You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
No ifs or buts, is waterboarding torture or not? If you think it’s a valid means to some end, read Derrick Jensen’s A Culture of Make Believe and then see if you still feel the same way.
Torture, stress positions, and other ‘interrogation’ techniques are not primarily attempts to gain intelligence but attempts to break the will and morale of an enemy. These are aspects of what Gen. Rupert Smith calls War Among the People, where an ideology is the real enemy of the dominant power. The power of an ideology can be broken by weakening the minds of its overt actors. Remember Winston Smith’s experiences in 1984? The torture we have seen in Iraq and the hidden torture programmes of the CIA are aimed at this end: you will stop resisting and ‘…love Big Brother with all your heart’.
This aspect of warfare has been happening since the wars against communism in the latter half of the 20th century, and it will only increase as multiple forms of resistance to hierarchical powers continue to increase. The forthcoming Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act in the US is a different manifestation of this mind control technique, where a witch-hunt will act to chill free speech and free thought in order to make activists and their ideologies less threatening to the dominant power. Thought crime has come of age.
Believe it or not one aim of this latter tactic is to help reduce the impact of the awakening (known as radicalization) that can occur when people read the same kinds of internet content that you are reading right now. You may be interested to know that the correct definition of radicalization is: to go to the root of an issue.
Very interesting state of affairs in Ohio. The subprime fiasco now has another angle to it.
The banking practice of subdividing mortgages into derivatives may have caused records of the ownership of the credit (mortgage notes) to be disconnected from the credit. The bank claiming rights to repossess a defaulter’s home in a foreclosure can be challenged to show that they have a legal right to the property. If they cannot connect their ownership right to the property then ‘case dismissed’.
It does seem odd that a defaulter would be able to claim that technically they do not owe anything. But it would be an appropriate lesson for bankers who play complex technical legal games themselves in pursuit of profit. Bleating “Judge, you just don’t understand how things work…” is a wholly inadequate legal argument and indicates a certain level of arrogance. Live by the sword…
The War on Drugs is a mess. Preventing harm cannot be achieved while some drugs are legal and others are not - it is a conceptual muddle and hypocritical. Many smart people have been saying for decades that drugs have positive aspects as well as negative. Educate people and let them choose what substances they want to use and the world will be a safer, healthier, and potentially better place.
Peace
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. “- Carl Sagan
Ecological
“The fact that Richard Nixon saw Timothy Leary [proponent of LSD] as ‘the most dangerous man in America’ is an indication of just how threatening the values of the ‘counter-culture’ were deemed to be. However, few people in ’straight’ society had even glimpsed the extraordinary power of the revolutionary tool which Leary and others were propagating. As Jay Stevens observes in his seminal study of the drug, even the activists of the New Left had overlooked ‘the role LSD was playing in redefining the Counter-culture’s thrust’. For the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘technology had produced a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilisation leading up to that pill absurd’” - Rory Spowers, A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age.
We no longer live in a world of straight versus counter culture and yet we continue to fail to calculate the social good (in the Spowers’ example above the context is ecological awareness) against the potential social harm from the drug. In terms of ecological awareness there has never been a more pressing need for an awakening pill.
A tiny percentage of all those trillions so far spent on the War on Drugs would have been better spent on education (including educating the medical profession) and treating side effects. All drugs have benefits, not least social benefits and yet ’social harm’ always seems to come up as an argument for prohibition. Let’s try an intelligent approach instead.
