.

I'm just putting my vote behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I'm all a fan of human rights, but, also, this is not new. The only reason child labor is illegal in this country is the historical power of the union. (And if family farms were more prevalent, that law would be more honored in the breach.)

And don't get me started on rape as a quasi-legal form of marriage or concubinage. I suspect it has existed in a lot more cultures than it hasn't. For that matter, it persists today, in American mythology -- the 1980s soap supercouple, Luke and Laura? There's rape in their history together.

Rape laws are pretty much tied into philosophies of ownership rights (and violation thereof). In most of the modern western world, we recognize that women own ourselves, and have the right to self-determination.

The history of the world is a different story. For most of what we know about it, wives, daughters, and sisters—that is, women—have not enjoyed any sort of meaningful right of self-determination. It's their male relatives (including spouses) who have the right of consent. When rape occurs in a society like that, it's the male "owner" of the woman who has been wronged.

And yeah, pfffft in many cases, cultural relativism can bite me.