Well, let's set the objective, shall we? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Who the fuck is Bruce Anderson?
Bruce Anderson: We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty
Bruce, Bruce, Bruce... Torture is unlawful. Has been for hundreds of years, as you point out in your article. You will fuck your mind up totally trying to argue in favour of it. Your argument appears to go along the lines of "well, they haven't done anything yet, but on the other hand, they may have done. So let's torture them, and find out." Riiiiiiiiigggghhhhht - I think you've just surrendered the moral highground, Bruce, me old mate, me old mucker, me old pal.
Addendum:
Just to reiterate: torture is forbidden by Law. As a matter of legal fact, then, we do not "have a right to use torture". On the contrary. As to having a duty... To whom do we owe this duty?.. Not to me, Bruce - it's not me who's terrified of terrorists, because I couldn't give a fuck, one way or another. So don't pretend that you have consensus, when you don't.
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20 comments:
Anonymous: You have a very limited vocabulary, and your punctuation is poor. Go away, learn how to express your ideas properly, and then come back and bandy words with me. Until then, stay the fuck away from me, you freak, or I'll rearrange what's left of your feeble mind.
Anonymous, etc: "All you were saying"? Give me strength... And what are you bleating about "threats" for? That is your interpretation; your generalization. I told you: don't bandy words with me, until you're able... State your purpose, or fuck off. In fact, just fuck off, because you've already bored me.
Anonymous, etc: Do yourself a favour, and don't tell me what my words mean, if you value your sanity... All you're doing is projecting your shit onto me, and telling me everything about yourself, in the process. I don't think you want to do that, to be honest.
Anonymous, etc: One last thing... Be sure you avoid telling me what I am able to do, from my current position. You are the ones who came to me, remember? As such, the balance of power is very firmly with me, as I see it. If you pretend otherwise, things will go badly for you.
4 x Anonymous: Are you still here?
4 x Anonymous: Incidentally, I've just noticed that you've broken every stated rule on this blog. Several times. That's really quite brave, not to say audacious. Or is it just rude and foolish - it's so difficult to tell, sometimes?
However, what this means is that there will be no valid communication between you and me - you will think that we're communicating, but actually I'm talking to somebody else. Let me know when you've worked out who that person is, won't you? Actually, don't... let's keep it a secret between the two of us.
Life is Nice: You're entitled to your opinion, of course. However, torture is unlawful, as stated, and is therefore not permissible under any circumstances. As soon as one starts to discuss what amounts to torture, and how severely one may apply certain actions to another person before they amount to torture (in the way that the cretin Shrub did, for example), then one turns the appalling into the grotesque, I think. In any event, the only reason one would want to engage in torture is because one has no better ideas, which ought to be the ultimate indictment of any claim to civilization.
Anonymous: Again, your generalization.
Yes, I know but torture is used widely, despite the absolute legal prohibition against it. Amnesty International has recently reported that it had received, during 2008, reports of torture and ill-treatment from 132 countries, including the United States, Japan and France. It is, in fact, arguable that it is the existence of an unrealistic absolute ban that has driven torture beneath the radar of accountability, and that legalisation in very rare circumstances would in fact reduce instances of it.
Life is Nice: Well, that's an interesting take, I suppose... However, there is the possibility (or, more likely, probability), that if one legalizes the thing, albeit in very limited form, then the game becomes one of rule-bending, rather than rule-breaking, and we begin to have these discussions of whether the electrodes were applied for too long, for example.
You can please yourself, but that sounds absurd, to me. Look, people becomes torturers because that is the way their minds have developed, and not because they believe in some kind of higher purpose - that's just how they justify the business of doing violence to a defenceless person. As such, a person who is a torturer will, to a greater or lesser degree, dissociate themselves from the tortured person's pain and may even take pleasure from it.
In short, the very person who is willing to torture is the very person who should be banned from it.
very good point, Radagast!
Torture could possibly dehumanise society. This is no more true in relation to torture than it is with self-defence, and in fact the contrary is true i guess. A society that elects to favour the interests of wrongdoers over those of the innocent, when a choice must be made between the two, is in need of serious ethical rewiring.
