Not really our turf, but Glenn Greenwald has officially jumped the shark. Here, he writes bout a man who is being sent to federal prison for making pornography. Pretty ridiculous, to be sure, and, though somewhat strange topic or him, certainly something you would expect Glenn to be upset about. He really starts to grasp at straws, though, when the article takes a strange turn:
But for our highest government officials, including the ones responsible for this prosecution, we have a different story altogether. In 2002, the Bush DOJ radically re-defined "torture" and illegal treatment of detainees to exclude anything that falls short of "the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The DOJ's John Yoo even decreed that the President could legally order "'scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance' thrown on a prisoner" and possibly even "slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb."Uh, Glenn, that's not really what they had in mind when they were talking about S&M.... For those of you who think I might be exaggerating, here's Glenn:
So, to recap, in the Land of the Free: if you're an adult who produces a film using other consenting adults, for the entertainment of still other consenting adults, which merely depicts fictional acts of humiliation and degradation, the DOJ will prosecute you and send you to prison for years. The claim that no real pain was inflicted will be rejected; mere humiliation is enough to make you a criminal. But if government officials actually subject helpless detainees in their custody to extreme mental abuse, degradation, humiliation and even mock executions long considered "torture" in the entire civilized world, the DOJ will argue that they have acted with perfect legality and, just to be sure, Congress will hand them retroactive immunity for their conduct. That's how we prioritize criminality and arrange our value system.Yeah, not quite the parallel I would've drawn, but I guess it gets lonely in lawyer land....
Seriously, has the election made EVERYONE lose their mind?
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13 comments:
I don't get it.
Yeah.
Where's the shark?
I see Glenn's point.
I dunno, it just struck me as a strange place to bring up torture.
It seems to me like Glenn is doing a bit of making ever problem a nail to his hammer of "ZOMG, gitmo!"
There have got to be better articles that he can be writing.
It seems like a valid illustration of the DoJ's hypocrisy, to me. They prosecute fictional torture, but not real torture. Glenn writing about Max Hardcore may seem strange, but that doesn't mean he's jumping the shark. His point was worth making.
Yeah, I guess it's not that ridiculous in certain aspects, but something about it's tone and the context of GG's other posts makes this one seem absurd to me.
I guess I'm the only one that sees it.
No shark, radio.
Anyone else old enough to remember that "joke"?
Nothing wrong with Greenwald's post.
Nutella:
You suck. Seriously. You scream "Fire!" in movie theater to call attention to a real writer saying, "movie" in a movie theater.
I'd start a blog called, "Fire Nutellaontoast," but I guess you'd have to get hired by a decent publication first.
Well, that was hurtful.
I wish anony would make up his mind about me already. Sometimes he's my friend, sometimes not. It's so hard to keep track.
So we're throwing Glenn under the bus now? What the fuck??
WTF indeed.
WE are not doing anything. I thought this post was ridiculous and said so, no one agrees, that's all.
Move along now people.
Really bad observation. Quite lame. And I need Max's movies for Channel 84.
Greenwald rulz.
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