Justice and Mercy

There’s a debate going on at the moment, regarding prisoner’s rights in South Africa. A lot of you may not know that a very large percentage of our prison population is HIV positive, mainly because they picked up the ’slow puncture’ in prison.
Large numbers of prisoners are dying in prison, and many have now made the case that these prisoners should be allowed to go home and die with their families.
Which is all well and good, and a clear case of tempering Justice with Mercy, as is right and proper.

But is it really? We are so very concerned about Mercy, that it seems to me that Justice has fallen by the wayside.
Where was Mercy when these men raped children? Where was Mercy when they brutally murdered people in their homes, or shot them in cold blood because they were ‘inconvenient’?
The answer? Mercy was nowhere to be found.

My Wise Sister-in-Law said (wisely, of course) that you can’t pay with more than your life. Which is very true. Many of these men would not be dying now if they hadn’t gone to jail, so in a sense they are paying with their lives.
But here’s the thing: 99% of them do not care. It’s a well known fact that if you go to jail, unless you’re very fast or you have some serious connections, you will be raped. Repeatedly and violently. And there’s a very good chance you will get AIDS from it.
Everyone knows this. But they still do it. They still think they can do whatever they please, to whomever they like, and there will be no consequences.
I’m not saying that male rape in prison is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.
It’s a horrible thing, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
But it is a consequence.
And when the government is so concerned with tempering Justice with Mercy that Justice has gone out the window, we need those consequences.

Think about this: in Saudi Arabia, consequences for crime are clear, immediate and more often than not severe. Allright, some of the things they consider crimes are not in the Western mind, crimes at all, but the point is that there are consequences. If you murder, you die. It’s a simple equation, and it works.
Because they are less concerned with the rights of the criminals than the rights of the citizens.
In the West, it’s often the other way ’round.

If our Mercy was more tempered with Justice, the world might be a different place.

Moral Question

As we all know, I have the well-rounded moral sense of an alley cat.
Which is why I am appealing to you, the Internet, to help me out here.

My Moral Question

Is it moral/ethical to be for something in general, but not in your specific case? Like, a big cause or whatever. If you champion a cause without actually wanting to apply it to you, does that make you a bad person?
note: not talking about laws and/or religions, obviously, because as far as I know if you believe in the laws of a religion, you’re supposed to believe that they apply to you first. Obviously if you’re diddling your daughter and campaigning against child abuse that does make you a bad person.

I mean, in the sense of, say, interracial or gay marriage. I’m all for people being able to marry whoever they want to, no matter what shape, size or colour they are.
But me, personally?
I generally prefer my partners to be white and male.

Does the face that I support interracial relationships and gay marriage despite never intending to practice either make me a hypocrite?

Anyway, I was just wondering that

Quentin Tarantino has more issues than the Daily Planet

Seriously. Watch Death Proof and you’ll see why. He’s a genius, of course, but he’s also more than a little mental, seems to me. He has this skill with that moment where you realize something really horrendous is going to happen to a character, but they don’t. And he draws this moment out for ages, while you’re sitting on the edge of your seat screaming at the screen like a demented person, hoping that by some miracle they’ll actually listen to you for once.
Alas, they never do.

In other news, I am reading The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F. Hamilton. As brilliant, if not more so, than the one before. Al Capone takes over the world, for crying out loud!
This book is the source of much joy, and also many panicky phone calls to my brother along the lines of ‘this and this and this just happened and please you have to tell me if Character X is going to be okay!’
But also, the book sucks rotten eggs. Because I am almost finished with it, and I won’t be able to get the next one for three weeks! muttermuttersulkfret.

In other other news, I have decided that reading too much grown-up Heinlein and too many bodice-rippers when I was young has permanently warped my mind and left me with the morals of an alley-cat. Haven’t decided whether I care or not.

Inspiration strikes like a thermonuclear warhead!

I have had a brainstorm. That’s like a brainfart, but it makes actual sense.
See, lately, as you might have noticed, I have been having some trouble writing. And now, I have finally figured out why that is.
You see, when I started my Monster Book of Doom, I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. But in the process of actually writing it, the whole feel of the stoyr has changed. I’ve gone back so many times and rewritten things that I no longer know what the central plot actually is. Hence, writer’s block.

So, to cure this most horrible of diseases, I have hit upon this: I am writing a detailed – and I do mean detailed – plot summary. Chapter-by-chapter he-did-she-did-this-happened and why. It’s like an old legend – he went there and did this and this is why, and so this happened.
As I’m writing – I’m only at Chapter 2 – I can actually feel the plot crystallizing in my mind, becoming if not set in stone, at least set in wax. It might melt and re-form later, but at least I don’t feel like I have a Hydra by the tail anymore.

I’ve never been an outliner, you see. My previous stories (all part of a monster of a saga involving much drama, many beautiful people and a practically infinite number of things happening for no apparent reason) were all very organic. They happened, more than they got written. But while a seven-thousand page multi-fandom fic involving Captain Picard, the Zerg (Starcraft), Spock, the Elves (Tolkien’s version), Gandalf, Data, sentient spaceships, vampires, people from another dimension, gods, demons, evil gods, suicidal immortals revered as gods, drugs and the sexual morals of someone who’s read way, way too many bodice-ripper romances, was great fun to write, not to mention a great way to spend the years between nine and nineteen, it didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

But this one has a plot, and I happen to think it’s a pretty damn good one. I just have to figure out what parts to include, since some of the things I’ve done either don’t fit the plot, or actually contradict pretty much everything else.
So, my Writing To-Do-List runs as so:

* Figure out plot.
* Decide whether antag is good or Evil (very important)
* Finish Plot Summary of Doom
* Rewrite Parts that don’t work while preserving parts that do.
* Edit Book
* Query Agent
* Get Published.
* Die happy

*dances around the office happily*

I am no longer flailing about! Well, I am flailing about, but now I’m flailing about with a plan!

