I thought this was pretty well stated.
"That's what pardons are for." BAM. Done.
Still wrong, but you know. For the sake of argument.
From rape to torture is an...improvement?
Tomorrow, testing cosmetics on adorable baby chimpanzees.
"First we give them dolls to play with. Then we poison the dolls."
That was dark. Maybe I need to play with my cats for a while, or find a field to frollick in for a few minutes or something.
The problem is that most people don't give a shit whether it's wrong. Maybe they wouldn't torture themselves, but they're happy for the government to do whatever in their behalf. How long did it take for the norm against torture collapse in the wake of 9/11? A couple of months? I had arguments about the ticking-bomb scenario within one week of 9/11.
Frightened people are generally pretty scary.
re: 7
Some don't care whether it's wrong, some probably do but have been convinced it's expedient for 'lesser evil' reasons, and some people are sitting wanking over the prospect.
I hereby assert that torture delayed us locating OBL.
I mean come the fuck on, even ignoring the morality side, we finally locate the dude after 10 years and we're chest-thumping about 1) how good we are at terrorist-locating program-related activities, and 2) that using techniques originally designed to elicit false confessions 7 years ago were a key factor? Moral monsters walk among us.
Sure, it's a peripheral point, but it does seem worth noting that this instance appears to be yet another example of bogus claims about the efficacy of torture.
7:Civilization is but a thin veneer on the direwolf of...wait, veneer on a direwolf? Civilization is but a three piece suit...
Maybe they wouldn't torture themselves, but they're happy for the government to do whatever in their behalf.
I would torture myself in a heartbeat, if fact I do a little every day, but I will be damned if I will give up my inalienable right to self-torture to some pointy-headed DC bureaucrats.
LB!!
In my gut, these debates strike me as punching tar baby. I hate them and always feel like the good loses ground to the bad. But I can see that recent history has proved that wrong - more ground is lost in silence than otherwise. I still hate them and tend to tune them out, though.
So thanks for fighting the good fight.
Is the NYT finally prepared to call torture by its name?
Headline on the front page of the NYT web site:
Bin Laden Raid Revives Debate on Value of Torture
And the caption of a related photo:
The discussion of what led to Bin Laden's demise has revived a national debate about torture that raged during the Bush years. A rally against torture was held in Washington in 2008.
Unfortunately, the story itself mostly falls back into discussion of "enhanced interrogation." But at least it uses the scare quotes around the phrase.
Some NYT web editor has gone rogue, I think. The print edition headline uses a euphemism. I wonder if the NYT will change the online version.
14: it's a step in the right direction, but if you read carefully you'll notice that at no point do they use "torture" to describe what US soldiers have actually been doing. It's only used as a vague general term that you can have debates about. What's really been going on is "harsh interrogation practices" or similar weasel phrases.
Does the Blue book tell you how to cite the article in the first paragraph??
The point of the ticking time bomb hypo isn't to imagine real-world scenarios, but to isolate our intuitions re: the moral acceptability of torture. And quite a lot of people think it can be moral under certain circumstances. You can shout that it's immoral as many times as you want, but it won't persuade anyone with different moral intuitions.
6: In light of 5, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of you playing with your cats...
17: Except not really, because the circumstances of a ticking time bomb scenario qualitatively changes the question. The assumption in this clean little mind experiment seems to be that torture, in this case, is the only way to get information that would definitely save lives. Um, ok. But that's not the torture we're talking about. We're talking about the systematic use of sadistic methods designed to create as much suffering as possible without resulting in death for the purposes of controlling and breaking both individuals and specific populations, the use of which is most obviously degrading to the victims, but is also profoundly degrading to the perpetrators. We are talking about institutionalizing these methods, and normalizing the idea that the state, or, really, anyone, has no obligation to observe the sanctity of the individual, of the body, whenever it deems fit. We are talking about the normalization of cruelty, sadism, and brutality. So I say again, in the wildly implausible event that there is one day a ticking time bomb: that is what pardons are for.
Also, and this should be relevant, it never fucking happens. There are many horrific, horrific things that one could theoretically consider to be moral (or at least the lesser of two evils) if one is willing to consider wildly implausible or even virtually impossible scenarios; they still have no bearing on the real world.
And quite a lot of people think it can be moral under certain circumstances.
The point of Belle's cited post is that the ticking time bomb argument is morally empty, because it proves too much -- you can come up with a similar argument that makes anything permissible if the stakes are high enough and the result is certain enough. The ticking time bomb argument either proves nothing, or it proves that there is no category of acts, however horrific, that can be called 'wrong'.
