Posting Towards Gomorrah

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
Boon: They can't do that do that to our pledges.
Otter: Only we can do that to our pledges.

Just when I had written you off as unfunny you come up with something like this.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
Boon: They can't do that do that to our pledges.
Otter: Only we can do that to our pledges.

Yeah, yeah, but it makes my heart swell all the same.

[Spanky]

A Dissident of Islam’

By George Will

While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls "raw steak tartare." Amused by the redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.


And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her own arrangements.


She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission," an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.


It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disc containing videos of "enemies of Allah" being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil" who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam."


The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.


Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Muslims, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.

Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam," by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her — this "Enlightenment fundamentalist" — somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.


She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher's sometimes abrasive intelligence and her fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends "only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe."


She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities" — enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind — many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.


She calls herself "a dissident of Islam" because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much." She says she is not "a militant atheist," but the emphasis is on the adjective.


Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers — John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies." Islamic extremists — the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons — will be enraged. She is unperturbed.


Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.


:bow:

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
I really think you're just plain wrong about that.

So, I'll ask you what your basis for that statement is -- just your interpretation of the precedential value of the cases, or some portion of the legal argument?

S_A_M

Last time you talked about these guys I looked it up and this is what I remember finding. But now I am too lazy to do it again.

:shrug:

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Just when I had written you off as unfunny you come up with something like this.

I am hilarious. Ty can cite to at least 20 liberal bloggers to prove this, if need be.

or we could just meet at Grand Central Terminal.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Spanky
Last time you talked about these guys I looked it up and this is what I remember finding. But now I am too lazy to do it again.

:shrug:

:brick:

[Replaced_Texan]

Texas prisons won't allow condom distribution, because sex is against the rules.

$12 million for HIV treatment seems like a much better use of state money.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Texas prisons won't allow condom distribution, because sex is against the rules.

$12 million for HIV treatment seems like a much better use of state money.

Do rapists tend to wear condoms?

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Do rapists tend to wear condoms?

Is all prison sex non-consensual?

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Is all prison sex non-consensual?

I'm assuming most of it is, other than the conjugal visits, in which case the conjugant can bring their own. (Am I wrong?)

ETA: I am wrong, at least if the survey reported in the article is correct (72% is consensual). Guess it could have more benefit than I would have expected.

ETFA: Then again, I imagine that many prisoners if asked whether sex they had was consensual would say yes, given the stigma of rape.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
I'm assuming most of it is, other than the conjugal visits, in which case the conjugant can bring their own. (Am I wrong?)

According to a CDC study cited in the article I posted, 72 percent of prisoners reporting sexual encounters said the sex was consensual.

DC (and a few other US) city jails distribute condoms. So do most prisons in Europe. And Canada*. Vermont is the only state prison system that distributes condoms.





*Canada isn't to be trusted, though. They subject their own innocent citizens to torture, you know.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Texas prisons won't allow condom distribution, because sex is against the rules.

$12 million for HIV treatment seems like a much better use of state money.

:shock: :cry: :cussing:

such stupidity in high places should be a capital offense:

:die:

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
According to a CDC study cited in the article I posted, 72 percent of prisoners reporting sexual encounters said the sex was consensual.

DC (and a few other US) city jails distribute condoms. So do most prisons in Europe. And Canada*. Vermont is the only state prison system that distributes condoms.





*Canada isn't to be trusted, though. They subject their own innocent citizens to torture, you know.

Springing off from this, and especially this quote from the Houston Press article, I have a lot of problems with the way our prisons are run.

"It's still such a conservative atmosphere and homosexuality still has such a stigma attached to it," she says. "I think wardens privately will acknowledge that sex is going on...But publicly, I think they hesitate to talk about it because, as one warden said to me, 'If we admit that sex is going on, then we're admitting failure in our security role.'"

A friend of mine is from El Salvador. She came here illegally decades ago, but now she's a citizen and free to travel back and forth between the two countries. This summer, she went home to visit her family and take care of some health issues (it's a lot cheaper to, say, go to the dentist in El Salvador than it is here if you don't have insurance which is another rant for another day). She was suprised at the increased level of violence in El Salvador. She said that it reminded her of her youth there, when she'd hear machine gun fire every night.

