Torture and international law in our little world

So Mike Pompeo and the Orange baboon are openly advocating torture now. Openly.

Newspapers report on this as if it was about discussing the weather, or perhaps some mildly embarrassing issue, like a herpes infection.

Nobody screams their bloody heads off about the "Freest Country" on earth advocating torture. I find this incredible. Apparently rules do not apply to some. International laws do not apply. The previous round of war criminals are still living their lives in complete safety and without being bothered by sharp questions (and I don't even mention tribunals), and here we go, the next round comes about. In other words: the US -don't forget, they are the "torchbearers of democracy, equality, whatever" can without any consequence break the law that governs international relationships. It should be discussed, it should be talked about: if the strongest nation decides the rules does not apply to them, they are essentially jeopardising the whole international legal framework, even if the whole Western world seems to do its best to ignore this. (As they undoubtedly realize this issue.) Keeping up the illusion of strong international laws does not help actually making them strong. It only shows off the hypocrisy and utter lack of moral principles of the West, enabling others to do whatever they wish to -after all, if the US does not care, why should they? Nobody is fooled by this display. You may pretend the US, the UK and other paragons of democracy are governed by laws, the stink of torture chambers and bombed weddings is still permeating every meeting room you are discussing these high-minded ideals of international law.


So let me say it again: the USA has broken, admitted breaking, and openly considers breaking international law. The perpetrators were not and are not being investigated. And the media reports it without even raising a single fucking eyebrow, as if torture was not really a big deal.


I guess you really should not be surprised that people tend to be cynical when it comes to the "bad Ruskies" or "bad Iran" routine, and cannot be adequately bothered to be outraged. I have to say I myself start to feel sorry for Milosevic and other small-time war criminals.

All this crying about fake news and the post-truth world...

Since Brexit and the Orange Wonderboy there has been much lamentation about all the fake news on Facebook, the Evil Russian Misinformation Factories, and in general, how inaccurate and untrustworthy the information is you get from social media. We live in an era when facts don't matter anymore; when not a couple of well-dressed talking heads are giving out the information, but the rabble makes it up for themselves.

If only everyone stuck to the real journalists is the unspoken (or spoken) conclusion. You know, the real McCoy; guys (and gals) in trench coats and sharp pens, investigating leads, running around and striking fear into the heart of the Establishment.

There are two problems with this. The first is: they lie as much as the "fake news" does. (I have no idea how the Independent dared to publish this article; it discredits them and every other news agency in the Free World... It's something we knew, but seeing it in print in a large -well, relatively large- newspaper is nothing if not miraculous. And this is the second time...) This has been quite obvious in the case of Aleppo, the Iraq War, the migrant crisis, the Russian hacks (I've still not seen anything that can constitute as proof of the accusations), or anything, really. It's not hard to see them; you just have to spend five minutes to find ample proof of the media being dishonest either by withholding information or by straight-out lying to the reader/watcher. They don't report, they manufacture facts to conform their agenda. We always have lived in the post-truth world.

The other is this. So here we have a very brazen (but not unique) example where a "real" journalist simply stole something from the social networks. It seems like there's a positive feedback here: something gets posted or Reddit (or Digg or Facebook or whatever), this gets nicked by the "real" media, and gets posted on Reddit again, which, in turn, gets reported in the media. They do it so shamelessly, they even quote reddit users. It's a self-sustaining perpetual machine that produces an endless stream of shit.

These people are part of the problem; the people who are supposed to be doing the journalism became simply content-thiefs. They killed journalism by replacing investigation with "cats that look like Hitler" (yes, a Bridget Jones reference; figure that, the movie actually had something meaningful to say), and "you would not believe what happened after this man told a woman not to apply makeup on the tube". Guess what I don't give a fuck. I would have, however, appreciated an honest assessment of the situation in Aleppo. As in: why did certain politicians call the members of Al Quaida "moderate rebels". And maybe a mention of how people of Aleppo did not support them to begin with; this kind of puts their heroic struggle into a different light. But we got "she did not know why the crowd was cheering her", and "can you go through all 10 of these horrible photos".

And, ladies and gentlemen, this is why the system is rotten to the core. This is why we have Brexit, why the Right is getting stronger, and why the Orange Ape (sorry, apes, I know I'm smearing your reputation) got into the White House.