The most reliable effect of torture/degradation/gross humiliation is to make people crazy with rage, and who wants to deal with crazy people?
"Crazy rage" wasn't the result of interned Japanese-Americans or Holocaust survivors or survivors of Pol Pot's regime or survivors of the Cultural Revolution--just to name a few.
Those folks dealt with the horrors they experienced by moving on, living their lives and building something productive. The Islamofascists and their appeasers will use this to fuel their endless store of self-pity and victimization.
Anyone catch last Sunday's "60 Minutes" spot about the 5 Western men who were arrested and tortured in a Saudi jail?
How about the two Palistinian men who dressed as women and tried to fire on a memorial service for the pregnant Israeli woman and her four daughters who were murdered a week earlier. I guess it's OK to face the horrible humilation of wearing women's clothing if you're doing it to kill Jews.
What happened at Abu Ghraib is wrong. It's unjustifiable. Those in charge and those who did the dirty work need to answer for their actions.
Or maybe we should wring our hands and discuss the "root causes" of why these young G.I.'s did this?
This is an international issue--but at least people in the US are wrestling with the problem.
I'm living in northern Costa Rica, in a place with 100+ inches of annual rainfall. People here waste water constantly. They also litter, burn trash--including rubber and plastic--in their front yards, leave SUVs, vans and trucks parked but running in front of businesses for a half-hour or more, burning diesel fuel, etc. Recycling of bottles and cans just started in this town.
All this in an area with a large "eco-tourism" industry. [And a hydro-electric plant built next to the world's third most active volcano.]
I have a coworker who won't eat eggplant or any other "night shade" vegtable because she says it causes inflamation in her joints, does this sound plausible to y'all?
Back in the early 80s I went through a macrobiotic phase, and they eschew all of those foods. [Along with just about everything tasty in the world.]
I'm amazed at the number of people who don't like chocolate! Astounding.
I admire Teresa's eloquence.
I believe because it comforts me and it makes sense to me. And the world is too chaotic and cruel without the presence of God in my life.
You can't save the world. I believe that when it comes to "helping", the only thing one can do, is to "save" what's in front of you. I can't save every abused/abandoned dog in Costa Rica, but I did save one that was bleeding to death in front of my house.
Think globally and act locally is all most of us can do. But it's a lot.
Michelle wrote:
More likely it's due to the beief that there are few, if any, truly evil people in the world. What was a the quote I recently heard? "No one thinks of themselves as nefarious." Again, if one can understand someone, doesn't that make it easier to deal with them, if you can comprehend that they have *reasons* for what they do? It always seems to me that any death is a loss for someone. How horrible would someone have to be that even their family didn't love them and mourn their death?
But it's also due to the fact that I'm a squeamish pacifist. I can't even kill bugs. So it's sometimes hard for me to see the grey areas that exist beyond "thou shalt not kill."
The commandment is "thou shalt not murder." Big diff. Come down to Central America for a week or two, and I guarantee you'll lose your pacifism re bugs.
Sociopaths always have "reasons" for their heinous acts.
I am now living for the day when I can tell an editor who makes a change:
I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation.
Madeleine:
I had an almost identical experience trying to buy romances at the Chestnut Street [SF] Books Inc. I was told "people around here don't read those sort of books."
Re cats, I'm allergic and don't really appreciate them in a store in which I want to linger.
I'm a former longtime SF resident who grew weary of the condescending attitudes of many of the indie bookstore staffs. To them, reading/writing romance/women's fiction was beneath contempt. A Clean Well-Lighted Place, IMO, had the snottiest staff. Stacey's wasn't much better.
Now I live somewhere where there's neither a library or a bookstore. I've ordered from Blackwell's in the UK, and half my orders are stolen by customs here. An order from B&N.com took six months to arrive. A recent Amazon order arrived in under a week.
I hope they're offering 50% off on Jane Austen Doe books.
The only time I've had candle salad is here in Costa Rica, at a baby shower. I was mightily impressed, but had no idea of its LDS roots.
BTW, the recipes posted touched me to the core of my suburban self.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 13 |
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