Huh. It would literally never have occurred to me without this that Dr. B's comments on the Volokh-execution-by-torture thing were a causative factor -- both because it wouldn't have occurred to me that there was a strong, obvious moral distinction between torture-for-information and execution-by-torture making it clearly wrong to lump the two together, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that anyone could reasonably have objected to angrily-expressed horror and disgust at Volokh's post. (I can imagine not sharing that horror and disgust -- I just can't see perceiving any expressed level of horror and disgust as over the line.) I don't mean by this to say that I have a thought-out position on why either of those things are wrong, just that not a glimmer of either idea had ever entered my mind.
So, pretty much everything I said in the other thread was working from a basis of having no idea what you thought was going on.
Ogged, Thanks for the explanation. I was only vaguely aware of some of what had happened. I really don't think you're missing much without Atrios. His stuff is remarkably vapid. We found Daily Kos a healthier diet. As for the Bitch Ph. D. end of things, there really are people in academic communities who do not think they've done a day's work unless they've hurt someone else real badly (all in a righteous cause, of course) and, all too often, it doesn't make any difference how seriously they have to lie or distort in order to hurt. The point is to count coup and to look fashionably adept in doing so. I hate it and I'm tired of doing damage control for such people's behavior. They're the first to look all innocent and say: "Moi?"
The point is to count coup and to look fashionably adept in doing so.
Yikes. I'm sure that's true of some people (and not just academics), but, insofar as I think part of the civility obligations in this thread are to avoid ascribing motives to others, and especially insofar as I don't think, in fact, that that's why b wrote her post as she did, let's just all pretend that you don't mean her, specifically.
I have a question. A few, actually. And I hope I may offer an explanation.
I did amend--from "people think" to "people seem to think." That was how I read people (and it wasn't just you) calling attention to Volokh's amending his argument--which wasn't changing his mind, as I read it, but merely saying it was impractical. I didn't think that I was saying anything, substantively, in that post that I hadn't said in the comment thread to your first post on Volokh--that basically I found it horrifying to even entertain the question. That was the "previous discussion" I was referring to.
My questions are. 1) If you had a problem with what I was saying, why did you not--as Ben did--point out the error you thought I was making in a comment? 2) Ok, no one is required to comment. But when I have a problem with something that someone I feel I "know" is saying, I raise my hand and object. It bothers me that you didn't do the same. 3) As many people have pointed out (and I agree) who you blogroll is your own business. Hell, who you want commenting at your site is your own business. Why, given that we were friends, did you not simply remove the link quietly, or email me privately and explain that your opinion of my blog had changed to that extent, rather than making a public stink about it? 4) Given that I had tried to explain in our email exchanges--many times--why I use what you call "uncongenial" rhetoric; and that I had also, more than once, expressed my distress at this misunderstanding, and that the beginnings of our problems started when I started objecting to what I saw as (unconscious) sexist comments here and there, and that you yourself invited people to "misconstrue as you will," why did you not think it would be read that way?
The whole thing felt, and continues to feel, punitive.
For the record that is how I read it, and while I understand what you are saying (and wish you had explained it to me, publicly or privately, at the time), I still think that this isn't just about my conflating violent execution and torture. More to the point, I was and am deeply hurt. The more so as, after our email exchange that you quoted from above, I did, in fact--at your request--modify my tone on your blog.
I am sorry that what I said stung. I wish I had been given an opportunity to say that at the time.
Ogged:
I read the post, and haven't read the comments yet, but this much is clear: dude, you are such a chick.
(Non-joke comment later).
The answer to your 1 and 2 is that I was, and am, through arguing with you; I didn't want to engage further, I wanted to disengage. The sins of your Volokh post seem to me too egregious to take up with the author.
Someone else suggested something like 3 here, and I simply can't understand why anyone thinks that people wouldn't have noticed, and asked. Then I would have been accused of being sneaky, and, frankly, it would have been a fair charge.
About 4: I did think it would be read that way; I didn't mean in this post to express surprise. I just didn't much care at the time, but I do care that people like LB and Adam are reading it that way, and while I've emailed them, I hadn't really offered an explanation, and figured that I might as well post one on the blog.
I think your other points are addressed in the post.
It's fair to say that I didn't mean Bitch Ph. D. specifically.
Ogged, as I said in my e-mail to you, I think I may have overstated things a bit, and I've also gained a better understand of B's position in recent days. The long and the short of it is that I apologized to her on her blog.
LB, if you're still reading, I think I owe you an apology as well. Bottom line: you were right that I misinterpreted B in the Mineshaft conversation. I guess you only have my word (and Chopper's and Michael's) that I wasn't making it up, so it's up to you whether to believe that or not.
That should, of course, effing saying "better understanding of B's...."
I couldn't care less who's on your blogroll, but the idea that it is "over the line" to "conflate" the advocacy of torture with the advocacy of ghoulishly violent punishment is just fucking hilarious. Don't conflate me with the waterboarders, I only signed on for drawing and quartering. You can't be serious.
I just saw your comment over at B's, and I thought it was very decent of you. I never did think you were simply making stuff up -- I was cross with your tone, and as a result figured that you were at least semi-intentionally taking something she had actually said in the least charitable way possible. Now that I've cooled off a little, certainly I take your word that you genuinely misunderstood her. No apology necessary, but it's certainly accepted.
Obviously, that was to Walter, rather than to ktheintz. Not that ktheintz doesn't raise an excellent point w/r/t Volokh's post.
People brought up the distinction in the Volokh thread too. My quick answer there was that torture afforded "no due process, no established norms, no due solemnity in the punishment." Ignore the last, as I never could explain it properly, but the other two are not difficult to understand. So unless you're going to argue that claiming there's a difference between murder and capital punishment is "fucking hilarious," you might want to reconsider.
How lame is this? Let us count the ways.
1. Implying that without the Volokh post, ogged would not have delinked. Lame.
2. Denying that the advocating of the flogging and stabbing, before execution, of a prisoner has nothing to do with torture. Lamer.
3. Compounding the obvious lame contrivance of the "conflation" thing by saying that's why Atrios was de-linked as well, when that delinking was itself a lame contrivance to obfuscate the too-obvious insult of publicly delinking Bitch. Lame squared.
4. Making up all these self-serving arguments, then trying to shut down conversation with, "I was, and am, through arguing with you..." That's some impossibly high value of lame.
Lame
There you go again, with your thoughtless disregard for the feelings of the differently-abled. Do you ever consider the effect this language has - imprinting the social construct of unconscious distaste for the weak and under-privileged on the minds of children? Won't you please think about the children?
Mithras, Are we to understand that you disagree with Ogged's reasoning?
Huh. I can think of several differences between torture and painful execution. An execution comes at the end of a long legal process. I don't believe it's an infallibale one, but this is a difference. Judges and lawyers (and $$$) argue it out, and at the end of that, sentence is passed. Torture is clandestine; one does not get trial or independent representation. Huge difference there. I can think of differences, but this is the most stark. Maybe you don't agree with state-sponsered painful execution (I don't), but to say that the two are conflaitable seems silly.
Mithras always knows what people are really thinking.
I make allowances for you, Mithras, because I assume that people will just discount whatever you say, but you are the grand master of imputing the worst possible motives to people you disagree with, and then pretending that you've refuted them by doing so. It's easy to pretend to win an argument by claiming that your interlocutor is arguing in bad faith, but it's not respectable (which I assume you'll take as a compliment).
Given that I had tried to explain in our email exchanges--many times--why I use what you call "uncongenial" rhetoric;
I'm not certain how others read this, but this seems to me to be an admission to arguing in bad fath.
No no, b was arguing that her rhetorical strategy was legitimate, not that she was deliberately using an illegitimate strategy.
But it seems she's conceding to your characterization of her rhetorical strategy, namely that she impuned motives to those who disagreed with her. Now, perhaps she thinks that's a legitimate rhetorical strategy, but, it does seem to me that she's agreeing that she did that. Possibly, I'm being to strict here.
No again, and obviously I can't lay it out, because I can't quote from her messages, but just take my word for it that she conceded no such thing (and I'm not sure if you mean "impugned" or "imputed"--not that it makes a difference to the point at issue).
All my previous snark and childishly deliberate attempts at goat-getting aside, Ogged, I read and like your posts and tend to find them pretty well thought-out most of the time. This, however, strikes me as a bit lazy:
I think any potential argument that violent execution amounts to torture is completely specious here: ...
Any potential argument is specious here? Are you defining torture in such a narrow way as to exclude any torture which isn't conducted expressly for the purpose of obtaining information? While the torture being done at, say, Guantanamo and Baghram may be put toward an ostensibly "higher" purpose than the torture in Iran Volokh approvingly cites in his original post, I don't see what makes the torture itself qualitatively different. A supporter of either kind of torture is still a supporter of torture, just a supporter of torture under differing circumstances.
Since Volokh himself has been pretty open to the possibilities of torture as a mechanism for interrogation - both before and after Abu Ghraib broke - I also don't see how it's bad argumentation to make a connection between his support for this and his support for Iranian-style public executions.
I write all this not having read Prof. B's posts on Volokh, and not knowing whether the actual case she made linking Volokh's support for torture-for-information to torture-as-execution was a decent one or pure sophistry. But the argument is there to be made, certainly.
sorry, making words up. I meant imputed. I'll take your word for it, despite what it looks like.
Oh, for gawd's sake. If there is one main benefit of a blog, it's that you're able to follow months (and even years) of conversations. Lots and lots of data to run through the heuristic and decide if ogged's an asshole. If you think ogged's a dick, fine - maybe, by your lights, he is. If you think I should think ogged's a dick, fuck off. Same for BPhD, with gender-appropriate offensive term. I get it if you're a party to the dispute, or maybe if you feel so insulted (by either side) that you feel you must speak; but shouldn't the rest of us just be circled up and singing Kumbaya?
Lungfish, thanks, and I see why you read the sentence the way you do, but the emphasis is on the "here." Which is to say that, yes, there are arguments to be made, but post hoc explications of potential similarities between torture and violent execution ought not be taken to excuse b's post, which simply assumed, without argument, that they were identical.
No, it's an admission that I am polemical. But I presume that those who know me understand that I never argue in bad faith, even if I do so strenously. What I said in between those emails ogged excerpted was this:
This is precisely why I use that rhetoric. *Because*
no one would say X. And yet, often, X--it seems to
me--is the logical conclusion to what *is* being said
(or not said). The subtext, as it were.
So the Drum thing: you said to start off with, "Drum
is one of the good guys." That's what I was
responding to. I don't care about Drum, personally;
I'm sure he's lovely. His good guy/bad guy status
isn't the point. Ditto the go to the back of the bus
thing: I think that was in a context where you were
saying that some feminist point was a distraction.
Well, not to me it's not. Being told (and Drum did
say this) that he can "live with" restricting abortion
is tatamount, to women, to saying that we should go to
the back of the bus and wait our turn while the
important issues get dealt with. I'm explaining how
things sound. Bluntly, yes. But this strategy of
saying, "I never said that" is infuriating, b/c it
just means that there's a certain deniability there,
or at least a failure to see the implications of
what's being said. I am trying to point out those
implications. That's why I talk the way I do.
His response, as you have seen, was to say that he prefers it when someone says, "Your statement seems to imply X," which, from that point on, on this blog, I did, out of respect for the fact that this is not my space.
In other words, I think I acted in extreme good faith; I explained myself, and when requested to make an accomodation, I did so.
I think that's the nicest thing SCMT has ever said to me.
By the way, ogged, you have my permission to quote from my emails. I think you have too much integrity to quote me out of context.
I will also say that I think that, to the person being tortured, the question of whether due process was or was not observed isn't terribly relevant at the time.
I think I acted in extreme good faith; I explained myself, and when requested to make an accomodation, I did so.
This is absolutely true.
I'm sorry people are having trouble believing that the Volokh post was the precipitating (though not sole) factor, but it was. I think b surmised that it was in an email at the time.
Thanks.
to the person being tortured, the question of whether due process was or was not observed isn't terribly relevant at the time.
I don't see that this is relevant. The difference between murder and capital punishment is due process, even though someone is being killed in both cases (there are other differences, but that'll do for now). The same goes for torture vs. violent execution.
I did surmise; but be fair--you didn't tell me that, I had to guess. Which is kind of ironic, given that it is my imputing motives that was the problem in the first place.
I do really think that, though the Volokh post was the catalyst, that it was the "tone" issue that was the real problem. I suspect that, Volokh aside, sooner or later something would have happened to cause more or less the same reaction. And I do, like LB and a few others, think that that is extremely problematic from a feminist angle. Particularly given that it is generally presumed, in these comment threads, that offensive remarks aren't really intended to be offensive, but are made in the general spirit of camaraderie and joshing. I don't see why the same understanding can't be extended to frustration and anger, particularly given that my frustration and anger is virtually always connected to some feminist point--in this instance, the idea that the body is more important than abstractions about it.
Okay, Ogged, now actually having read the comments, I see your reply on 13.
I take it your objection to the US's current use of torture, then, is not an objection to torture per se, but an objection to torture without due process. If this were your belief, I can understand some conflicts with someone who believed that torture was an intrinsically immoral violation of one's basic humanity at any phase of the criminal justice system. Raping someone with a chemical light is still raping someone with a chemical light; do twelve jurors and a judge make it that much better?
Admitted re. murder vs. capital punishment in terms of legal definition. On the other hand, I think that capital punishment is unacceptable and, if anything, even more morally objectionable than murder, because it is always done in cold blood and with the weight of the state behind it, and absolutely zero possibility of self-defense.
I had to guess
True.
As for tone and catalysts, yes, probably something would have happened sooner or later, but--now that I'm on the spot--by my reckoning, that's because you would have said something sooner or later that I would have found similarly outrageous. And yes, the tone bothers me, and I do believe that it bothers me apart from whether its employed in discussions of feminism or not, but I understand that lots of people don't believe that.
Regarding the delinking controversy, I believe Ogged's greatest sin by far here is that Instapundit is still on his blogroll. I have located, after thirty seconds' Googling, video of a young man beating off a horse which is superior to Mr. Reynolds's commentary in every way, and I recommend it to everyone.
Ogged,
if what i understand from this is a) you find her tone to be a little (ok, a lot) harsh, and b) everyone thinks its because of her feminism, i think part of it is you didn't like having your opinion criticized. or having a misinterpretation of your opinion criticized. or anyone elses. which seems a little thin-skinned to me, but then, i may have your point of view way off here, so my point may be moot.
Tweedle, I really really don't mind having my opinion criticized. I don't know what else to say than "look through the comments." I've been called a lot of things, and I almost never mind.
I believe that the tone bothers you regardless; I find it hard to believe, though, that it bothers you AS MUCH when it isn't coming from a woman who has used it to challenge your feminist credibility. I mean, I have always used that kind of polemical tone, even back in the days when you were a big fan; it wasn't until I got snarky over the Dowd thing and refused to let it go that it seemed to bother you.
The whole thing is a real problem for me. Inasmuch as we were friends, I never wanted to anger or attack you. I honestly believed that any arguments/snark/polemic were within the realm of honest, if rigorous, disagreement. Which is why I am still bothered that you didn't either engage it or tell me, as a friend, that it was over your line. Had you done so, I like to think you know that I would have apologized, publicily if need be.