We can never be totally sure that torturing a person will in fact result in us saving an innocent life.
Will a real-life situation actually occur where the only option is between torturing a wrongdoer or saving an innocent person? Perhaps not. However, a minor alteration to the Douglas Wood situation illustrates that the issue is far from moot. If Western forces in Iraq arrested one of Mr Wood's captors, it would be a perverse ethic that required us to respect the physical integrity of the captor, and not torture him to ascertain Mr Wood's whereabouts, in preference to taking all possible steps to save Mr Wood.
Im sitting on the fence on this one, I know.
Another glass of wine I think, it might nudge me off.
Life is Nice: I think it's regrettable that we've reached a position where "to torture, or not to torture?" is the question with which we are preoccupied, as though those were the only options open to us.
There is a question that some people choose to ask, when considering whether or not a particular course of action is valid. They say "would I be prepared to live in a world, where everybody did what I'm about to do?". Do torturers ever ask themselves this question? Unlikely, I should have thought, or if they do, they don't ask it seriously - it is a hypothetical analysis, for them. And then they might say "what other choice do we [not "I," but "we"] have? The very absence of a readymade alternative is validation enough of the torturer's action, I imagine.
Anyway, that first question, which one might regard as a moral amplifier, may or may not be the means by which every choice should be made, but it's a challenging one, nonetheless, and its difficulty for some people makes it all the more important, in the asking. Fortunately, I do not need to make that choice, but those who would do torture only because they think it cannot be done to them (and this is why it is done in secrecy - so that there is no comeback), and knowing full well that they would not like a world where everybody had licence to do it, are very dangerous. They're dangerous, because they have to create hierarchies in their heads: who is less important, such that they may be tortured, and when one decides that somebody else is "less," one may allow oneself to do just about anything...
Have you ever read "Crime and Punishment"? Dostoyevsky's analysis of the effect that this phenomenon has on Raskolnikov is really quite accurate, I think, although there are reasons why Raskolnikov realizes what he's done, in a way that torturers generally never do.
International Law is sovereign and torture is against all treaties blah blah blah...
This is unacceptable and the culprits should be under severe investigation.
But since US in involved I don't think that nobody will do anything.
Nobody cares.
I guess only half a dozen people REALLY cares.
People have already got what they wanted from Guantanamo and Abbu Graibb:
material for claiming: "The world in unjust, human kind is no good. Let's take care of our house."
Thank you Matthew!
Thank you for be part of the few who really cares and do something.
I quote you: "knowing full well that they would not like a world where everybody had licence to do it, are very dangerous. They're dangerous, because they have to create hierarchies in their heads: who is less important, such that they may be tortured, and when one decides that somebody else is "less," one may allow oneself to do just about anything..."
Yeah, you're right, torture corrupts and degrades the torturers. Torture also damages relations with allies and can interfere with cooperation on vital intelligence matters.
I quote you: "Have you ever read "Crime and Punishment"?
No, but im told much of the book's message revolves around his argument that the Western-influenced theories and emphasis on rationalism were not only incompatible with Russian society and history but even dangerous to them.
Great Blog, cheers.
Life is Nice: LOL. I haven't noticed a great deal of intelligence, to be honest!
Anyway, you'll have your own views on this, obviously, but I didn't say that the torturers were corrupted and degraded, although I imagine that one could make a case for that. No, I wrote that they were dangerous - they're dangerous, because one cannot tell merely by looking at them who it is that they've decided is "less". That makes life very uncertain, but is the nature of a world where very nearly everything is conducted in secret - right up to and including trial, judgment and punishment, it seems.
Anyway, as to Dostoyevsky: that kind of historical analysis escapes me... I can't assess the impact that his writing would have had, at the time he wrote it, so I think I'll stick to analysing the universal human themes that he deals with.
Ana: The thing is, I'm *not* doing anything except voice my opinion on a little blog that gets little traffic. I will voice my opinion, and then let it go. Unlike the people who send the torturers to do their dirty work for them, I do not need others to see the world as I see it... In any case, seeing the world as I see it would cause most people to commit suicide at the horror of it!
Well, Im not very intelligent to be honest, but I try my best. Maybe I "drink" too much...haha, what is it? "laugh my fucking arse off?", no thats going too far...
