Input Junkie

I'm going to address the "fair-to-middling bad" thing later. Meanwhile, I'll just say that I'm glad to have any reasonably ethical leverage against the bad guys--it just gets to me that the leverage doesn't have to do with their major publically known badness.

From:

pocketnaomi.livejournal.com

Understandable. It would probably get to me too if I weren't having so much fun watching them squirm to care what was causing it. :)

From:

kgbooklog.livejournal.com

It's the idea that "sincerity is more important than competence". Foley was caught breaking laws he introduced and was in charge of enforcing. Compare that to the press conference Bush gave to hand-picked journalists, who all came out praising his decisiveness and air of authority.

From:

esmereldachubb.livejournal.com

Thank you!!!! I hate the fact that we live in a country where it's seen as politically expedient to vote *for* a bill that legalizes torture and eliminates legal rights for people accused of terrorism.

I wonder if people will start to care when Congress passes a bill that allows the police to hold *anybody* indefinitely without access to lawyers, or a right to a trial, or even to know what the charges against them are? Or when the police are allowed to torture suspects for a confession?

Gah. Don't get me started.

From:

cakmpls.livejournal.com

A lot of people wouldn't care--some people would think it was a good idea. Because, after all, the police only arrest guilty people, and I'm not guilty of anything.

From:

Afaik, Americans can have their citizenship taken away, and then be treated as enemy combatants.

It's not just seen as politically expedient to vote for torture, it is politically expedient to vote for torture.

There are all too many people who say "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." This assumes that everyone who's convicted is guilty, and removes all responsibility for moderating the level of punishment.

And there's a tremendous amount of popular art with interrogation scenes based on the premise that torture and/or threats of torture is a quick reliable way of getting the truth with no bad side effects worth mentioning.

When I've described such art as a bad thing, the most common answer has been "but if it were done differently, it wouldn't be any fun". The US has had a pro-torture culture for a long, long time (how about getting suspects to agree to plea bargains by threatening to give them a cell mate who will rape them?)--9/11 just made it obvious.

From:

libertarianhawk.livejournal.com

You might find this useful:
http://maradydd.livejournal.com/319361.html

From:

I'm not feeling as sure as I used to that torture, in war, is always wrong. If you pre-emptively agree not to torture your enemy's soldiers, while they're still torturing your soldiers, you lose your bargaining position. You lose the chance to convince them to stop torturing your soldiers.

From:

That's not the primary reason for not torturing enemy soldiers. Here are the reasons I'm against torture. It's vile, it isn't a reliable way of getting information, it makes establishing peace more difficult, and it makes enemy soldiers less likely to surrender.

From:

daystreet.livejournal.com

If you pre-emptively agree not to torture your enemy's soldiers, while they're still torturing your soldiers, you lose your bargaining position.

What bargaining position are you referring to here? That if they don't stop torturing your guys, you will start torturing theirs?

If so, it seems a pretty weak bargaining position to me. If the Enemy is torturing people, do you think they are the sort who will give a damn whether *you* are torturing people? You think these beheader guys give a hoot about who we torture (except for their propaganda purposes)?

I think in an Army v. Army situation, the military guys might care because they don't want to see their own guys tortured, but I don't think the politicians would give a damn. I frankly don't think our politicians who voted for torture would care except for the fact that it would make for great See The Evil Enemy propaganda.

From:

Yes, in the current situation it seems unlikely any bargain will be made.

From:

I perceive it precisely the opposite way.

If you've got a policy that says that you're allowed to do something, then you are implicitly saying that it's okay for other people to do the same thing.

If waterboarding enemies is okay for us to do, then we are saying that we're cool with it being done to our captured warfighters. (I've finally seen good descriptions of what waterboarding is: suffice it to say that the Khmer Rouge developed it, and they were good at torture. If the Khmer Rouge does it, and thought it was torture, it was torture.)

How would you do a war crimes trial for the folks doing it? They can say that they were working well within the rules of war by forcing our captured soldiers to stand naked in a cold room being doused with water for hours on end. After all, that's a legitimate way to treat prisoners by our definition.

Unless you state that an action is unacceptable, you can't claim that an action is unacceptable. If you say it's okay for us to do to others, you're saying it's okay for others to do it to us.

This, of course, is only one of the pragmatic reasons to forbid torture.

Here are some others:
1. Torture gives you wrong information. If you use torture, you will end up confirming ideas that are incorrect, leading you to take actions which aren't based on what's real, which will lead you into big trouble.