Your (b) should read "some people", not "everyone."
Ok, I'm going to bed, so replies to further comments will have to wait till morning. Remind me to take up Lungfish's 34 if someone else doesn't. It's a good question.
Iron Lungfish,
re: 34. Of course that makes it all right. Except that it's cruel and rather unusual. And capital punishment isn't. And now, let me remove my tongue from my cheek.
Michael, my point would be that my tone is harsh for reasons that have everything to do with my feminism.
Which isn't to say that people have to like it, or agree that that is okay with them. So, in the present instance, not being on someone's blogroll is fine with me; I'm not everyone's cup of tea. And I'm quite willing to discuss (as you yourself gave me credit for in an earlier thread, which by the way I appreciated) most anything, almost any time.
On the other hand, I continue to be alternately angry and hurt that I am no longer welcome to comment (I, and ogged, are apparently both making an exception for this particular thread), as if I were a troll. Everyone gets commenters whose tone or beliefs or whatever aren't perfectly congenial to the blogger's tastes. Generally, such commenters are tolerated (except for trolls). I don't see why, except for abc123 (who, as I understand it, was, in fact, a troll) I ended up being the single person who was intolerable, especially as I had already demonstrated a willingness to shape my comments to ogged's tastes.
b, it's precisely because you were a friend. (Yeah, I'm still up.) It's easy to treat trolls like trolls; we either make fun of them, or ignore them. But you were a part of the community--probably the most prolific commenter for a while--and so when your comments went over the line, that was a big problem; and then when you wrote a post that I still think was a (probably unintentional) straight-up smear, that was a big problem. I'm not going to tell Mithras to get the hell out, because he's not in. But you were.
As for the tone, quite apart from my own sensibilities and sensitivities, I also feel something of a responsibility to the blog and to making it the kind of place that the people I like like to visit. After the delinking, the emails I received confirmed that your presence here was alienating a lot of those people.
Of course that makes it all right. Except that it's cruel and rather unusual. And capital punishment isn't. And now, let me remove my tongue from my cheek.
Well, yes, and pretty clearly. I think the great unspoken tragedy of the torture debate is that a lot of Americans don't care all that much about torture as long as it only happens to Very Bad People - pretty much the same relationship we have to capital punishment. It's also becoming clear that Democratic opposition to torture is a little less than full-throated: you don't see Dems on TV denouncing extraordinary rendition with the same vigor they do Social Security privatization. To a degree this is a matter of picking your battles, but to a degree this is also a Don't Look Soft syndrome, where we've convinced ourselves that not doing the unspeakably vile in the name of God and country makes us weak. Again, like we do with capital punishment.
It's probably early to say this, but we could probably break 300 on this thread without trying too hard. There are a couple of interesting areas for actual debate. Plus, there are a lot of quotes to take completely out of context and change the meaning of in a humorous way. For example, in 13: murder and capital punishment is "fucking hilarious,". Don't you mean are fucking hilarious?
Yes, I know the grammar is proper when 'is' is agreeing with 'difference' in the original comment.
No, that joke didn't really work, but I wanted to leave a comment and that was the best I could do on short notice.
Man, I stopped reading for a couple of weeks and I missed out on lots and lots of goings on. Not to make light, but I think there's a screenplay in here somewhere?
B, I'm not sure, maybe there was some confusion. My 41 responded to tweedle's 38, not your 40. You people are fast typers.
I think the great unspoken tragedy of the torture debate is that a lot of Americans don't care all that much about torture as long as it only happens to Very Bad People - pretty much the same relationship we have to capital punishment.
Actually, I think this is very much discussed, and it's not that they don't care, but that they consider it justified.
IL, I'm going to be very political here...
The reason you can't be tough on capital punishment? Because people are dumb and they refuse to think about two sides to an argument. It's too difficult. Look what happened to Dukakis. He said he wouldn't go for the death penalty even if his wife were brutally raped. Because what Volokh said is partially true, you can't take a stand on it, because you'll get villified. That doesn't make it right...
All the more reason to talk to me about it.
I think that saying you got email saying that I was alienating people is a really low blow. Clearly shunning me has also alienated people. That isn't the point. If people have a problem with me they should be willing to say so to my face. Whatever my many offenses against you or Drum or Volokh or whoever, they were committed in public, where people had a chance to respond.
So unless you're going to argue that claiming there's a difference between murder and capital punishment
The hilarious part isn't in maintaining a categorical distinction between torture for utilitarian purposes, and ritual execution for more or less aesthetic purposes. What is hilarious is taking offense (or professing to) at the failure or the refusal to honor the distinction. Like the conflation represents an injustice to the class of people who support ritualized violent execution, or something. How dare they.
If you want to purge everyone you consider shrill from your blogroll and your comments section, fine, it's your blog. But your rationale is too contrived to be taken in earnest.
#50: No, I wasn't confused, I know you were responding to tweedle. I was saying that I find the distinction between "tone" and "feminism" problematic in this case, and trying to explain why.
Sorry you still can't see it, kt, but I take b's post to be calling me (insofar as I supported Volokh's position) an advocate for torture; which is not something I'll tolerate being called.
Three quotes:
Ogged: "...post hoc explications of potential similarities between torture and violent execution ought not be taken to excuse b's post, which simply assumed, without argument, that they were identical."
Volokh: "I am especially pleased that the killing ... was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging."
American Heritage dictionary's first definition of torture: "Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion."
I have to say, Ogged, that both flogging and slow throttling strike me as torture, struck me as torture when I first read Volokh's post, and still strike me as torture after reading your comments. I can wrap my head around your distinction between torture and violent execution, but I strongly disagree with it: to me the "infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment" is torture even when done with your criteria of due process, established norms, and due solemnity.
It simply wouldn't have occurred to me (before reading this thread) that any argument was needed for that view. Is that ignorance inexcusable? If so, why? And if not, why was Dr. B's post inexcusable?
ktheintz, you seem to ignore that Ogged was for Volokh's argument for execution but stridently against torture.
If people have a problem with me they should be willing to say so to my face.
I don't think that's true in this case, and I think it's to their credit that they haven't said anything. You've already been shunned, why pile on?
#55: I did not say, nor did I think, you were advocating torture. What I was trying to say was that I found discussions of whether or not actions-which-I-think-amount-to-torture offensive, by definition. Specifically, I thought *Volokh* was advocating torture, and I found it shocking that people were willing to entertain his arguments just because he was the one making them. If pushed, I might say that I think that doing so indirectly amounts to excusing actions-which-I-think-amount-to-torture, which I think was the clear implication of that post.
Yarrow, again, of course it's torture of a sort, but when we say "torture" in America, or at least in blogdom, what we mean is Abu Ghraib; Volokh's proposal was for something quite different.
I'm still trying to absorb BPD's statement that "... I think capital punishment is unacceptable and, if anything, even more morally objectionable than murder, because it is always done in cold blood and with the weight of the state behind it ...." As a repudiation of violent death, it's a strong statement, but it also cuts the other way against due process rights. I have my doubts whether BPD would really sustain that argument in a considered debate. It's the kind of rhetorical excess that lends itself to serious misreading.
Who gave you the right to use the royal WE?
Yeah, Ralph, I forgot to bring that up. Agreed.
I thought *Volokh* was advocating torture
Yes, and I had agreed with him.
#58: If my presence was inhibiting them BEFORE I was shunned, they ought to have said so to my face.
And I still think its a low blow to say, "well, I got emails agreeing with me." The reason I haven't said anything in public about any of this until now is to prevent people from having to take sides, even at the cost of not defending myself. If people chose to take sides in private, bully for them, but that doesn't make it okay to say "lots of people who I won't name don't like you either."
Unless the point is merely that this is a popularity contest, rather than there is something about *me* and my tone (or whatever) that is beyond the pale.
RL,
I don't think B would have a problem sustaining that point. Sure, it may not fit with your viewpoint, but then, there's nothing to say she doesn't have perfectly valid arguments. And that's the crux of the problem with the whole B/Ogged thing. Ogged and B have a fundamentally different view on what torture is, and she shouldn't have to accept his viewpoint, just as he isn't required to accept hers.
It's much harder to sustain the claim that it was my sensitivity about my feminist credentials that fueled my annoyance when my annoyance is shared by others; unless you want to end up arguing that anyone who doesn't like your tone is ipso facto anti-feminist.
Tweedle..., Are you _really_ prepared to pass so quickly over the elemental necessity of due process rights in a civil society? Jesus!
#61: How does it violate due process? The problem here is that I'm not a legal scholar? If I said something stupid, I will admit it, once I understand what it is you think I said; but it seems a bit much, in my book, to blame me for serious misreading when, as is being admitted, you doubt that I mean what you think I am saying.
#61: Abu Ghraib is manifestly not the only thing that constitutes torture, even if it's the most prominent example in most people's minds at the present historic moment. If I had meant Abu Ghraib, I would have said Abu Ghraib.
#64: Yes, and I said in the post where you did that that I found your agreement offensive.
no. I'm not ready to pass them over. I'm just saying B could have a very valid argument for why she thinks that capital punishment is worse than murder. I love due process. I think it's a great thing. I don't think this has so much to do with due process as with one's feelings towards state-sponsored capital punishment.
Uh, BPB, murder occurs without due process; capital punishment occurs at the end of due process. Do you still think that murder is morally preferable to capital punishment?
Abu Ghraib is manifestly not the only thing that constitutes torture
Argh. I never said (or meant to say) that it was. Just that that's what people think right now when you say torture. So when you say that Volokh supports torture, anyone who doesn't click through (which is most people) will think that he supports what happened at Abu Ghraib.
#67: It depends on why they don't like my tone. As they have not said anything in a forum where I can see what their problem is, I clearly have no way of knowing. I mean, they could dislike me because they think my taste in shoes sucks, and you could dislike me because you think I'm intellectually dishonest (which I still think is terribly unfair), and they could still be cheerleading you on because, after all, common enemy and all that.
#68: Of course due process is important in a civil society. How does saying that capital punishment is heinous because it is state-sanctioned killing, or that if I am the person being killed, I don't care a whole lot about the motivations of my killer, deny that?
That's all I'm going to say on the tone issue, because I feel like I'm being goaded into saying nasty things.
I think if one is threatened with violent death, it makes a great deal of difference whether the threat comes from a murderer or from a capital punisher. And the difference is due process, in which one can show cause why violent death is not one's just dessert. Rhetorically bliterating that distinction is _really_ dangerous.
Actually, Ralph in 71, I can conceive an argument that it's precisely because capital punishment comes after due process that it's worse than (at least some forms of) murder (phrasing it as "murder is preferable" is obviously a rhetorical move that would hurt the argument).
I realize that's a provocative thing to say without actually bringing forth the argument but I'm going to bed because I'm tired. Visions of reconciliation will ease me to sleep.
But first I want to make it explicit that 76 neither means that I do nor means that I do not actually believe in the merits of that argument or position.
#71: I don't think I said "morally preferable" I said, "if anything, capital punishment is even more morally objectionable" and I gave a reason. By which I meant, "one could make the argument that." Which may be equivocating, I suppose. But I do think there is something horrific in having the entire weight of the state behind killing someone.
#72: Wait. Your point is that if people don't click through when I provide a link, AND if those people are so silly as to think that only Abu Ghraib = torture, that I am responsible for their intellectual laziness? By those standards, one almost could never write anything at all.
Yarrow, again, of course it's torture of a sort, but when we say "torture" in America, or at least in blogdom, what we mean is Abu Ghraib; Volokh's proposal was for something quite different.
So you got mad at Dr. B because she was implicitly accusing you of supporting the practice of making (quite likely innocent) people stand hooded on boxes under the false threat of electrocution, when you were actually supporting the practice of flogging and slowly garrotting (very probably guilty) people?
I see that the two cases are different, and perhaps you are right that the word torture currently conjures up the first case by default; but clearly Dr. B was talking about the second kind of torture.
And RL, I don't really find it a repudiation of due process to say that the death penalty is wrong because it is state sponsored murder. if you look at it from a completely dispassionate legal standpoint, sure it is. But when was the last time anyone did that. The fact of the matter is we don't live in a sterile environment. I can love due process. I can love the fact that we can look violent people up for life for murdering someone. I can detest the fact that we allow 12 people to decide that someone should be killed for something they did. It's not that I detest the due process of the matter. It's because I detest the punishment imposed.
I love due process. I think it's a great thing.
Some of my best friends have been entitled to due process.
(More substantive comment to follow.)
I'm getting entitled to due process in a month, when they look at my traffic ticket and go... "Whaaa?"
So you got mad at Dr. B because she was implicitly accusing you of supporting the practice of making (quite likely innocent) people stand hooded on boxes under the false threat of electrocution, when you were actually supporting the practice of flogging and slowly garrotting (very probably guilty) people?
Yup. I'm still trying (genuinely trying) to see how people can think they're similar, because they seem so very obviously so very different to me.
clearly Dr. B was talking about the second kind of torture
Why is that clear? If this discussion were happening in 2000, the words would mean very different things. But in 2005, if you're going to say that someone advocates torture, you have to be *very careful* if you don't mean Abu Ghraib type torture, to say just what you do mean. Look at the comments to the post on B's site: at least half the people there are talking about "torture" in terms of interrogations. QED.
300 was apparently a lowball estimate, I'll jump in on the substance after sleep.
You say Boston, I say Bahstan. Honestly Ogged, to most of us you're anonymous. You could just be Googlezon making shit up. But to get uber-offended because someone said one thing that got mistaken for another? And then to say that it's their fault completely because they weren't clear enough in their words? Come on. That's like me calling someone a filthy dog, having a bunch of people get mad at me because she's ugly, when what I meant, and those who were following the conversation knew, that she was taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
Also, do we consider those people who got tortured to death executed? If not, then what?
Yup. I'm still trying (genuinely trying) to see how people can think they're similar, because they seem so very obviously so very different to me.
So to be perfectly clear on this, Ogged, you DON'T have a problem with torture as such - you just need it to come after a jury trial? Because as far as I can tell, the problem that B and I and a lot of others have is that torture is an intrinsically hideous violation in any context. Electrocuted genitals don't look that much better to me with a court order.
Why was it clear that Dr. B was talking about the second kind of torture? I do admit I assumed that anyone who hadn't read Volokh's post would click through. I now see your post assuming they wouldn't; but I see a fair amount of click-through evidence in the comments thread to Dr. B's post. The thread was hijacked early by a pro-torture person who dragged in a find-the-ticking-bomb argument, and many people responded to that rather than to anything about Volokh; but those who mentioned Volokh did seem to know what he was talking about (e.g., QrazyQat's
response about the ticking bomb (first) and then Volokh's post.
What the hell?
Executions are by definition violent. Executions that seek to inflict gratuitous pain for the sake of inflicting pain--I would call that torture. And the Iranian execution was definitely torture.
