Category: Rants

What’s so bad about torture?

In what is becoming an depressingly common manifestation of both general populational ignorance and an infuriating tendancy by many people to unquestioningly accept as gopsel whatever tripe the government spouts I had to listen this morning to a generally well respected morning television show host ask a question to the effect of “But these are terrorist we’re talking about here. What’s so bad about torturing them?”

I can’t understand how people are unable to work through in their heads the following train of thought:

1. Terrorists are bad (because they seek to deny people life, liberty and freedom without the foundation of laws, or recourse to a legitimately appointed judicial system to argue their case(s).)
2. We are good (because we base our actions upon universal laws and protection of human rights)
3. If terrorists do bad things we arrest and imprison them, both to protect ourselves, and to illustrate that we have retained both our moral superiority and the moral justification for our actions by:

a) Allowing the terrorists to defend themselves in open court against defined charges under defined laws
b) Finding them guilty of a those defined crime based on evidence and due process
c) Imprisoning them in a way that punishes them while still protecting their human rights (which, by their nature, every human retains regardless of innocence or guilt).

4. When we act this way we also protect those who are genuinely innocent, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or those who the government may choose to label terrorists simply because it does not like them (eg. Political opponents, common criminals, racial or religious groups).

As such, if we fail to do any of the above (for example by torturing them to confess to a crime, or by torturing them as part of their eventual punishment) then we become no better than the terrorists, and cannot claim that we are justified in our outrage at their “terrorist” acts, or in our reactions to those acts.

We also leave ourselves open to having the terrorists say “such and such a nation summarily kills and tortures us, so we are quite reasonably justified in defending ourselves by summarily killing and torturing them back…”, which is what is happening to America at the moment because they refuse to conduct either their interrogations or their military tribunal trials in an open and fair fashion. They may not actually be doing anything wrong, but their unwillingness to be open makes it look very suspiciously as though they have something to hide.

Absurdistan

As an initial side note, Absurdistan is also the title of a book that Catherine showed me the other day.

This evening I arrived at the airport an hour before I needed to be there to discover that there were probably 300 people in line waiting to check in, and 4 people at the counters doing the checking in. It was rediculous. And then at regular intervals they would announce over the PA system that all passengers for whichever flight was closest to departing should proceed to the front of the line and the counters would process those people and stop checking in anyone else.

As one of my associates in the queue observed, you can see how the airlines are making huge profits by reducing costs (eg. of check-in staff), but it’s hard to deny that service has gone out the window when you wait an hour and a quarter patiently in line, only to have your flight finally called to the front of the line anyway. It would have made far more sense to simply have gone and gotten some take away coffee and a paper and found a seat near the check-in for the hour, and just pottered up to the front when your flight got called. It was frankly rediculous.

Right to cheap fuel

It has been rather cynically amusing watching all the dumber and more reactionary members of the public respond to the rising cost of petrol. They almost universally behave as though cheap petrol is an inalienable human right, rather than something that is controlled by the markets under the control of simple supply/demand economics.
They don’t seem to understand that oil is a finite resource, and that we have been lucky to have petrol as cheap as we have had it for so long (most Europeans pay about double what we do in Australia, and have done so for years). They also don’t seem to understand that this is not something that the government can (or even should) intervene with to alter prices.
They also clearly don’t have a clue as to what the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) actually does (which is to prevent price fixing, insider trading, or other anti-competitive corporate behaviors), or that just because prices are rising it does not by default mean that the petrol companies are colluding or price gouging.

I really wonder what they will do when significant supply side restrictions (ie. when oil fields start running dry, and prospecting stops finding new fields) start affecting oil prices…

Discrimination

On the way to school this morning I was once again dumbfounded by the sheer blinding cluelessness of politicians on multicultural issues. This time it was the New South Wales backbencher Bronwyn Bishop proposing that the government ban moslem girls from wearing head scarves in schools.
Coming a week after the government ran a meeting with Moslem leaders to promote dialogue and understanding this comes out as promoting the exact opposite.
Now although I don’t agree with it at all, there is nothing legally to stop the government saying that you can’t wear religious symbols to school, but any rule has to apply to everyone, not just muslim girls wearing head scarves. It has to be an equal opportunity opression, stopping christians wearing crosses, catholics carrying rosaries, jews wearing a kippah, and so on. The fact that she was focusing on only one group shows that it is not a matter of opression, but simply a matter of racism, which is far far more disgusting in a supposedly human rights embracing parliamentary democracy.
Subsequently the PM came out this afternoon and quashed the idea, although his reasoning was because such a ban would be “Difficult and rather impractical” to enforce.
I think that Greens senator Kerry Nettle was wholely correct when he made the observation that: “The right to wear a headscarf if you are a Muslim schoolgirl is surely a matter of cultural and religious freedom, which the Prime Minister appears not to understand. Freedom of religion is an Australian value – that is the message John Howard should be sending – not that banning headscarves is simply impractical.”
As a side note I’ll also be interested to see what comes of the law suit that the 10 year old imigration detainee has filed against the government, especially given that the Australian Human Rights Commission ruled that his continued detention was unjust 3 years ago.

