In Continuum.

Torturing is a bad thing, in fact it is a horrible thing. That's the whole argument behind why many people in America feel that Bush and friends should be impeached, the way that they allowed torture to be involved in interrogations. It's like saying, just as long as we get the answers that we want, then the ends justifies the means, and torturing another fellow human being is A-OK. But then again, I don't suppose humans could ever wash our hands clean from various torturing techniques, the way we have always resorted to torturing to get what we want. Sometimes, it isn't so much about getting answers, but just to prove a point sometimes to the general public. I think we all know about lynching in America, and all the people that were killed as a result. Some of them were tortured before their deaths, with Jesse Washington's death being the most prominent in 1916, when his genitals and fingers were cut off, and then later burned to death at the stake. This happened only in the last century of human history, and it's just disturbing that this is just one other way in which humans differ from animals - when was the last time you saw animals actively torturing each other on television? 

But humans have this obsession with torturing, no? You see a perfectly shaped object, and you just want to tear it apart for one reason or another. We do it because we can, we love it because we do. We have a human being, perfectly normal human being, and we just want to break it apart and see what happens, see how far he can go with the pain. So over the years, humans have came up with different ways to inflict pain, for interrogation, for fear, and for fun. But the act of torturing isn't so prominent in today's context as compared to the past, though they usually come under a different name for the most part. It's kind of like how slavery has been renamed just so that it does not sound half as bad, but the problem of slavery is worse now than ever before, truth to be told. Just because the name is changed, it doesn't actually make it OK to commit such a crime. Torturing techniques have been renamed to be "Intelligence Gathering Operation Management", and our love for such inhumane acts has also been fueled, though under a disguise, by the movie industry. You know, all the Saw movies, all the Hostel movies, and all those movies that involve people being torturing on screen. Well, it's not real - it's OK. 

No, it's not. But at the same time, we aren't living in George Orwell's 1984, thought crime isn't really a crime, is it. It isn't a crime if you merely think about it from time to time, who doesn't like to think about the possibilities anyway. We dream about robbing banks, being drug lords, murdering your boss in a dozen different ways. If it exists in your head, then it isn't so bad, I suppose. We all have people in our lives whom we can do without, and things would be much easier without these people around. So you think about different ways to eliminate them from the surface of this planet, only because imagination knows no boundaries, and it is perfectly legal for you to torture someone in your head, just so long as you do not torture that person in real life. I have had recurring thoughts about various torturing techniques myself, but they usually never go further than the thickness of my skull. They remain there in my brain, they tumble around and then they fade away like the end of a heavy metal song into that of a rock ballad. They don't last very long, but they are there if you look hard enough. Unlike someone like Nurul (whom, I have a suspicion, thinks about it all the time), I only harbor such thoughts in extreme cases of anger or frustration. And that, was yesterday morning in school. I was positively infuriated by my lecturer, and we all know who we are talking about. 

I was talking to Azhar the other day about murder, and he was telling me how he never knew the point when a man goes "I want to kill that person". There's always a point when you just don't care, when there are enough reasons to send a person six feet underground. Well, that moment came to me ever so briefly yesterday morning, and the thoughts of torture surfaced once more as I sat in the lecture theater. There is something really messed up with our lecturer, don't you think? There is something really wrong with her, almost everything is amiss. The way she walks seems awkward, and her body proportions make her look like a doll made out of clay by a five year old with shaky hands. Physical attributes aside, I hate her teaching style - I hate it. I hate it when a lecture is vague about what she wants, and then comes to penalize you when what you have is different from what she had in mind. I know it doesn't make sense to you now, and you would think that these "professors" should know better, but they don't. Everything exists on the paper for them, all those certificates and all those alphabets and numbers don't speak very much when it comes to their abilities to teach, and she is a great teacher when she is instructing a dog on how to poop in the sandbox, at best. 