I am very, very careful about throwing such words around. I hate it when people make casual accusations of treason and murder and fascism. Furthermore I am unfortunately immersed in torture issues because of a paper I'm writing on "extraordinary rendition". So I wouldn't throw it around lightly. But I think it applied to Volokh's post, and if the simple use of the word "torture" is what caused to falling out--I don't get it. I think you're falling for Volokh's euphemism & it's a really lousy thing to delink someone over.
In Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber (1947), Willie Francis, "a colored citizen," was sentenced to death by a Louisiana court. The attempted electrocution failed due to mechanical difficulties, and Francis petitioned to the Supreme Court, arguing that a second attempt to execute him would be unconstitutionally cruel. Justice Stanley Reed, writing for the majority, ruled against Francis. Even though he had already suffered the effects of an electrical current, that does not "make his subsequent execution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other execution. The cruelty against which the Constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty inherent in the method of punishment, not the necessary suffering involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely." The dissenting justices understood Francis's experience to be akin to "torture culminating in death," and asked, "How many deliberate and intentional reapplications of electric current does it take to produce a cruel, unusual and unconstitutional punishment?"
How does punishment, no matter how insufferable, become legal? While granting that the Eighth Amendment prohibited "the wanton infliction of pain" and admitting that Francis would now be forced again to undergo the mental anguish of preparing for death, Reed concluded by turning to the intent of the one who pulls the switch: "There is no purpose to inflict unnecessary pain nor any unnecessary pain involved in the proposed execution. The situation of the unfortunate victim of this accident is just as though he had suffered the identical amount of mental anguish and physical pain in any other occurrence, such as, for example, a fire in the cellblock."
The intent requirement of Louisiana ex rel. Francis, would become the controlling precedent for later cases that analyzed how the "cruel and unusual punishments" standard applied to the conditions of a prisoner's confinement. In Franzen v. Duckworth (1985), Judge Richard Posner, writing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, concluded that although shackled prisoners were injured during transport when their bus caught fire, there was no Eighth Amendment violation. The intent requirement was not met, since the officers had not intended "maliciously" to cause harm. "Negligence, perhaps; gross negligence . . . perhaps; but not cruel and unusual punishment." What happened was nothing more than "if the guard accidentally stepped on the prisoner's toe and broke it." Invoking Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, Posner defines "punishment" as " ‘Any infliction or pain imposed in vengeance of a crime.' " In other words, punishment is decreed by the sentencing judge and has nothing to do with what happens afterward, whether deprivations within or accidents outside a prison. Only "malicious intent," not what Justice Frankfurter called "an innocent misadventure"—he was referring to the accidental character of the failed execution in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber—could make unconstitutional what prisoners suffered after incarceration, no matter how harmful to their minds and bodies.
I'm hesitant to jump into this, as I'm supposedly on my own much-needed blogging hiatus, but this article (excerpted above) on the history of the 8th amendment - though uneven in places - is worth a read.
Ogged writes:
Yarrow, again, of course it's torture of a sort, but when we say "torture" in America, or at least in blogdom, what we mean is Abu Ghraib; Volokh's proposal was for something quite different.
The irony here, and the reason I bring up the article, is that - at least as I understand it, but I'm no legal scholar - according to the logic of the torture memos Volokh's proposal would be "cruel and unusual" because it involves the intent to inflict cruelty while the detainee abuses do not meet the same standard because the cruelty inflicted is incidental to the goal of obtaining information.
In any case the key distinction here still seems to be due process insofar as the detainees in question were detained, and then tortured - which is what I'd call it even if the administration lawyers don't - without it.
Note: this is not to say that Volokh's now-withdrawn proposal (or the support thereof) implies the approval of torture of the Abu Ghraib type. It should be clear that it doesn't. (I suppose I should also go on the record saying that I oppose both.) It is only to point out that the way we talk about torture in the wider public sphere does not seem to match up to the way the concept of "cruel and unusual punishment" is interpreted in the legal system.
(Sorry about the length of the comment; I wanted to keep the three paragraphs of the article excerpt together.)
A couple of procedural points and then really to bed (addressing the substantive points tomorrow--though short answer to IL, no, to be clear, I do have a problem with the kinds of things you're describing).
1. We're getting close to "You delinked her over a word, or over due process?" But that's a caricature. Read the post. To say that the Volokh post was precipitating factor, is not, of course, to say that it was the sole factor. And see my exchange with b up at 33 and 36.
2. Let's recognize at the outset that though I'm willing to discuss this for a good long while, I can't possibly convince everyone that I was fully justified. Some of you will still think I'm thin-skinned on tone; some of you will think I'm making a distinction without a difference on torture, etc. This is just by way of framing: at some point this will end, and some people will go away unhappy.
Just to remind everyone exactly what Volokh said he approved of:
The killer was hoisted about 10 metres into the air by a crane and slowly throttled to death in front of the baying crowd. Hanging by a crane - a common form of execution in Iran - does not involve a swift death as the condemned prisoner's neck is not broken. The killer collapsed twice during the punishment, although he remained calm and silent throughout. Spectators, held back by barbed wire and about 100 police officers, chanted "harder, harder" as judicial officials took turns to flog Bijeh's bare back before his hanging. Bijeh was stabbed by the 17-year-old brother of victim Rahim Younessi, AFP reported, as he was being readied to be hanged. Officials then invited the mother Milad Kahani to put the blue nylon rope around his neck.
And here is the Convention Against Torture's definition of the word "torture":
"For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."
Okay. Please explain to me how the Iranian execution, which Volokh said he supported, falls outside the definition. Understand--I'm not merely arguing that it's reasonable to say it fits the definition. I'm arguing that it's unreasonable to say that it doesn't. I'm saying she's right, you're wrong, and you owe her an apology.
Severe pain or suffering? Yes, I would say being flogged and stabbed and suffocated to death in a deliberately slow and painful manner qualifies.
The Convention is clear that severe pain or suffering for the purpose of "punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed" is as much torture as severe pain or suffering inflicted to extract information.
And, obviously, a state sanctioned execution is carried about by someone acting as a public official.
So what the HELL is wrong with calling it torture?
(the CAT does say that torture:
"It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."
but before anyone goes all John Yoo on me--they do NOT mean things like the Iranian execution, which is no more "incidental to lawful sanctions" than drawing and quartering. You can legalize anything as a matter of domestic law; that's not the test.
I am 100% beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt confident of this, but don't have time to give all the details.)
Hey, can y'all not comment long enough for me to close the lid on this thing?
Katherine, as I said above, there's no question that we can reasonably call what Volokh endorsed "torture." What I'm saying is that we have to 1) recognize the difference between what Volokh proposed and what happened at Abu Ghraib (and continues to happen elsewhere and 2) recognize that, absent an attempt to clarify, most Americans today when they hear that someone "approves of torture" will assume that that person approves of Abu Ghraib type torture. Given 1 and 2, it seems to me plainly unfair to say that Volokh advocates torture without making it quite clear *just* what it is that he's advocating.
And, given what I said at #90, point 1, your call for an apology seems a bit peremptory.
And seriously, stop talking about "violent" executions. There's no such thing as a nonviolent execution. The term you're looking for is "deliberately painful" or even more accurately "gratuitously painful" executions.
To put it even more simply: it's not that they're not both torture, but that, even so, they're importantly different. The definition of torture discussion is a red herring.
Can I see where everyone stands on this? Let's say we tried everyone at abu gharib, and then convicted them with a jury, and then sentenced them to torture. does that make it ok?
Tweedle: no, not by a longshot, never in hell.
That's a totally ridiculous standard. There is no moral obligation to bury your point in a sea of disclaimers. And I don't even know what you mean by "Abu Ghraib torture" unless you mean "torture for the purposes of interrogation" which doesn't seem like a moral difference to me, or "torture of the innocent" which is a moral difference but which is not one implied in the word "torture". With this rendition stuff--yeah, I get more upset too when we do it to innocent people, but torture is torture. I mean, when we call Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald both "murderers" do we have to issue a disclaimer explaining that of course Ruby's not Oswald because he didn't commit JFK-assassination-type murder, he only shot the guilty? That makes no sense.
And I only read this blog casually, but I'm certain that you do NOT bury your own writing in disclaimers this way. And I'm glad you don;t.
Well, I doubt I'll convince you, but that is how this looks to one casual reader who spends lots of time immersed in the legal definition of torture.
I don't know what other people think. And I too need to go to bed.
But my problem, and since it's me we're talking about I'd like this to not keep getting blown past, is not that you took bitch off the blogroll. I don't care one way or the other about that, I never did, and if you had done it silently or simply said that you were doing it because you were offended or whatever, that would have been fine and I would have been among the first to defend your right to do so.
I don't even have so much of a problem with being told that I comment too much, or in the wrong way, or that you've gotten emails from people saying they hate my guts and no longer comment because of my presence, so would I mind commenting less or not at all, please, thank you. Sure, my feelings would be hurt, but I'm an adult, and I could deal with that.
My problem is that the way it was done, and the ensuing discussions both private and public, and even the initial response to me in this one, all read, to me, as incredibly hostile. And I did not think then, and I do not think now, that I deserved that hostility. My offense over the Volokh thing was, as you yourself admit upthread is probably the case, entirely unintentional, and I would have appreciated being given the benefit of the doubt.
I would also appreciate being given credit for the fact that, knowing you wanted me gone, I went quietly, and I, for my part, did not try to foster fights on your blog or point to you in any way in a public forum. Yes, I did complain to a few people in private, if they asked me about it, but I did my best in every case to say that I did not know, to summarize facts accurately, and to label my complaints as mine. In other words, to be as fair to you as I could be. More fair than I think you were to me.
In other words, I guess, I resent the ongoing implication that I behaved in bad faith, when I have bent over backwards to do the opposite. If my rhetoric goes overboard, I think the record shows that I will correct it. If I offend personally, I will try to make amends. You know this, or you should. And I can understand being angry at the time, but since time has passed, I, for one, would like to either bury the hatchet or, at least, part on amicable terms.
If only for the sake of the children.
"it's not that they're not both torture, but that, even so, they're importantly different. The definition of torture discussion is a red herring."
Oh for fuck's sake. You're the one who said, in this very post, that her post was "so far over the line of intellectual dishonesty" mainly because of
"the complete unargued conflation of Volokh's approval of violent execution with approval of torture. (I think any potential argument that violent execution amounts to torture is completely specious here: given what's been going on in the world, we all know, or should know, exactly what will be understood when we accuse someone of being for torture.) "
So look, you were insufficiently opposed to, maybe even supported, torture briefly. It happens. With this rendition stuff--there's a guy in Syria right now being held in a grave sized cell and probably beaten from time to time. His name is Muhammad Haydar Zammar. The U.S. sent him to Syria from Morocco on a private jet staffed by CIA agents.
Awful, right? But here's the thing: this is probably the guy who recruited Muhammad Atta into Al Qaeda in Hamburg. And I had a good friend evacuated from his apartment in Lower Manhattan for weeks because of the smell of burning bodies. So when I heard about Zammar, yeah, I had a brief flash of "he deserves it". Which you had about a serial killer and child molester. It's a pretty common human response, and if it stays a fleeting thought--it's not all that shameful. But in that fleeting moment you think "good, he deserves it", you are supporting torture, and it's neither dishonest nor unfair for someone to say so. It shouldn't be the source of a permanent falling out--especially when they didn't accuse you personally of supporting torture.
Ogged: since you've made it clear that you seem to have a problem with torture per se, but support (supported?) the Volokh-style execution-by-torture, I'm assuming you believe that due process mitigates this problem somehow.
On a practical level, of course, any system of normalized torture is going to torture innocent people, due process or not (a point which Volokh both allowed for and dismissed as uncompelling in his original post). But even if we had a flawless system which only tortured Bad Guys, is this acceptable? Do you accept that the state has the power and the right to inflict massive pain on individuals simply because it wants to?
Anyway, I'll wait 'til tomorrow for you to explain/finish this.
I am so not wading into this dispute, but as to the last sentence in the post: did you just accuse me of being twelve years old?
So here I am, in theory working but instead blog-commenting. In my first post on this thread I said the following:
wouldn't have occurred to me that there was a strong, obvious moral distinction between torture-for-information and execution-by-torture making it clearly wrong to lump the two together, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that anyone could reasonably have objected to angrily-expressed horror and disgust at Volokh's post. (I can imagine not sharing that horror and disgust -- I just can't see perceiving any expressed level of horror and disgust as over the line.) I don't mean by this to say that I have a thought-out position on why either of those things are wrong, just that not a glimmer of either idea had ever entered my mind.
After a good night's sleep, I do have a thought-out position. Ogged --- in many ways you're a lovely person, and I enjoy the blog lots, and I mean this only to apply to your positions in this regard rather than to your personal identity in any deeper sense --- you have completely lost your mind.
(This is limited to your reaction to Dr. B on Volokh. The earlier problems you perceived with her commenting I'm not addressing here.)
(1) This:
First and biggest problem with her post: the complete unargued conflation of Volokh's approval of violent execution with approval of torture.
is insane. Killing someone in a deliberately painful and extended manner is torture. It's not a borderline case -- that's what torture is. Yarrow above linked a dictionary definition that included infliction of pain for the purpose of punishment as torture, and I have never before this moment seen a usage of the word that would allow someone to say "No, that wasn't torture -- he was found guilty before he was flogged." Volokh unambigously as a matter of normal English usage advocated execution by torture for particularly heinous criminals. B's characterization of his post as advocating torture was perfectly accurate, and your describing it as dishonest in that regard is simply lunatic.
You see a moral difference between torture-for-information and torture-as-judicial-punishment, and you're free to, but the difference you see is properly described as a difference between two categories of torture, not between torture and not-torture. You simply cannot reasonably call someone dishonest for failing to adopt a private, narrowly defined usage of a word ('torture' is only torture-for-information) when there has been no prior conversation explicitly limiting the usage of the term.
(2) The particular offense in B's post against you is that B linked to your post in a way that categorized you as someone who approved, or at least didn't strongly disapprove, of Volokh's position; a position, I note, which remained unchanged after his 'recantation'. He still thinks execution by torture is a good idea, just that it's politically unworkable. (I'm not going to get into the details of her wording; I don't think her wording was such that it can be usefully be parsed with much more precision than I gave.)
Here, the question is what do you think of Volokh's advocacy of execution-by-torture? If you don't think Volokh was beyond the pale, which you don't seem to, how has B mischaracterized or insulted you? If you do think his remarks were disgusting and reprehensible, I think B was perfectly correct that you haven't made that clear. You can't have it both ways -- she can't both be unfairly hostile to Volokh, and unfair to you by implying that you don't recognize how bad Volokh is.
To continue:
Just to make it clear where I stand on Volokh, and on what I believe to be your position on execution by torture.
Volokh is, in this regard, loathsome and disgusting. I am astonished that anyone decent still links to him after that post -- I can see no proper response to it other than public shaming. I can see no reason to converse with someone (in the absence of strong and immediate personal emotion) who believes that it is a positively good thing to systematically inflict pain and bodily damage, ending in death, on another human being. If a friend expressed an opinion like Volokh's and did not swiftly recant, that friendship would be at an end.
