Lynchings in the Congo over theft of penises

I never cease to be amazed at the delusions that the human mind is capable of believing. One of the more amusing -- but still serious -- delusions is genital retraction syndrome, GRS, where victims believe that their penis is shrinking and that they will die once it disappears completely.

In addition to affecting individually disturbed sufferers, GRS can also be a form of mass-hysteria. Outbreaks of GRS are surprisingly common, particularly in parts of Asia and Africa, where it is often attributed to witchcraft, communist agents or Zionists. In 2003, in the midst of an outbreak in the Sudan, the journalist Ja'far Abbas blamed laser-controlled penis-melting Zionist cyborg combs for emasculating men who combed their hair.

In mid-April of this year, rumours of penis theft started spreading in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 13 supposed sorcerers, and 14 supposed victims, were arrested by police in an effort to prevent the murders that followed a previous outbreak in Ghana.

Police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko was quoted by Reuters as saying:

"We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten."

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke. But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'."

Lest you think GRS is purely a problem for "funny little foreigners", I have a book, "Only Human", by Dr Stephen Juan, that describes a case in heartland USA. And then there's the rampant fear among certain circles of conservative Christians that soy products (a.k.a. "a devil food") is turning good ol' American boys gay and shrinking their penises.

And lets not forget that the reason so much spam offers penile enhancements is that people buy that garbage. Spammers make rather tidy profits from selling snake oil to men who worry about their penis size.

As much as I would love to come up with a long and detailed investigation into the social and psychiatric factors behind the fear of penis shrinkage, I think I'll just take the easy way out and just laugh at it.

Bumper sticker of the day

"Dick Cheney, before Cheney Dicks you!"

Jesus, that spanking hurts!

Spanking model Adele Haze's blog includes this Christian Fundamentalist story-for-children: apparently getting sick is being spanked by Jesus:

But sometimes if we're really being bad or foolish and doing things we know are wrong, the Lord may take away His protection and let us get hurt or sick as punishment for being so naughty.

Sometimes that's why we get sick, because the Lord is spanking us for being naughty. When we're sick we should pray and ask the Lord why.

(Click image for full view.)

"Dear Lord, why am I sick?"

"It's because you didn't tidy your room like Mommy told you to."

"So, nothing to do with me eating food contaminated with Salmonella then?"



Hundreds of years after the invention of the scientific method, more than a century after the discovery of bacteria, and god-botherers are still pushing the ancient superstition that disease is a divine judgment. Makes you proud to be Homo sap, don't it?

Testing...

I'm testing the gnome-blog journal editor, and using this rather than my main NorthernPlanets blog in case of disasters.

So, let's see what happens when I click Post Entry.

They didn't die in vain

Over at the Reality Based Community, Mark Kleiman raises the question of what opponents of the war in Iraq should say when asked if the sacrifices of "our troops" were in vain. His answer is straightforward: of course they didn't die in vain.

My answer is: Are you fucking stupid??? Did you drink paint as a baby? Of course the poor suckers died in vain. They went off to a shitty, illegal, unnecessary war. They accomplished nothing of value, and instead of making their country safer, at best it is in just as much danger as before the war.

Died in vain? Oh, if only they had died for nothing, instead of dying for Halliburton's profit and Bush's election victories. If they had died for nothing, it would have been a tragedy; but they died for less than nothing, they died to make their country a weaker, meaner, more divided, less secure place.

Kleinman starts with a saccharine ode to the fallen:

No one dies in vain who dies for his country, or her country. Our soldiers in Iraq won the war to depose Saddam Hussein, and before that the war to free Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban and to uproot al-Qaeda from its base of operations. Nothing will dim their glory;

Dispose Saddam? Sure, they accomplished that. A pissant tin pot dictator with no economy or army to speak of. And for what? For lies and oil and damn little else. There were no nukes. There were no biological or chemical weapons. There was no threat. Did they die so Junior Bush could get one over his Daddy?

They certainly didn't die for Iraq. Iraq is in a worse state than it was under Saddam. Just ask the Iraqi Christians, protected by Saddam but targets in the new Islamic state of Iraq. Just ask the women being kidnapped, not the one or two that the dictator's pervert son Udi used to snatch off the streets, but dozens or hundreds. Or those beaten for not wearing the veil. Saddam killed his enemies and rivals, but in the glorious new Iraq, everyone is at risk.

And the Taliban? They lost control of Kabul. Big fucking deal. Four fifths of Afghanistan hasn't changed a whit since the Russians left a decade ago. The Taliban still controls half the country, where American troops don't even go in force. The other half is under the control of warlords. The supposed national government barely controls the capital.

But at least we have the glory, right?

Bullshit. There's precious little glory in letting Osama bin Laden get away, or in Abu Ghraib, or the rape and murder of 14 year old Iraqi girls.

"They didn't die in vain" is purely wishful thinking, a myth. But it is such a powerful myth, so deep in the bone, that even opponents of that wasteful, wicked war in Iraq keep telling themselves that the troops aren't dying in vain.

It's crazy, really. On the one hand, they'll tell you that the war was unnecessary, a waste of money and lives, counter-productive even -- but then on the other hand, the troops didn't sacrifice their lives and health in vain, oh no.