Most people wouldn't buy into the second possibility, which leaves the ticking time bomb argument as meaningless.
18: Heh. My cats express joy through trying to kill things, so they're probs ok. Also, they've been making out at this point for, like, an hour.
20: So basically I was pwned by the link I didn't bother to read. I see.
21: Does that mean your cats have been killing something together for about an hour? Or that making out doesn't involve joy for your cats?
22: Well, I was being cute, so I didn't even link it, you would have had to google. But you should, the post is great.
I endorse 10, and I think that liberals have a characteristic vice that they surrender to at every opportunity -- the vice of "I'll will concede 95% of your stipulations because with only 5% I can still beat you with my clever argument." Of course they're lying about torture working. What, they tortured KSM for 5 years, and finally he cracked and told them something useful?
23: It means prolonged making out usually leads to one of them launching a sneak attack on the other. They are about to erupt into a fluffy hurricane of destruction.
The Belle post in question, for those too lazy to google.
25: It is a vice, but it's also one of the few ways to remain respectfully engaged with people who lie all the time -- trying to get to a point where you're saying that you don't have to give a fuck about whatever stories they're making up, your position holds regardless. And if people who lie all the time are in powerful positions, it's hard to get anywhere if you're treating them with the contempt they deserve.
Ah, but LB, what if they get to those positions of power partially because no one treats them with the contempt they deserve? I don't even think it would have to be everyone, all the time, either. Just some well timed, public contempt can do the trick. Doesn't always work, obviously (see: "He was born on third base, and has gone through life thinking he hit a triple"), but, you know. Worth the effort.
Amen to 10 and 25. It's always worth pointing out that waterboarding and similar techniques are designed to produce false confessions and were largely forced upon professional interrogators by Bush administration officials who wanted to use them for ideological reasons. In fact, it seems (from the linked article and elsewhere) that the only information that conceivably derived from torture was KSM and (possibly) another high ranking figure lying about the identity of the courier -- and the CIA thinking that, if KSM was covering up his role, it might be important. So the critical result from our national adventure in torture was some false information that could just as easily have been obtained through non-torture, and that formed A small part of a mosaic of information mostly collected without the use of torture. Awesome record.
I always thought Jim Henley's point was the right attitude to take to this.
I do think that, for purposes of preventing future experiments in US torture by the John Yoos of the world, "torture doesn't work" is a far more important point to make loudly and publicize than "even if it could work a little bit, torture is still wrong."
Huh. I'm definitely of the opinion that giving any ground in the "torture: wrong or wronger?" debate is a bad idea, because it opens the door for the idiot implausible scenarios, and, as Henley points out in dsquared's link, the people who are advocating for this kind of thing aren't actually considering the merits, they're just looking for an excuse. Giving them an inch is enough.
Perhaps we could combine the arguments. "Torture is morally abhorrent for many reasons, and one of them is that it doesn't fucking work, and therefore the only reason to do it is because you're a sick fuck, you sick, sick fuck."
"even if it could work a little bit, torture is still wrong."
I see some kind of a Book of Genesis "Abraham argues with God" reversed argument.
"If it can save 50 innocent people, should you torture this guy?" "What about 45 people?"
It seems like for public sentiment to be strongly and loudly against torture of prisoners, average people have to fear that innocent people like themselves could be potentially arrested and tortured.
Instead, (here) people's biggest fear about government is financial: government is wasting your money, and it's yours, and it's being wasted. Your money! Stolen and wasted!
Torture apologists have been very deft at preserving the idea that this couldn't possibly happen to you or someone you love, and therefore keeping the public emotionally unengaged. Plus the distraction about how you should really be focused on tax theft.
34 seems to clinch the argument. I've seldom seen it better stated. Perhaps we could spread a meme to use the term perverted whenever torture advocates are discussed, eg. "Perverted torture advocate John Yoo said this morning...", "Perverts in the CIA responsible for waterboarding inmates at Guantanamo..."
I'm on board with 34.2.
Is now a good time to remember that none of the architects of the Bush torture regime have gotten any punishment or sanction whatsoever. And that John Yoo not only continues to teach students and receive a salary from the University of California, but hasn't even been censured by his own colleagues. (The latter despite some impressive but quixotic effort by Brad DeLong).
"Torture pervert" should absolutely make it into the lexicon.
re: 39
Probably ripe for a bit of twitter hashtag meme-spreading, along the lines of the current #donaldtrumpisabellend.
How long did it take for the norm against torture collapse in the wake of 9/11? A couple of months? I had arguments about the ticking-bomb scenario within one week of 9/11.
