The mind boggles

Web-savvy as you undoubtedly are, you doubtless have learnt about the relatively recently-discovered practice of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan trading gory death pictures for porn...or at least for access TO porn. When I learnt about it this morning, I was prepared to enter the flamewar waiting on FARK.com on the topic, knowing that, as always, there would be SOMEONE willing to defend such a practice.

I won't bore you with the details...flame wars, especially ones about Iraq, are distrssingly predictable. But this one did arouse my interest for hitting a new low in self-cheapening. Basically, many of the posters did not view the picture-taking as bad because, to paraphrase, 'they were criminals anyways'...going on the assumption that the various mutilated and severed bodyparts featured in the gore-for-porn forum were insurgents and terrorists. When it was pointed out that in at least one case, that of a woman with her foot blown off, that even the PHOTOGRAPHER assumed she was a civilian (who had stepped on a land mine), the response was, to me, mind-bogglingly denialrific.

"I don't think that picture is even from in-theatre."

Seriously, at this point reality stops. What mental gymnastics does the mind have to go through to come up with this justification for dishonoring the innocent dead to come up with that? What makes winning a goddamned Internet flame war THAT important that you can self-delude like that? I truly, honestly, and deeply do not understand...and more than anything else in this fucked-up life we seem to be living right now, that scares me.

Giant Robots, on a trip to hell on a motorcycle. At least that's what the crazy man outside Burger Baron told us.

University

An interesting discovery....it is not University that I despise being back in...it's my department.

My one History course is a pleasure and a joy. I like teaching...why don't I like Education?

Giant Robots suspect the answer is socialism.