As I understand your original position, which you've sort of backed off of, it's deeply, deeply mistaken, but not loathsome like Volokh's. What I understood you to be saying is that: (A) Our culture has a seriously messed up relationship with violence and death, that leads us to seek out violence as if it were a good thing (as demonstrated by movies, video games, unthinking militarism); (B) Possibly torturing heinous criminals to death would satisfy this need for violence, allowing our society to be saner about violence in other regards. When I, among many others, pointed out that many societies had tortured all sorts of criminals to death, and it had never the good effects you thought might come of it, your response was, as I understood it, something along the lines of "Perhaps they weren't doing it right -- with a good enough understanding of psychology we might be able to constitute a society that would get the benefits I hope for from torturing criminals to death." To which the only reasonable response I can think of is that, in the words of a very wise woman, with that good enough understanding of psychology we might be able also to provide ponies for everyone. Your premises (that torture would have the anticipated good effects) are without any basis I can see in fact, but if they were true, they would provide at least a respectable, if not compelling, argument for execution by torture. Volokh made no such argument -- he just thinks the torture is desirable in itself.
It seems possible that you are both defending Volokh more actively than you might otherwise, and taking attacks on Volokh more personally than you should, because you have attributed your own position to him, and feel that an attack on him is an attack on you. I wouldn't -- he has been pretty clear that for some categories of criminal, he actively wants to see them bleeding and suffering, gradually hurt more and more badly until they finally are injured severely enough that they can no longer survive, he believes that that suffering is in itself good and desirable. You, for some reason, appear to think that a possible route to a more humane society is doing the same, and you are willing to consider inflicting that suffering in the interests of achieving such a more humane society. He is a disgusting object; you (to the extent you still hold this position) are merely bizarrely mistaken, and you shouldn't take anyone's opinion of his entire loathsomeness as a reflection on you.
I'm not commenting on the ogged/Dr. B dispute (I haven't read all the comments above), but I do dispute L-Breath's claim (in 103) that 'torture' is a morally neutral term. When I consult the Black Box in which my native-english-speaking competence resides I get this different result: to call x 'torture' is to characterize x as pro tanto wrong.
When someone claims that torturing for information is right (or permissible), they're claiming that the value of the information (or some other aspect of the situation) outweighs the pro tanto wrongness of the torture. And the burden of proof is always on the shoulders of the person who makes that claim, as the person will concede (if they understand what they're saying).
But someone who claims that violent execution is right is not thinking of the violence as pro tanto wrong. In that context, they think, violence that would be pro tanto wrong in another context (even if that pro tanto wrongness is overridden by other considerations) is simply fitting and right.
If we think of the violence in the way this second person is thinking of it, we don't need other considerations to outweigh its pro tanto wrongness -- since it isn't even pro tanto wrong. But if we think of the violence the way the torturer-for-information is thinking of it, we do need outweighing considerations.
I think this is the key difference between the cases. It may be the difference that ogged had in mind, but of course I don't know.
It sounds like the comments about a break being inevitable at some point hit on the rub of the thing. If it wasn't that Volokh post, it would have been something else.
Communism was just a red herring.
But (and I know I'm not the most longtime commenter here or anything) it was definitely uncomfortable the way it all played out, and after volumes of explanation by both parties, I still tend to side with B when she says she felt publicly punished when a private split would have been much more appropriate. Sure, some folks would have said, every so often, "Where's Bitch these days?" but those questions can always be answered in private correspondence if necessary. I suppose Ogged is happier now that she's out (this thread excepted, I guess), but his method still feels petty, and it still surprises me that he chose that route, given the high regard in which I hold him.
I guess all this is to say that the events in question obviously caused a lot of bad feelings all the way around, most of which could have been avoided if Ogged had used a little more discretion in expressing his wishes to B.
Ogged, I accept all your claims at face value, but I also don't see why, if you care as much about the community as you say you do, you wouldn't value the harmony of the group over the temporary satisfaction you may have gotten from a loud divorce announcement. What harm would it have done if you and Bitch quietly agreed not to interact anymore, she refrained from commenting here, and you left her on the blogroll for the sake of not raising questions? Yes, yes, I understand the integrity of the blogroll, and how it implies an endorsement of the blogs in question, but surely an exception here would have given you the opportunity to sidestep the whole kerfuffle, at least the public kerfuffle.
Anyway, what's done is done, I guess. But I do hope things get patched up eventually between you two. If only because I'm of the type who wants all the people I like to be friends and hold hands.
I'm not commenting on the ogged/Dr. B dispute (I haven't read all the comments above), but I do dispute L-Breath's claim (in 103) that 'torture' is a morally neutral term.
I don't believe that I made the "morally neutral" claim -- at least, I don't quite understand what you mean by it. Beyond that, I guess we just have different idiolects: while I believe that all acts that are properly characterized as torture are wrong, I don't think that that wrongness is necessary for them to qualify as torture. If Volokh were right that torturing criminals to death were a good thing, it would still be properly characterized as torture, in the dialect of English I speak, and that the dictionaries I've consulted report. (And as Katherine said above, "violent execution" isn't a useful euphemism here -- whether a death is violent or non-violent, e.g. firing squad vs. lethal injection, has little or nothing to do with whether it incorporates the deliberate infliction of horrific suffering. How's "deliberately-painful execution" instead?)
Communism was just a red herring.
"I was going to expose you!"
"I know, so I choose to expose myself."
"Please, there are ladies present!"
Sobchak, I think we're the only ones here who fancy ourselves as clever for quoting films like we do.
It's sad, really.
Just to distill all this mess down a little bit, I think that what Ogged is saying is that Bitch PhD wasn't booted over trivia, but over a substantive difference of opinion.
Ogged doesn't like torturing someone without due process, but flogging and strangling them slowly to cause maximum agony during a state-sanctioned execution is OK.
Bitch PhD thinks that is heinous, and is ready to supply scathing excoriations of people who support that sort of thing on her weblog.
Am I missing something? Because the first opinion seems literally barbaric to me, while the second is only sane and civilized. And complaining that the second opinion was too harsh and hurt people's feelings is just nuts. When you're talking about ending people's lives with deliberate pain, it's silly to demand manners.
And keeping Instapundit because he's an "icon" while taking an axe to Bitch Phd...that is simply bizarrely inconsistent.
But if Jesus had a blog, I'd have to keep him on my blogroll. Not because I'm a Christian (I'm not), but because, good God man, it's Jesus!
By attributing to L-Breath the claim that 'torture' is a morally neutral term, I meant merely that he denies that 'x is torture' entails 'x is pro tanto wrong.' (Sorry for all the 'pro tanto' talk. I don't know how else to put it aside from the ungainly 'to-that-extent-wrong.')
I put my point in terms of linguistic intuitions, and L-Breath claims to speak a different idiolect. Okay. But I could also put the point like this: Volokh's basis for thinking the deliberate infliction of pain appropriate was not at all similar to the oft claimed basis for thinking torture-for-information appropriate. Given my idiolect, I'd express that difference by saying that deliberately painful execution -- as Volokh was imagining it -- is not torture. But how we express the point doesn't matter.
What matters is that Volokh wasn't thinking of his case in a way at all similar to the way those who would justify torture think of their cases. So it really isn't fair -- I agree with ogged here -- to claim that he was attempting to justify torture.
I say this while (a) believing that Volokh was dead wrong to try to justify deliberately painful executions in the way he did (and not merely for the reason that led him to change his mind) and (b) refusing to take sides in the ogged/Dr. B dispute. Yes, I agree with ogged that it's not fair to claim that Volokh was attempting to justify torture. But I don't have any views about whether Dr. B was actually making that claim. For all I know (or care), she wasn't.
I could also put the point like this: Volokh's basis for thinking the deliberate infliction of pain appropriate was not at all similar to the oft claimed basis for thinking torture-for-information appropriate. Given my idiolect, I'd express that difference by saying that deliberately painful execution -- as Volokh was imagining it -- is not torture. But how we express the point doesn't matter.
Precisely. Thank you, Ted H. I went to bed hoping that I'd wake up and someone would have made the point more clearly than I'd managed.
So what you are saying is that if someone is going to criticize you in a serious manner, they have to work off the same dictionary as you? That makes debate a rather difficult prosposition.
This post is why blog discussions ultimately don't go anywhere, BTW: people will accept the weakest, thinnest, most inconsistent rationalization possible for their initial position rather than admit they were wrong. And there is always SOMEONE who will supply that rationalization, and when they do, you can simply thank them and ignore the other arguments--you never need to deliberately address them.
LB, the way you characterize my position in 104 isn't quite right. Let me put it as pithily as I can manage: If a) you watch the Nick Berg beheading video, then b) Kill Bill isn't funny anymore. I think (b) is a great good thing. The problem with our relationship to violence is that it's abstract and intellectual. I was thinking something like: if we're going to execute the fuckers anyway, let's get some social utility out of it and remind people how disturbing killing actually is. (I've since been convinced that that's a bad idea. But I feel absolutely no shame about proposing it, which brings me to...)
You've reminded me about something else that annoyed me so much during the Volokh discussion, and which is cropping up again here, namely the simple smug self-assurance with which my liberal friends use conventional morality as a bludgeon. I'll say again, as I think I said in the original thread, that if you just believe "violence/sadism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is bad, therefore we have to stamp it out," then it's possible (how possible, I don't know) that you're in fact doing your world a net disservice, and that shouting down someone who tries to think about ways to rearrange our fucked up relationship to violence doesn't make you the better person.
But I could also put the point like this: Volokh's basis for thinking the deliberate infliction of pain appropriate was not at all similar to the oft claimed basis for thinking torture-for-information appropriate. Given my idiolect, I'd express that difference by saying that deliberately painful execution -- as Volokh was imagining it -- is not torture. But how we express the point doesn't matter.
In the context of the ogged/B dispute, it does. While I can accept the existence of your, and apparently ogged's, idiolect, dictionaries suggest that it is non-standard, and that it is more conventional to include infliction-of-pain-as-punishment as a subset of torture. Ogged's position was that B's use of the word "torture" to describe infliction-of-pain-as-punishment was offensively dishonest. This position is, I think, indefensible: he can say that there is an important distinction between the two cases, and that for that reason he wishes to limit the use of the word 'torture' to 'torture' for information; he can say that he wouldn't have thought of infliction-of-pain-as-punishment as falling into the category 'torture'; I do not think that he can respectably call her usage of an English word in a commonly used sense, supported by the understanding of many of her readers and by all references I've consulted, offensively dishonest because it does not accord with his private sense of how the word should be used.
But I could also put the point like this: Volokh's basis for thinking the deliberate infliction of pain appropriate was not at all similar to the oft claimed basis for thinking torture-for-information appropriate.
On this point, I think you and ogged may be oversimplifying a little in saying that the two situations have nothing to do with each other. The Abu Gharib torture wasn't truly torture-for-information -- it was largely torture-for-kicks based on the sense by the torturers that the victims were, as terrorists or insurgents, fair game. Volokh's position seems to be that there is a category of people -- convicted heinous criminals -- who are, in fact, fair game for torture-for-emotional-satisfaction. The distinction between Volokh and the Abu Gharib torturers seems to me to be limited to his claim to have selected his category of victims more carefully and defensibly than they did.
Katherine, I have a lot of respect for what you've written on torture, and find your comments generally to be incisive, so can you tell me what you take Ted H. and I to be saying?
LB, I'm not appealing to private sense of the word; quite the contrary, I'm saying that the current (emphasis on that current!) common sense of the word invokes torture-for-information, not torture broadly construed. Therefore, given that there are (I believe) clear (and moral) differences between the two, saying that someone supports "torture" without further clarification, is, in the current climate, unfair.
"So it really isn't fair -- I agree with ogged here -- to claim that he was attempting to justify torture."
Was the Iranian execution torture? Yes. Everyone has all but conceded that it was. Was he justifying it? Yes; no one has ever tried to argue otherwise. Were the circumstances and purpose for this torture different from the circumstances and purpose for the torture at Abu Ghraib? Yes. Do those different circumstances and purposes mean that this is not torture? No; they do not go to the definition of the word. They make it a different sort of torture--they don't make it not torture.
Is it unfair to call it torture? There are murderers who shoot their victims relatively painlessly when a robbery goes wrong, and murderers who rape and torture their victims to death. There are people who kill their spouses as revenge for years of brutal abuse, and people who kill their spouses when they find out they're committing adultery, and people who kill their spouses for the insurance money & inheritance. Some of these murders, some of these killings, are morally worse than others. But it's not wrong or unfair to call a murderer a murderer because he's not Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not wrong to call what's going on in Darfur a genocide because it's not quite as awful as Rwanda--not yet anyway. In 1994, it wasn't wrong to call what was going on in Rwanda a genocide because it wasn't quite on the same scale as the Holocaust. It's not wrong to call Abu Ghraib torture just because Saddam Hussein and Islam Karimov torture people in even more imaginatively brutal ways.
Fuck this. I see enough fucking rationalization for torture the rest of the time. I don't fucking need it on a lighthearted liberal weblog like this too. It's not worth it.
Ugh. What a mess.
LB-- might you not acknowledge though, that at least recently in the blogosphere, 'torture' has generally been indicative of torture for information or ticking time-bomb scenarios, and not cruel and unusual punishment?
To me, it least, it doesn't seem that this is a distinction limited to ogged and Volokh, but something most of the blogosphere could accept and has accepted in practice, lately. And if we accept that, it does seem like a rhetorical (although probably not intellectually dishonest and probably harmless) conflation.
Fuck this. I see enough fucking rationalization for torture the rest of the time. I don't fucking need it on a lighthearted liberal weblog like this too. It's not worth it.
Does anyone else see that this proves my point? The way the discussion was framed by b, my and Volokh's position is cast as "support for torture," indistinguishable from the position of apologists for Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, etc.
Ogged:
If a) you watch the Nick Berg beheading video, then b) Kill Bill isn't funny anymore. I think (b) is a great good thing.
That's pretty much what I understood you to say. I also think that it is, in a world where people brought their children with picnics to watch hangings at Tyburn Hill, inarguably false that (a) leads to (b). Thousands of years of experience teaches us that exposure to violence and brutality doesn't disgust, it desensitizes -- torture becomes entertainment.
You and I have the luxury of being shocked and repelled by the Nick Berg video precisely because, as modern Americans, we have been sheltered from such things for our entire lives. I will not willingly return to a society where I must accept such things as a societally-approved category of amusement. (I don't think you want this either -- I just think you're entirely mistaken in your factual beliefs in this regard.)
Yes, LB at 123, I think I've more or less come around to that view.
Now, about questions upthread about whether "jury + Abu Ghraib = Abu Ghraib ok."
Short answer: not at all.
The second part of my quick answer to the difference between Abu Ghraib and Volokh's proposal was "no established norms." If we were to adopt barbaric executions (Katherine's point that "violent execution" is a terrible euphemism is a good one), presumably we wouldn't do so by turning a bunch of barely-adult soldiers loose on inmates in the dead of night. It's creepy to think about, but, there are, and have always been in human societies, very clear rules about how executions are to be carried out, and this case would be no different. There would be, if the policy were adopted, some sort of consensus about what was and wasn't permissible. The public debate and consensus is another very important disctinction between Abu Ghraib and Volokh's proposal.
Ok, have to eat breakfast, back later...