God I love hypocrisy

Only a couple of weeks after the Supreme court delivered it’s ruling stating that publishers of Peer-To-Peer software could be held responsible and sued for the unintended illegal uses of their products by their customers, comes this wonderful news, illustrating the blinding hypocrisy of the White House and US Senate.

While it’s bad to steal music and you can get sued for making software which makes said activity possible, there is no problem whatsoever with manufacturing assault rifles and handguns that people can then use to commit murder…

Below is a direct quote from the article:

“The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse.”

And yet you haven’t heard a pip from them on file sharing have you…

Medical Student Debt Case Book

On March 31 the New Zealand Medical Association, in conjunction with the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association, the New Zealand University Students’ Association realeased a publication entitled “Doctors and Debt: The Effect of Student Debt on Doctors“. It was a cohort study of first year house officers (interns) in New Zealand, and outlined the impact that high university fees and correspondingly high student loans have had on the members of the cohort, both individually and on a statistical level within the entire cohort.

For New Zealand Students (medical or otherwise) it serves as a depressingly predictable validation of the claims that have been made since the begining of the student loan scheme about the detrimental effects of such debt on young graduates, and the subsequently the economy and infrastructure of the country as a whole.

For my australian readers it’s worth a read, as it is a stern warning of the effects of allowing such policies to be implemented, because while Australia is currently benefiting from the immigration of NZ doctors into higher paying locum positions within Australia, the current push by the federal government to allow full fee paying medical school positions, to increase the fees attached to government subsidised HECS medical school places, and the failure of certain states to maintain competitive (ie market driven and realistic) award pay rates for junior doctors could combine quite rapidly to leave Australia in the same medical staffing crisis that New Zealand is increasingly experiencing.

Academic sliding scale

As a result of several conversations and an email that I recieved from the med school this week (whatever you do, don’t let me get started on the med school or the quality or content of it’s communiques to us scum of the school underlings), I came to the disturbing realisation of how academically pointless any grades or subsequent academic transcripts from a UQ degree are.

Now this isn’t as big a deal to me as it might have been a few years ago, as I have come to realise that in the eyes of the med school (and it’s assessment department) I will never be anything more than an “also ran”, middle-of-the-pack med student, but I will still come out a perfectly functional doctor, and so I stopped caring about trying for the grades that both my appathy, the atrociously written and abysmally marked assessment, and the frankly bizarre bell curves were never going to allow me to attain.

See it turns out that the University of Queensland does not use a standard grading scale. So the percentage pass mark to achieve a 7 in one department or degree can be completely different from the percentage pass mark necessary to get a 7 in any other department or degree. Worse still (which arose in one of the interesting email from the med school) the grade to achieve a 7 within a single degree does not even have to be consistent from year to year, so that in med you have to get a higher percentage pass mark to get a 7 in year 3 than you do in year 4…

This doesn’t even superficially make any sense. Particularly when you consider that they were so finickety about working out your GPA (the average grade you got during your degree) to get into med in the first place. When a GPA of 7, or 5.5 or whatever it is does not actually correspond to any meaningful value or standard, what is the point in asking for it at all. They can (and in spite of their assertions to the contrary, quite clearly seem to) bell curve the marks to their hearts delight to get the necessary grade distribution, but they should at least then apply it to a grade scale that actually means something.

I suppose that the only real consolation, as mentioned before, is that we will all graduate as doctors (barring major stuff ups), will all get equivalent jobs (even if the equivalence is that we all will get equally treated as scut monkeys), and will all get onto training programs where they rely on personal references for selection, and don’t even ask for a GPA.

Perversions

Does it strike anyone else as more than a little perverted that the Republican controlled (and generally conservative) ligislature in the US they are pulling out all the legislative stops to try and keep alive one woman who wished to be allowed to die, while at the same time they appear to be doing nothing whatsoever to implement controls over the swathe of guns that are at the exact same time killing dozens of innocent people who don’t want to die at all…

The FBI’s “Crime in the United States” estimated that 67% of the 16,503 murders in 2003 were committed with firearms – for those of you who don’t want to do the math, that’s 11,057 people shot and killed in 2003 in the United States, and still the government(s) appear reluctant to do anything serious about it, and as the Terri Schiavo case illustrates, it’s clearly not due to a lack of ability on the legislature’s part (after all, they had sufficient numbers voting for the bill in both houses to make the Schiavo bill an amendment to the constitution if they had wished). They just had a lack of inclination. Sick really.

Rant-Ability

I am quite enjoying having a forum for offloading some of my natural perpensity towards politically and morally oriented ranting. It’s great. I can say (within reason) just about anything I like, and because it’s on the web I am free to believe that the whole world is listening to me, even when the reality is that probably no-one is listening to me (pretty much the same situation as when I out loud rant at my generally disinterested but politely listening friends…). Basically, everyone goes home happy. 🙂

Society

It is not sufficient only to have a society. You must have a society which is fair and just. You must have a society. which strives to provide the best for its citizens, and indeed for all or humanity, and which revels and wonders in the achievements these provisions allow.