The New York Times reports that terror suspects are now being "renditioned" to Uzbekistan, the "authoritarian" state where people are boiled alive.
Previous exposes have revealed that terror "suspects" often prove innocent.
After the next big terror attack, of course, the administration's definition of just who is and is not a terorist will no doubt be quite flexible. In the resultant hysteria, don't be surprised when even the minor Bush enemies are whisked away.
What I'm about to say may sound silly, but...
...months ago, I mentioned a former girlfriend's allegedly psychic premonition in 1999 that a "small" nuclear event on the Chicago river would destroy the Sears Tower. I normally am quite skeptical of all supernaturalistic claims, but this lady had, on other occasions, impressed me.
A disconcerting thought has begun to nag at me: What if her prediction comes to pass? I doubt that there are many believers in ESP at the FBI (although Chris Carter would have you think otherwise).
Well, I'm no doubt too small a potato to be worth the boiling. I worry, though, about the more prominent anti-Bush voices. At the height of McCarthyism, anyone involved with wartime cooperation with the Soviets suddenly found himself a target of subversion charges. I can easily see that history repeating itself. Whipping up hysteria against real and imagined enemies is always the best way to transition from freedom to dicatorship.
7 comments:
You should learn to discount premonitions and other ESP as such. I know it is difficult to do, because I went through that myself, but it should be done. Your life will be more pleasant afterwards, even though bad things like terrorist attacks on landmarks will keep happening. The interesting question isn't whether there is premonition or how it would work; the interesting question is what makes us believe in such things as premonition.
Maybe this is relatively easy for me to see because my education is in engineering. Engineers must assume the world is orderly, because otherwise the products of their work fail as surely as alchemy fails to make gold from lead. On the other hand, we already know many times over that humans misevaluate probabilities and causes and so on; no one is completely immune. So it is very likely that you are misevaluating your experiences with this person.
BTW aren't classical and modern visual art also founded upon the very orderliness that is the foundation of engineering? The main difference being that in engineering there is no alternative, in _any_ era, because otherwise your products collapse in ruin.
Well Barry, I understand and largely concur. I went through a long period of my life chasing down the Fox Mulder trail. At the end of that trail, I emerged as an grumpy skeptic.
And then...I woke up one morning in 1999 next to woman who told me that she just had a vision of commercial jet liners ploughing into the World Trade Center. (She went on to descirbe later evnts, which I outlined in a long-ago post.)
You can imagine how I felt on Spetember 11, 2001.
I'm now willing to concede the existence of ESP; it's my sole supernaturalistic belief. But I insist on the proviso that the real thing is probably as rare as hen's teeth. Also, I'm not sure that ESP really IS paranormal in nature; that which is unexplained at present may one day prove scientifically explicable.
So in a sense, I am torn. It's depressing and infuriating to realise that we live in nation filled with rubes so rube-ish that they discount the theory of evolution. The culture-wide segue into rank irrationalism bugs the hell out of me, just as it must bug you. On the other hand, I am now perfectly willing to countenance the idea of ESP.
To be completely honest, I suppose I should mention that my girlfriend and I like to visit "haunted" restaurants and similar locations -- especially on Halloween. But those excursions are just a matter of fun and romance. So they hardly count.
Most "ghosts" are probably hypnapompic hallucinations, which I get myself. I tell this to people who get the same thing and they say, no, for them it is "ghosts," because of this or that reason.
How many times have you experienced deja vu? It must have happened to me hundreds of times by now. But it's just an illusion, because of the way the brain sifts facts and relates them with each other. You think something has happened before, but it hasn't. It is your brain that is doing the interesting things. You can't even shake the feeling that you remember the exact same thing happening before. It's right there in your head; you "remember" it clearly.
If I were to believe in ESP then my world would resemble those of primitive cultures, in which for instance a hunter makes himself look like a big cat, believing this will make him a more effective hunter. It does no such thing, but try to convince him of that. The interesting question is why does he believe it works, when it really doesn't.
BTW witnessing airplanes and other aircraft flying into things is one of my commonest nightmares.
Re: ESP. You gotta love skeptics who earlier in mankind's history believed that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it.
Re: "skeptics"
Maybe religiously-indoctrinated european
serfs believed the world was flat.
I have a hard time believing that
intelligent hunter-gatherers believed it.
From any kind of height at all you can see
the curve in a "flat" valley or the sea.
The cycles of the moon make it obvious
that the moon is a ball--the idea that the
sun is too and thus the earth might be
also follow pretty easily.
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