So, the lot of us had this research paper to do, it is upon three hundred points. I hate the fact that she grades every semester to one thousand points, because that kind of means a whole lot more assignments for us to do. If each assignment is one hundred marks in total, that's ten assignments altogether. Aside from all the assignments she wanted us to do throughout the semester that weren't graded at all, she has been vague about the ones she actually wants to grade. Her instructions usually involve font sizes, page margins, line spacing, and all these little technical stuff that are usually pretty pointless in regards to the research paper as a whole. That is not to mention how she drops assignment as and when she likes, like those one-minute speeches we had to do yesterday for the last lesson. She wakes up with a thought, and she wants us to do it as a "take home assignment", and she claims that it isn't a very big workload - it is. Anyway, so we had this research paper to do, and I won't go into the details as to what it is all about. I have a feeling that she didn't really know what she wanted at the beginning either, and only came up with what she wanted halfway through marking the first paper. So this is what happened. 

A bunch of us have to now redo this stupid research paper because we all failed. When she was explaining to us what we did wrong in the research paper, it was the first time we were hearing all those things. By that, I mean she never actually went through what she demands in the research paper, in concert with how vague she usually is about everything. It is always "up to us to decide", and "whatever that we deem fit". The end result is half the class failing because what we deemed as being fitting, isn't what she deems as being fitting either. Like Jeremy said, it is OK for you to fail us if we do not follow a set of instructions that you gave, that's fine. But when everything is usually up to us, and then you fail us for that, it doesn't make any sense afterwards. Let's say she wants you to do some kind of poster for the module, and she wants you to be creative about it - that's the only rule. "Oh, be creative", she would say, but you have no idea what to base the poster on. So you go up front to ask her about it, and instead of answering your questions, she asks you a question, which leads to even more questions. So you become frustrated, which is why you go on to do it on your own. 

The poster gets done, you print it out on an A3 sized paper and it looks fantastic. You hand it up to her, and a few lessons later she tells you that you failed because it wasn't what she wanted. "Well, I wanted it to be based on your own experiences and what you have learned, not so much textbook content. I'm sorry, I had to fail you. This isn't what I wanted". It's kind of like trying to make a living in a country with no laws, and yet you have policemen barging into your shop and telling you that you have broken the law, when you don't know what they are in the first place. I was really frustrated with everything, simply because my group was being penalized for something that we didn't know about. She has been this way for a long time now, always being vague about what she wants and then giving you a shitty grade afterwards. Of course, she then went on to tell us that she had a great time teaching us, and wished us good luck with the finals. OK, with grades like that for the research paper, no kind of luck is going to help us pull through till the end anyway. She loves to pour salt into your wound and then bandage it up with a band-aid. OK, maybe not a band-aid, since it really does little to ease the pain. Probably just a Kleenex in an attempt to stop the blood. 

That is also why some of us conjured up various torturing techniques in our heads, especially Nurul and I. You know how it is, when you feel that you have been thoroughly fucked upside down by somebody, this is probably how it feels like. Nurul spoke about how she has always wanted to peel the skins off somebody bit by bit, pulling his or her veins out to make into pasta, and then rolling that person's bare skin in salt. I've always thought Vlad torturing methods to be gruesome, and yet ingenious. He was called Vlad the Impaler for a reason, and what he did was to set up columns after columns of wooden spikes, and then he would put someone through from his asshole to his mouth, or the other way around. Nurul and I agreed to incorporate both methods, which would be pretty interesting to say the least. Of course, all this is going to happen in a room that plays the songs of Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus all day long. I think the songs are going to drive someone over the edge, we won't need all the dirty gritty stuff. There are times when you just want to tear someone apart, even if it is just in your head. There are some people that just deserve it more than the others, and I suppose this is one of those moments whereby you just want to break all the rules and take a moral holiday.

By the way, an interesting bit I just read from the textbook that belongs to her module:

"A third style of team leadership is negligent (or laissez-faire) leadership. This type of leader offers such little guidance or direction that this style closely matches a nonleader situation. He or she offers complete freedom and movement in the group. If asked for information, the negligent leader will respond, but otherwise, the leader takes no part in decision making and offer slittlea dvice or direction. To use an analogy, this type of leadership is like a cold, limp handshake: Neither has much life, and both are unsatisfactory. Research has shown that this style usually generates negative effects in both task and satisfaction outcomes. Team members not only take more time on task management, but they also resent the overall inefficiency of the process."

- Page 194-195 of Business and Professional Communication, by Carley H. Dodd.