2. Torture has a corrosive and destructive effect on the people doing it -- a soldier who uses torture as part of their job is going to be worse at their job as a soldier, and will have a much, much harder time transitioning back to civilian life. A soldier who uses torture either ends up with truly crippling PTSD, or a sociopath. Neither is good for our society.

3. It's wrong. It's evil. It's morally bankrupt. It's WRONG. That's all. It's wrong. No matter what else we're talking about, talking about the acceptibility of "coercive interrogation techniques" means that we're talking about making the United States genuinely evil. The Good Guys don't use torture. The Bad Guys use torture. Matter of fact, that's a pretty good litmus test to figure out who the bad guys are. If they're using torture, they're the bad guys. I don't believe that the United States are the bad guys, or at least, I believe that we SHOULDN'T be -- and anyone who supports a policy of accepting torture is, whether they know it or not, advocating a policy of the United States being evil and being the bad guys.

From:

Right on all counts.

TK

From:

enegim.livejournal.com

xiphias, I think I love you.

From:

Torture isn't good for getting information. Some of the most important "information" used to justify the war with Iraq was extracted under torture.

Saying "It's WRONG. That's all. It's wrong." is a religious position. It's the same sort of thing as saying life begins at conception. It's drawing a line in the sand at an arbitrary position, saying "This is the line that we cannot cross." Torture hurts people, but not as much as locking them in jail for 20 years does, and we do that ALL THE TIME. Yet few seem bothered by it. Like the death penalty, it's a huge distraction - all of the energy that could have gone into reducing the suffering of the huge masses incarcerated for decades goes instead into reducing the suffering of a small number of people who are, statistically speaking, least worthy of our help.

Any position that renounces cost-benefit analysis in favor of a line in the sand leads to more suffering and less good.

That said, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to use torture in the present conflict. And the authorities have used torture in situations that are so far outside anything that could be rationally justified - on people who aren't actually known to be involved with terrorism, for instance - that they clearly can't be trusted with it.

From:

It's not a religious position: it's an ethical and moral position.

Now, my morals and my ethics are influenced by my religion and my philosophy. But one MUST consider morals and ethics in considering one's actions -- on an individual level and on a societal level. One must have things that create and support one's morals and ethics -- and religion is one of those things.

There's nothing wrong with having a religous position that says that torture is wrong. It seems that, if we have no ability to say that things are wrong, then we also have no ability to say that other things are right. Without morals, without ethics, there is no reason to do much. Without morals, without ethics, there's no reason to care what happens to anyone else. If you are not working from a moral and ethical basis, what do you care whether people are being tortured, and, for that matter, whether it's particularly effective? The odds that you will be personally affected by terrorism are vanishingly small.

If you're not taking a moral position on these matters, what possible position are you taking? Why do you care?

Utilitarianism is a . . . simplistic philosophy. I don't like it. Doing the most expedient thing at all times seems like a barren way to live.

Nonetheless, in this case, the utilitarian position and the moral position are in conjunction.

From:

I have a lot of sympathy with the "torture is wrong, it's just plain wrong, I tell you, AND it's evil" position, but the problem is that it's unconvincing to people who don't already believe it.

Utilitarianism isn't just doing the most expedient thing--you can take the long range into account, and torture has all sorts of nasty side effects in addition to not reliably accomplishing its stated purpose of getting information.

From:

To me, moral thought means thought on how to make the world better according to your values. If your values say that suffering is bad, then morality requires that you think about how to reduce suffering.

Religion is, I would say by definition, a system of beliefs that forbids you from engaging in moral thought, as you must accept a set of values, and ways of acting, handed to you by a (usually unquestionable) authority. Religion suppresses morality.

Would you rather be dunked in water for half an hour, or be held in prison for 20 years? If torture is preferable to the individual, and causes less suffering than long-term incarceration, then a utilitarian approach suggests that incarceration is worse than torture, and that our policy of locking people up for long terms without budgeting much money toward preventing crime or reducing recidivism is worse than torturing people. A religious approach does not even ask these questions; it already has a set of criteria - a checklist of "things that are wrong" - and anything that doesn't get flagged by something on that checklist (like putting people in prison for 20 years) gets passed on without thought.

From:

I think you've never really studied religion.

Or ethical systems, for that matter.

Religions do not, universally, discourage questioning of assumptions -- talk to a Talmudist or a Jesuit or a Buddhist or a Taoist or a modern Orthodox Jew or a leftist Catholic or really most religious people, and you'll see that your assumption is faulty.

Similarly, not all moral and ethical systems encourage questioning of their assumptions.

