Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Ok, Correntians, this is one of these long and substantial posts of mine where one of you shows up in the comments and summarizes the whole thing in 2 lines… making me look like a blabbering fool!

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it’s time for one. So here we go:  Read more 

A Love Letter to America’s Mesopotamian Friend With Benefits

I found this letter buried beneath John Ashcroft’s Water Wiggle in a trunk in the basement. I wonder if we forgot to mail it? Gonna have to go get some stamps…*

mjs

++++

Dear Snuggle Pumpers,

Look, baby, you know I love you. Your belly full of oil, your eyes full of desire, your swarthy swarthiness—I wanted you in the worst way, which is the best way I want things. When I want something, I take it, and I slap it around and punch it and go to town, you know what I mean? And I wanted you, baby. You. It was always you. Well, since the internal combustion engine anyway…

I knocked you off your feet, and then picked you up by your feet, and then I dropped you…I admit I dropped you—but I picked you up again, and then, admittedly, dropped you once more, oh, but darn it, I just kept on picking you up. And dropping you. It was all good fun…at first. I slapped your thighs but good and gained the golden hall without so much as a titty-tickle and wham! came off like Speed Racer—it was good. Damn good. Get the bleach out good. Emission accomplished good. Jack-off in the shower while visualizing Max Boot good, now-that-I-think-about-it-good.

And remember when I found your daddy and got his buddies to fuck his ass up something fierce so we could be together, just you and me and some contractors? And then it was mostly just you and me (and the contractors, but what can you do?) and a future filled with flying carpets and easy money and then…oh, criminey, but I went soft. I’ll admit it. I went soft like a White House reporter full of cocktail weenies and Swedish vodka. Yeah, that soft.  Read more 

I don’t mean to be understated but … Houston we have a major fucking problem.

Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.Numbers reported by the Department of Defense show a sickening pattern. In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported — 73% more than in 2004. The DOD’s newest report, released this month, indicates that 2,688 reports were made in 2007, but a recent shift from calendar-year reporting to fiscal-year reporting makes comparisons with data from previous years much more difficult.

Link

Systematic rapes to destroy women in the Congo.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

Just to remember. War is a moral force.

That.
Gives.
Us.
Meaning.

JC Christian wrote a letter to a Mr. John Petroski about Petroski’s paean to rape.

Upon reading Petroski’s slippery words I couldn’t help but feel he was talking to our President about Iraq. Guess I’m funny that way. Regardless, some lyrics ensued…

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No-bid Rapists On Parade

don’t drink no scotch
don’t snort no coke
days are dry, he don’t get high
his little soldier needs a poke

yeah, I know she’s ugly
yeah, I know she’s afraid
no one does her for free
(no-bid rapists on parade)
who needs a wet dream
when you can cream
in mesopotamia
(no-bid rapists on parade)
I’ll hold her down
you grab her wrist
come on boys
lets do the twist
maybe even kiss
no-bid rapists on parade  Read more 

[See UPDATE below the fold.]

As the Bush administration in the person of Dick “Dick” Cheney yet again uses its standard technique of conveying, through nods and winks, that torture is A Good Thing, and winger operatives helpfully explain the technique to any “young professionals” who want to follow along at home, the horror—Well, let’s just go ahead and use the right word, even if it sounds Shrill—evil done at Abu Ghraib will live on after us for a long, long time. Greg Mitchell:

[US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein] ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America’s image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of “rape and murder” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were “blatantly sadistic.”

(And to think George Felix Allen (R-Severed Deer’s Head) is slamming Jim Webb about a Fuck-ing book.)

Gee, I don’t remember any Abu Ghraib prosecutions or convictions for rape and murder. And you’d think, with videotaped evidence, convictions would be pretty easy to get. Readers, am I having a senior moment, or did the rapists and murderers skate?  Read more