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These are short pieces in which two different melodies are played simultaneously. Usually, the right hand plays the higher voice, and the left hand plays the lower one. In each Bach invention, there is a motive (a short musical idea) that is repeated in various forms – each time slightly different, and is developed through the whole piece.
Cheering for a credit rating downgrade. They play with sparklers in fireworks factories too. *sigh*
I’m always a bit flabbergasted when people start making pronouncements about moral issues and backing up their claims with biblical proof. You may as well be saying that your beliefs are decisively supported by the ham sandwich you had for lunch. Qualia Soup dissects the inanity and lack of intellectual rigour of theists who claim to have absolute morality on their side. Unsurprisingly, the theist’s position turns out to be quite immoral when all is said and done. Colour me shocked.
I just keep posting about gender inequality, others say pfffff! what the heck I am talking about….
Until the idea that inequality exists and that it is a problem,then there really is not much to discuss now, is there?
The Panopticon come to life.
Prison is not supposed to be a walk in the beach. I understand that. People that commit offences need to be consequenced for their transgressions against what society deems to be the proper set of standards. Consequences should not include psychological torture, self-mutilation and degradation.
“Supermax prisoners’ daily lives are chock full of alienating and undignified experiences, so empty of positive human interaction, thousands are willing to risk death than endure such inhumane conditions. That alone speaks volumes about the reality of life in supermax prisons.
One of the most humiliating aspects of life for inmates are the frequent strip searches – forced to be naked, ordered to bend over by guards and spread the buttocks apart to have the anus inspected for contraband while coughing. Strip searches are the old normal. The photos of nude prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq shocked the world, but to be stripped naked for hours or even days is standard operating procedure in supermaxes.
Nelson explained: “Every time you leave your cell you’re strip searched … They do this to degrade and shock you…Sometimes the guards would make ‘homosexual’ comments like: ‘Hey baby, spread your cheeks’. Darrell Cannon, a survivor of a nine-year stretch in Tamms, described the strip search: ‘They tell you to open your mouth, raise your tongue, hold your hands up, they go through your fingers and toes and tell you to turn around and spread your cheeks up against the chuckhole … It’s degrading to have two other human beings looking at you like you’re some kind of specimen. It is extremely degrading.”
Conditions certainly look promising for an orderly transition back into society.
“Prisoners on suicide watch are routinely left naked in their cells. And inmates have been punished by “caging”, they’re held naked or partially clothed in outdoor holding cages in inclement weather.
There is no pretence of rehabilitation in supermax prisons; the purpose is harsh punishment. Prisoners endure supersized portions of psychological punishment as a result of strict and prolonged solitary confinement. Inmates are confined for 23 to 24 hours a day, every day, in cells that measure 7-by-12 square feet. It is psychological torture.
Supermax prisons are intended to isolate prisoners and to deny human contact. Cannon said: “Everything you do, you do alone … It [supermax] was designed to break you mentally, by not allowing you to have another human being right there with you that you can interact with.”
This extreme environment of sensory deprivation and social seclusion makes men go mad. Supermax prisons are filled with inmates with mental illnesses diagnosed. Laurie “It is a form of insanity to put people in a place that provokes mental illness … Either they went in crazy, or they go crazy once they are there,” said Jo Reynolds, an organiser for the Tamms Ten Year Committee and a Soros Justice Fellow.”
Straight punishment does not fix people. Remove the authority or system that is enforcing said strict punishment and old behaviours will return. So much money is being spent on incarceration in the face of all we’ve learned about how human beings work. We can build the supermax prison but can we build the services and support necessary to transition people back into society? Hell no, we are just ‘coddling’ criminals then and appearing to be ‘soft’ on crime.
Horsepucky.
“Prisoners resort to cutting their flesh: A form of self-mutilation that results in thick scarring. Small shavings of concrete, plastic ‘sporks’ or paper clips are used to cut and cause bleeding to arms, legs and genitals. Cannon remembers some prisoners cutting themselves, “just to feel something … they were willing to do anything to get out of their cell and into the infirmary to be around other people”.
