Not just some bad apples...

Some bad f*cking trees...

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Unredacted_documents_reveal_prisoners_tortured_to_0212.html

Of course, most people are already aware of the Bush Administration's record on torture. 

To me it was a real puzzle as to why the Bush Administration adopted those policies, knowing as they did (or should have known), that not only is "enhanced interrogation" illegal and immoral, it is also useless and ineffective, the TV show '24' (cited as "evidence" by some on the Right) notwithstanding. 

As a lay person, I am fairly well read, although not as much in history as I would like.  That said, I don't know of a single documented instance where a "ticking bomb" catastrophe was averted by somebody resorting to torture.  Perhaps there is one and I just don't know about it.  But it seems like our friends on the Right would be throwing it up in everybody's face if there was one. 

But it seems reality provides us with few (if any) situations where thought experiments like the "ticking bomb" scenario can be tested.  I think that's why '24' gets cited as evidence.  
 
Now In Austin, somebody also tried to use a online review of the movie 'Taken' in a backhanded way to imply justification for the Bush Administration...that's not to say, I didn't enjoy the movie in a primitive, vengeful kind of way, which led me to think--
 
Given that governments, generals, street gangs, mafiosos of various kinds,  are hardly squeamish about the application of force and violence when felt necessity dictates it (and often when it doesn't), who can really believe that an official who really, really has ironclad evidence of a (really specific) ticking bomb that desperately needs to be uncovered would fail to resort to torture if that seemed to be the only avenue to stop it--regardless of any laws or conventions that might be on the books.  And who can believe the official would be prosecuted if he/she did in fact keep the bomb from going off?   The point is, prior validation of torture as an acceptable policy is beside the point in any situation where it could be proved conclusively after the fact that torture was necessary and effective to avoid massive catastrophe.
 
So why was the Bush Administration trying to enshrine torture as policy?  I think it has to do with the same mindset evoked by movies like 'Taken' 
 
Republicans and conservatives generally tend to believe the world is a highly dangerous place, and that the only real safety lies in having the biggest stick and being the meanest SOB in the valley.  All else is mere window dressing & fluff.   George Will* and the usual run of talking heads on Fox News & their ilk hew to a view of U.S. foreign policy that the U.S. should be perceived as somewhat crazy and dangerously unpredictable. 
 
I submit Cheney, the neocons, et alia, weren't interested in developing information by torturing people.  They were serving notice that Americans are crazy, dangerous people who will do ANYTHING when they feel threatened--or even if they don't.  Even absent validation of torture as policy, given the invasion of Iraq I'll bet the world didn't need any additional evidence...
 
(In fact somebody commented on an earlier post--I thought I knew who, but I may be mistaken--cited me as an example of a dangerous American attitude because I was venting about the Taliban and Al Queda...
 
*I don't watch Fox News any more except for occasional comedic distraction, but it's interesting that I don't recall George Will being on Fox News much--perhaps it's too lowbrow for a great newspaper scholar like him...
 
Well, there are lots of things wrong with a maddog foreign policy.  Maybe too obvious to comment on, but maybe later.
 

 
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Ah, the joys of privatization...

(From AP story on Huffington Post):

Judges accused of taking payoffs to jail kids WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.
The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

 
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So--the Sussex name makes the news

10-Year-Old Sussex Spaniel Wins Westminster Dog Show

And, yes, I watched the show with with relatively little shame.   But looking at that pore, ol' dog, I couldn't help but think the sympathy fix was in...

Oh, well.   

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A-Rod?

Who gives a sh*t?  It's only an effing game.  Madoff?  A lot more to get cheesed at, sure. 

But our whole society is a casino with a crooked wheel that lets the marks win just enough to keep them from tearing the place down.

Yes, it could be worse, say, like in the old days in Haiti, with the Ton Ton Macoute.  In fact, much of history was and is implemented by creatures similar to the Ton Ton Macoutes. 

Why can't we merely form Rockdale cooperatives and all get along? 

A purely rhetorical question.

R.
 
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Re: American bloodlust and Iraq

"If Iraq manages to hold together in some minimal way as a fairly secular state after the U.S. leaves, it will be treated as a vindication of Bush Administration's invasion."

Well, let's forget the vague "treated as". Will it actually be a vindication of the invasion? If not, why not?

Doug

2009/2/8 Roy Griffin <roygg9@yahoo.com>

As I said, the UN strike force idea is a fantasy, but were there in place a concerted plan by the more powerful and more enlightened (& I mean that in the sense of the Englightenment) members of the UN to engage in systematic and well prioritized efforts to redeem shitholes like Haiti and the Sudan, and yes, maybe local interventions in backwaters and the ghettoes of the U.S...or France...or anywhere...I think it might be worth supporting, even it meant the use of some force & violence applied along the lines of "just war" theory...the foregoing idea could only be feasible in the context of a world greatly reduced in concern about national sovereignty--or the appearance of it.  That's one of those things where appearance and reality are pretty much the same.

