Bill's posts with tag: insanity
 Just saw in the news that some Indian tourist has chosen to write to Gordon Brown and Manmohan "Chairwarmer" Singh complaining about Mohandas "Mahatma" Karamchand Gandhi's waxwork at Madam Tussaud's being "placed near to a dustbin."
Apart from the usual rants - which I shall spare you for once - about busybodies with too much time on their hands, and misplaced priorities and so on, it strikes me that putting Gandhi next to a dustbin is peculiarly symbolic.
We Indians, after all, trashcanned Gandhi long, long ago.
 In one of the newspapers I read, I came today across an article on the "urgent need" to defeat the "worst threat" to the country - the Maoist insurgency in the forest areas of several states.
Since the conventional attempts by the state have failed and are failing, the "correspondent" writes, the government - its counter-Maoist forces outnumbered and outgunned - will have to defeat the Maoists using the techniques General Thapar (then, I must point out, the figurehead chief of the Indian Army; the real power was in the hands of his whilom deputy, the vainglorious and incompetent Lt General Brij Mohan Kaul) used against the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1962. Phew.
While I am, and have always been, pro-Maoist, and my sympathies are entirely with those who seek to save their lands and forests from rapacious government-backed corporations and feudal landlords, let me just step back a little and look at that statement dispassionately.
In 1962, the Chinese had whipped India's ass so thoroughly that even Indian history books don't pretend it was not a defeat. Trust me, that's a real whipping. And this guy suggests the government use the same tactics against the Maoist insurgency...
If they do, I suggest they simply surrender to the Maoists right away and spare us a messy civil war.
I wasn't going to write anything more today, but one of my contacts (I don't know if you want me to take your name, so I won't, seeing that you posted for contacts only) has written about how some people are sending him/her invites to child porn sites, apparently.
I'll admit I don't know much about psychology, and I can't really appreciate anyone else's point of view (as anyone who knows me will attest) - but I have never even begun to understand the mentality of any person who can like child porn. I can't even call it porn, not really, because porn has some requirement of titillation to it.
A year or so back I'd written about the human tendency towards underage sexual partners and towards incest. I still am of the view that incest and underage sex taboos are social, not natural, constructs. But that is premised on a simple idea - that the sexual partner/victim, call him or her what you will, is sexually mature, even if below the legal age of consent.
Look at a sexually immature child. If it's a female, she will have a flat masculine chest, absolutely no curves anywhere, she will release no feminine odours or pheromones or anything. Not just mentally - physically she will not be capable of giving out any sexual signals. This is an obvious evolutionary measure to prevent her from having children until she is capable of bearing them to term, birthing them and taking care of them. Sexually, during this time she might as well be neuter.
Well, then, in my never humble opinion, lovers of child porn might as well go want to have sex with a stone or a tree.
There are the psychos, of course, but as far as I know not all child porn lovers are psychos and not all psychos are child porn lovers. And not all people who have sex with children actually want to do them physical harm - they might pay them off with sweets and toys and go their way when the deed is done, as many, many sex tourists do in South East Asia and in India too (the beach resort of Puri is notorious for this, with hotels keeping child prostitutes on retainer, and I am not joking).
There was a Swiss couple who regularly visited India and invited street kids to their hotel where they filmed them doing "sex acts" and paid them off with clothes and sweets and money - and used the same kids, again, when they came back next time. (At the time of writing, as far as I know, they are still in custody, unless they were quietly released).
There are the morons who think sex with a virgin (and who is more likely to be a virgin than an immature girl?) is curative of sexually transmitted diseases, but they too will form a minority of cases of child sexual abuse. So this leaves a very large number of cases I won't explain because I can't.
I'll say it again in public what I have already said in responses to certain posts on Multiply - I have once seen a case of child porn. It was on a CD of what I thought would be ordinary straightforward XXX material (yes, I do sometimes watch pornography, and so what?). It began as usual, and suddenly morphed into a East Asian child - long black hair and all - completely naked, maybe nine years old, wearing lipstick and eye shadow, smiling and waving and then pretending to enjoy it while being screwed by a very fat white man in a black hood. I watched it just the once. It wasn't disgusting or anything similar...disgust is not the emotion I felt. It was like watching someone do something one couldn't really imagine, like drinking petrol or consenting to be eaten alive. One watches with the numb fascination like the rites of some alien race on a planet in a distant galaxy. The disgust and horror come later.
