Apparently the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are being well-treated. As long as your definition of ‘well-treated’ is ‘beaten almost to death’.

Meanwhile in Iraq, the torture stories worsen. Seymour Hersh says he’s seen unimaginably horrible things happening to detainees and their children.

What can be done?

Morrissey‘s (English) heart is in the right place, but his prescriptions are horribly wrong: if Bush were to die, Cheney would take over, and that would be worse.

If Cheney were also to die, Dennis Hastert would take over, and I don’t see that being any better. Next-in-line Ted Stevens is Alaskan, and having an Alaskan president might be groovy, but he seems a little too embroiled in the whole military mess as well. Then the first sensible person on the list is Colin Powell. It’d be nice to have State back in charge of foreign policy, and it’d also be good to have a black President…

Now, I think that calling for the simultaneous assassination of four senior politicians would be going a bit far. But if anyone enterprising fancies organising some kind of jolly for top Republicans – a trip through the Paris night in a Ritz Hotel Mercedes, perhaps, or a walking tour of Afghanistan, or a lava surfing trip to Mount Santa Maria in Guatemala (perhaps with local nuns ensuring Cheney’s safety), then I’d certainly salute them.

Three happy but lethargic cheers to the Portuguese authorities for their efforts at keeping England fans under control…

One of the people on my team at work was trying to research an Austrian juice brand called “Grannies”. Tragically, they made the mistake of googling for “grannies juices“.

Free speech? Not for filthy foreigners…

I’m worried that America might be becoming increasingly Sturmified.

I don’t hate America. I do, however, hate Americans like Steve Sturm. If I thought all Americans were like Steve Sturm, I would seriously consider supporting terrorism against America. I suspect that many of the people who do hate America do so because they do believe this.

That said, there is some merit in his ‘worth of people’s lives’ calculus. I would adjust his metric slightly:

* a human life: 50 points

* Steve Sturm’s life: zero points

(found via this post, which confirms the belief stated in the paragraph above).

There seems to be a trend at the moment among writers of good blogs to give co-writing duties to half-crazed right-wing idiots.

I’m always loath to miss a good bandwagon, and I feel that actually managing to lower the standard of SBBS would take serious effort. So I’m aiming to hire Adam Yoshida as my co-writer, which, unfortunately will mean teaching him to write, which will take about ten years; but time well spent, I think, because he’s such a very good half-crazed right-wing idiot.

In an attempt to bring levity and fun into your miserable lives, the SBBS editorial team have come up with an exciting new game: Guess The Dynastic Tyranny. We give you a summary of a news story, and you guess which dynastic tyranny it’s referring to…

1) The government publishes a document made up entirely of outrageous, easily-disprovable lies – which supports government policies that everyone else knows are disastrous.

2) The leader gives a speech about how business and trade make everyone better off.

3) After the death of the leader’s dynastic forbear, his embalmed corpse is displayed in the national parliament building for genuflection and general worship.

4) A citizen of this state who fled to another country for political reasons 30 years ago faces life in jail should he return – and is likely to be forcibly taken home should he visit the neutral third country where his wife lives.

5) The leadership claims that economic growth has been strong for the last two years, but -ordinary people in the country are seeing little or no benefit.

6) While a constitution formally grants the people great power and protection from government excess, the leader does not believe himself bound by the document. The government regularly carries out actions that breach it, in spirit at the very least.

Josh Chavetz at Oxblog approves of the New York Times’s moral defence of eating expensive food.

I wonder if either Josh or William Grimes, the NYT writer, have read Moral Saints by Susan Wolf? It’s an excellent philosophy essay, which comes to the rather satisfying conclusion that (assuming certain premises that hair-shirted ascetics would generally accept), hair-shirted ascetics are morally less good than people who do things they enjoy…

For some reason, I found myself reading the proceeedings of the Islamic Human Rights Commission‘s Annual Islamophobia Awards. They’re annoying.

Islamophobia is a problem. There are people who are taken seriously in the UK and US who genuinely hate Muslims, say truly vile things about the religion and (far more importantly) its adherents, and need to be publically shamed. Unfortunately, few of the Islamophobia Award Winners are among them.

So BNP fuckwit Nick Griffin was a nominee for Islamophobic politician of the year, for saying Muslims were aggressive and corrupt and that they brought ethnic cleansing upon themselves. Fair enough. David Blunkett was a nominee for saying that 30% of British Asians didn’t speak English at home. Hmm. The two shared the award.

Then in the flagship ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ category, Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror” was up against John Ashcroft “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you”. Now, the second of these appears somewhat Islamophobic. The first, err, is only relevant if you view Muslims as terrorists – a perception that I’d like to think these awards are against…

Perhaps the highlight of the awards was a speech from Sister Muddassar Arani, which needs to be read for one reason or another. Apparently the British police put guns to children’s heads to threaten their parents for being Muslims, and arrest Muslims for trying to get married.

If true, this allegations are very serious – not particularly for anything to do with Islam, but because they’re clear violations of all human rights laws and the relevant policemen ought to be thrown out of the force and into jail with great rapidity. But as far as evidence for their truth goes, err, well…

So well done, Islamic Human Rights Commission. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m reasonably sure it’s made up of self-promoting tossers who speak for the Muslim people about as much as Billy Graham speaks for Christians, then it would have actually managed to *damage* at least one British liberal’s perception of Muslims as “not being swivel-eyed moonbats”…

Update: the “some reason” is because Peter Briffa linked to it earlier. Sorry Peter…

An anonomous friend of Iain Murray has some more than slightly surprising claims about the swivel-eyed loons of the UKIP.

You cannot possibly understand from the US how much the announcement of Robert Kilroy-Silk as a candidate has boosted their cause – without him there is no way they would be polling as well and they wouldn’t have had half the press attention.

Surely even out of the set of people who’d consider voting UKIP, there can’t be many people deranged enough to believe that Robert Kilroy-Silk is other than a horrible embarassment…