LB, I'm not appealing to private sense of the word; quite the contrary, I'm saying that the current (emphasis on that current!) common sense of the word invokes torture-for-information, not torture broadly construed.
Ogged, no, I can't accept that. The recent discussion of torture-for-information did not create a new "common sense of the word" 'torture'. (And, as I said above, I would note that the actual torture that invited that discussion was largely not torture-for-information, but torture-for-kicks -- much closer to what Volokh was talking about than you have acknowledged.) You could rationally have responded to B by saying something along the lines of "Don't confuse the torture Volokh is advocating with torture-for-information; while I agree with you that torture-for-information is unacceptable, I think there are valid points to be made in favor of torture-as-punishment, and in fact I wouldn't even describe the latter as torture." Calling her dishonest for using an English word in a conventional sense, simply because there had been an earlier discussion using it in a slightly different sense, is indefensible.
Does anyone else see that this proves my point? The way the discussion was framed by b, my and Volokh's position is cast as "support for torture," indistinguishable from the position of apologists for Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, etc.
You've been cut a great deal of slack on this issue, by people, including me, who are pretty sure you aren't a bad guy and that therefore if you're saying that torturing people to death may be a good idea that you have some morally defensible argument for it. You must understand that for many, perhaps most, people who oppose torture the whole problem is the intentionally causing another human being grave suffering and injury bit. We don't give a damn about why you want to do it. The moral problems with the two things you see as so distinct are exactly the same.
I'll listen to you, and engage with you, about your views in this regard because of my generally high opinion of you, and because they seem to be based on factual error rather than on moral blindness. Nonetheless, in my eyes, once you are advocating the torture of any person for any reason, it is entirely legitimate for people to react with horror and disgust to that advocacy. If you want to make a case that it's justified in the face of that horror and disgust, go ahead and make it, but I think you are unreasonable to expect politeness and respect for the fine moral distinctions you see between different reasons to torture.
Sobchak, I think we're the only ones here who fancy ourselves as clever for quoting films like we do.
I wouldn't say clever... more like it's just fun to quote movies with someone who has a pro tanto similar sense of humor. Ipso facto.
#122. Actually I think this proves my point; it seems to me that Katherine's position on the subject is not only independent of mine, but better informed. She is expressing impatience with your insistence that calm semantics--it is wrong to call X torture because torture implies judgment (how is this substantively different than what Gonzales did in his hearings?) are more important than the material facts, which are that if you are the one being beaten, a beating is a beating.
I also see that my #99 (and Katherine's #115) are being ignored. Which is a lot like our email correspondence, actually, and reads to me as the same thing: the rules are we must discuss semantics, and that trying to talk about the motivations or implications of the semantic distinction is off the table.
I do still think that this is a feminist issue. Because the distinction between the bodily and the abstract is feminist (which is one reason I got so angry at Volokh), and because the Volokh incident has now taken over notwithstanding your admission that there was a larger context (in earlier posts you referenced the debate over Drum, for instance, and the email exchange we've both excerpted here also makes the feminist case).
But more importantly because #122 suggests to me that when a woman gets impatient, that the argument immediately becomes about her impatience, rather than to the substance of what she's saying; because your ignoring #99 seems to me to show that when a woman expresses distress, she is ignored (this also happened more than once in our email correspondence); and b/c when Alameida expressed her thoughts on the situation, she was immediately rebuked. Everything seems fine as long as women have no emotional register other than joking and flirting. When they actually want to be listened to, and get upset when they are not acknowledged; or when they want to define the terms of the debate, and resist having those terms changed, then suddenly that's out of bounds.
That's how it reads to me.
the distinction between the bodily and the abstract is feminist By which I mean, of course, that calling attention to it and problematizing it and arguing that the body is more important than abstractions about it is feminist.
What I haven't gotten to yet is not being ignored. I did in fact respond to Katherine by asking her to explain what she thought Ted H. and I were saying. I'm getting to your 99...
Ok, good. But Katherine's point was that you weren't responding to what other people were saying, and your response was to ask her to clarify, which is a continued non-response response. And in #122, to say "this proves my point" rather than addressing her very cogent and reasoned argument--an argument that a lot of people here understand--that the distinction you are drawing is so purely semantic as to be somewhat meaningless.
OK, let me try to be serious for a second, because Ogged said something that precisely corresponds to my view on the matter:
You've reminded me about something else that annoyed me so much during the Volokh discussion, and which is cropping up again here, namely the simple smug self-assurance with which my liberal friends use conventional morality as a bludgeon.
It's very easy to say something like "torture is wrong" and "killing is wrong" and so forth, because we all learn those things by fifth grade. Not to suggest that all positions against torture and killing are simplistic or childish, but they are very rhetorically "safe" positions; in other words, no one who opposes the death penalty, or torture, or, say, chemical testing on fluffy bunnies, is really taking any particular rhetorical risk by doing so, because they are by default taking the moral high ground; virtually all civilized human beings consider those things "wrong" in the sense of "in a perfect world, none of that would happen."
What I think Ogged is saying, and in either case what I know to be my perception, is that often those positions are staked out by people who then proceed to "react with horror and disgust" toward anyone who takes what they consider to be a less-enlightened position. In moments of sharp conflict, these people wrap themselves in a cocoon of moral superiority, impatient dismissiveness, and what comes off to me as affected (or at least greatly exaggerated) righteous indignation; such a reaction often appears to gloss over the more unpleasant aspects of reality, apparently due either to willful ignorance or naivete.
Having refreshed since I started this, I'll also add in response to B's #128 that this, in my view, has absolutely nothing to do with whether the person in question is male or female; rather, it has everything to do with the establishment by that person of a seemingly arbitrary binary condition of acceptability / non-acceptability on the basis of a rather conventional, as Ogged put it, and somewhat sterilized version of universal morality.
I also want to be clear that this should not be construed as agreement with Ogged's position on torture vs gratuitously-painful execution, but merely as my own interpretation of Ogged's explanation for why he reacted the way he did. To be honest, I'm really not at all sure I understand Ogged's distinction either, or at least the substance he attributes to it; I just understand why he may have gotten fed up with being on the receiving end of the attitude I described above.
Some of us take semantics very seriously.
But more importantly because #122 suggests to me that when a woman gets impatient, that the argument immediately becomes about her impatience, rather than to the substance of what she's saying; because your ignoring #99 seems to me to show that when a woman expresses distress, she is ignored (this also happened more than once in our email correspondence); and b/c when Alameida expressed her thoughts on the situation, she was immediately rebuked. Everything seems fine as long as women have no emotional register other than joking and flirting. When they actually want to be listened to, and get upset when they are not acknowledged; or when they want to define the terms of the debate, and resist having those terms changed, then suddenly that's out of bounds.
That's how it reads to me.
The only possible response to this is: fuck you, again. I'm trying to respond to a dozen people who are all angry and missing a pretty basic point (which Ted and Cala seem to understand); Katherine has been the most "impatient," most accusatory commenter here, and I've responded by telling her that I respect her and would like her to further explain her position and you cite this as evidence of my hostility to feminism? Seriously, go away, don't come back. Any other comments you leave here will be deleted without being read.
You of all people, w-lfs-n? I'm sobbing.
i don't know why i'm doing this, i guess i'm a hopeless optomist.
Torture - I don't think of a state-sponsered action that is supported by the people, do you? But what Volokh was suggesting seems like it would have had to have met with the support of the people.
So, clandestine and oversaw by shadowy agencies vs. supported by the people.
The other thing about Volokh's proposition is that it is more or less in keeping with the 2 reasons the Supreme Court has decided to allow capital punishment. Deterrence and punishment.
Torture, as we tend to think of it, cannot be defended so.
So, all this childish "torture is torture" is silly. Ignoring the real differences to make one's own argument easier.
Torture - I don't think of a state-sponsered action that is supported by the people, do you?
The only way I can see that you arrive at this is with the specious argument that "for utilitarian purposes" is, since Abu Ghraib, part of the generally accepted definition of the word torture. And there's no reason convicts might not have their fingernails ripped off, either as retribution for their past crimes or to deter future would-be criminals.
I can't make out whatever you just tried to say.
The recent discussion of torture-for-information did not create a new "common sense of the word" 'torture'.
I think this is a basic fact that we just disagree about. If I were to put it as a question, I'd ask, what do you think people will think is being approved of, if they're told that so-and-so approves of torture?
We don't give a damn about why you want to do it. The moral problems with the two things you see as so distinct are exactly the same.
I don't think that's quite right. They partake of the same moral problem, namely, causing another human suffering and injury, but there are clear and significant differences between them. Are you saying that the similarity swamps any distinction we could make between them?
Throughout this thread, Ogged has been engaging LizardB, who is a woman. And she is being directly confrontational with him (is, in fact, usually a bit confrontational here), not joking or flirting.
By turning this into him being anti-feminist, you seem to be supporting his exact point, that you engage in unfair rhetorical methods.
This is even more evident to me, since I would otherwise be sympathetic to your side of the semantic dispute. The fact that you're turning this around into a feminism issue makes him seem more credible on the other point.
(And B, I like you, I read you all the time, I'm glad you commented on my site the other day, and I found your expression of hurt here very articulate and moving. I found you a little aggressive in the initial interaction I had with you, but it's probably only some internal worry on my part about being insufficiently militant. Just to explain where I'm coming from.)
I appreciate that very much, ac. Thanks.
(But since b can't comment here anymore, don't expect a response....)
"the distinction between the bodily and the abstract is feminist"
This seems to ascribe a very broad swatch of philosphy, jurisprudence, and biology to feminism - is this the part of the mainstream feminist view of what "feminism" encompasses? Or put another way, what field of study that considers human behavior isn't feminist under this definition?
Yes, realized that, sort of, and still felt I should address it to her, since I don't want to feel sneaky or indirect about it.
Too bad, ac, that we won't be able to read B's response to your comment. Really, ogged, don't you think automatic deletion is a touch excessive?
Michael, I was just saying that this:
So, clandestine and oversaw by shadowy agencies vs. supported by the people.
is a completely arbitrary and ad hoc distinction, supported neither by the definition of 'torture' nor conventional usage. Public torture, 'supported by the people', is both perfectly conceivable and a usage well within the confines of ordinary language.
B referenced a current blogosphere nine-days-wonder, which she came to late, and therefore with an expectation that most of her readers would already be familiar with it, by describing it accurately in English (as being about 'torture') and linking to Volokh's post. If you think that any reasonable reader would be deceived by that into thinking he had advocated 'torture for information', you're nuts; your position that it is dishonest for her to have used the word torture in that context is likewise nuts. (To even begin to consider her post dishonest, you have to start from the assumption that execution-by-torture is self-evidently a much less bad thing than torture-for-information, and so that accidentally creating an association between the two is an offense against the advocate of execution-by-torture. I understand that you think so -- you seem to have a very, very, very hard time understanding that I, and B, and Katherine, and lots of other people, do not see the moral distinction between the two as self-evident, and find the fact that you do surprising. You seem to be calling B dishonest, in part, for not sharing your moral intuition in this regard -- I would call that a point of disagreement, but I think it is inexcusable for you to call her dishonest on that basis.)
They partake of the same moral problem, namely, causing another human suffering and injury, but there are clear and significant differences between them. Are you saying that the similarity swamps any distinction we could make between them?
For me, it does. I recognize the possiblity of a moral distinction, and don't judge you harshly for having attempted to draw such a moral distinction. When you made that attempt, however, you didn't convince anyone, and ended up to some degree unconvincing yourself. You seem to be demanding that B draw a sharp moral distinction between the two cases or be judged intellectually dishonest -- I haven't seen any convincing support from you for the proposition that the moral distinction should be drawn (that is, that the societal norms/due process factors you identify are morally important in this regard). Calling her intellectually dishonest for not spontaneously drawing a moral distinction that is not apparent to many people who are approaching this argument in good faith, and that you couldn't convince anyone was valid after extensive argument, is crap.
Throughout this thread, Ogged has been engaging LizardB, who is a woman. And she is being directly confrontational with him (is, in fact, usually a bit confrontational here), not joking or flirting.
By turning this into him being anti-feminist, you seem to be supporting his exact point, that you engage in unfair rhetorical methods.
And ac, I don't think this stands up at all. Because ogged is willing to engage with one woman does not mean that his treatment of another is not mediated by her gender. If my commenting on this blog is going to be interpreted as evidence that the men around here can deal with reasonable women, just not the irrational types like B, I'm out of here.
Ah. Katherine and LB covered this very nicely in almost every sense of the word (why the fuck does this shit always start on Saturday?). Oh, well! Here goes!
Torture: I have no idea when this word suddenly achieved single definition status. Torture involves hurting people severely. Torqemada tortured people to save their souls. He still tortured them.
Killing someone because of crime is a killing. When a little old lady blows away someone who tried to rob her store, it's still a killing. When a soldier shoots another soldier, it's still a killing. When I kill an animal because it suffering, it is still a killing. When I eat a chicken, that's because the chicken was killed. Since I am eating it, I may as well have done it.
Likewise. When I intentionally inflict severe pain on someone it is torture. I can do it to get information. I can do it because I think they deserve it. I can do it because I get my kicks from it. (I don't, BTW.)
I disagree with El Bitcho Profesor that killing is worse than torture. I think torture is worse than killing. Because everybody dies, but the suffering is optional. When they execute someone it isn't to make them suffer. If they suffer that's incidental. The point of execution (or life in prison without parole) is to deepsix someone who is so bad, you never want to deal with again. Put them out of comission. Eliminate them from society. That is a useful (albeit unpleasant) purpose.
The BTK killer tied his victims up, sometimes raped them, and then strangled them slowly with venetian blind cords. I would not expect to 'reform' him. I would want him removed. I would not torture him, because it is entirely gratuitous. That would make ME like HIM. Killing for kicks.
This stuff about teaching people about violence: I can kill, gut, skin, slice into tasty steaks and then eat a cow. Under no circumstances am I going to tie the cow up, sodomize the cow with glow sticks, whack off its limbs one at a time, skin it while it was still living, and then pump 10,000 volts through it (dry) so that the cow is conscious while it effectively burns (slowly) alive. From the inside out. There is no point to it.
If I did this while small children watched, there would STILL be no point to it, unless I wanted to teach some kids that I was absolutely bugfuck. 'Hey, kids! This is violence! Isn't it fun? There's going to be a test so keep good notes!'
Similarly, with the child killer and the village: 'It's ok if inflict severe pain on a helpless person....if we do it together.' Great. You have all the same desires as the guy you're waxing, but you're too chickenshit to do it by your lonesome. You need a crowd. Lovely.
*I* am fairly inured to violence. I know a lot about it. I am good at it. I am a fucking expert of fucking violence. I suffer not from emotional, psychological or physical queasiness from say, seeing that guy beheaded on the video. I don't LIKE IT. It seriously pisses me off that they did that. But it induces no fainting spells. I was neither shocked nor surprised.