Therefore I don't think you can actually wipe out paedophiles by jailing them or ripping their guts out. You can't, because they aren't human in the normal sense. Your concerns aren't intelligible to them. They are not of this planet.
And that last line is not some kind of declaration that I'll write a story with that as a premise, believe me.
Did you think Myra Hindley or Ilse Koch the ultimate in female psychopathic murderers?
Try again. Back in the sixteenth century, in Hungary, there was a Countess Elizabeth Báthory. She lived in a castle at Čachtice, Hungary, and in the years between 1585 and her arrest at the end of December 1610 is thought to have murdered from “several hundred” up to 650 young girls and women, whom she enticed into her castle on the excuse of employment. Some of the methods she used to kill them were, according to witnesses,
- severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death.
- burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia.
- biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts.
- freezing to death.
- starving of victims.
Why did she do all this? She wasn’t stupid or dumb – she ran the castle and its estates in the stead of her husband, who was off fighting the Turks, and she was literate in four languages. She wasn’t casually venting her boredom by killing young women for fun, either. So why? Apart from simple sadism, she was rumoured to have bathed in the blood of her victims to renew her youth – virgin’s blood being a rejuvenator par excellence, it appears. So listen to me, boys and girls – it’s not wise to be cherry. Pay heed. After her arrest, which followed years of accusations and rumours, she was never brought to trial – although three of her accomplices were tortured to death and one was sentenced to life imprisonment. She spent the rest of her life, four years, in her castle under house arrest. It's said she was walled up in a single room with no access to the world but a slit for food or water, but I somehow doubt that. Given what she was allowed to get away with, I'm sure the circumstances of her imprisonment would have been somewhat less uncomfortable.
I guess it’s always paid to be stinking rich. Even more then than now.
Today, I was looking frantically for my mobile phone, wondering where I'd put it...and I was talking on it at the time.
Time to turn myself in for a strait jacket and a padded cell.
 In a town in South India, a 15 year old boy - son of a couple of doctors who own a nursing home - performed, with his parents' permission, a Caesarean surgery on a pregnant woman.
The reason was his parents' desire to get him on the Guiness Book of World Records. Accordingly, they recorded the event, put it on a CD, and showed it to members of the local chapter of the Indian Medical Association (IMA). Now, these two crooks knew perfectly well this was illegal. No one can perform a surgery unless he or she is a surgeon qualified for that purpose. The local IMA chapter petitioned the national IMA for revocation of the couples' licences to practice. What happened? Nothing. The national IMA said nothing could be done without a complaint from the patient. And she will not complain because she will either be threatened or bought off. Meanwhile, the CD has disappeared. Not surprising. The IMA will do nothing, in fact is moving very, very slowly in order to ensure that it will have to do nothing. If, after all, every case of malpractice is to be punished, at least half the members of the IMA would be left jobless. Not even the fact that the dad, who is not an anaesthesiologist, administered anaesthesia to the patient will be punished. After all, virtually all doctors who own nursing homes do this as a matter of course, and many of them are not even surgeons. Apart from medical malpractice, what does this tell us about the Indian penchant for getting into record books, at all costs and against all good sense? I'm sure many Indian parents will be ready to defend this duo of charlatans, as well as their son, just as they were ready to defend the exploitation of Budhia Singh. It's a bad outlook.
 
 A woman lying on a stage made to look like a bedroom, completely naked, with a small dead pig draped over her, which she cuts with a knife. What would you call this? Crazy? Perhaps. Exhibitionist? Certainly. Art? I wouldn't say so, would you? Well, what do I know? Kira O'Reilly not only did it, she got paid for it as well. From taxpayers' funds. Now we know the future of art... I think I'll stick to being a dinosaur.
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