So, in effect, you're begging the question. You're defining a "religion" as "that which does what you disaprove" and an "ethical system" as "that which does not."

From:

Most of the people you just mentioned are not what I would call very religious. In fact, studying with the Jesuits was a major factor in my becoming non-religious. Buddhism comes in two varieties, a folk religion, and a philosophy, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other. Orthodox Jews, and the entire Talmudic tradition, are a tradition of overcoming religion, and thinking independently of and in contradiction to the "holy" books.

As to my never having studied religion, or ethical systems, you are off by a very wide margin.

I am using the term "religion" to refer to systems that involve divine revelation, faith (which appears to mean the suspension of reason), and looking for non-material causes for events.

From:

Torture, no matter where, is always wrong.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

There is no shade of grey, and no bargaining positions to be worked with. I don't really understand that idea anyway. If one side tortures people, they have no moral standing to protest being tortured.

But what, saying we only torture as a tit-for-tat issue? That non-torture is a quid pro quo?

No.

Torture is immoral, impractical, and evil.

That it fails in its aims (the collection of actionable information) is just a grace note.

TK

From:

As I've said before: I now understand how the Right felt about Monica Lewinsky.

It doesn't matter, but it's what we've got to take down the Bad Guys.

They felt Clinton was a Bad Guy, not because he slept around, but because he was doing many policy things (which I like) that were changing America away from what they wanted it to be. So, when he gave them a lever that people could actually UNDERSTAND, they grabbed it.

The Foley scandal, people understand. The fact that one congressman was probably schtupping teenagers is not really THAT serious on the grand scheme of things -- it's bad, but it's bad on a personal, individual, "retail" level.

Torture as a policy, suspension of habeas corpus, and the general expansion of the powers of the executive are wholesale bad. And much, much bigger.

And much harder to understand.

So, damn it, I want the Republicans to lose power for being corrupt, immoral bastards who like torture and abuse of power, but, if they're going to lose it because one of them schtupps teenagers and others of them didn't stop him -- I'll take it. If that's what we've got, fine.

From:

As I've said before: I now understand how the Right felt about Monica Lewinsky.

It doesn't matter, but it's what we've got to take down the Bad Guys.

They're still talking as though they think it really was a big deal. Do you know people who at the time thought it was strategic rather than morally important?

From:

Well, people still say, as they said at the time, that the sex part wasn't important, it was the lying under oath.

But they went with lying about sex rather than lying about anything else, because sex sells.

From:

I don't see it that way.

The Lewinsky thing was, at so many levels, evil. It was a trumped up case, using irrelevant testimony, to gin up a non-case (there was no perjury, and lying under oath is not a crime, perjury is a crime) and it seems the Special Counsel primed the pump, so he could manufacture the case, and fan the outrage.

This is a legitimate complaint.

1: Foley seems to have done things which were innappropriate (so did Clinton, and some of them are related, the power differential between Foley/Clinton and Monica/Pages makes it questionable, no matter who initiated it).

2: Foley seems to have broken the law.

3: Members of the Republican Party seem to have been aware of (1) for years, and of (2) for months.

4: They actively covered it up.

Those are very different things to me, than Clinton parsing an answer (which seems to have actually be a non-lie, per the definitions of sex used by the plaintiff's attorney in that deposition) to not admit to an affair; when that affair wasn't relevant.

The ability of the Leadership to see what is, and isn't, improper behaviour, and deal with it,when it comes up, is an issue of fitness to govern.

So, no, I don't see the parallels.

TK

From:

Oh, I don't see that Clinton did anything particularly wrong in the Lewinsky case, nor do I think he committed perjury. I think Foley did something wrong, and that Clinton didn't. And in that sense, yes, there isn't a parallel

The parallel is the idea of taking down someone that you dislike with whatever you can get, even if that thing is relatively unrelated to the thing which is significant to the reason you dislike them.

In other words, I now understand emotionally what the Right was doing with the Lewinsky case.

From:

I still don't see the parallel. Ignore, for the moment, all the other reasons this incarnation of the republican party is fit for removal. Look purely at the Foley scandal.

On it's merits this is worth making a significant change in the makeup of the house.

Which the flap over Lewinsky didn't.

So emotionally this is very different.

I may have thought DeLay a third-rate hack and a first-rate slimeball, but I never wanted to manaufactur a phoney charge, so I could try to get him kicked out of office. Hell, I wouldn't even want to do that to merely hound him out of office.

TK

From:

That just means that you're a better person than I am.

From: