Rhinocrisy

Huh. Since the French have elected an evil fucking maniac in line with our own patriotic Americans’ bloodthirsty, jingoistic and xenophobic tastes, I was curious whether Bill O’Reilly would lift his long-standing absurdist “boycott of France”. What do you know, he did. Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles! Where is my fucking elephant gun?

I’m just registering a note of shame over this story about Richard Gere, which you may have missed. Apparently the guy kissed Shilpa Shetty (a Bollywood starlet) a couple of times on the cheeks during an AIDS rally in Mumbai. Subsequently a band of Hindu nationalist thugs known as the Shiv Sena (which has a long and illustrious history of idiocy) staged protests around the country, burning and beating Gere in effigy and burning pictures of Shilpa Shetty, in protest of this outrageous act of indecency:

“Even if the protest has been staged by the Shiv Sainiks, I would not blame them as the way Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere indulged in a shameless public display, it was not at all in keeping with our culture and tradition,” Sena MP Sanjay Raut said.

Now, I know I’m an ultra-liberal American; I was raised here and my permissive attitudes are informed by American libertarian ethics. But I’m pretty sure people kiss all the time in India. Given the current rate of growth of the population, I’m also pretty sure they get up to other things as well. And they certainly display affection in public settings quite often. Here’s a picture of Rani Mukherjee kissing Shah Rukh Khan:

And let’s not count the number of lips-on-bare-chest scenes I’ve seen in Bollywood films, which might be considered a bit more risqué than a simple kiss on the cheek. So let’s be clear that this is NOT the viewpoint of Indian society. Indians are certainly more conservative than Americans are, but this is the extreme reaction of a bunch of right-wing nutjobs, not a mainstream view.

There might be some value in debating whether this anger flows from the “interracial” nature of the kiss in question, but mostly I think the only value to be gained here is to wave an angry hand in the direction of the cloud of hornets infesting that particular corner of the Indian polity. Please, please, you Nazi shitheads, for the sake of all of us, disappear off the face of the planet.

Just a heads-up. I assume by now that all of you have heard of and perused Conservapedia, the product of a group of uneducated troglodytes home-schooled conservative students which attempts to counter the pervasive liberal bias evident in Wikipedia (cf. Colbert’s observation that this bias may be attributed directly to reality). It’s only good for a chortle at the moment, since they seem to have locked out account creation and anonymous page edits. But you might check out their page of Debate topics, or the star in their crown, the Theory of Evolution (link fixed).

Check out this bizarre segment on Fox News, where a reporter has himself waterboarded in order to, essentially, redeem the technique. His report concludes that, since he was “feeling fine” moments after his “torture”, waterboarding was really “an efficient mechanism to get someone to talk and still have them alive and healthy”.

This should go without saying, but judging from the comments on the linked thread, it needs to be said: this is deeply fucked up. Let’s first briefly mention the fact that there really is no way to properly simulate torture in this situation - the victim is a volunteer, his interrogators^* are merely demonstrating, and he is free to tap out if he feels uncomfortable. Needless to say, this bears little resemblance to actual torture. Other accounts of waterboarding I have read emphasize that the purpose is to convince the subject that they are going to die; that this is an execution.

Now, what is apparently being proposed is that torture (as the reporter candidly calls it) is fine so long as it doesn’t do physical damage to the subject, or cause excrutiating pain. I’m appalled that this is being discussed. We are not seeking the most efficient and least physically invasive mechanism of information-extraction, here. The reason torture is unacceptable is not because it merely leaves scars on the victims (although, obviously, mental scars do not fade as quickly as physical ones), but because it makes a beast of both the torturer and the tortured, both of whom must lose a part of their humanity in the process.^† Cruelty should not be held as a virtue by civilized people. And I think civilization (in the sense of civility) is something we should still be aspiring towards.

But it seems I am wrong. I simply don’t comprehend how we’ve lost our way so thoroughly. This flies in the face of the most basic principles of freedom,^‡ which we allegedly prize so highly that we fight and die in wars around the world to preserve. We’re off the slippery slope. We’re in freefall down a sheer rock face. And there’s broken glass at the bottom.

---

^* Who are apparently active duty soldiers, and quite gleeful that they know not only how to perform these torture techniques, but lots more. Presumably this story was reported with the eager cooperation of the Pentagon. I don’t know what to make of their desire to advertise their prowess in this odious field, especially since the “reporter” neglected to clarify where or whence this training came from.

^† Thus falls the argument that because some US Marines underwent waterboarding and other non-injurious torture techniques as part of POW resistance training during the 1990s, it is surely not too much for those we interrogate. But the situations are not analogous. This is not a clinical exercise; we are not merely monitoring resting heart rate, galvanic skin potential, blood pressure, etc. There are human actors involved. They know what they do, and to whom. And that’s far more important than the mere biology of it.

^‡ E.g., due process, presumption of innocence, and the basic right not to be subjected to barbaric punishments.

T to start random searches for bombs.

Now, let’s start off by saying that I recognize the obvious, OBVIOUS constitutional argument doesn’t really hold water, since the T is not a public place - you must pay for the privilege to ride on it, and it is technically private property. That said, it’s quasi-public and a quasi-governmental organisation, and there’s nothing quasi about random bag searches - they undisputably contradict the spirit of the fourth amendment. I imagine most Americans will accept the fear-driven logic that giving up liberties like the right to privacy are necessary in order to ensure public safety. Disproofs of this tomfoolery are difficult or impossible - might-have-beens can’t be demonstrated. All I can do is state my own preference: marginal deterrents to the miniscule risk of terrorism are not worth the sacrifice of very real personal rights. Especially as, being of brown hue and lately prone to sporting the facial hair, I’m disproportionately likely to be “randomly searched”. If this happens to me, I’m going to give someone the finger and get arrested, I think.

… You promise to veto a bill because it contains provisions condemning the use of torture against detainees and sets up comissions to investigate the possibility of torture. You do that despite the fact that it passed the Senate 90 to 9.^*

---

^* The nine: Allard (R-CO), Bond (R-MO), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Cornyn (R-TX), Inhofe (R-OK), Roberts (R-KS), Sessions (R-AL), Stevens (R-AK)