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What's the incident rate of men in these situations killing their wives and their wives' families? A light Wikipedia search and then a couple questions at Grok turned up nothing specific.
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I've noticed a trend lately where TLC's on the culture war roundup are increasingly dominated by Indian issues and things that only Indians would be concerned about, and it’s becoming hard to ignore. I don't believe it's malevolent for Indian users to bring up topics relevant to their country, however there’s a real risk that the entire site starts to tilt toward Indian concerns, removing what was once sacred about this place. (Sheer volume notwithstanding)
I hate to say it, because I do sympathize with and appreciate our Indian brothers, but it is something we probably need to guard against. It has destroyed other communities.
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This only presages what's gonna happen to the whole of the internet in the next decade and a half. Both India and China on their own have more people than the entire western world combined. Now China has language barriers but for India and associated countries the English speaking internet is fair game.
If anything this world is a more fair one than the one of the 2010s where the internet was dominated by the concerns of average residents of WEIRD countries which make up an even smaller percentage of humanity (at least before 2010ish you could reasonably say the Internet was where the Western elite congregated and they deserve a bigger megaphone by dint of their eliteness).
Alright, psychology and sociology 201 it is.
People get attached to things they like, especially if they've liked those things for a while and those things have given off indications of catering to them. They don't like it when those things drift away from them and start catering to others in preference to them. This is the emotion of jealousy (in the proper, original sense, not the pop-culture synonym for envy it's become) - what you have, you hold on to, and you don't want someone else to take it from you.
And, to be frank, there's some merit to this kind of jealousy. The ideal Internet is one where different subcultures can all have their own spaces, but those different subcultures are of vastly-different sizes. That means that with a naïve policy of "let everyone in and always cater to whoever's the biggest chunk of the userbase", niche subcultures cannot have an enduring space - they'll be locked in a cycle of "start forum just for them" -> "forum grows" -> "despite self-selection, most of the new members are from more popular subcultures due to order-of-magnitude size difference" -> "forum's membership statistics slowly drift" -> "forum becomes genericised" -> "original userbase becomes disillusioned and secedes" -> "start forum just for them". It is not unreasonable to want a permanent internet-home, and that necessitates breaking the cycle somewhere.
"Growth" of that sort is growth of the site but not expansion of the community - it's colonisation of the site by a different and larger community. Denigrating the original community for failing to welcome their own marginalisation is effectively asserting that they have no right to a community at all.
(Disclosure: This is a copypaste of two posts I made on Questionable Questing about the site SpaceBattles transitioning from a hard-SF-sperging forum to an anime-fanfiction forum, with some specifics stripped out. All my words, though. Personally not confident that "Indians on theMotte" risks turning into an instance of that pattern, for reasons others have noted.)
My response is that western normies are already colonizers who savaged the original founding population of the internet which was tech nerd elites. The Eternal September happened in 1993! The true founding community of the internet is long dead and control being wrested from low tier Westerners towards low tier non-Westerners will just be fair comeuppance for them destroying the thinking man's internet and reducing things to the lowest common denominator.
I am not dead. I think.
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I don’t think I’ve noticed such. Maybe a relative increase due to the lull in American presidential politics? But no absolute flood.
I was gonna say, I think it's literally all because of the very OP of this TLC. Vanillasky posts a lot about India.
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As a user: Culture War is not unique to America. We welcome contributions from other countries, and have had a number of long-running contributions from England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, etc. I see no reason why Indian concerns should not be welcome here, nor any benefit to concerns about rate or volume of contributions by nation of origin generally.
The OP in particular seems directly relevant to both sides of the general debate over Feminism as an ideology. It seems obvious to me that the situation they're describing arrived through attempts to solve valid, legible problems identified by feminism, and is a demonstration of how Feminist solutions aren't sufficient in and of themselves.
Specifically, my understanding is that second/third world laws written by westerners to ‘protect women’ are often actual causes for serious complaint by men in countries like India and Mexico, where in the U.S. and Western Europe divorce rape mostly isn’t a thing and most other examples are things where someone has to get the short end of the stick.
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To steelman: There's an argument, and a pretty solid one, that SJ is mostly the same across US/England/Ireland/Canada/Australia/NZ/France/Germany/Scandinavia (as a product of its online emergence) - there's a lot of variation in the strength and some variation in the type of movements opposing SJ, but the issues are mostly the same. My understanding is that while there is some cross-pollination, India's culture wars are substantially different.
