As compensation for keeping quiet, the brothers' family offered to the girl's family a 6-year-old girl as a bride. They also offered to have the alleged victim marry a young male in their family, so as to save her and her family from dishonor. The family declined and, despite death threats, sought the help of Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit in Kabul. An inquiry was ordered and one of the men was recently arrested.

Afghanistan has had "governments" before 1973, but they never had a national police force. The tribes had a system for settling conflict, and when the conflict couldn't be settled, then they would take out guns and shoot each other until someone decided to negotiate a truce.

This process hasn't been that much healthier for Afghan men than it has been for women, since the young men are the ones expected to give up their lives in tribal war to keep the tribe's honor intact.

In tribal law, it's normal to offer families compensation of some kind -- not to keep them quiet, but just because that's how tribal law works. It's supposed to restitutive justice rather than retributive justice like we have here.

It's a very new concept in Afghanistan to call the police instead of the tribal leader.

The first national police force in Afghanistan actually had nothing to do with enforcing any laws prohibiting interpersonal violence. The first Afghan national police force was formed by Mohammed Daoud shortly after his 1973 coup, and their two main functions were to cut down the cannabis that was being farmed all over Afghanistan, and expel the hippies who were buying it and exporting it to America.

That's ALL the Afghan police did for the couple of years of their existence.

The Soviets came in just a few years after that, and so the Afghan experience of treating rule of law as involving police and arresting people was very brief before a state of all out civil war enveloped the country.

And after the Soviets left, there wasn't enough of a central government able to operate in Kabul to promote the concept of rule of law through government rather than tribe.

When you look at these stories, you can't interpret them like you'd interpret rape stories in America. They weren't paying off the family to keep them quiet. They were trying to "pay" for the crime in the old fashioned tribal way.

It's going to take them a while to adjust to the idea of treating violent crime as involving individual rights rather than collective tribal honor.

I thought the strip satirized loopy American seekers who customize world religions for their own needs, not Islam.

But that's not even funny. That's part of the natural dynamic of religion. Why is that funny?

Gentiles customized Jewish Christianity for their own needs.

Elaine Pagels built her entire career by telling us how and why they did that.

She never called them "loopy" or satirized them even once. But that's because she's a humanist and respected them as individuals.

I thought the strip was just another sign that Americans really don't understand tribalism and have not the SLIGHTEST desire whatsoever to learn a goddamned FREAKING thing about it.

That's not something I find funny either.

Simultaneously a great poet and an immunologist who authored over 150 papers. He credited his scientific training for giving him the mental discipline that he needed to craft his poetry.

Whether or not the LW acts on his internal inclination toward the arts, I think he should still do everything he can to pass physics and organic chemistry. They're both really useful things to know and learning them both involves a lot of beneficial exercise for the brain.

One problem people have in learning physics is unlearning physics. They come into class pre-programmed with a lot of wrong stuff they picked up elsewhere. When they learn the right stuff, they tend to add it to the wrong stuff instead of using it to replace the wrong stuff. Unlearning, it turns out, is even harder than learning.

I've had family members who were alcoholics and roommates who were cocaine addicts and I really honestly do not see the difference.

An alcoholic can be as pathetic and dangerous as any other drug addict. Families are ruined by alcohol, childhoods destroyed.

I don't think any social drinker has any kind of moral superiority to anyone else who does any other kind of drugs.

I thnk alcohol is a vile, disgusting, harmful drug but the users of this vile drug are so great in numbers that the entire political system of the country has been bent and deformed to become like another form of alcohol-related violence.

That's how I see the half a million other drug users we have locked up like animals in steel pens -- a giant episode of alcohol-related violence.

The children whose homes are ruined by alcohol are invisible in our system. We can't see them. They don't count.

Now a crack baby -- that's not boring, that's alarming. A crack baby can't be ignored. A crack baby counts.

Because it's the alcohol users who do the counting.