Like fuck they didn't. Precious little good came out of their deaths, and that little that did almost certainly could have been reached by other means. You wanted Saddam out? The Pentagon is spending about $5.8 billion per month on the war in Iraq. For the money spent in six months of this lousy war, $35 billion dollars, and a promise of immunity from prosecution, the US could have bought Saddam off and retired him to the Caribbean somewhere. Hell, with enough sabre-rattling, he might have taken the money and run, immunity or no immunity.

Like that other pernicious meme, "support the troops", the myth of not dying in vain simply extends the agony. Like an addict who tells himself he can quit any time he likes, and so isn't really an addict, the not dying in vain meme allows people to pretend that they aren't culpable for the deaths of their sons and daughters. From the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the trenches of Flanders and the jungles of New Guinea, from Iraq to Vietnam, and a thousand more wars throughout history, we, the people back home, have sent our sons (and now daughters) to die, and then absolved ourselves of responsibility by saying they didn't die in vain.

Sean Baker

Veteran of the first Gulf War, Sean Baker, knew what he had to do the moment he saw the planes hit the World Trade Centre back in 2001: re-enlist in the army and do his part for his country.

He didn't know then that his country was going to fuck him up in a training exercise so badly that he would suffer permanent brain injury. Nor did he know that after fucking him up, his country would try to fuck him over by refusing him a disability payment.

Acting as a military policeman at Guantanamo Bay, Baker broke the first rule of being a soldier: he volunteered.

He didn't just volunteer, he volunteered to play an uncooperative prisoner in a training exercise. Except nobody bothered to tell the extraction team (the soldiers sent in to remove the prisoner from the cell) that it was an exercise. Instead, they were told that Baker was a real prisoner who had assaulted a guard and that pepper spray had not had any effect on him.

After the guards realised their mistake, the strangest thing happened. The video tape of the training exercise mysteriously disappeared. Funny about that.

Now, the thing is, all these injuries happened to Baker in possibly as little as thirty seconds or a minute. Had he been a real prisoner, had he not spoken English and not been wearing his military uniform under the orange jumpsuit, imagine how long the beating would have gone on and how badly he would have been injured.

What happened to Baker is quite shocking. And yet somehow it is hard for me to care. It's uncharitable, I know, but there you have it. Baker's mistake was being a stupid patriot. Not a real patriot who wants the best for his country men and women, but the stupid sort who will believe any lie, accept any mistreatment, ignore any crime, if it is wrapped in the flag. Some people might say that being a stupid patriot doesn't deserve a lifetime of epileptic fits, but goddamn it, if it wasn't for the fucking stupid patriots saying "Yes sir Mr President, fuck me up the arse!" all the time, we wouldn't be sinking into this fucking mess of bad wars and extraordinary renditions.

Even after his crippling at the hands of the guards, did he rethink the part he played in the illegal and immoral treatment of prisoners? No. Did he turn his back on a military and political system that fucked him up and fucked him over? No. Instead, he got a tattoo of SUCKER on his forehead, taped KICK ME on the seat of his pants, and tried to go back on duty. After the army tried to ignore their obligations to him by refusing him a medical pension, he sued them to get his job back.

Is he the stupidest arsehole in the universe or what?

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of soldiers in Gitmo who deserved to be taken out and beaten to an inch of their life, then one more inch. Aren't they lucky that, unlike the prisoners in their hands, they're protected from arbitrary detention, beatings, torture and execution? (Or at least, they're protected so long as Mad King George doesn't decide that they're a terrorist.) Nobody deserves to be left a cripple because someone else was having a bad day. They have due process, equitable treatment, and the protection of the law, and that's how it should be.

Sean Bean did not, because his fellow work-mates thought he was a prisoner.

Maybe, just maybe, some of the prisoners are actually bad guys, although judging by previous cases possibly not. Whether the prisoners are innocent or evil shits, it doesn't matter -- what defines us as "good guys" is that we don't do what the bad guys do.

If you'll torture for a good reason, you'll torture for a bad one. Rule of law, justice and -- yes, even for Muslims and terrorists -- mercy is what distinguishes decent, good people from thugs and monsters. Everybody, every single one of us, deserves to be beaten to death according to somebody. We distinguish ourselves from the al Qaedas and bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins by refusing to act as they act, not by meaningless white hats and black hats.

Sean Baker was part of a system that acts just like the bad guys act, only more efficiently. Regardless of the stars and stripes on his flag, that makes him a bad guy. His fellow bad guys almost beat him to death. That doesn't make him a hero in my book, it makes him a fucking moron who got a taste of what his buddies deal out every single day. He wasn't even defending his fellow country people. He was part of a system that tortures and brutalises an Australian kangaroo skinner and Osama bin Laden's chauffeur.

You sleep with hyenas, don't be surprised when they beat you to a bloody mess and leave you with brain damage.

Dominance rituals, the President and the Terrorist

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published a review of "Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait" by Israeli journalist Uri Dan. Dan was the former adviser, close confidant and friend of the late Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon.

In the book, Uri Dan discusses a meeting between Sharon and US President Bush:

Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"

Once a frat boy, always a frat boy.

But on a more serious note, students of human nature may notice just how many dominance rituals are deeply sexual in nature. (And for that matter, how deeply sexual physical dominance is to many people.)

As many millions of gay men, and many millions more of heterosexual men and women, will tell you, being screwed in the arse is -- or at least can be -- a deeply pleasurable experience.

It tells you something about sex and power that (arguably) the #1 Alpha Male on planet Earth -- at least for two more years -- thinks the worst thing he could possibly do to his worst enemy is to fuck him.