…fucking.

You know that old game where you make cookie fortunes funnier by adding “in bed” at the end? I think it would be funny if everything that goes wrong in the world were blamed on terrorism. That would amuse me greatly. Here’s some headlines from recent news:

• Terrorists Infiltrate Museums, Leave Anti-American Messages in Human Remains
• Fifth Day of Terror onslaught in Texas
• Terrorists, Feminists Threaten Veteran Memorial

Shit, I could have sworn there was a recent news item about some US government watchdog agency listing the ACLU as a possible terrorist threat, or at least as something that needed to be watched. If anyone knows what I’m talking about, could you please send me a link?

Via Fark, this made me laugh out loud. My favourite bit is the last line.
link

Remember this excuse? If you had a parent like my mother you’ve heard it. The English translation is “I don’t feel like justifying this rule because I implemented it by rote, without putting much thought into its justification.” My mother used to use it all the time when she didn’t feel like satisfying the curiosity of her intelligent and inquisitive children by explaining the motivation behind some decree of hers. As a clever kid who delighted in figuring out why and how things are, this pissed me off to no end. I am horribly jealous of people whose parents treated them like peers by explaining their reasoning. Perhaps my mother interpreted my questioning as arguing, for which she had no patience. But my natural curiosity didn’t accept that. I think perhaps that is why I now have a talent for figuring out the motivation behind rules, and playing the devil’s advocate: I wound up figuring out for myself why certain things were verboten.

To her credit, my mother never pretended her regime was anything but a dictatorship. “This house is not a democracy” was an mantra intoned whenever my sister or I would voice any human reaction to her rules. I was happy to leave her house, because I was of the opinion that rules should be consistent. If rules exist, they ought to be universally followed, or at least broken in predictable and retributable ways. The idea of one entity not subject to these rules does not fit into my world view, but if she was going to be inconsistent at least she admitted so.

The same, of course, applies to the Real World. If you happen to be the sovereign leader of a country and you decide to disregard international laws, if you decide that decades-old treaties designed to outlaw cruelty don’t apply to you, and get your lawyers to do whatever they can to find some way to wriggle you out of them, don’t pretend that you’re the world’s saviour. If you consistently lie to your constituents, disregard their will on key human rights issues and then deny them the right to speak out against you in public, don’t pretend that you’re running a democracy. And if you and your staff are going to bully other countries into following you and do whatever you want without accepting moral responsibility for the outcome, don’t you dare call yourself anything but a despot.

Why do I pay so much attention to US politics? It’s explained here.
Oh, and by the way thanks to Jake for sending me this link.

Due to a fuckup involving navigation away from the entry entry page, there is no blog today. It’ll be up tomorrow.

I was listening to one of my favourite songs today, and it got me thinking: what sort of rights do/should dead people have?

There exist already rules and guidelines. For instance a corpse has the right to not be randomly exhumed, and to not be fucked. Plus, the wishes of the person the deceased used to be are respected, hence the whole “will” thing. But are those unalienable rights? Can I, for instance, state that anybody found violating my corpse by vandalism, graverobbing or necrophagy is to be forgiven? I can already consent to bits of my body being used for medical purposes, why not for entertainment purposes as well? What about if, for whatever reason, I am not capable of consent? Do I then even have the right to write a will, or to place demands on the treatment of my corpse?

There’s another way of looking at it: That after I die my corpse becomes property, and belongs to my heirs. Essentially my corpse has no rights, my heirs do. Then my heirs can do what they want, and hopefully out of respect for me they’ll follow my wishes to the best of their ability. So I may not get that solid gold coffin I wanted, but perhaps they’ll at least paint my pine box yellow. I’ve just got to make sure that I pick an heir who will do things the way I want. And by the time I kick it that may be a very short list of: me.

So let’s suppose I die without an heir. Does my corpse then have no rights? Is it fair game to grave robbers and horny morticians alike? I think I remember hearing that if someone dies without a will and no heirs his assets go to the city or whatever. Are an anonymous DOA patient’s organs up for transplant? If he has a donor card, they’re fair game.

I guess a corpse is a bit like a child, in that it has certain rights regardless of its guardian, and if there is a guardian (read: heir) some of those rights are alienable and the guardian has control over stuff like burial rites. The difference is that the corpse (usually) used to be an adult, with legal decision-making powers. But what I want to know is this: Am I allowed to waive my right to remain undisturbed once buried? Am I allowed to waive my right to not be the subject of necrophilia?

Aw, shit. I just got an image of black-market corpse-whores. Some hapless soul is paid twenty bucks or so for the right to rent their body out after death. Maybe this price varies depending on the attractiveness of the person, and the likelyhood they’ll die young, plus other factors. The body signs a waiver saying he waives his right to not be fucked after death, and when he kicks it the necro-pimp preserves his body as well as he can and rents it out to necrophiliacs for two hundred bucks an hour. I can see the advertising now: “Slap her around as much as you want — she’s already dead!”

This would be a pretty exclusive service. Not many people would be in the program at a time, and they’d have to be discarded before long. So prices might get high once business is rolling, and the payout to the living body would grow. The biggest difficulty would probably not even be in arranging the legalities of the project, but in finding people who are going to leave behind suitable corpses. Suicides seem a natural choice, but they’re not necessarily cooperative. Bah, it’s almost not worth it.

What happens when the youth chapter of a church plans their bicycle outing the same day as a local nudist group plans theirs? Sorry folks, but the nudists have the right of way in this case.

My favourite line:

[The church organizer] is now asking the 300 or so cyclists on his youth tour to call the police if they see any nudists.

I love the righteous indignation angle. I’m picturing some flabbergasted priest shaking his head and sputtering “Nudity is ilegal! It’s… it’s just not natural! This display is an affront to God and to man!” Okay, so I’m exaggerating. I admit I have a bias, and little or no respect for religions like Christianity.

I’ve gushed about Shirley before. Well, I’ve tipped my hat to him. But today’s collection of Stock Conversations tickled me somewhere very deep and private and probably pink.

The first time I heard of the photos american soldiers had taken at Abu Ghraib I immediately pictured the snapshots I had seen from the first part of the 20th century, where a bunch of grimy, toothless rednecks are standing around with their rifles grinning like the cat that ate the canary, while a black guy dangles from a tree behind them. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to draw that parallel. (amptoons links to this article)

So I was having a from-the-hip conversation a while ago about the nature of abuse. My stance was this: While over the past however long the amount of abuse generated has not much changed, it has become less directed. While abuse used to be of a particular ethnic group, or of women, or children, or the elderly, or queers, now it is common to see abuse of people in general, or of broad groups such as “foreigners” or “consumers” or “people and others.”

This assumes a few things: that the amount of human rights and other abuses going on has not changed to any great degree in the past century or two. That the subjects of said abuse are in fact a much broader group now, and a few other things. Let’s pretend for the sake of this discussion that these assumptions are correct. This isn’t meant to be a serious study of society, but a look at the nature of abuse and humanity.

(Read more …)

Yeah, I have sort of a fetish for well-done ads. Here is one that caught my attention recently. Starts off kinda quiet, though.