In these days of the nanny state, when so many people seem to need a government program involved in wiping their own asses, it’s nice to see people show a bit of initiative. Item the first:

Prosecutors said 44-year-old Rajini Narayan confessed to neighbors that she set her husband on fire on Dec. 8, 2008, after she saw him hug another woman.

She was initially charged with endangering life and arson but the charges were upgraded to murder after her 47-year-old husband, Satish Narayan, died from his injuries last week.

Prosecutor Lucy Boord said Narayan told neighbors she was a “jealous wife” but she hadn’t meant to kill him when she doused the sleeping man’s genitals with an alcohol-based solvent and then set him on fire.

Boord quoted Narayan allegedly saying: “I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else. … I didn’t mean this to happen.”

Perhaps things got a bit out of hand, but there’s no such thing as excess in the defense of keeping one’s husband from hugging some other broad (as Barry Goldwater once said). This seems to an example of taking the principle “If I can’t play by my rules, I’m taking my bat and ball home” except with the addition “where I’ll pour gasoline on them and incinerate them so no one else can play with them.” Oh, and also it’s someone else’s bat and balls. But still the overall principle is similar.

Speaking of incineration, here’s another commendable example of people engaging in a bit of “self-help” (no, not that kind, and you have a dirty mind for thinking of such a thing in serious context like this):

A young Papua New Guinea woman has been burnt to death in what authorities fear is the latest sorcery killing in the remote and lawless interior of the country.

The woman, believed to be aged between 16 and 20 years old, was stripped naked, gagged and tied to a truck loaded with firewood which was driven to a town dump and doused with petrol before being set alight, according to witnesses who saw the act near Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands.

“The girl was stirpped naked and could not shout for assistance or resist as she was tightly strapped and her mouth gagged,” Jessie James, who witnessed the girl’s death told the local Post Courier Mail.

“I don’t know the right words to describe it but it’s barbaric. Can you find the best words to describe such acts that are rampant here?” said highlands police chief Simon Kauba.

Black magic is still practiced in the Highlands and it is not unusual for women to be killed after being accused of sorcery, adultery, or of spreading HIV/AIDS.

An editorial in the Post Courier compared the country’s hysteria over alleged sorcery with the 17th century witch-craft trials in the USA and made a plea for the end of such brutal practices.

“Sorcery is a most difficult crime to prove,” it said. “Those who say she got primitive justice should pause to think, it could be you next on that truckload of burning tyres.”

Much to ponder here. First, what’s this about “lawless interior” and “primitive justice”? Sounds like a lot of “privileging” Western practice over native customs. Sounds very non-post-colonial to Keyser. Next thing you know, people like this will start insisting on banning female circumcision. Talk about your ethnocentrism!

If we’re going to start getting all historical here, let’s at least get our facts street. A couple of women were hanged in New England at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Continental European craze for witch hunting was picked up on a lark more than a half century after the Hexenwahn (”witch craze,” as the Germans call it) had died down in Europe. The burning of witches (as heretics) was an exclusively continental phenomenon, and while it picked up steam (so to speak) in the fifteenth century, the really big campaigns of witch burning took place in Catholic German in the period of about 1590-1630 in places like Bamberg and Eichstätt where local prelates with temporal powers who were convinced of the reality of witch craft as an anti-social sect under the guidance of Satan himself used their secular jurisdiction in ways that are grim to contemplate.

Anyway, if someone had, say, stolen your penis, wouldn’t you take matters into your own hands? (And shame on you a second time for thinking of that again in serious context!)

So, all Keyser has to say is that if anyone is planning on exercising a bit of “self-help” (stop it!), at least be sure you’ve got the facts straight! Burning someone who was merely being friendly or who had not in fact stolen your privy member is just wrong.

[This information on do-it-yourself home improvements was read in a copy of The Idiot's Guide to Being Minister of Justice over at Keyser's Lair.]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under A Victims Perspective, Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.