We don’t need any more fear-mongering Conservatives trying to run this country into the ground for their own person gain. Not that I expect Obama to institute real change—though I hope he does—, but I do feel he would make more positive changes than the Clintons. Only time will tell.

‘Mind-altering substances’
Scott Allen, a physician and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I, noted that there are no accepted medical standards for the use of drugs to subjugate prisoners. Thus, any such use in interrogations “would have to be considered an experimental use of medicine.”

Hallucinations
So far, the evidence is limited to the accounts of detainees who describe similar episodes in which they were forcibly given drugs and experienced unnatural physical effects ranging from extreme drowsiness to hallucinations. U.S. military officials have acknowledged using only therapeutic drugs, such as vitamins and vaccines, on Guantanamo Bay detainees.

“Our policy is, and always has been, to treat detainees humanely,” said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “The use of medication to manipulate a detainee has never been an approved DOD interrogation technique.” While declining to comment on specific claims, Gordon said medical care was provided “based solely upon a detainee’s need,” adding that the interrogations did not affect or influence medical treatment.

WTF?
When can we start prosecuting these war crimes and crimes against humanity. And, please, let’s revoke the lincenses of any medical doctors rendering harm on other people.

I repeat this article here for convenience:

The D.C. Court of Appeals has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by four British men who were held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The four men had sued former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse. The judges effectively ruled that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The court ruling read in part “Because the plaintiffs are aliens and were located outside sovereign United States territory at the time their alleged claim arose, they do not fall with the definition of ‘person.’” The ruling was issued on Friday just as thousands of human rights activists were gathering around the world to protest the sixth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo.

I am saddened to hear that the Canadian Supreme Court does not agree that the US occupation of Iraq is indeed illegal. It is sad that other civilised countries in the Western world are colluding with the illegal war crimes perpetrated by the regime who have hijacked the United States and run roughshod over its constitution. It appears that the Canadian government is smoking from the same crack pipe they are passing around the halls of the US government. This habit needs to be broken before it is too late.

Whilst the term does seem to make sense: a-theism = against-theism, it doesn’t make sense to couch your argument against their term. We don’t call people who do not believe in UFOs “aUFOs,” and we don’t call people who don’t believe in astrology a-astrologists—I guess I should have picked a word that didn’t begin with “a.” We call them rational, logical. Therefore, the correct characterisation of this argument is not theist versus atheist but irrational versus rational.

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• Conservatives focus on people: People are inherently evil and need to be controlled. This is the basis for wars and the prison industrial police state we find ourselves approaching.
• Liberals focus on society: People are opportunists, and will do bad things, but if things are going generally well, people will be good. This is the basis for social programmes.

Here are my problems. I believe these worldviews are not mutually exclusive, and since societies are comprised of people, they have the same tendencies toward evil. What to do—how to reconcile these? As Carl Jung once said (paraphrasing), “there is nothing worse than a group of “good” people. Just look to the Puritans, Christians in general, and most so-called God-fearing peoples. I don’t know the statistics, but self-professed religious ideologues are behind most of the mass murders and genocides that have occurred on this earth. I understand that calling yourself, for example, a Christian, does not make you a Christian, per se, but with the fallibility doctrines, Christians always have that as an out—sort of like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

So, I guess I am not going anywhere with this, but I’m just saying…

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technorati: politics | anarchism | nature | government

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” — Kierkegaard

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technorati: politics | anarchism | freedom | nature | government | language | property