Nelson recalled an inmate who continually tightened a piece of string around his finger. It became gangrenous and was amputated. Men who injured themselves told him: “I need the pain, to feel real”.
“Gassing” is also common in supermax prisons. It is a word used to describe prisoners throwing urine and faeces at guards. Gassing is treated as a security threat and is met with excessive force by a tactical team.
Prison mental health staff label inmates who engage in cutting and gassing as malingering and “acting out”, not as suffering from mental illness. And yet there is decades of indisputable, well-documented evidence that solitary confinement causes mental breakdown and self-injurious behaviour.
Dr Terry A Kupers, a psychologist who has conducted hundreds of assessments of prisoners in supermax prisons, explained in an article in the Belleville News-Democrat. “Twenty-three hours a day alone in a cell causes many inmates to brutally attack themselves,” he wrote. “In the adult male population of the United States, self-mutilation occurs only in solitary confinement. It’s an epidemic across the country. They’re not faking.”
23 hours a day of solitary confinement? The line between prison and torture-camp is blurring.
“Supermax prisons are modern, high-tech, taxpayer funded concentration camps. The architecture is a twisted blend of Fascist-Stripped-Classical and Functionalist designed to facilitate the One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest punishment of inmates. They are located in rural areas in small, conservative, majority white towns desperate for jobs. Pelican Bay was built on an abandoned logging site and is completely cut off from its surroundings. Tamms supermax is located in the far corner of Illinois in the village of Tamms, population: 724. The remote location of supermax prisons keeps them hidden and away from public scrutiny and protest. Media are not allowed in.
On the perimeter of supermax prisons loom large and imposing guard towers with gun turrets and floodlights that resemble German Flak towers.
The interior of supermax prisons is built on the architectural principles of isolation, surveillance and über-control. Doors and gates are controlled electronically. A panoptic central guard tower is encircled by prisoner “pods” and closed-circuit TV cameras allow guards to see into every cell. Privacy is nonexistent. Concrete cells contain a poured concrete bed, immovable concrete desk/stool, stainless steel sink, toilet and mirror. Metal wire mesh cell doors have a slot to deliver food and other items. Some doors have Plexiglas covers that insulate cells from sound, air and vision.”
Contemplating or threatening suicide? Well, well just add more restraints and there we have it, problem solved! (NSFW, violence and language)
To reiterate, yes prisons are necessary. Torture and inhumane treatment is not if we want to honour the claim that we are civilized society.
*April 15th, 2012 Update* – Al Jazeera has continued the series on incarceration in the United States.
Strap on the feedbags y’all. Because if you have not maxed out your gluttony meters yet have we got a deal for you. All the goodness of a cheese burger cradled in the sugary luxury of a glazed maple doughnut.
- 1500 calories and wating in quantity at a Fair near you…
Oh! It is that news story that got bumped off the radar because the two business parties of the US cannot decide how best to rid their society of the evilz of the pesky socialism. The famine in the horn of Africa continues…
The most recent (and continuing) episode of people dying miserable deaths due to starvation and lack of potable water...
Future historians, if we have future historians, will look back and wonder, “What the frack were their priorities back then?”. We can talk of geopolitics and of population control or even government corruption. Really, just choose your scapegoat and then you can feel better and justified about the state of the world and your position in it.
With the great intersection of science and technology we can send vehicles to Mars, or produce a precision guided missile that can guide itself to within 10m of the intended target. We can garner resources to bury a 27 kilometer length of concrete tunnel, ring it with superconductors and smash atoms, yet we cannot figure out how to feed people who are starving to death in another part of the world.
This is happening right now. We are culpable for our actions. This is our watch. We’re failing, on a grand scale, in the most basic aspects of altruism and empathy for others. We worship consumption and continue to celebrate our civilization blind to our own history and struggle, nestled within the tenuous safety of our technological achievements.
The world burns and we revel in our cheese-burger-doughnuts. A civilized culture indeed.
*update* Oh! Food is a no-go…but tobacco, that friends is a different story.
It’s funny how when the bible says some really ugly repugnant things the ability to interpret what it ‘actually’ means becomes so darn important. One would think the word of god was above the musing of mere mortals….
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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