Human Rights Watch is recommending a criminal investigation into the George W. Bush administration. Their use of torture was common, horrific, admitted and pointless. It both hurt captive human beings and hurt America. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, US torture was documented, much to their discredit and the discredit of human rights policy in general.

I think Scarface put it best when he said, “when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Alternately, “then you take the women”. There are enough women that fawn over money or power that some men seem to think that anything else is just playing hard to get. In fact, it’s often not. They’re saying no, and you’re raping them. Like Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK).

All manner of despots invoke the sovereignty argument like it’s something sacred. It’s not. It’s actually bad. To look at what sovereignty is, look at the incoming nuptials of Prince William and Kate. Not them, but their ancestors. William’s ancestors – until World War II – married not for love or even proximity but in incestuous sovereignty. The House of Windsor was then the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a German house. What unified Europe was not the self-rule but selfish rule by a set of elite families that transcended nationality.

This was written while listening to Robert Gibbs statement on the Egypt situation. It’s a bit of a rant. This blog about how not say stupid stuff about Egypt is probably more interesting. Fuck the US right now man. Their dictator friends suck, their diplomatic hedging is bullshit, and I think they’re causing a lot of the problems in the world. Suspend the aid to Mubarak, he’s beating up his own people. WTF. And Mubarak is using the same diplomatic hedging to peel away blame. It’s a big fucked up system, built on hypocrisy in the air while the reality is quite clear on the street.

Couples are seated at tables with Ministers, Generals and movie stars. They are hemmed in a solid square by soldiers, lackeys and cameramen. Family and friends watch the scrum from a distance, fifty feet away. These are token couples, swarmed by media, tokenizing the event and obstructing the view for everyone actually there. If you wander back, however, some couples are sitting almost entirely alone.

The police are cracking down on courting couples and taking down indecent posters. Which is whatever, but I think they’re missing the point. A girl can’t take public transit without getting sexually harassed. I know exactly zero girls who haven’t been flashed at least once. A girl can get abuse or raped and it’s difficult to impossible to report. Marital rape is basically considered a part of marriage. It’s fucked up. I personally think half the men in this city need to be thrashed, including many in my social circle, but something socially must be done. We stand by and let way too much shit pass, and it’s more serious than posters and umbrellas. There’s a culture of rape on our streets and it has to stop.

The first guy I met in India was a Sri Lankan, an estate Tamil who’d fled after the riots. I just got off the phone with his sister. While he was hiding from the mobs in a church, she was hiding in my uncle’s house. Small world, in kindness and in cruelty. When the riots started she and her family had hid in an adjoining garden while people ransacked and looted their house. In the night my uncle came and brought them back to the house. People muttered that there were Tamils there, but my uncle was imposing and his father was a policeman and no one interfered. It was hard to find enough food until the worst times passed over, but they did. It’s history now, one we rarely tell.

If you lie long enough does it become the truth? Or do people just fall asleep? The new charge (like the old charge) is that opposition is treason. Well, it’s not. Loyal opposition is a vital service to the country. The lie is conflating opposition to Mahinda with opposition to Sri Lanka. The two are not the same. The slanders being thrown against the opposition are based on a lie, but there is so much that it acquires a weight of its own. Democracy is actually based on some unlikely notions. Older governance is based on preserving and glorifying itself. Democracy is based on criticizing and periodically tearing itself down. The old assumption was that the king was always right. In democracy the assumption is that the government is often wrong. One’s loyalty is to laws and a system, not men and their families.

I met a chap who said he worked at Google from 9 to 5, but that his full-time job was environmental activism. I don’t really get it but that’s cool. His organization was holding an environmental workshop at a bookstore owned by the Deccan Chronicle, which ran a misquoted and mangled story on it the next day. But still, that was fast. More impressively, the workshop was full of kids ranging from like 12 to, uh, I guess me at 27, all active and smart. I was quite impressed.

When I meet people they often ask why I’m not dead or in jail. I find this a rather odd way to start a conversation, but it’s a persistent joke. On one level it’s funny, but on another it’s the most powerful tool of censorship available. There are a few messages (murders, arrests and disappearances) that everyone forwards. So the people trying to quieten you down end up being family and friends, and they do it with the best intentions.