Which is about as long as it took me to go from being willing to answer the question 'can you think of any situation where torture would be acceptable' with 'no'. Strictly speaking that's not true, but as real world practical question the answer is still no. They might as well ask 'can you think of any situation where torturing to death twenty random American toddlers on live TV would be acceptable'. That said, I've never been completely confortable with the strong version of the 'torture doesn't work' argument. Based on both my intuition and on reading plenty of WWII history, it can be quite effective when used to obtain information which is easily and quickly verifiable.
I had to tell him about Baggins. But he didn't the Precious.
But he didn't the Precious.
The typos, we hates them, we hates them, forever.
Ooops. The scary thing, as a reflection on how I spend my time, is that I only needed to type "Opinionated G" before the form memory thing kicked in to finish.
|| Damn. A breach of the veil of pseudonymity has occurred. I'll likely still be around, but my delightfully witty pseud shall not.) |>
It's a sign of how incredibly naive I was that I thought that the italicized argument that Henley gives here was sufficient to settle the question.
45: Oh, no. Hopefully everything is mostly all right?
I hear Dean of Students Wry Cooter is available.
Since I am back, I might remind the group that one doesn't have to be opinionated to drop by and make a joke. We would not have been confused had the comment come from an unmodified Gollum, and "opinionated" refers to a distinct second joke that doesn't make 46 and 47 funnier. Rather, a superfluous "opinionated" takes away from the funny, which is just as wrong as torture.
I wasn't kidding in 46. I think torture is actually bad. It's just a big joke to you, isn't it, Megan? ISN'T IT!
In support of dq's 19 and LB's 20 I'll note that hearing anyone seriously discuss the "ticking bomb scenario" is one of my hot buttons. How much more fatuous could the "argument" be? None, none more fatuous:
1) It never happens.
2) If it did "happen", people could do as they saw fit* and throw themselves on the mercy of the court (as dq says).
3) Come on, be an adult.
Also what Henley says, both per dsquared's 32 and Walt's 46.
*Although I guess they wouldn't necessarily have the necessary tools at the ready. I await the day when every big-city SWAT team has a portable waterboarding setup in the truck.
I feel mildly self-satisfied that way back in law school, long before I knew anything about you guys, I was boggled by my Philosophy of Law professor harping on the "ticking time bomb" scenario. I thought we spent an utterly disproportionately amount of time on it. I didn't understand the objections that Henley and Belle and LB explain to me, but I clearly remember thinking "You know what? This never happens to me. This is not a problem I face. I do not have to map out my response to this in advance. Can we talk about real philosophical questions that are actually important to my life, like how legislators should represent public opinion?" Even then, without much conscious thought, I knew that dwelling on the ticking bomb scenario was masturbatory.
Except not really, because the circumstances of a ticking time bomb scenario qualitatively changes the question. Not at all. It's one end of a quantitative spectrum. It's a little like saving 10,000 Indians in the John & Indians hypo (or whatever moderately offensive title it has). That's one extreme end, and then as fewer and fewer are saved, intuitions tend to shift.Same w/ the ticking time bomb: it's a bit extreme, but is one end of a spectrum that we can gradually move along. So we can move from 100% chance of saving 100X people to 10% chance of saving X people.
re: whether the scenario ever happens: of course it wouldn't, but that's not the point. It's enough to tell us that torture is theoretically justifiable. Any reasonable argument that it isn't justifiable proceeds along practical or cost/benefit grounds ("it doesn't work," "the cons of what it does to the torturer and tortured outweighs the benefits")
Correcting format:
Except not really, because the circumstances of a ticking time bomb scenario qualitatively changes the question.
Not at all. It's one end of a quantitative spectrum. It's a little like saving 10,000 Indians in the John & Indians hypo (or whatever moderately offensive title it has). That's one extreme end, and then as fewer and fewer are saved, intuitions tend to shift.
Same w/ the ticking time bomb: it's a bit extreme, but is one end of a spectrum that we can gradually move along. So we can move from 100% chance of saving 100X people to 10% chance of saving X people.
re: whether the scenario ever happens: of course it wouldn't, but that's not the point. It's enough to tell us that torture is theoretically justifiable. Any reasonable argument that it isn't justifiable proceeds along practical or cost/benefit grounds ("it doesn't work," "the cons of what it does to the torturer and tortured outweighs the benefits")
It's enough to tell us that torture absolutely any action, up to and including raping your own toddler, as Jim Henley points out is theoretically justifiable.
FTFY.