On a somewhat unrelated note, from the point of view of domestic U.S. politics, what's going to happen with Iraq is this:

If Iraq manages to hold together in some minimal way as a fairly secular state after the U.S. leaves, it will be treated as a vindication of Bush Administration's invasion.  If Iraq falls apart after the U.S. leaves, there will be a "stab in the back" theory blaming the Democrats for the failure.  The Democrats should be prepared to meet the argument head on.   I doubt if they will be.

I sometimes wonder if the Democrats capable of coherent & strategic political thinking.  The Republicans certainly are, even though the content of their actual policies suck. 

R.
 
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American bloodlust and Iraq

As I said, the UN strike force idea is a fantasy, but were there in place a concerted plan by the more powerful and more enlightened (& I mean that in the sense of the Englightenment) members of the UN to engage in systematic and well prioritized efforts to redeem shitholes like Haiti and the Sudan, and yes, maybe local interventions in backwaters and the ghettoes of the U.S...or France...or anywhere...I think it might be worth supporting, even it meant the use of some force & violence applied along the lines of "just war" theory...the foregoing idea could only be feasible in the context of a world greatly reduced in concern about national sovereignty--or the appearance of it.  That's one of those things where appearance and reality are pretty much the same.

On a somewhat unrelated note, from the point of view of domestic U.S. politics, what's going to happen with Iraq is this:

If Iraq manages to hold together in some minimal way as a fairly secular state after the U.S. leaves, it will be treated as a vindication of Bush Administration's invasion.  If Iraq falls apart after the U.S. leaves, there will be a "stab in the back" theory blaming the Democrats for the failure.  The Democrats should be prepared to meet the argument head on.   I doubt if they will be.

I sometimes wonder if the Democrats capable of coherent & strategic political thinking.  The Republicans certainly are, even though the content of their actual policies suck. 

R.
 
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Slumdog Millionaire

I shall now proceed to tell you how much I liked the movie and then hem and haw about it.

In the early scenes about Jamal's childhood, I was nearly sobbing with rage.  It made me yearn for some kind of UN strike force that would go in mow down the slumlords, child slavers, indifferent capitalists, corrupt police & government officials, etc. (Yes, I'm well acquainted with the paradoxes, impossibilities & moral quandaries of such an idea--it's just a fantasy).  But I liked just about everything about the movie and loved much of it. 

I don't know what the screenwriter's intent was, but it seemed to me also a good expression of how the Islamic faith gets lived out, at least in that particular historical context.  I don't mean the Islam as preached by the local imams, but Islam as it is lived out culturally by people who most of the time are only nominally Muslims--just like the bulk of Christians &,  say, Buddhists, are only nominally Christians and Buddhists most of the time.  And that brings me to the hemming and hawing...

There's nothing in the Koran that unequivocally enjoins classic holy war, honor killings, female circumcision, intolerance & passages that may seem to, especially as regards holy war, are offset by other passages.  Jesus reportedly said "I come to bring not peace but a sword."  That has been invoked by Christians when they found it expedient to wage wars or engage in violence, but there's little doubt that the Semon on the Mount demands that that particular remark of Jesus requires that it be treated symbolically rather than literally.  And whenever Christians don't have their bloodlust up , that's how they do interpret it. 

 (Much of what we Westerners object to in Islam has to to do with the local and (often) tribal cultural matrix in which it is embedded that actually pre-existed the arrival of Islam.  In Saudi Arabia, there was no tradition of pictorial art when Islam arose.  Consequently, Arabian art is confined to mosiacs and "arabesques"  In Iran and Indonesia there was already a naturalistic pictorial tradition so the Koranic stricture against likenesses of God was taken to mean only as "don't try to draw God" and their pictorial traditions continued.)

But the hemming and hawing concerns this:   There is a fatalism in the movie that works well vis a vis the wonderful love story, but to me could be enervating as far as the pursuit of social justice, not only because of the implicit appeal to resignation, but also because of a certain mystical individualism. 

I dunno.  Michael Walzer has argued that the Calvinists, who were nothing if not fatalists with their doctrine of hard predestination, were also the spiritual ancestors of the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries a la Lenin--don't remember if he discusses Blanqui or not.  I wonder if Blanqui came out of a Huegenot background.

But the fatalism I saw in the movie is something I associate with Islam.  But maybe that's all wet.   There is a saying, "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel"  I wonder if it's in the Koran. 

R.

 
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