This is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan:
Sometimes, when a man is consistently correct in his moral thinking, he is forced to change his language. Some words will no longer do. Believe, me, I admire the stance you’ve taken; I’d go so far as to say that I agree with ninety percent of what you say on your blog. You’ve held a merciless mirror to this administration, and it can’t have been boundless fun: you’ve predictably lost a few friends in the process.
Nathan Winograd is the leader of the No Kill movement, a genuine revolution in animal welfare. Three million healthy and adoptable pets will be killed next year in America’s shelters. Not, however, if Winograd and his growing army have any say. I caught up with him a few weeks after the No Kill Advocacy Centre‘s annual conference in Washington D.C.
From the LA Times:
The wages of sin are Me. In general, I get too little credit for my contribution to the Fall of Man. Kids, I was there in the garden; I was a major voice in the conference preceding the Apple Incident; I’ve done most of the grunt work when it comes to postlapsarian retribution. Before you get damned, you generally have to die, right? So it should be no surprise to you, especially if you’ve studied depth psychology, that I pretty much came up with the concept of sex.
Nothing so unnatural as “natural causes.” Look, I designed the whole system of demise, and I assure you, disease and old age were an afterthought. Ideally, men should kill men. I’ve been tweaking the man-killing-man scenario for millennia, and I’m not sure many of you recognize what I’ve had to go through to arrive at the current virtuosic state of affairs.
One of my favorite places in the second half of the twentieth century was a quaint, rustic torture complex in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng Prison. Extinction without torture is like dessert without dinner (I am nothing if not an aesthete); death of the soul should precede – not accompany – death of the body. Let a man know that he is going to die, feel that state move in excruciating stages through his various gates of pain, experience the complete demise of happiness, hope, then dignity; and only then is his removal from this sphere a work of art.
They say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. What this quip fails to acknowledge, however, is just what an achievement the camel is. No mean feat to design one.
Wikipedia is a camel.
I’ve always been a fan of Wikipedia. Detractors argue that you have to double-check everything you encounter there. I see this as an argument in its favor: you should double-check any fact, encountered anywhere, but only Wikipedia comes with this useful caveat branded on its communal forehead. Britannica’s
Alito is a menace. Friends, this is no time to invoke the Powell Doctrine. Sometimes you have to enter a battle without overwhelming force and without the assurance of victory: that’s what’s known as “courage.” Conservatives are salivating for a reason: Samuel Alito’s succession to the court would render the Bush era permanent.
At last we have details regarding “special rendition” (or, if you prefer, “extraordinary rendition” — a phrase which is even more doubleplusgood). This is important. If you are mistakenly kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, it’s useful to know what to expect. The intrepid Dana Priest (WaPo’s new star, now that Woodward has become Dubya’s pet hack), has written yet another remarkable exposé of the Cheney/Bush reign of (t)error — Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake.
If you’re not reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, you’re not fully aware of what this administration’s doing to untried prisoners in the name of The War Against Other People’s Terrorism. Some technical details:
“TORTURE AND WATER: One of the experts on torture, especially that practised in Iran, professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, emails an exhaustive account of the various techniques involved, including their gruesome nuances:
This specific water torture, often called the “water cure,” admits of several variants:
(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside.
“He’s a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he’s been tapped by God to do very important things.”
No, that’s not an assessment of George W. Bush. It’s the beginning of the smear campaign against the prosecutor: the quotation is from a “White House ally… referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.”
Animal rights activists, opposed to the No Kill movement, recently threatened to kill Nathan Winograd’s beloved pet dog. The threat appeared on a Facebook page entitled “I Hate Dog Breeders.”
Nathan Winograd is of course the leading voice for the No Kill movement. His campaign to end the unnecessary killing of shelter animals has inspired all sorts of slurs, one of which is that he is in the pocket of the puppy mill industry.
Analogue photos from the nineties, poorly scanned. Much of this was for New York Magazine and various travel publications, meaning we’re talking about poorly scanned second-generation imagery. Which has its charms, I suppose. (This takes you to Dysmedia, which was the site I lived at many years ago.)