Bad boyfriends

Writing is like a psychotic boyfriend, now that I think about it. You know the type – your parents love him, your sisters adore him, your friends think he might be ‘The One’ for you. And none of them notice the way you walk hunched over all of a sudden to keep your heart from breaking, and the bruises that are the reason why you suddenly wear a lot of make-up.

Writing is a lot like that. Sometimes, when it’s good, it’s very good. But when it’s bad, it’s worse than anything you can imagine.

I haven’t been writing for a year and a half now. It’s like being in heroin withdrawal, with the added bonus that your drug of choice doesn’t work anymore. I still love writing. I still love the feel of a character or a story inside of me, waiting to come to life. I imagine that that’s what being pregnant must feel like.
I just can’t do it anymore. I am filled with ideas, pregnant with them…but when the time comes to put them on a page, I just can’t do it. I write perhaps two pages and think to myself ‘what utter shit. Nobody will ever read this!’ and it’s true. Because somehow, somewhere, I seem to have lost the confidence in myself that made it possible, even when I despised myself and wanted to die, to write and get myself out of there. Writing was my lifeline back then, lifting me out of myself and taking me to places where I could be whoever I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do. And it doesn’t work anymore.

Because since this thing happened to me – this thing that turned my art against me – writing has been my pain. Not my drug against the agony of life, but the cause of it. And that’s never happened to me before.

And I still want it. That’s the worst part. Maybe I’m just too stubborn for my own good, unwilling to give up on the idea that I will be a writer, or maybe I’m meant to get through this and go on writing, someday even something worth reading.

And that’s why writing is like a psychotic boyfriend. You know he’s only going to hurt you. You know he’s bad.
You know that ever time he says ‘it’ll never happen again,’ never is really only ‘until next time’ because it will happen again.
And you still go back.
Because despite what the world wants you to believe, there are more important things than being happy. And art is one of those things.

People do strange things for religion, don’t they?

We kill each other, and castrate each other, and strap bombs to our bodies to low up our enemies…and then we create this:

And this

The presence of God, real or imaginary, no matter what you call him, has the capacity to bring out the very best and the very worst in human beings.

The most beautiful poem I ever read was in the name of God. And so was the worst atrocity.

Last night

The braai did not materialise.

But on the upside, on the way to buy some cigarettes and more mix for Albert’s whisky, we met two guys who checked into the hotel where I work yesterday. We ended up taking them home, getting drunk with them and having a great time in general. They left at around 23:00, which was actually a good thing because shortly after that, Albert got mightily sick. I haven’t checked yet (and I’m not going to) but I think he repainted the entire bathroom floor Puke Green. Fortunately today is Cleaning Day. He will be cleaning it up, because my sympathy for people who are stupid enough to get that drunk is strictly limited. When you start feeling sick, drinking stops being fun. That’s why you stop drinking before that. Which also neatly avoids situations like passing out and waking up with your nails painted sparkly pink (Yes, I am a bad person )

But back to the guys. I think they were called Rowan and Chris. Chris is black, and on Friday night they and their friends got kicked out of one of our three nightclubs, because he was black. Yes, this is still South Africa. Apartheid is alive and well. Anyway, so they stopped us to ask for directions to any kind of metal club, which naturally we don’t have. So we invited them back to our place. Much fun was had by all. Chris thinks I’m some kind of genius because after three years of History of Art he doesn’t know what Pre-Raphaelite is. And despite never having studied that, I do. It’s very sad. He decided that I know everything.
Which is funny, because recently I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know very much about anything at all. There are whole schools of knowledge that I don’t know about at all. And that’s strange, because people who meet me often think that I know many things about many subjects – and the funny thing is, often I do. But only the surface things, the things I would expect any half-intelligent human being to know. And then they treat it like divine wisdom handed down from on high – and I might be completely wrong. I’ve been completely wrong about any number of things, like the rime I thought a fat thirteen-year-old could get away with hotpants and high heels. Have we become so ignorant that the ignorant are considered wise? Because I am ignorant of so many things, and yet…some people find my intelligence intimidating.
People are weird. People are like aliens but without the things that make aliens funny. Like tentacles. I would much rather have tentacles than nose hair, actually.

I ended up cooking the boerewors in the pan – it turned out nicer than it would have if we’d tried to braai it, and putting it on bread slices. Albert didn’t have any. His loss. There wasn’t room in the tiny fridge for his leftover so I put it in a covered dish and left it on the counter. Hope the ants don’t eat it.

Albert just called. Was very apologetic re:puking all over bathroom last night, forgetting to light the fire etc. Was also v. worried, as he woke up and went ‘WTF where’s my girlfriend?’. Also worried about whether or not I ate last night. Infromed him re: location of his dinner and womanfully restrained myself from mocking the man with the hangover.

That’s my man. He might be a doofus, but he’s a sweet doofus.