The cause? El Salvadorians who end up in US prisons and the various prison gangs. After they serve their sentences, they're shipped back to El Salvador and pretty much terrorize the population there, having learned how to organize as gangs.

A few months ago, there was a three day report on NPR 1, 2, and 3) about solitary confinement. What struck me from that report was that the practice became much more prevelant in the 80s and 90s, as the prison population expanded exponentially. I remember reading last week during the Ann Richards coverage that the Texas Prison System doubled under her reign. I'm pretty sure that this is the result of the War on Drugs.

But the thing that struck me the most from the report was this, which goes back to Mila's observations in El Salvador:

Officials say 70 percent of the inmates in California's prisons are in some way affiliated with prison gangs.

When asked whether the gangs control Pelican Bay, Williams says: "The biggest part of me wants to say no. But you know, prisons only run with the consent of the inmates -- and that's all the inmates. The administration and the officers do have control of the prisons. But there are times when you lose control."

Associate Warden Larry Williams says it has been this way since the 1980s, when the number of inmates exploded, and rehabilitative programs disappeared. The gangs filled the void left from increasingly tense conditions and utter boredom. California's answer to the gangs was, and is, the SHU.

. . .

Jim says gang leaders still control the gangs from within the SHU, mostly by mailing each other letters. And he says if you show up to prison and don't join the gang of your race, you'll be a target for the other gangs within days.

"When there's a war, there's a war," Jim says. "You're a target just because of the color of your skin, so you might as well. You're going to have to defend yourself. The lines get divided. You've gotta take sides."

Jim was sent to prison 10 years ago for armed robbery. Several years later, he was put in segregation for assaulting other prisoners when he joined a prison gang called the Nazi Low Riders.

"It's definitely racist," Jim says. But he says he wasn't racist before he came to prison. "Prison made me that way. My mom and dad taught me to respect everybody, no matter who it was. It's funny because I still remember, to this day, my dad telling me, 'You respect every man until he proves differently.'"

I know absolutely nothing about how prisons are run other than having watched Oz. I have no idea how realistic it is to try and quell the gang situation inside of prisons, and for the most part, no one really cares about what prisoners are doing to other prisoners. But it bothers me quite a bit that gangs running the asylums is pretty much accepted as the status quo in American prisons, and it seems to me that somehow focusing on the enforcement of a "no sex" rule is ridiculous in light of how little control our prisons seem to have over the prisoners.

And when they get out, it seems to me, they are much worse people for society than they were when they went in.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Springing off from this, and especially this quote from the Houston Press article, I have a lot of problems with the way our prisons are run.

A friend of mine is from El Salvador. She came here illegally decades ago, but now she's a citizen and free to travel back and forth between the two countries. This summer, she went home to visit her family and take care of some health issues (it's a lot cheaper to, say, go to the dentist in El Salvador than it is here if you don't have insurance which is another rant for another day). She was suprised at the increased level of violence in El Salvador. She said that it reminded her of her youth there, when she'd hear machine gun fire every night.

The cause? El Salvadorians who end up in US prisons and the various prison gangs. After they serve their sentences, they're shipped back to El Salvador and pretty much terrorize the population there, having learned how to organize as gangs.

A few months ago, there was a three day report on NPR 1, 2, and 3) about solitary confinement. What struck me from that report was that the practice became much more prevelant in the 80s and 90s, as the prison population expanded exponentially. I remember reading last week during the Ann Richards coverage that the Texas Prison System doubled under her reign. I'm pretty sure that this is the result of the War on Drugs.

But the thing that struck me the most from the report was this, which goes back to Mila's observations in El Salvador:

I know absolutely nothing about how prisons are run other than having watched Oz. I have no idea how realistic it is to try and quell the gang situation inside of prisons, and for the most part, no one really cares about what prisoners are doing to other prisoners. But it bothers me quite a bit that gangs running the asylums is pretty much accepted as the status quo in American prisons, and it seems to me that somehow focusing on the enforcement of a "no sex" rule is ridiculous in light of how little control our prisons seem to have over the prisoners.

And when they get out, it seems to me, they are much worse people for society than they were when they went in.

Your friend went to El Salvador because her dental bill would be cheaper? did she think to factor in travel costs? she better had been getting some massive rework, like all gold teeth, something like that.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
we could just meet at Grand Central Terminal.

Keep your straw in your pants