I fucking hate Cory Doctorow and his complete lack of journalistic integrity; every single article he posts on Boing Boing is misrepresented, inflated nonsense. But I had to post this here. This shit is unbelievably sick, and I seriously wonder how much people know about it. We think, here in the United States, that things are fucked up and we deal with inequality and police brutality, but—and this might just be true for the majority of people I’ve met, and not many more—it seems to me that the majority of people think that disgusting, barbaric, tortuous psychological hell doesn’t exist here for people who aren’t Bradley Manning. But it does. We have one of the worst, if not the worst, prison systems in the world, where you almost definitely will be raped if you enter for any crime that doesn’t qualify you for a solitary-23-and-1/2-hours-a-day supermax; we have a barely regulated mental health system, where people are given electro-shock and restrained and given countless other treatments that are guaranteed to make them insane if they aren’t already; and we have these fucking camps for children—where they can be sent without any oversight at all because of their age and the religious affiliation of the camps. Which means, essentially, that there are laws against child abuse—beating and such—but if you have enough money you can send your children to a place they can tortured and generally treated like jews, gypsies and homosexuals waiting to be marched into the ovens. But there are no ovens. Just lifelong fear based on indoctrination via physical and psychological torture. Are they raped? Probably. Beaten? Probably.

My ex-girlfriend* was sent to one of these camps—that really is a great name for them, isn’t it?—in Utah where she was forced to cut grass with scissors and other fun activities. She was sent because her step-mother** caught her kissing another girl. I didn’t know her before she was sent, but I can say with confidence that she never recovered.

This really is the unseen dark side of religion in America, and I genuinely hope this asshole—Cory Doctorow—is able to shed some light on it.

*Long time ago ex. When I was in high school. I’m not, in case you were wondering, banging children.

**The same step-mother, I might add, that told her all about the near-certainty of me kidnapping her to my homeland of Iran. Even though I don’t speak the language, wasa born here, sounded and looked like any random barely-educated asshole from New Jersey, have never been there, am only half Iranian, am not even allowed in the country because of things that happened with my family there, don’t have any contact with and have never met any of that part of my family, etc, etc, etc.