I'm not going to do that because it's wrong. (And in fact, I am going to avoid violence for the most part, thank you.) Beheading a civvie because you're in the middle of a war makes me _morally_ queasy. And if the Chinese occupied us tomorrow, I'd be one of the guys doing his best to kill every last Chinese soldier he could get his hands on. I would feel exactly the same way as the insurgents attacking American soldiers feel. (Hint: that is the reason I would not invade a country unless it were utterly neccessary. Just for exactly that reason. They live there and I don't.)
Beheading civilians is still wrong, and I wouldn't do it.
Neccessity defines the perimetre of what violence I will tolerate. I am against the death penalty as well, and not because of queasiness. If you kick in my door, and charge in with a big knife I will have no compunction about blowing you away. (Legal here!) But I will still have performed a killing and that will be on my hands, or on my head. But generally, beaureaucrats are good at killing people, not so good at limiting it to the guilty.
As for Volohk, I frequently agree with him about lots of stuff. And I read all his stuff about torture. And having read the treaties and read his arguments about the legality of torture (months and months of that), I would be really hard pressed to conclude that he was actually against torture, so much as making an argument of convenience. (Torture is bad...but legal!) For the simple reason that everything he said was legal was clearly spelled out in about as plain a language as possible about torture being flatly prohibited.
So I was not shocked that Volohk then came out and said what he said. (Previous to his original post: Q:'What do you think Eugene Volohk's stance about the pre-execution torture of serious criminals would?' 'Well, gee, he'd be in favor it. He likes it lots of other ways.') I am not shocked that he holds that opinion. I think he is not being truthful that he changed his mind about wartime torture. I wish he were. Some people are and that is straightforward. I could vehemently disagree with them (and have!) and not hate them. Although I am pretty sure I would not like them.
There is no 'knee-jerkness' here. There is merely vehement opposition.
Hideous meandering, but oh, well.
ash
['I hate these tiny little textboxes.']
Stepping in where I'm not wanted, "If [you believe what you claim to believe], you're nuts" is in my view unfortunate rhetoric - too Krauthammery.
If you think that any reasonable reader would be deceived by that into thinking he had advocated 'torture for information', you're nuts
I don't understand this. That's exactly what happened, both in the comments to her post, and here.
You seem to be demanding that B draw a sharp moral distinction between the two cases or be judged intellectually dishonest.
Yes, that's right. I think the analogous intellectual sin is committed by, for example, people who argue that there's no meaningful moral distinction between using an IUD and infanticide. Lots of people agree that there's no difference--they're both killing babies, why can't you see that? etc.--and think that attempts to tease them apart are simple sophistry. But I'd say that calling someone a "baby killer" based on his support for an IUD, without knowing, or mentioning his position on infanticide, is intellectually dishonest.
If you want to replace "you're nuts" there with "I find your perceptions of the situation entirely at odds with reality", that would work too -- I meant "nuts" colloquially, and had no intention of impugning ogged's mental health in any serious sense.
No worries, LB, I didn't take it that way.
Whatever happened to "based on my experience or facts a-f, you're wrong" or "I disagree with your interpretation of facts a-f"?
as far as whether I'm being "knee jerk" and condemning people who are "less enlightened", let me repost this:
"So look, you were insufficiently opposed to, maybe even supported, torture briefly. It happens. With this rendition stuff--there's a guy in Syria right now being held in a grave sized cell and probably beaten from time to time. His name is Muhammad Haydar Zammar. The U.S. sent him to Syria from Morocco on a private jet staffed by CIA agents.Awful, right? But here's the thing: this is probably the guy who recruited Muhammad Atta into Al Qaeda in Hamburg. And I had a good friend evacuated from his apartment in Lower Manhattan for weeks because of the smell of burning bodies. So when I heard about Zammar, yeah, I had a brief flash of "he deserves it". Which you had about a serial killer and child molester. It's a pretty common human response, and if it stays a fleeting thought--it's not all that shameful. But in that fleeting moment you think "good, he deserves it", you are supporting torture, and it's neither dishonest nor unfair for someone to say so."
So look, I am not saying that I am morally superior, that I am above that "good, he deserves it." I'm not particularly prone to it--when I encounter the graphic descriptions of exactly what goes on in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, I find it dissolves pretty quickly. And by now I've read so many graphic descriptions, including of cases where the guy was innocent or some low level scrub, that it's no longer a temptation. But that wasn't always true.
So that's not what's driving me crazy. What's driving me crazy is this:
in discussions about whether or when torture can be justified, in a country an at a time when our government is actually having people tortured and getting away with it, the only unforgivable sin seems in discussions about torture seems to be hurting someone's feelings by accusing them of justifying torture--even if they are, in fact, justifying torture.
That's what I can't stand.
Needless to say, this thread is not the only place where I've encountered this attitude. Hell, we all remember James Inhofe after Abu Ghraib--"outraged by the outrage." But that doesn't make it better; if anything it makes it worse.
kt,
No, it is not arbitrary. I call the public perception of torture to be torture as it actually is; clandestine and shadowy. Volokh's call for what you call "torture" would be open and visible. This does not exist. Not in America, which is what we're talking about.
Torture, as it is practiced, has a limited set of characteristics. Simply because other characteristics are possible does not mean that "torture" necessarily encompeses all of them. So, yes, while one can conceive of torture in the open, people-supported sense, it does not actually exist in America. We're talking about the impression the word leaves in people's minds. I really don't think that said impression will have anygthing to do with virtual possibilites, but will have everything to do with actual practice.
LB,
Because ogged is willing to engage with one woman does not mean that his treatment of another is not mediated by her gender.
You should replace "one woman" with "many other women". Do you really think Ogged's problem is Bitch's gender? That's what you are alluding to, but you don't seem to want to come out and say it.
Ash,
Maybe cow's aren't always tortured in the manner you describe, but many are tortured in other ways. But that torture has a use; cheaper, more plentiful meat, and more profits for the big farms. Since you eat cow...
I don't understand this. That's exactly what happened, both in the comments to her post, and here.
People brought up torture-for-information because they think of the two types of torture as presenting the same moral problem. I just reread her comments thread -- if you can see anyone in that thread expressing the belief that the topic of Volokh's post was torture-for-information, I missed it and would appreciate a link.
Yes, that's right. I think the analogous intellectual sin is committed by, for example, people who argue that there's no meaningful moral distinction between using an IUD and infanticide. Lots of people agree that there's no difference--they're both killing babies, why can't you see that? etc.--and think that attempts to tease them apart are simple sophistry. But I'd say that calling someone a "baby killer" based on his support for an IUD, without knowing, or mentioning his position on infanticide, is intellectually dishonest.
Here, I'm appealing in some sense to majority rule. I agree with you about IUDs, but I would say that the intellectual dishonesty in that case comes solely from the fact that person who conflates an IUD with infanticide knows damn well that most people don't. When she calls an IUD user a baby-killer, she means people to develop a misapprehension of the facts due to the fact that their moral intuition (IUD!=infanticide) differs from hers. In the original sense of the word, she is equivocating -- saying something that in her moral universe is true, but that she fully intends her audience to misunderstand.
I do not think that you can fairly attribute such equivocation to B. First, as I said before, torture means torture. While it may mean only torture-for-information to you, you are not Humpty-Dumpty and do not get to accuse people of bad faith for not using words in precisely the way you would like them to. She linked Volokh's post; in the comment thread, while the discussion turned to torture-for-information, there was no indication that anyone thought that the subject of Volokh's post, specifically, was torture-for-information (btw, I'm not a big Volokh fan, so I hadn't realized that, if ash is correct, Volokh advocates torture-for-information too. Does that change anything in your eyes?); I can see no argument that her post was in fact deceptive about the nature of Volokh's post or that if anyone was deceived that it was her fault. Second, this is not the IUD/infanticide situation, where the speaker is deliberately exploiting a difference between her own, highly idiosyncratic, morality and the more conventional morality of her audience. B thinks that execution-by-torture and torture-for-information are pretty much morally equivalent; so do I; so does ash; so does Katherine -- we are at least a substantial subset of the population, and I believe that we're probably a substantial majority (if you include the "both are okay" crowd as being, for this limited purpose, on our side.) Your morality, drawing the sharp distinction between the two, is in my opinion idiosyncratic, but is in any case nowhere near being an accepted norm -- expecting her to have explicitly acknowledged a moral distinction that she does not make and that she does not expect her audience to make is entirely unreasonable.
You should replace "one woman" with "many other women". Do you really think Ogged's problem is Bitch's gender? That's what you are alluding to, but you don't seem to want to come out and say it.
I won't be used as a stick to beat other women with. I would prefer not to engage your question, on the principle that it's better to keep focused on one argument at a time.
"Yes, that's right. I think the analogous intellectual sin is committed by, for example, people who argue that there's no meaningful moral distinction between using an IUD and infanticide. Lots of people agree that there's no difference--they're both killing babies, why can't you see that? etc.--and think that attempts to tease them apart are simple sophistry. But I'd say that calling someone a "baby killer" based on his support for an IUD, without knowing, or mentioning his position on infanticide, is intellectually dishonest."
Yes, but people who use IUDs generally don't believe they're killing babies--in fact that are close to certain they're not. And I think the facts are overwhelmingly on their side.
If the Iranian execution is torture, and you defend it, you're defending torture. I mean, Q.E.D., right? Maybe not all torture is created equal, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to call torture torture.
You originally said it wasn't torture, but you've basically conceded that it is. (So did Volokh, btw, after an email exchange.) So if it is torture, what the hell is wrong with calling it that? You're left making an argument that would imply it's a "sin" of some sort to call Darfur a genocide, a less-brutal-than-the-BTK-murderer a murderer, etc.
Is it wrong to call Franco a fascist because people think of Hitler & Hitler was worse? Is it wrong to call Gorbachev a Communist leader because people think of Lenin and Stalin? I mean, there's no end to it.
"Here, I'm appealing in some sense to majority rule"
are you sure you're not appealing to accuracy? I'm appealing to accuracy.
Well, accuracy, in the sense of word usage, depends on what your audience is going to think it means -- if in the infanticide/IUD case, the speaker was somehow 'right' about IUDs, she would still be dishonest if she was counting on her audience to misunderstand her. So accuracy is one way of putting it -- what B said was perfectly and unexceptionably accurate -- but I think she achieved that accuracy through the fact that a majority of her audience uses words the same way she does.
But other than that, everything you said. (Can I say, long after the fact, thank you for all the work you did on extraordinary rendition? Not that you didn't get a full measure of kudos at the time, but that was great work, and I wasn't commenting at OW when those posts were up.)
Is it wrong to call Franco a fascist because people think of Hitler & Hitler was worse? Is it wrong to call Gorbachev a Communist leader because people think of Lenin and Stalin? I mean, there's no end to it.
It's not wrong to call Gorbachev a communist leader because people think of Stalin, but if someone were to defend Gorbachev against some charge, and then were characterized as defending a communist leader, by someone who knew that the audience would think of a defense of Stalin, I would find that a suspect rhetorical move. If a defense of a specific instance is rooted in the particular characteristics of that instance, saying of the defender that he defends the genus as a whole is, I think, unfair. (That doesn't mean that I don't think you can point out in an argument that, in defending the specific, he's defending an instance of the generic, but simply saying "so-and-so is defending <generic>"—which doesn't distinguish between the different specifics that fall under the genus, and is a third-personal informing of others about so-and-so's position—well, I can see how someone might find that uncharitable, at least.)
One last thing.
It is perhaps a mistake to get angry enough so that I can dismissed as an overemotional chick who can't handle a semantic argument, when actually a lot of my frustration stems from what I see as the utter crappiness of your semantic argument. If you're going to quiblle over semantics you'd darn well better be precise, and you are being pathetically imprecise.
For instance:
What is the moral distinction between torture for information and torture as punishment that makes torture for information WORSE?
I can see why torture for information would be better--because you're trying to save lives, not inflict pain to inflict pain.
But as far as why it would be worse? I would guess the answer is, because it only happens after someone receives due process of law. But presumably you don't mean "due process" in any sense that some Stalinist show trial would do, even if the law of the land provided for show trials. I would guess "due process" changes things for you because it's a meaningful opportunity to contest your innocence.
So the moral distinction is between torturing innocent people and torturing guilty people. But as the sentence I just wrote shows--both are torture. The definition of the crime doesn't ride on how good a person the victim is. It is perfectly possible to rape a rapist, torture a torturer, or murder a murderer.
So what's your argument? Just a bunch of internally contradictory hand waving that boils down to, "she hurt my feelings!"
Re my 164: That was supposed to be directed just at Katherine's preceding comment at 161—I'm not saying that's what I think bitch did, and I believe her saying that it's not.
If a defense of a specific instance is rooted in the particular characteristics of that instance, saying of the defender that he defends the genus as a whole is, I think, unfair. (That doesn't mean that I don't think you can point out in an argument that, in defending the specific, he's defending an instance of the generic, but simply saying "so-and-so is defending [generic]"—which doesn't distinguish between the different specifics that fall under the genus, and is a third-personal informing of others about so-and-so's position—well, I can see how someone might find that uncharitable, at least.)
Finding it unfair rests in the assumption that the expected audience would regard [specific] as in some important sense atypical of [generic]. While I can see that being a fair assumption in the case of [Gorby]/[Communist leader], I think that the belief that [execution-by-torture] is an importantly atypical subset of [torture] is not widely enough held to make B's post uncharitable to Volokh (who apparently does support other kinds of torture as well).
Oh, for cripes sake.
1. Give the devil his/her due. Pretending that Ogged is unwilling to take criticism is unfair. He's taken a pretty good smacking in this thread, and has done so elsewhere. He's responded to claims and complaints that I would have ignored, and generally done so with a fair bit of restraint.
Would I have handled the BPhd circs. differently? Probably, but I don't precisely how one more adroitly says, "Dear friend: at the moment you are irritating the fuck out of me. Please go away."
BPhD has also largely handled the circs with decency and restraint, both before and now. I'm not crazy about her rhetoric, though I didn't (and wouldn't presume to) complain about her. I don't think claiming bad faith on her part is useful or accurate. She sees the world a certain way, and it's not crazy. It's not necessarily the way others (like me) see it, but I've been badly wrong before.
2. Comparing Ogged with Inhofe. Are you kidding? If you've read the blog for a while, you know that any matrix charting Ogged's position on Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, torture, torture memos, etc., puts ogged in a vastly different location than Inhofe. Pretending otherwise is silly.
One of the benefits of blogging communities is that they are communities of chosen association. If you're here, there's a pretty good bet that you are somewhere in the center or left. If someone, like Ogged or others, says something crazy, you might wonder quite reasonably how someone who so clearly shares so many of your values could be (or now, could have been) so desperately wrong on something so obvious. Particularly when he or she has been so explicitly on your side of things in the narrowest range of issues on the topic. You should absolutely argue vigorously that he's wrong (as most of us did). You should absolutely sort out where he's made the error, and what it depends upon. You should not, however, pretend that the mass of his beliefs is something vastly alien to yours, as is the case with Inhofe.
In the end, what troubles me is that people can't seem to give two people (Ogged or BPhD, as you like) to be badly wrong about something, particularly given they are both clearly one of ours. Seriously, in all the ways that matter to you IRL, which side do you think either is on?
3. "Because ogged is willing to engage with one woman does not mean that his treatment of another is not mediated by her gender."
