Talk:Falaka

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[edit] Victimhood

It does not make any more sense on a NPOV basis to call a person punished by falaka for a crime a "victim" than it would to call someone incarcerated in prison for a crime a "victim" unless there are exceptional circumstances making the punishment fundamentally unjust. But justice and injustice are POV and therefore beyond the scope of Wikipedia. St. Jimmy 15:10, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Such willfull ignoring of the wider scope of the term victim (the injustice notion was the last to come into use!) is linguistically wrong. However, since the matter is not essential to an understanding of the falaka as such, I won't keep reverting this. By the way, I like to point out that I have no particular hostility to corporal punishment, in fact my many descriptive contributions on various instruments etcetera have mainly been challenged by people who clearly think (erroneously, in most cases based on their strong aversion) them to positive. However, a better point could be made that systematically calling the punishee 'offender' is a one-sidedly positive point of view: do you suggest in earnest that every person who suffered this painfull treatment had actually offended, even under such oppressive regimes as Sadam's Iraq? Even a staunch supporter of corporal punishment (never mind whether any of us is, of course) must admit that it can be at least as injust as alternative punishments when there is no just reason to punish at all! Fastifex 07:33, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I do admit that, however, normally we don't see people defined as "victims" of incarceration, fines, community service, etc., so we shouldn't reserve the term for those experiencing politically incorrect punishments. As for "offender", I think we can presumptively assume that a person subjected to falaka has offended against some rule, whether it is a particularly reasonable rule or not. And just because we CAN use the word "victim" in a certain circumstance by repairing to the dictionary does not mean it is the best word in its full context. If we have to choose between a technically correct word that has negative connotations and a technically correct word that does not, it stands to reason that we choose the one that does not. To me, it seems clear that "victim" is more prejudicial than "offender", although in a pinch "subject" seems acceptably neutral. St. Jimmy 08:01, 11 May 2006 (UTC)