If you don't find the fact that the ticking time bomb argument tells us that raping your own toddler is theoretically justifiable, and possibly even morally required, depending on the circumstances, illuminating, then you shouldn't find what the ticking time bomb argument tells us about torture useful either.
57.last: None more fatuous! You can have a million fucking arguments of this type about any "bad" behavior. Why are we having this one? I re-post the Henley link from dsquared's 32.
Pwned by LB but tough shit.
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I've been listening to Louis CK clips since PGD linked to him the other day. This man needs to be our next President. In this clip he asks Donald Rumsfeld if he's actually a flesh-eating lizard disguised as a human being.
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57: You really appear not to have understood the point, even though it has been made about eleventy billion times in this thread, and has been made, at length, by both Belle and Henley in essays linked in this thread. That is...impressive.
Your scenario depends rather heavily on knowing for a certainty that the consequences of one bad act will definitely lead to the prevention of another bad act. That is one of the reasons it is so uselessly stupid. Another reason is, as Henley, Belle, LB, and others have pointed out, if you stipulate such uselessly stupid circumstances, you come to the logical conclusion that there are scenarios that would, per Henley's example, morally compel you to rape your own child. If you want to insist on the validity of uselessly stupid things, you really have to accept the moral validity of impossibly monstrous things as well. Go ahead. Pick your poison.
But you know what? This cannot be said enough: these are impossible circumstances that will never actually occur, and this matters. We can never, ever know anything for a certainty, including whether committing one bad act will prevent another. Full stop. Stipulating circumstances which are impossible in the universe we inhabit in support of an argument about things that actually happen in the universe we inhabit is a profoundly dishonest rhetorical trick designed to "prove" something you've already decided you want to be true. Given an inconsistent logical system, you can prove anything to be true.* Convenient, I know, but still fucking wrong.
*This is just another way of stating Belle and Henley's argument; I just think it's useful to have several formulations.
I'm sorry that 61 is so bitchy in tone, but honestly, this enrages me. jpe, I know it's very probably that you don't mean any harm, but it is this sort of quiet, unassuming monstrosity that I find to be the most destructive. That is not to say that you, yourself, are monstrous; I think everyone's capable of having monstrous opinions or making monstrous arguments, including myself (I've done it, obvs, and will certainly err on the side of the monstrous in the future). So I retract any sense of personal attack - it's not appropriate.
62 further: Well, I retract it as far as one can. Seems kind of shitty to be like, "Implied personal attack! I retract that." That is to say: it's wrong, and I'm sorry.
I'm also against torture. I even had a twinge of "Yuck!" when I read that Bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot. That torture is evil appears to be a conviction I'll take to my grave, but I managed to rationalize away the second example by noting that an Osama was nevertheless still a combatant -- assuming he ever really existed.
I think we should keep in mind that everything we've heard about Osama Bin Laden has been second-hand at best. And now Ill never be convinced that he was the Evil Mastermind because he'll never be tried in a civilian court of law; hell, I'm still not convinced that Osama Bin Laden ever really existed. Please excuse me for not swallowing whole everything some stranger's enemies accuse him of.
I bet he'd cry at his mother's funeral though, even if he had to yank a hair from his nostril.
36: It seems like for public sentiment to be strongly and loudly against torture of prisoners, average people have to fear that innocent people like themselves could be potentially arrested and tortured.
..,
Torture apologists have been very deft at preserving the idea that this couldn't possibly happen to you or someone you love, and therefore keeping the public emotionally unengaged.
This, but I also think that part of the equation is protecting me or someone I love (or descendant) from participating in inflicting torture*. Not going resonate with most people, but the social contract has two sides.
*As part of official duties or serving in the armed forces, or paying taxes ...
66: Very good point. I hadn't considered that, given I have even less chance of being ordered to torture anybody. But yes, that's also somethng we should just say no to and teach younger people to eschew as well. Even when it involves somebody who's a real pain in the ass.
Did somebody want a porn thread, ladies ?
Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.
You went to law school! I suppose this is a situation about the archives and the reading the fuck thereof, but I would not have guessed that.
hearing anyone seriously discuss the "ticking bomb scenario" is one of my hot buttons. How much more fatuous could the "argument" be? None, none more fatuous:
It never happens.
It very rarely happens. I can think of two instances:
During the Second World War, the Italians mounted a diver raid on the British fleet in Alexandria. Two of the divers were captured, and refused to say whether they had mined any ships, and if so where the mines were; the British accordingly locked them up in cells aboard HMS Valiant, below the water line. With fifteen minutes to go, one of them admitted that they had mined Valiant; because he refused to say exactly where the mine was, he was returned to his cell and was injured when the mine went off.