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Is the judge offering to settle the case for just $6K? Surely this guy would have had $6K to make this go away? IMO it's not prima facie unreasonable for a divorce to split assets evenly if the couple has been together a long time, and presumably they had over $12k in assets.
The judge was requesting a bribe. Westerners really don't comprehend how corrupt third world nations are even when presented with an example of it in the most direct sense possible.
Third world bribery is hilariously different from first world bribery. A policeman shaking you down for a random traffic pit stop is unheard of in the developed world, whereas the networked corruption of opaque contracts and awards buried within bureaucratic legalese are a misty shadowland for third world.
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And to think that the previous generation of my family understood bribery vocabulary so well.
Anyway, giving the judge $6k to make it all go away still seems to make sense. When in Delhi, right?
Does the bribe actually work or does the Judge just take the money and then claim the other family paid more so you will need pony up some more?
Presumably, if the judge reneges on his side of the deal, he will torpedo his chances at getting future bribes.
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*requesting
Yep, good correction.
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I read it as a pure bribe ; in exchange for six thousand dollars she will try to limit the alimony and other claims, which are in the hundreds of thousands.
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An uncle of mine married a lady while they were both finishing up their engineering PhDs.
She was chronically depressed, and had even been started by my (gyno) parents on SSRIs for postpartum depression. When their kid was about 6 months old, she was alone at home and hanged herself. No note, it was a spur of the moment decision while their daughter slept next door.
I have absolutely no reason to think my uncle or his immediate family had anything to do with it. They were a happy couple, even while grappling with her mental health issues. As you've mentioned, the death of a wife within 7 years of marriage automatically warrants investigation*, and in this case, her side of the family were disgruntled and lodged charges, accusing him of instigating her suicide, while also asking for the custody of his daughter.
The legal system here is automatically, and intentionally, biased against men in such affairs. He was imprisoned while standing trial, a protracted affair, and a ruinous one for someone who had just started their own company and acquired a few sizable contracts. It took about a year for the charges to be dismissed and for him to see the light of day, but by then he was a broken man, and half a decade of work he'd put his blood and sweat into was gone with nothing to show for it.
This was all despite literally no evidence beyond the unfounded claims made by his in-laws, while he was able to show evidence of his wife's struggle with depression and get her doctors (including psychiatrists not in the family she was referred to) to testify.
Last time I saw him, he told me to:
A) Never get married B) Get out of this country while I still could
I'm not inclined to follow the first bit of advice, it was an unfortunate accident but he still had his life ruined because he was a man, and men are never above suspicion. The latter? You know where I am.
*A perennial headache when I was an intern at a government hospital. You had women dying shortly after childbirth, or because they got run over by a car, and yet it was automatically a case with medicolegal implications and a dozen times the paperwork for my sorry ass to handle.
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What are the marriage prospects for a divorced woman like this like in India? What motivation would she have for her alleged actions according to this guy?
Divorce isn't a social death sentence anymore. It's highly frowned upon, but can be forgiven if justifiable.
A cousin of mine got divorced (after marrying against family advice). She ended up marrying another divorcee and seems happy enough. That's usually the case, with divorcees marrying other divorcees.
Of course, big country, loads of variance, but you can put it behind you in most cases.
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This immediately jumped out at me:
Is it common in India to use this kind of terminology?
Also the basis of the murder charge against him was humorous to me:
Is this actually treated as a legally plausible claim in India?
Yes, developing countries often have de jure law codes which are just ridiculously prima facie unfair to men surrounding things like that. Mexico has similar issues with its domestic violence laws.
Usually these laws are written by radical feminist activists from the west.
Incidentally, divorce/family laws of similar vein (i.e. practically written by feminist activists and applied very unfairly by a judiciary motivated to protect women at any cost) caused the most major fracture in Islamist politics in Turkey since Erdogan's rise 20+ years ago, with a promising new party (led by Erdogan's old mentor's son) spawning around it.
I don't think almost anyone in his cabinet personally would agree with these laws or their applications personally, but even after achieving near-dictatorship level control of the country, Erdogan and his Islamists have been seemingly powerless to stop this drift.
Non/anti-Western politics are often really brain-dead and are starved of human capital. They are really bad at actually articulating and planning for a society that escapes the slow but steady drift towards the latest Western fashions.
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I don't get it. How was she forcing him to pay her money? Was she just making up charges, and the corrupt legal system assumed he was guilty with no evidence?
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