I don't begin to know what that means. Do you mean that it doesn't inoculate him against charges of sexism? I buy that. Hell, I buy that he (like I, and most men) are probably more sexist than we realize, and less willing to change on issues where we recognize some sexism than we care to admit. But let's also acknowledge that if you were drawing a pool of 100 men with whom to push towards a less sexist society, under almost any drawing restrictions (only Dems, only men of a certain age or geographic location, etc.), the vast majority (say all but six) of those men would be less helpful than ogged. (Which is to say, he's not an enemy of any movement that's like to have much movement).
Nor is it clear what "mediates" means here. In the sense that gender pervades all, true. In the sense that he might not be sufficiently attentive to women's reasonable worries and complaints, possibly/probably true. In the sense that he would not have responded to BPhD the way that he did but for her gender? I don't buy it; I'm pretty sure someone else (presumed male) got rougher and similar treatment elsewhere (though, if IIRC, they were very obviously of deserving of it).
The tone of this thread, rather than the content, is distressing, and worse, a bit laughable.
Do you mean that it doesn't inoculate him against charges of sexism? I buy that.
That's all I meant. I was being used as evidence that sexism couldn't possibly be a factor, and I found that both personally offensive and not generally a sustainable argument.
No, I am not comparing ogged with Inhofe. Or rather, I am not arguing that ogged is the same kind of person as Inhofe. What I am saying is, they are making very similar arguments in this one case. It's completely uncharacteristic of ogged based on what else I know of him, and completely characteristic of Inhofe based on what else I know of him. So that's an important difference.
And ironically, your inability to grasp it, isvery similar to the mistake that makes the GOP unable to think straight about torture: we're not like Saddam Hussein, so when we do it it's not torture. And when liberals call it torture--they're accusing American troops of acting like Saddam Hussein! How dare they?
There is a difference between drawing equivalences between arguments, and drawing equivalences between people the people who make those arguments. There is a difference between drawing equivalences between actions, and drawing equivalences between the countries that take those actions.
These are the exact same sorts of mistakes that make it impossible to discuss Abu Ghraib with the right.
as for the tone on the thread--it's entirely predictable based on both the tone and content of the post.
I find the accusation that Ogged's actions in this thread can be explained (in any meaningful way) by issues he has with women to be false and hurtful.
I second B-Dub's 146 that Ogged's reaction to that hurtful statement was excessive.
I just previewed and noticed SCMT above me, saying a lot of what I wanted to.
Katherine, your 171 ignores the rhetorical force of the comparison, especially in the context of this thread.
and this:
"In the end, what troubles me is that people can't seem to give two people (Ogged or BPhD, as you like) to be badly wrong about something, particularly given they are both clearly one of ours."
Given that one has delinked & banned the other from commenting, this is not even a tiny bit convincing.
It's because ogged is "one of ours" that I'm so annoyed--he knows better than this kind of crap. Believe me, I wouldn't be arguing on James Inhofe's blog.
p.s. notice that with the Inhofe thing-- I'm once again being criticized for how my remarks would be "rhetorically" hurtful and personally offend people based on a certain "context"--as the content of the argument is ignored. I argue that it's wrong to be "outraged by the outrage" & worry primarily about protecting people's feelings & not offending anyone in discussions about torture, using Inhofe as an example--and they respond that saying ogged is "outraged by the outraged" & even mentioning Inhofe is hurtful and offensive.
It's like a fractal, or something.
p.p.s. no idea how gender plays into it. don't see a use in speculating. I have had other conversations with men on blogs that were remarkably similar, so the concrete v. abstract thing may have something to it. But in my case, I'm pretty sure the rendition stuff & the 100s of conversations about it are swamping whatever effect being female has.
Precisely. Look, as 'one of ours' ogged should get the courtesy of being allowed to explain his position even when it, at first blush, looks repugnant. He doesn't get, because no one gets, immunity from being compared to other people holding the same or similar positions even when they're bad people and he isn't.
(And I don't want to have the gender discussion in this thread -- I just don't want to be used as evidence in it.)
I wasn't really using you as such, LB, rather the fact that you are here, and were the last time B came up, confrontational. And Ogged seemed, if anything, bending over backwards to address your complaints and arguments. And not you, necessarily, but the complaints themselves.
I realize you are one person, and not all women everywhere, but you are a woman who comments here who has been confrontational - can I not make any inferences from that about how Ogged handles these things based on that? It seemed unfair, what she was saying, so I spoke up.
I addressed the comment to B herself, and I had a little exchange with her on my site, where I explained my comment further, if you are interested.
Katherine, I'll try this one more time, following up Ben's 164: I'm not saying that it's false to call them both "torture." That is very heart and point and purpose of the parenthetical in the original post that begins "I think any potential argument that...." I've explained that more at 27 above. Yes, they're both torture; they're both other things too, like "things to do on a sunny day," "things about which it is possible to speak," etc. Those, and "torture," are just not the relevant categories. At this point LB would say, I think, that my absolute distinction between the two, or my understanding of what people think when they hear "torture," are mistaken. I don't see a good way to settle that. We just disagree, it seems.
(LB, it was my understanding that Volokh had pointedly refused to engage the torture a la Abu Ghraib question, not that he'd endorsed it. I could be wrong.)
Keeping likes with likes:
1. KT: "[Ogged and Inhofe] are making very similar arguments in this one case."
LB: "He doesn't get, because no one gets, immunity from being compared to other people holding the same or similar positions even when they're bad people and he isn't."
Except that, precisely b/c it's "completely uncharacteristic of ogged...and completely characteristic of Inhofe," it seems at least possible that they are arguing different things. Just as you wouldn't understand a H. Clinton statement that "we ought to listen to the Pro-Life groups" in the same way that you would understand, say, DeLay saying the same thing. You might disagree in both cases, but you'd probably be arguing against different sorts of justifications.
2. KT: "And ironically, your inability to grasp it, isvery similar to the mistake that makes the GOP unable to think straight about torture: we're not like Saddam Hussein, so when we do it it's not torture."
Disagree entirely. You're ignoring the way in which Hussein or Inhofe enter the conversation. If you say, "We're torturing people," and then the GOP says, "You mean we're like Hussein? Are you nuts?" then the GOP is making a grouping to make you seem silly. If you say, "We're torturing people," and add, "I wonder if Iraqis are re-thinking the whole anti-Saddam thing," you could either be (a) snarkily pointing out that we were supposed to be against this sort of thing, or (b) arguing that, like Hussein, the US govt. uses torture as a method of Iraqi population control. (a) isn't really an argument - it's a pointer to an already existing argument. If you're arguing (b), you need to add a lot more argument (though I'm a bit sympathetic to the idea). I'm saying that your use of Inhofe was more like the second case, in which case you're arguing either (a) or (b). If it's (a), then it's not a pointer to a useful argument if we think Ogged must be saying something different than Inhofe would say). I'm saying I don't buy, in the least, (b).
3. KT: "I argue that it's wrong to be "outraged by the outrage" & worry primarily about protecting people's feelings & not offending anyone in discussions about torture, using Inhofe as an example--and they respond that saying ogged is "outraged by the outraged" & even mentioning Inhofe is hurtful and offensive."
Except that, as I said in #1, given where Ogged falls on the "one of us" matrix, I think he's arguing something different than Inhofe. So maybe the same rhetoric isn't appropriate or, more to the point, useful. I seem to recall that there are blogs out there that have -- honest to Gawd -- speech codes and banning policies. I think that's so people can hash out inflammatory issues without the comments turning into a fire-fight that makes the blog an ultimately uncongenial place to do the very thing that makes it interesting - that it's a place to hash out inflammatory issues.
4. "Given that one has delinked & banned the other from commenting, this is not even a tiny bit convincing."
I'm hopeful this will change in time. In any case, BPhD has a blog, with I'd guess a pretty strong cross-readership (inc. me) with Unfogged. I'm sure most people will go over there to see if there's any more to the car wreck (I will). Presumably, she'll say what she feels she must about all this, so there's here space. I'm hopeful that people who disagree will be respectful in her comments.
5. A lot of this thread seems to be arguing about precisely how much the straw that broke the camel's back weighed. Who cares? It's a piece of straw - it was going to be loaded up sooner or later. Now, Ogged may believe that he wouldn't have de-linked, and etc., but for the BPhD post on Volokh; I don't and it doesn't appear that most others do either. Doesn't mean Ogged's lying, just that, like the rest of us, he may know himself imperfectly. Again, who cares? Look at the sum, decide if he's generally jerk or not, and act accordingly. I happen to think that Ogged overreacted in the Volokh case, but who cares? Presumably BPhD and Ogged, and they should address it, and all other relevant matters, as they can. But most of the rest are laying to thick a theory on one piece of data.
(Errors intentionally left for w-lfs-n's enjoyment).
Ok, let me address b's 99. She writes,
My problem is that the way it was done, and the ensuing discussions both private and public, and even the initial response to me in this one, all read, to me, as incredibly hostile. And I did not think then, and I do not think now, that I deserved that hostility.
As I've tried to express, in the post, and at comment 46, without actually using the word, I take b's Volokh post as a betrayal, plain and simple. I don't care if it was intentional, I could even throw over (though I'm not even close to convinced that I should) the torture conflation, and we'd still be left with the link to me, which no one has even tried to defend. And none of that is to say that something else wouldn't have happened eventually to bring about the same reaction, because the powder was dry and days were hot, no doubt.
So, hostile? I haven't expressed even a tiny bit of the hostility I feel. Not even a little sliver of the whole.
I don't care if it was intentional, I could even throw over (though I'm not even close to convinced that I should) the torture conflation, and we'd still be left with the link to me, which no one has even tried to defend.
Actually, I have, see my 103, point (2). B's post was, if anything, an expression of disappointment and anger that the three linked blogs had failed to disassociate themselves from Volokh. You don't ssem to think that Volokh's post was anything to be ashamed of -- if it is, why haven't you disassociated yourself from it? If it isn't, why is B's linking you with it an insult?
LB, the claim in the link was that I thought Volokh was a "big man" for changing his mind. I said no such thing in the linked post.
Ok, you agree that they're both torture. What about everything else I've said? Why is calling them both torture any more intellectually dishonest than calling Darfur and Rwanda both genocide even though the circumstances are different & it's possible to argue that one is worse than the other? Or--pick any on the long list of things I wrote about.
Note that for the purposes of convincing you I'm conceding something (that it is morally better to torture people as punishment for a crime than in interrogation) that I don't believe. (As I've said before, I think that torturing the innocent is worse than torturing the guilty, but that doesn't correlate perfectly with the punishment v. interrogation distinction, and I also think that torturing in even a misguided or mistaken attempt to prevent a terrorist attack is better in some sense than torturing for the sake of inflicting pain on evil men. So I think that morally speaking, it's kind of a wash.)
I understand your argument--I think it's really, really not convincing, and also flatly contradictory to things you said in the initial post. You haven't addressed mine, though, as far as I can tell.
Ok, I'm glad we're past the "is it torture?" question. I'm now rereading your comments and will reply presently. (And I'm not sure where I've contradicted the initial post.)
and part of my hostile tone, though virtually none of the substance, is undoubtedly on account of realizing today that Maher Arar's is very, very like going to get thrown out of court before discovery because those fuckers in the administration really do have the better of the jurisdictional argument. So, excessive rudeness about torture or posts supporting torture (Volokh, not you) is just not something we should be worrying about. Then again, hostile blog discussions among people who are much more in agreement than not & who aren't the architects of these policies are not exactly productive either. So to the extent that I attacked you instead of your arguments, or acted like I was talking to Eugene Volokh or whatsisname Inhofe when I know I'm not, I apologize. I hope you & bphd sort things out but you guys know each other better than I know either of you so whatever.
Arar's lawsuit is likely to get thrown out that is.
here's some background for those wondering what I'm talking about.
No apology necessary really. I don't mind people getting angry about torture, and it's fine to get mad at me as long as you don't, like b and Mithras, presume to know my mind. Writing a response to your other points right now...
Ok, let me try to explain where I'm coming from on this.
1. It matters to me a lot that I not be identified as someone who supports Abu Ghraib type torture or interro-torture, etc.
2. Note that it matters to me not at all if people think I'm barbaric or horrible or immoral in lots of other ways; it's this particular badness that I don't want to be associated with.
3. The corollary to 2 is that it doesn't matter if the immorality of interro-torture and barbaric execution are a wash--they're still different.
4. They're different even though they're both torture. (Do you see/grant this, Katherine?) Possible justifications for them depend on different arguments, premises, beliefs, worldviews, temperaments, etc.
So it's simply not sufficient to say that someone supports torture, because that doesn't tell us enough about what that person believes--and the ambiguity leaves room for thinking that the person supports interro-torture, when in fact he might be vociferously opposed to it.
I don't honestly know enough about Darfur to give a very good answer to your Darfur/Rwanda analogy, but my rough response is that while one might be worse than the other, they're bad in similar ways, so it's fine to call them both genocide. (But I can imagine cases where "genocide" would be similarly problematic: if we kill all the rats in NY, that could properly be called "genocide," but no one would like it if you started comparing the exterminators to Nazi guards....)
I probably shouldn't wade into this, since I'm essentially a lurker, rather than a member of the community. (I'd like to join. But w-lfs-n terrifies me, and also I'm incapable of learning how to use code.)
I don't understand why Ogged's attempting to sever ties with Dr. B is at all controversial. Even those who think she is correct on the substance, still have to concede that her rhetorical strategy is to draw lines and to dismiss as disgusting those views that fall on the wrong side of them. Can anyone blame Ogged for not wanting to share a community with someone who openly treats his views as beneath contempt (which seems to be the obvious implication of the infamous Volokh post)? And Ogged's being blameless in that regard is altogether independent of whether or not she is in fact right on the substance. That is, it could be true both that, as a feminist, she *does* occupy a position of epistemological privileged, *and* that her rhetorical strategy is indeed the appropriate one to employ when speaking truth to power, _and still be true that Ogged's response to her is entirely appropriate and understandable _. Somewhere, Dr. B suggested that Ogged is being inconsistent in finding PZ Meyer's tone toward creationists congenial, but not her tone to him. Isn't that the crux of the matter? We all make choices about what kinds of opinions we are willing to tolerate being expressed by other people. It is Dr. B.'s right to draw the lines wherever she wishes. What seems to me to not be her right is to expect those whose views she isn't willing to tolerate to want to spend time in her (virtual) company.
By "tolerate" above I don't mean "agree with." I mean "attempt to construe generously, or as deserving of something other than mockery."
" while one might be worse than the other, they're bad in similar ways, so it's fine to call them both genocide."
...which I think this applies exactly here except that I'm not actually sure that one's worse than the other. They may be different, but they're not different in a way that makes it inaccurate or misleading to call them both "torture", and you've essentially conceded that.
"(But I can imagine cases where "genocide" would be similarly problematic: if we kill all the rats in NY, that could properly be called "genocide," but no one would like it if you started comparing the exterminators to Nazi guards....)"
Well, "genocide" means "people", I think it's even in the latin root.
