Whenever something is causing someone to suffer in unspeakable ways, people are always eager to come up with a litany of pitiful little chicken-shit excuses and explanations, few of which have any basis in reality, when one looks closely at the reasoning. It's difficult to discuss a lot of these contexts that have relevance to the discussion, given the ways in which stupid people pile on layers and layers of garbage into bureaucracies and "economic" systems and so on. In the case of my recent discussions on the use of torture in "interrogations," the discussions provide a useful context in which one can examine individuals' attitudes toward the supposed abuse of power. When a person is tortured, one or a few people have decided to engage in unspeakable violence against another person. Additionally, the decision to continue the violence that, in my opinion, is closely analogous to continuous sexual assault or continuous, ongoing attempted murder, at least from a "conceptual" standpoint, is a decision that one or a few people are likely to make. Anyway, I can't really continue to discuss this stuff. Maybe if I had the slightest bit of respect for torturers, I could calmly and coldly discuss and explore the topic in more depth. The use of torture is morally reprehensible, and anyone who comes up with some rationale for its use is a goddamn stupid piece of trash and isn't worth knowing. Anyone who uses it or allows it to continue is, in fact, in my opinion, making an explicit statement that he or she believes that the use of torture has some value to it, even when he or she does not provide a verbal explanation of his or her supposed "rationales" for its use. In a different sense, however, anyone who claims to have a rational purpose for the use of torture, other than to pour out his or her hatefulness and participate in systematic abuse, is unlikely to be someone who is being honest, with himself or herself, about his or her reasons for supporting or participating in its use. When someone has the power to stop the use of torture and fails to do so, the person is, in my opinion, behaving, in some ways, on the level of some street criminal, running around shooting people or something. Even if there's nothing technically "illegal" about its use, it's something that just is profoundly unacceptable. Torturers like to go around blaming the person being tortured and trying to say that the person being tortured isn't doing enough to help himself or herself. But when the discrepancy in power is as nearly-absolute as it is in the case of the torturer-victim "relationship" or interaction, it's not ever going to be true, in my view, that the person being tortured can "do something positive," such as to reveal "information," to help himself or herself. Stupid people always set up things that they've "gotta do" and then put on a little goddamn show of bewilderment when people expect them to act in something resembling a reasonable or decent manner.
I'll never understand why small-minded, jealous, pathetic people like to go around bullying others, but I guess it goes along with the whole militaristic notion that one has to make things abusive because things were abusive for the previous generation, etc. One can say it's just the old "cycle of abuse" and that, for example, the educational system or prison system is an imperfect and oppressive system that there's no easy solution for. It's not my goddamn job to write things, on a blog that no one reads, about the reasons things "would be," in a real context, so much more terrible than people "would be likely to realize," in the event that I were someone writing a blog in a context I could understand. If one uses the old "government-access-to-time-travel-technology" concept, as an example of an extreme case of one group having almost unlimited power and the rest of the people having essentially no hope of ever having any power, the reality would be that no one who had ever committed a crime or experienced abuse or any other horrible thing would ever have had to experience any of those things. No one would be guilty of any crime, and no one would ever have had to die or suffer. In the case of the use of torture, one sees a situation that is not so different from that situation. In other areas and aspects of society, such as in the "educational" system, one also sees similar discrepancies in power, even in the absence of advanced technology. No one would have had to spend any time in a classroom, but that's beside the point, apparently. That's of no interest to any "big decision maker" who prances around like some piece of shit, making the "big decisions" about people's lives and parcelling out suffering and little smidgens of pleasure, as if human emotions are just things or extradimensional geometries. When a person gets to be a big decision maker, apparently, allowing a person to continue being raped for another few days or weeks is "no big deal." Meanwhile, people are screaming on the floor of the emergency room, in unspeakable pain, begging to see something resembling a characteristic of a living being, and the "wise old decision makers" "gotta" stick to their fucking bullshit plan of sexual torture and all manner of inhuman abuse. I'm supposed to believe there's not a goddamn thing anyone can do about the 60 percent graduation rate among high school students or the failure of the educational system to teach whatever percent of students to read and write? Whenever someone has a tremendous amount of power and is in a position of control over the lives of people who are in tremendous pain, as so many young people are, for example, in the educational system, there's something that's gone terribly, terribly wrong. "Why didn't you finish your essay, little Johnny Doe? What? Speak up when I talk to you! You slipped on a banana peel and fractured three vertebrae? Well, I'm not your mother, Johnny. Get a goddamn note from the doctor. I sure as hell won't believe that it actually happened, given that you're a young person and all."