During the Algerian War, according to Alastair Horne,
Fernand Yveton, a Communist, had been caught red-handed placing a bomb in the gasworks where he was employed. But a second bomb had not been discovered, and if it exploded and set off the gasometers thousands of lives might be lost. Nothing would induce Yveton to reveal its whereabouts, and Teitgen [Paul Teitgen, Secretary-General of the Algiers préfecture] was pressed by his Chief of Police to have Yveton passé à la question :
"But I refused to have him tortured. I trembled the whole afternoon, Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right, because if you once get into the torture business, you're lost... Understand this, fear was the basis of it all."
And that John Yoo not only continues to teach students and receive a salary from the University of California, but hasn't even been censured by his own colleagues.
Nor has he been publicly humiliated by the student body. What are you waiting for?
The NYT, meanwhile, has found its balls down the back of the sofa.
John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture...
Not "ill treatment" or practices that "some consider torture": just torture. And stick it round Yoo's scrawny neck.
72
It very rarely happens. I can think of two instances:
OK, so that's two instances where time bombs were set and someone was captured who could have stopped them. In the first instance, coercive methods were used (I know we don't like weaselly language, but it feels a little weird to call it "torture" to simply put someone in harm's way of their own bomb. That's too poetic.) and didn't work. In the second instance, torture was considered but rejected for all the right reasons, and in hindsight it would have been unnecessary and unhelpful anyway.
I get that the "ticking time bomb scenario", narrowly interpreted, actually does happen sometimes, but those examples seem like very bad evidence for pro-torture arguments like conservatives make.
76: oh, I agree absolutely. They're neither of them evidence that torture is advisable.
You know what the single best interrogation technique was for Iraqi POWs in the first Gulf War? Cigarettes. Most of them smoked, and by the time they were captured their supplies had been pretty bad for some time, so most of them were running short. The int guys who were interrogating them gave them cigarettes and they were grateful. Hot food and sweet tea worked too.
That's really what it's all about - building up a bond with the subject. And it goes without saying that torture is not exactly the best way to do that.
Paul Teitgen had been a member of the French Resistance in World War II, and had been captured and tortured by the Gestapo, which perhaps contributed to his objection to torture in Algiers. He eventually resigned in protest over the issue, but he was not representative: Massu and his troops used torture and murder systematically in their campaign against the FLN.
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This fun from Yves Smith
a) Food Prices charted vs Fed Treasury buys + b) Bread Prices scatterplotted vs revolutions, 1848 and 2011
I would caveat that food prices are multiply determined, but many of the factors can be related to cheap credit. The Finance Casino now uses both scarcity and oversupply as loci of crazy hedging and overleveraging.
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Unthinkable ...2010! Samuel Jackson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Michael Sheen, and my favorite Martin Donovan.
I watched this this year, or at least the second half. Four actual ticking atomic bombs, including one in Dallas! OMG! What can we allow Jackson to do to the guy? Moss is soooo conflicted.
Finally after hours of pulling Michael Sheen's fingernails, Jackson brings in Sheen's two under-10 children into the glass booth? "You don't think I'll do it? Huh?" Hardened CIA agents are screaming in horror, but Moss allows.
Sheen cracks. A-bombs defused. Dallas saved. Carrie-Anne hugs little children.
I pick my jaw off floor.
75 I was going to post that (noting also the headline 'The Torture Apologists' with a print edition subtitle 'Efforts to justify torture after the Bin Laden killing are cynical and destructive') and the fact that they repeatedly refer to it as torture, only using 'enhanced' interrogation in the formula 'so-called enhanced interrogation' when speaking of how its defenders refer to it. They also explicitly call out waterboarding as torture. They do occasionally switch to 'abused' and 'tormented' when they apparently feel they've used 'torture' too many times in a row. Note also their statement that the Bush administration offered 'succor and comfort' to 'this country's enemies' i.e. an explicit reference to the constitutional definition of treason.
But it is also important to remember that this is not a news article, it is the NYT editorial page which follows different guidelines and which is very, very liberal. Other than the occasionally pompous style and greater politeness their views tend to be reflective of what you'd find on any strongly liberal US blog.
14: Unfortunately, the story itself mostly falls back into discussion of "enhanced interrogation." But at least it uses the scare quotes around the phrase.
Meant to point out that this does seem to be current dividing line on the debate in the US--which words you get the scare quotes. "Torture" or "enhanced interrogation" (I'm using quote quotes). What you lead with matters, of course, but it should be consistent with the quoting scheme.