I must have interpreted what you said wrongly.
I just found out about these free audiobooks available at librivox.org. I haven't heard them yet.
Now I can hear Dostoevsky's famous words "I am a sick man..." in our iPod headphones. Okay, not my words. hey-ho. Baffled?
Life is Nice: Even if I thought you weren't as bright as me, I wouldn't deride you for it. The comment about "intelligence" was a play on words, and referred to the "intelligence" services.
Anyway, baffled? About what? I don't waste my time trying to work out which language people are speaking, these days... Perhaps the "sick man" comment was applied to you, or me, or the world at large and perhaps it was metaphoric, or maybe literal, or something else entirely; I wouldn't know, and I'm not that bothered, to be honest. If you want to tell me what that was about, then you will, if you don't, then you won't. It's as simple as that - I'm completely relaxed, either way.
n any case, seeing the world as I see it would cause most people to commit suicide at the horror of it!"
If I ever have a chance to go to Britain I will stay far away from you Matt.
I fear we make a death pact.
LOL
I'm trying to pay attention at my thoughts lately and I was find myself finding unacceptable behaviors in the world.
Maybe there is not a day I don' count three horrors.
Why am I like this?
It would be so good not to think and not to care and only pay attention in my life!
The thing is that I think that I don't think that life, waking up doing stuffs, working, having fun... blah blah... is that interesting...
I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say here.
People accept life as it is and only question when in time of troubles, their own troubles...
It is not enough for me.
I dunno.
I'm in a period of my life that I have to make some changes.
Dunno.
Middle age crisis?
Maybe.
I would like to know that I did anything to improve anything in this world.
Knowing that I can't is something that amazes me.
Most people don't feel this need.
Ana: A suicide pact is not something that I could agree with. There are always alternatives. Me? I laugh at the absurdity of it, and then carry on as if it were all normal, which it is to most people!
Anyway, it would be very difficult to proceed through life, concentrating only on the things that affect one, and nobody else. "No man is an island," wrote John Donne, and he was probably right - pretty much anything that you say or do is going to have some kind of onward effect on somebody else. Regrettably, other than delivering a few platitudes, I've yet to meet anybody who's willing to follow up their words with any kind of action from which I benefit to any great degree. So, now I'm choosing who it is that I help, because they have no choice but to help me, in reciprocation - their problem is mine, and vice versa. It's a funny thing: I've noticed that people get really upset when I don't leap to and try to solve their shit for them! It's obviously never occurred to them that they should give something that I deem of equal value in return! Hmmm. Abstract meandering, again!
Anyway, somebody recently said probably the saddest and most pathetic thing to me that I've ever heard. "I just want to be remembered," he said. Which I find ironic, because I just want to be forgotten.
I think you need to decide for yourself on what scale you need to change the world. Also, for whose benefit? Let me give you an example: you're walking down the street, you see a homeless person in a shop doorway (we'll leave alone the question of whether or not they get "disappeared" by a police death squad), and for some reason, at that instant, they look up from their contemplation of the pavement, and straight at you. Most people would look away, embarassed - logically, one should do everything one can to change that person's world, because that person's tragedy is evidence of a failed system, but seeing as nobody else is doing anything to help, and one barely has enough to maintain one's own existence, one does nothing. However, on this occasion, you smile the smile of someone who recognizes a kindred spirit. And in acknowledging that person's existence, when most don't, you will have changed the world.
The "really big changes" (ie, the things that make the TV news), the things that politicians and diplomats do - brokering peace treaties and trade deals (the things that make not one jot of difference, in truth, because they have no significant impact on our day-to-day lives), are going to be closed to you - you are not of the social class that is permitted that kind of influence. But to make an "untouchable" feel part of society, again... well, that's something that no politician could ever do, because there is no discernible benefit to them in that activity, from where they're sat.
Matt
I was joking Matt.
I don't want to commit suicide either.
I didn't think you did, somehow. However, I've been there, and being the person that I am, I sat down and worked out what the phenomenon amounted to and what caused it. You'd be surprised: it's not that difficult to model, and I have the sense that I'm not the first to realize that.
Matt
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