I remember that, during one semester in college, I got infectious mononucleosis (from Epstein-Barr virus infection) and had autoimmune liver damage and severe, autoimmunity-driven neurological problems, due to the viral infection. Whenever one has any health problems as a young person, few people are able to offer anything but a callous sense of bewilderment. I remember communicating with an organic chemistry professor who said to me "I'm not your mother," when my skin was yellow and I was stumbling around because of reductions in blood flow to parts of my brain, caused by the thrombogenic blood disorder that the infectious mono had produced. I could barely walk across the room, and it was like pulling teeth to try to retake a fucking exam or whatever. I was able to easily get a note from my doctor, but many people might not as easily have been able to get one. Anyway, that's just one example, and the months and years go on. People are still screaming on the floors of the emergency rooms, with open wounds, and all the big decision-makers have to offer are statements about "access to care" or some such thing. All of the people screaming in pain aren't interested in or capable of listening to "reminders" about bureaucratic bullshit or the kinds of goddamn bold-faced lies that one so frequently hears, these days, in the media. You don't give lectures or yammer about lesson plans to people with open wounds, you fucking goddamn trash.
I'll never understand why small-minded, jealous, pathetic people like to go around bullying others, but I guess it goes along with the whole militaristic notion that one has to make things abusive because things were abusive for the previous generation, etc. One can say it's just the old "cycle of abuse" and that, for example, the educational system or prison system is an imperfect and oppressive system that there's no easy solution for. It's not my goddamn job to write things, on a blog that no one reads, about the reasons things "would be," in a real context, so much more terrible than people "would be likely to realize," in the event that I were someone writing a blog in a context I could understand. If one uses the old "government-access-to-time-travel-technology" concept, as an example of an extreme case of one group having almost unlimited power and the rest of the people having essentially no hope of ever having any power, the reality would be that no one who had ever committed a crime or experienced abuse or any other horrible thing would ever have had to experience any of those things. No one would be guilty of any crime, and no one would ever have had to die or suffer. In the case of the use of torture, one sees a situation that is not so different from that situation. In other areas and aspects of society, such as in the "educational" system, one also sees similar discrepancies in power, even in the absence of advanced technology. No one would have had to spend any time in a classroom, but that's beside the point, apparently. That's of no interest to any "big decision maker" who prances around like some piece of shit, making the "big decisions" about people's lives and parcelling out suffering and little smidgens of pleasure, as if human emotions are just things or extradimensional geometries. When a person gets to be a big decision maker, apparently, allowing a person to continue being raped for another few days or weeks is "no big deal." Meanwhile, people are screaming on the floor of the emergency room, in unspeakable pain, begging to see something resembling a characteristic of a living being, and the "wise old decision makers" "gotta" stick to their fucking bullshit plan of sexual torture and all manner of inhuman abuse. I'm supposed to believe there's not a goddamn thing anyone can do about the 60 percent graduation rate among high school students or the failure of the educational system to teach whatever percent of students to read and write? Whenever someone has a tremendous amount of power and is in a position of control over the lives of people who are in tremendous pain, as so many young people are, for example, in the educational system, there's something that's gone terribly, terribly wrong. "Why didn't you finish your essay, little Johnny Doe? What? Speak up when I talk to you! You slipped on a banana peel and fractured three vertebrae? Well, I'm not your mother, Johnny. Get a goddamn note from the doctor. I sure as hell won't believe that it actually happened, given that you're a young person and all."
I remember that, during one semester in college, I got infectious mononucleosis (from Epstein-Barr virus infection) and had autoimmune liver damage and severe, autoimmunity-driven neurological problems, due to the viral infection. Whenever one has any health problems as a young person, few people are able to offer anything but a callous sense of bewilderment. I remember communicating with an organic chemistry professor who said to me "I'm not your mother," when my skin was yellow and I was stumbling around because of reductions in blood flow to parts of my brain, caused by the thrombogenic blood disorder that the infectious mono had produced. I could barely walk across the room, and it was like pulling teeth to try to retake a fucking exam or whatever. I was able to easily get a note from my doctor, but many people might not as easily have been able to get one. Anyway, that's just one example, and the months and years go on. People are still screaming on the floors of the emergency rooms, with open wounds, and all the big decision-makers have to offer are statements about "access to care" or some such thing. All of the people screaming in pain aren't interested in or capable of listening to "reminders" about bureaucratic bullshit or the kinds of goddamn bold-faced lies that one so frequently hears, these days, in the media. You don't give lectures or yammer about lesson plans to people with open wounds, you fucking goddamn trash.
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