Adults only

Stupid blog ratings.

Following Michael Froomkin’s example, I’ve idly run the RBC blog through the Mingle rating service :

Explanation:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: torture (3x), dangerous (2x), drugs (1x).

I’m relieved that even a stupid computer program recognises this blog as designed for grown-ups. But we obviously haven’t been trying hard enough. So here goes.

Crypto-fascist wingnuts defend torture, but torture is wrong. Torture is stupid. Torture is a crime. Torture becomes a drug, a quasi-sexual addiction, to those who use it. Torture has made Abu Ghraib, GITMO and secret American prisons into living hells. Creating a body of professional torturers outside the law is dangerous to the intelligence community. The arrogation by the executive of regal claims to torture by prerogative is dangerous to the democratic state. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and their lying train of thugs, lickspittles and sold-out consiglieri should stand trial for conspiracy to torture.

If I were an American, rather than just a foreign friend, I might be tempted here to use strong language. But let’s see what Mrs Grundy makes of this.

Instant update

We now rate

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: torture (13x), dangerous (5x), kill (2x), crap (1x).

Mingle didn’t notice drug, sexual and hell. But still, a trivial mission accomplished.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web