Let me assure you, and I know whereof I speak, the most racist people I know are recent immigrants. These are people, after all, usually from pretty monocultural monoethnic monolinguistic societies, and being exposed to the cultural mayhem that is almost any downtown North American city is a pretty steep shock. A pretty common reaction is rejection, and women tend to be pretty big on circling the wagons, when the family is apparently threatened.

And yes, ugly racism is passed along by moms as well as dads, and frankly, it somehow feels uglier when women do it. But do it they do. We have plenty of little Koreans being told to never ever associate with Chinese, by their moms, and plenty of Russian tots told to despise Ukranians, by their moms. Their dads do it too, but at more of a distance, it doesn't have quite the same impact, at least not at the pre-school level. That comes later.

Hey Lefty-C, you got a mention there!

You ain't gonna see me vblogging anytime soon. I blog enough already (completely other name, don't bother looking) and have a fairly respectable hit rate. But I like text. Text is how we live. Text gives the user a lot more control. Text enfranchises almost everybody, even the blind, in this day and age.

Vblogging does not, it is one to many, very difficult to manipulate, and basically the MPAA/RIAA type assholes' wet dream. You will sit still and listen, you will give me your time, is what it is.

Yeah TC-F, you are pretty hott. What other point is there to your vblogging, other than to establish that?

Oh, as an ex-pat, I don't get much of a vote on the primaries. And my presumptive state (I've been gone a very long time)is pretty safe Dem turf. But I have kinda decided that while I would really like an XX President, I just ain't that hot on Hillary. Too much triangulation, too many bad memories from the healthcare fiasco. We all want Bill back, but Hill just ain't Bill. Sorry to say.

Boy, this is sure going to rev up some of our "more enthusiastic" posters.

It seems by the article that they did a pretty thorough review on a case by case; some get pardoned, some get released, and some get referred early to parole. But I do think that the aforementioned enthusiasts might actually have a point this time around; surely there is a man somewhere in jail that killed his wife in self-defence or in reaction to prolonged abuse of one kind or another. Not likely to get much sympathy under current cultural norms.

Well, things are better in different places; we've only had a handful of domestic murders hereabouts in that last few years; and yes, one of them was a woman killing an intimate partner, where there was no possibility of abuse really (an affair gone bad, apparently). But domestic violence cases have a tendency to be insanely complex and difficult to sort out, with lots of parties, mostly all behaving badly (whether under duress or not).

Why would a lone single woman want to go on the Hajj? Have seen pictures of it? And the number of people that get killed in the crush every year? Most men don't go alone anymore.

Nobody got out of jail free in this case, indeed some of the women had served considerable time. And the cases were reviewed very thoroughly, nobody was credulously believing every claim of abuse.

Nobody is saying abuse should necessarily be a get out of jail free card, let alone that a simple claim should be. But it should be taken into account when drawing up charges, coming to a verdict, and sentencing.

The real issue, as it often is but nobody brings it up nearly enough, is prosecutorial discretion. The charge doesn't have to be 1st degree murder, it can be manslaughter. And manslaughter can be beaten with a self-defence argument, I've seen it happen. And a manslaughter also gives a Judge a lot more discretion in sentencing.

That statement sure was ugly, but not true. It is bigoted, hateful, stereotyping, misogynist, and verging on racism.

See the thing here is, some of us actually work with domestic violence and family conflict, so we know whereof we speak, which is not out of our ass like you are.

Here are some facts. Most domestic violence starts some years into a marriage. Women are not marrying men who scare them.

Substance abuse and mental health issues are involved in a staggeringly high percentage of cases, and these are issues that frequently develop later in life.

The biggest reason the authorities can be reluctant to prosecute, and the cops to arrest, is that the cases so very frequently collapse, even if you can initially get her (or him, seen that too) to press charges, and usually you can't. Know why? She/he loves him/her. He/she will change, he's/she's promised, and he/she loves her/him you see.

(Take the she/he's as given from here on.) And she loves him, at risk to her life and limb, at risk to her children, and she will lie in court or failure to appear or change her story multiple times. She will go back, usually more than 5 times before she finally calls it quits. Sometimes this is due to economic and family pressures and all the rest, but so very very often, it because she loves him, or thinks she does, and thinks he loves her.

Doesn't look much like your picture of women, does it?

Oh, and in my experience, false abuse charges are almost always tied to custody battles in bitter divorces. You don't see them out of pure maliciousness very often. And men make them too, often enough by the way, typically not of themselves being abused, but of children being abused.