beautefantasy
May 2012
Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”
[…]
William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough
“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”
” —Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
Does anyone see a never-ending conflict here?
(via mohandasgandhi)
Let’s not forget, the DOJ has moved to make the Secret Kill List, or whatever you want to call it, a state secret and thus not subject to judicial review.
Let’s just think for a moment about how sickening and terrifying that is.
(via humarashid)
This is something that’s always important to talk about because of the legal precedent it sets. This article talks a great deal about the legal approaches Obama used in fighting the “War on Terror” that I found absolutely fascinating. The article seemed to indicate that Obama took the steps he did so he couldn’t be criticized by Republicans and Dick Cheney, of all people, who bemoan reading terror suspects their rights and “treating them like Americans.” Whatever happened to being the shining beacon of democracy and extending the same rights to the “bad guys” as is done with others? I mean, we tried the Nazis. We can’t do the same with terror suspects?
Obama seems to usher in these new legal policies to avoid criticism from the right in an effort to gain or preserve political points - all of this for political points. Obama didn’t want to be accused of being soft on terrorism so he maneuvered these new hard-lined policies through highly contested means. I just find it unbelievable that he’d rather move his policies further and further right, even desecrating the Constitution he used to teach, rather than fight back politically and play hardball with the Republicans. The Obama administration traded part of the U.S. detention program in for drone strikes. So what? The legal tricks that were used to justify such have unprecedented consequences and let’s not forget:
Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.
(via mohandasgandhi)
PROBLEM: Women’s bare bodies are on display in billboards, movie posters, and many other kinds of ads. Though plenty of studies have looked at the ramifications of this pervasive sexual objectification, it’s unclear if we see near-naked people as human beings or if we really do view them as mere objects.
METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by Philippe Bernard presented participants pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing a swimsuit or underwear, one by one on a computer screen. Since pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but images of objects don’t have that problem, some of the photos were presented right side up and others upside down. After each picture, there was a second of black screen before each participant was shown two images and was asked to choose the one that matched the one he or she had just seen.
RESULTS: The male and female subjects matched the photos similarly. They recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they saw the sexualized men as persons. On the contrary, the women in underwear weren’t any harder to recognize when they appeared upside down, indicating that the sexy women were consistently identified as objects.
CONCLUSION: People objectify women in sexualized photos, but not men.
SOURCE: The full study, “Integrating Sexual Objectification With Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis,” is published in the journal Psychological Science.
