The Antisocial Socialist

Have I mentioned lately that I love Skinny Puppy?

I mean, they are one of my favourite bands and have been since I was a wee thing of 13. Very psyched to see them play here on the 18th.

But it's always nice when one's musical tastes and political sensibilities dovetail. You might have heard that after the U.S. government used Puppy's music for torture at Guantanamo Bay, the band sent the Department of Defence an invoice of $666,000 for the use of its music.

Here's an interview with cEvin Key about it.

"What do we want?"

"No more walking around in circles, holding picket signs, across from the U.S. Consulate, which is closed because it's Saturday!"

"When do we want it?"

"NOW!"

I also seek a moratorium on shouting "SHAME!" as it applies to our ruling class. They have no shame. That's kind of the point, y/y?

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Press coverage here and here, photos here. Note the 100-person discrepancy between the Sun and the Star.

The U.S. government's role in torture, and possible culpability for war crimes. It's a good read, but the most striking bit was this (regarding meetings at Gitmo about how best to torture people):

Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV’s dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. “We saw it on cable,” Beaver recalled. “People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular.” Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. “He gave people lots of ideas.”

The brainstorming meetings inspired animated discussion. “Who has the glassy eyes?,” Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, 30 or more of them. She was invariably the only woman present—as she saw it, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even. “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas,” Beaver recalled, a wan smile flickering on her face. “And I said to myself, You know what? I don’t have a dick to get hard—I can stay detached.”

That's always what I've suspected about pro-torture types; they get hot thinking about it. There are safe and consensual outlets for those sorts of sexual predilections but people with those sorts of politics are generally too uptight to go looking for them.

Hat tip: king_felix.

If you need a palate-cleanser after that, check out the Westboro Baptist Church getting Rickroll'd.

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Hat tip: trollprincess.

The Pride Weekend festivities shall begin fairly soon (which means I won't be at my computer very much), but in the meantime, here's some reading material.

Many of you have heard of the latest outrage in Australia. As if the aboriginal communities there don't have enough problems, the Howard government has decided that Father Knows Best and it looks like they're gearing to revive the good ol' tradition of stealing indigenous kids from their families and such.

ironed_orchid has a link round-up. It's some very disturbing stuff.

First, the good news: They might close down Gitmo. The bad news? You know they'll come up with something worse. (Hat tip: jhfurnish.)

The CIA is finally going to tell you about the nasty shit it did a few decades ago. The nasty shit it's doing now is still classified, sorry. (Hat tip: jamie_miller.)

Call-out for the Second Carnival of Radical Action.

zingerella wants your opinion on ideological purity in the feminist movement.

Omar Khadr is in "legal limbo." As far as I can tell, this means that while someone's finally acknowledged that holding a 15-year-old Canadian child in an American gulag as a war criminal was kind of a bad move, they still don't exactly know what to do with him.

For a brief refresher, Khadr is a Canadian who allegedly lived in bin Laden's compound, attended a military training camp, and killed an American soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan. At the time, he was 15. Under both Canadian and American law, a 15-year-old is ineligible to vote (and thus participate in the making of foreign policy), attend a school field trip without a note from his parents, or drive a car. He was, however, apparently old enough to be shot, arrested, shipped to Guantanamo Bay, tortured, charged, denied an independent medical examination, and held for five years. For those of you keeping track, that's a fourth of his life.

There's a consistency issue here, and it's not just in terms of how we define "terrorist" or "war crimes" or "enemy combatant" but in terms of how we define adulthood and enfranchisement. Allow me to advance the possibly unpopular proposal that, if we hold that a 15-year-old is too young to cast a ballot, he's too young to be charged in an adult court.

Of course, Khadr is no longer 15. He's 20, and he has yet to be convicted of any crime. Still, it's unlikely, after all this, that even if he's released, he will ever be a functional member of society. Guantanamo has nothing to do with protecting anyone from terrorists, and everything to do with breaking minds and spirits, sowing fear, creating the illusion that you're safe from terror just as long as you don't step out of line. As Amnesty International's Jumana Musa points out:

At this point more people have died of apparent suicides (at Guantanamo) than have faced trial before a military commission. I think that's a pretty ringing endorsement as to why these commissions need to go.