And again, I don't see what the moral difference is if it's not ultimately about torturing the innocent v. torturing the guilty, which:
a) doesn't correlate perfectly with torture-for-interrogation v. torturing-for-punishment--it's totally, totally possible to torture guilty people during interrogation and innocent people as a sentence for a crime.
b) is a real moral difference, but also a moral difference that is completely separate than the difference between "torture" and "not torture".
I find it worse to rape a 6 year old than a 30 year old at some level, but rape is rape. What crime is committed is a totally separate question from how good or bad, or innocent or guilty, the victim is.
Katherine, I'm not sure I can explain in many other ways, and I'll do one more comment on this and then leave it for anyone else who wants to give it a shot.
Although they're both torture, they're also different in important ways. Due process is one way (that's not quite the same as the guilty/innocent distinction--that matters too, but it matters a lot that this not be lawless, in addition to not being maximally unjust.) The method of torture also matters, as I mention somewhere above: if we're goiing to do it, we'd have to decide as a polity on the how and why.
But, more to the point, the arguments for them, and the kind of character we attribute to the people making the arguments, are different. So, for example, the person who defends what happened at Abu Ghraib, or even less controversially, defends the waterboarding of KSM is showing himself to be someone who does not care for the rule of law (because torture is illegal), does not care if the innocent are tortured (because there's been no due process), and does not care about government being accountable to its citizens (because torture is carried out in secret). That's just for starters. None of those things can be said of Volokh based on his proposal. Those are massive and massively significant differences.
By the way, "genocide" is "genos" from Greek, and "-cide" from Latin. The Greeks used "genos" for race/tribe, though Heidegger has an idiosyncratic reading I won't burden you with ;)
I'm not going to read through this whole thread, since I'm hopping in so late, but I notice the string "Kleiman" does not appear in it. So I think it's worth saying this:
In this post of Kleiman's, he praises Volokh rather extravagantly for his revised position on torture. (Kleiman:
Not merely has he seriously weighed the arguments against a position he prefers -- this, though it sits on the ethical borderline, is admittedly a valid rhetorical device -- Volokh has actually changed his mind in the face of argument, admitting that the institutional point made by Brad DeLong and elaborated in this space counts decisively against his proposal.
Kleiman, incidentally, has good reason to praise Volokh even when the praise is undeserved; I think he's personal friends with Volokh, and if one of my friends had said what Volokh said I would be grasping at straws to find nice something nice to say about him.)
That's not the post you linked, Ogged, but it's the post Yglesias linked. Yglesias and Kleiman were linked in B's posts on the two words before the link to you.
So the three people B linked were: Someone who, inarguably, thought it was real big of Volokh; and two people who were connected by chains of linking-without-comment (though Yglesias used the same mock-sarcastic tone as Kleiman in saying "Kleiman has the sordid details").
Was B being unfair to Ogged in assuming his post was praise of Kleiman? Possibly. Was this "so far over the line of intellectual dishonesty" as to merit the sort of smackdown it did? Absolutely not. (Especially given Yarrow's point in 56 and 79, which destroys the idea that B was being intellectually dishonest in point 1; perhaps she was being misleading, but "intellectual dishonesty" is a huge stretch.)
As far as "intellectual dishonesty" goes, I think nothing B did is as close to intellectual dishonesty as what Ogged does when he cites B's link to him without noting that it was in the context of two other links, which support B's case.
Let me be clear, because I'm really not trying to piss anyone off: I don't think Ogged is being intellectually dishonest here at all. It's easy to miss this sort of thing when you're blogging, which is usually done hastily. But I think this shows that a little bit of charity is called for before you accuse other people of intellectual dishonesty.
And when Ogged says that B's post--every word of with I agree with, other than the one linking to Ogged--is so far over the line of intellectual dishonesty that he had to smack her down in public, it's obvious that he's decided not to extend that charity to her. That's his right, and it's his right to keep anyone he likes from commenting here. And (scrolling up) I see that Ogged really really thinks there's a huge difference between the two types of torture, and the points he raises about the rule of law are salient ones. But the accusations he's levelling at B don't, I think, look particularly convincing if you're not looking at them in the exact same framework that he is.
OK, I see that in 182 LB does allude to the fact that there were three linked blogs. Still, I think it's worth pointing out that one of the three linked blogs did exactly what B said, and it wasn't insane to think that the other two linked blogs were implicated in this, by the "you link it you own it" rule. My claim isn't that Ogged actually expressed approval of Volokh's recantation-such-as-it-was, but that it's not over the line of intellectual dishonesty to read him that way.
Matt, I think that's nuts. I wrote what I wrote. How does putting the link to my post next to links to other posts that say something different make the link to my post excusable? I hope I'm misunderstanding you.
Oh, you have not explained. You have asserted, again and again, and again and again failed to actually address my arguments.
For the last time, in all caps
EVEN IF THERE ARE REAL MORAL DIFFERENCES, WHICH HAVE YOU HAVE JUST ASSERTED AGAIN AND AGAIN WITHOUT PROVING OR EXPLAINING, THEY ARE NOT MORAL DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE IT IMMORAL, INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST, OR IN ANYWAY IMPROPER TO DESCRIBE BOTH THINGS AS "TORTURE".
I'm no longer angry, but I think you're being absurdly dense, and it's useless trying to argue with a brick wall.
This must have been covered previously, but I think the problem isn't with describing both as torture, but with describing people in favor of either as "torture supporters" full stop.
To elaborate, let's say I support torturing three year olds to death in, and only in, the exact conditions described in Belle's. classic post. I talk about that on my blog, though I hedge my position a little because I know it's controversial and really just want to discuss it rather than give my full throated endorsment. Someone else, on their blog, calls me a "torture-supporter." That would be bad, right?
That is not what happened between Ogged and Bitch, Ph. D. Shouldn't the argument be over how different what happened is from that, not whether or not that would be bad?
I meant the link to be, Belle's classic post, without that extraneous period.
Oh, you did explain the moral differences. I think those are pretty lousy arguments, but you made them. I'm all for doing things in the open & all for due process, but to argue that the crucial moral question is whether you beat someone to death proudly and publicly or in secret seems bizarre to me, and it's even further from defining what constitutes torture than the guilty/innocent victim thing. Anyway--if this was secret before, it isn't now. If the public is unaware it's because we don't want to know.
I guess the archetype of torture today is the cell in the basement of the intelligence service, or the foreign prison camp, but that wasn't always true. In 1789 the archetypal image was probably drawing and quartering in the town square.
If you're arguing in terms of fidelity not to any old law but to the U.S. Constitution, I can see how due process of law is a moral consideration separate from whether people are innocent or guilty. I can certainly see that. But we are talking about something that's quite clearly a violation of the Eighth Amendment. I don't see why violating the Eighth Amendment is morally preferable to violating the Fifth, I really don't.
It's odd--you seem to agree with me that torture is wrong, but you seem bizarrely disconnected from me on the single, central reason WHY it is wrong.
It's not because it happens to innocent people, though it often does, and that makes it worse. It's not because it happens without due process, though it usually does, and that makes it worse. It's not because it happens in secret, though it usually does, and that makes it worse. It's not because it's against the law, though it is, and that makes it worse. It's not because it's counterproductive at deterring crimes or reducing terrorism, though it is, and that makes it worse. It's not because torturers make untrustworthy leaders in all sorts of other ways, though it does, and that makes it worse.
I'm not saying those things aren't important. I'm saying they don't go to the central reason why torture is wrong.
So what is that central reason? I think you need to read your William Brennan. It "treats members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded."
Do you not agree with this?
Partially OT. Katherine- The most recent post on Volokh Conspiracy (not by Eugene) excerpts and links to a new Washington Post Op-Ed defending extraordinary rendition. My first read-through makess it look like a fairly typical "pox on both of their houses" piece, which I find annoying. I don't know if it's relevant to your project.
This discussion has been absurd.
Torture is torture, whether you're doing it for revenge or for information or for girl scout cookies, whether it takes place on the orders of a judge or on the orders of a CIA interrogator. B was perfectly justified in describing Volokh's proposal as torture; any offense taken based on her post alone is just plain nuts. I don't live in Ogged's head and can't fathom why he does what he does, but I find it hard to believe that this was the whole story. Ogged doesn't come across as someone so ludicrously irrational as to fly off and punish a friend for honestly pointing out that Eugene Volokh is a lunatic.
As far as delinking speciously-reasoned, non-congenial blogs, why is this idiot still on the blogroll?
Let's have that competition for most annoying commentator again. Katherine gets all my votes.
I'd just like to point out some of you have spent a big portion of the last 24 hours yelling about torture and how wrong it just is, and how strongly you feel about it, and how you're an absolutist on it and all. I really, really hope you've been engaged in a letter-writing campaign or protest rally organization as well, today. I mean, if all of your considerable anger on this issue is merely being spent arguing over an inter-blog dispute...that's not good.
That's pretty offensive, Michael. Have you ever read Katherine at Obsidian Wings?
And look, there's "I support torture", there's "I don't support torture", and there's "I support certain kinds of torture under certain conditions." Whatever the reasons I have for believing that I don't support torture, if I say "certain kinds, under certain circumstances" it's still torture. Rationalize however I will.
And where's profgrrl in all of this soap opera? That's what I want to know.
I so hate to get involved in this conversation, and I promise to shower afterwards, but I can't resist a point about this. Katherine:
I think you need to read your William Brennan. It "treats members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded."
I suspect Ogged would say that torture-for-information does this; it treats someone's physical self as a means to some end. Punishment, on the other hand, is a form of respect for the choice of wrongdoing. Someone (a Volokh time-slice, for example) might think that the only morally appropriate response to certain heinous choices is, say, death by torture, because only this takes the wrongs done to the victims seriously enough. The Brennan considerations seem to emphasize, not undermine, the distinction between two forms of torture.
I think this is my last post in this thread (always assuming no one either asks for a response, or says something I really want to respond to.)
Weiner's 196 is exactly right. It is not dishonest to read linking-without-comment as implicit endorsement -- it may be mistaken, but it's a reasonable mistake, the kind that people dealing charitably with each other straighten out rather than regarding as a betrayal. (And in the context of this whole conversation, ogged, I really don't see the offense. You've been implicitly defending Volokh as not having said anything all that bad; B's post only seems offensive, even if mistaken, if you do disapprove of his position.)
And (scrolling up) I see that Ogged really really thinks there's a huge difference between the two types of torture, and the points he raises about the rule of law are salient ones. But the accusations he's levelling at B don't, I think, look particularly convincing if you're not looking at them in the exact same framework that he is.
And this -- the 'conflation' that upsets you, while I don't agree that it's a fair reading of B's post, is only an issue within your strongly idiosyncratic moral analysis of the situation, which B does not share. You can draw the distinction you draw, and you can be hurt and offended that others don't draw that distinction, and so may take your willingness to countenance the possiblity that execution-by-torture is justified as implying a willingness to countenance torture-for-information. You are extraordinarily uncharitable toward B in taking her failure to explicitly draw attention to a moral distinction which you consider important and she does not, in a post not primarily concerned with your views, as a personal betrayal.
"respect for the choice of wrongdoing"--that's Kant's whole thing, right? I think it's total bullshit, a fancy rationalization for something that by pure coincidence reaches the same outcome as a system based on pure vengeance.
Matt, I think that's nuts.
if we discuss this, we will discuss it civilly.
(deep breath)
Ogged, the point is that the post wasn't primarily an attack on you. If B had said "Ogged is praising Volokh," that would be weird. Since B said (effectively), "Some people are praising Volokh"--and she linked to someone who was, and to two people who were linking to that guy, it's not weird.
It may have been inaccurate, but you are setting an extremely high bar for your criticism of B. You call her--not just "intellectually dishonest," which is a fairly nasty thing to say to an academic--but "so far over the line of intellectual dishonesty." This looks way out of proportion to what B actually did.
[Now, if you had called B's post unfairly hostile to you, I could understand that. Your relations with B are your own business, and if you decide she's being mean to you and you don't want her around your blog, that's your privilege.]
Another thing: You suggest that B unfairly conflated two kinds of torture, in a way that suggests that you're for interro-torture. But B, in the linked post, didn't actually accuse you of being for torture; she accused you of being too nice to Volokh, who supports torture. And Volokh has shown pretty thoroughly that he doesn't have a problem with the Bush Administration's practice of interro-torture without due process. Here's Kieran Healy on the weirdness of Volokh's refusal to blog on the torture, and here (scroll way down, it's in alphabetical order) is Volokh's claim that "Republicans' views on the war against terrorists, economic policy, taxes, and many though not all civil liberties questions -- such as self-defense rights, school choice, color blindness, and the freedom of speech (at least as to political and religious speech) -- are more sound than the Democrats' views." So, if Volokh opposes interro-torture, he thinks it's less big a deal than affirmative action and gun laws. It's fair to say he's soft on both kinds of torture.
Which is just to reinforce what LizardBreath says in 208: Your distinction between these two kinds of torture is idiosyncratic. B doesn't share it, and Volokh himself doesn't seem to think it's a big deal. (In fact, I'd guess that for most people, though clearly not for you, there's a correlation between thinking that executing convicted criminals in gratuitously painful ways might be OK and thinking that torturing prisoners for information might be OK.) So to describe B's conflation, if such it be, of these two kinds of torture as tremendously intellectually dishonest is to set a low, low, low standard for intellectual dishonesty.
You're entitled to be personally angry at B, but she just wasn't intellectually dishonest.
ogged,
sometimes it sounds like you are saying that there will be only one interpretation of what you are saying, and that interpretation is yours. this is not always the case, but sometimes, you get awful close to saying that.
also, if it's a basic point and few seem to accept it or recognize it as such, it's not so basic.
shit. sorry about the name there. i was searching for a word using type ahead, and forgot that the name box was selected. that was me, not some person named fuck masquerading as me. please accept my apologies, and fix if you can.
Katherine, I'm virtually certain that Kant himself supported capital punishment but not torture. I don't much like the "respect for the person" line either, but applied properly I think it yields a different outcome than a system of pure vengeance. For Kant the desire for vengeance would be a mere inclination, acting on which can have no moral worth.
Volokh really did express (and didn't really back off from) a view like the one Labs sets out: For some crimes, only torture is appropriate punishment.
I really don't think that this can hold up: The effect of this torture really will be to dehumanize people and treat them as a punching bag for our anger against their crimes, rather than to respect their humanity. So Brennan's point doesn't reinforce the distinction between kinds of torture unless add in a whole bunch of extra assumptions. But it's an intellectually possible position, I guess.
Totally OT, but Weiner, did you/will you get a mention in the Leiter Reports for the TT job? Or is that only for established philosophers?
Leiter does a roundup of junior hiring for places with graduate programs (I think); since Texas Tech has an MA I expect I'll wind up in that. There's something slightly incoherent about the way he does it; the reason to restrict it to places with graduate students is that the Report is for those deciding on grad schools; but he lists it by the PhD-granting institution, which makes it seem as though he's trying to provide a snapshot of the department's placement record. In which case my classmate who got a job at Williams (three years ago) would be relevant. But, he doesn't tell me how to do my job.
Comments 48 and 84 (numerical palindromes, huh) in this thread did not occur. If you think you see them, you are hallucinating.