I'm not arguing that he didn't do it, by the way; I'm arguing that he can't be held legally responsible. Not unless we're willing to take on the considerably larger task of redefining what constitutes citizenship.

ETA: A decent Star editorial on the subject.

I haven't really been able to follow the news, but I gather that in Gitmo, a guy confessed to a role in Sept. 11 and killing Daniel Pearl, and another guy confessed to bombing the USS Cole.

I guess waterboarding does work after all.

I finished watching Road To Guantanamo last night. I want to comment intelligently on it, but I'm still kind of reeling. I've watched a lot of movies lately that were upsetting for one reason or another, but not like this.

If you haven't seen it, it's about three young men from Tipton who end up in Afghanistan in September/October 2001, get captured by the Northern Alliance, and eventually imprisoned in Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. While it's never made clear why they decide to go visit a war zone and then try to leave almost immediately (they come off as a bit naïve more than anything else), it is immediately obvious that the Americans intend to treat them as terrorists, despite the lack of any evidence. In fact, it's their tormentors' zeal that eventually frees them—the CIA insists that the fuzzy faces in a videotape of a bin Laden rally belong to them, but the video is clearly dated; at the time, one of the men was working in British shop at the time, and the other two were doing community service and regularly reporting to parole officers. Even with the most obvious alibis ever, the men are still held in Gitmo for three months and the Americans try to get them to sign papers admitting that they're linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

( thoughts )

We're into the last stretch, gentle readers. Less than three days until I'm off to Chicago. Don't expect radio silence, necessarily -- I may have to pop into an internet cafe to stop my inbox from exploding. But in the meantime, here's a bunch of random things I've been meaning to post.

Quote of the day

What in all this disqualifies comparisons to other regimes? We’re less systematic and explicitly ideological about it than the Nazis? We’re not coming anywhere near the Khmer Rouge’s record-setting score for total percentage of population slain? Gitmo’s generated fewer notable works of literature than the Gulag Archipelago? That’s like saying you can’t be called an alcoholic because you drink less than Shane MacGowan.
--Teresa Nielsen Hayden, responding to Charles Bird's assertion: "Can we agree that … putting American in the same sentence with Nazis, gulags and the Khmer Rouge has no place in civil political discourse?"

Now for the last slew of photos you'll get for awhile.

First off, I did promise you guys a picture of a wet cat some time ago, and never let it be said that missnegativity does not keep her promises. Unfortunately, ( this is the only one that I could get of him sitting still. )

On my way to take the bus to Montreal, I had to do a double take, because right in front of Toronto City Hall, there was a ( very distressing photograph. )

Now, I never approved of the ( scowling sculpture of Winston Churchill ) in front of City Hall -- both for political reasons and because I don't really think it's appropriate to have a British PM outside of a Canadian city hall. But at least it's a funny and unflattering statue, so I could pretend it was up for the irony value. But then someone went and put up ( this little display ). Man, I hope that none of my tax dollars funded that.

I stopped to take a picture of ( a random note scrawled by some crazy person. ) It made sense at the time.

I only took ( one photo in Montreal, ) but I think it's a very nice photo.

Finally, when I got home, I found ( a note on my door. )

Thing is, the only Mike I know is one of the Bad Neighbours (who, presumably, does not have access to my building), I don't know anyone named Ben, and when I looked out on the roof, no one was smoking "hoob" at all. How very odd.

P.S. I just saw a bunch of old guys dressed very Clockwork Orange, with white coveralls and red suspenders, wearing bells on their knees, and dancing gleefully in a circle to live fiddle music. I really shouldn't leave my apartment -- even if it's just to pick up hair dye at the drug store -- without bringing my camera.