Torture poll

[slyc_willie]

I think you need a buff job on that tin foil hat, there . . . .

 

[sr71plt]

The fact is that sr71plt promised to put me on ignore but never has. He doesn't do well in debating people like you or me who really understand what we believe. He lacks character and that can not be gained by debate.

He told the fans on another thread that he had complained to the administrator of the forum about me and that the administrator had given me a slap on the wrist. He either flat out lied or the administrator of the forum just did not want to bother with sr71plt. He is greater in his own eyes than anybody elses eyes. Watch out for him, he is a secret agent for RABD, just like Pure the OP here.

A. Please cite where I ever "promised" to put you on ignore. I've never made such a statement. Do note that whenever you make something up about what I've posted, I'll continue to challenge you on that. This is the third time you've asserted a post to me that I did not make, and you've never backed your claims up when challenged.

B. The site administrators not only deleted many of your spamming posts last week, but they also gave you a public "this is your last warning" wrist slap. I'm sure you noticed. I do sort of regret you didn't just keep on spamming to see what would happen.

 

[Pure]

torture is the subject of this thread.

please do not post personal attacks, here.

further, if personally attacked, please do not respond, here. [[ADDED: If a personal attack breaches LITEROTICA rules--AH has no special ones--contact the administrator, Laurel. E.g. posting personal info or threats of harm.]]

note: it is not a personal attack to say 'the views of x are wrong on this subject...'

neither is it a personal attack or response to one to say, 'y is not correctly representing my views on the subject. they are, in fact, as follows.'

[the above are personal, not official, statements related to being a moderator of another forum]

 

[wmrs2]

A. Please cite where I ever "promised" to put you on ignore. I've never made such a statement. Do note that whenever you make something up about what I've posted, I'll continue to challenge you on that. This is the third time you've asserted a post to me that I did not make, and you've never backed your claims up when challenged.

B. The site administrators not only deleted many of your spamming posts last week, but they also gave you a public "this is your last warning" wrist slap. I'm sure you noticed. I do sort of regret you didn't just keep on spamming to see what would happen.

I sure never noticed any of my post being taken off. I am sure that the administrators did not authorize you to spread your hate around the forum. And I am sure that they would have notified me of a last warning before they would have authorized you to blab it. So far, they have sent me nothing. Maybe after you complained they checked out your behavior too. Maybe they decided to allow a gentleman like you to work out his own problems that he caused.

It is most unethical to discuss another person on the forum with a third party as a form of ridicule. Your attempt to make me look like a racist was very much across the line of ethics. You ganging up on me with your RABD friends has been very insulting to me. When you begin treating me with respect, I will treat you the same way.

I deny that I have done any spamming. The most I have done, although that might appear to you to be a large amount, is to have responded to some very harsh and unethical remarks. You just in your last post made a smart ass remark about me. I pointed out that if we were to be in a shit throwing contest that you just opened the door. Did I misjudge the situation? You set the bait and you walked into the trap and you are herewith exposed again as a secret agent of ......

I await your apology for causing this spamming incident right here. Are you man enough to admit you are wrong?

 

[cantdog]

Cantdog, I am not amicus although we hold many of the same views. Amicus is an atheist. I am not. This sr71plt is a complete sophist and has no moral convictions at all. He attempt to play you against amicus and make you his friend. He tries to say that I am amicus to discredit my discussion with you. However, if you address me with respect, although we disagree, I will return that respect.

Here is what sr71plt says that you put him on ignore just like you did amicus. The fact is that sr71plt promised to put me on ignore but never has. He doesn't do well in debating people like you or me who really understand what we believe. He lacks character and that can not be gained by debate.

He told the fans on another thread that he had complained to the administrator of the forum about me and that the administrator had given me a slap on the wrist. He either flat out lied or the administrator of the forum just did not want to bother with sr71plt. He is greater in his own eyes than anybody elses eyes. Watch out for him, he is a secret agent for RABD, just like Pure the OP here.

Actually, I don't sweat the pilot so much. And I saw with my own eyes the warning you got from the site administrators, to which, they tell me, he referred. I hadn't imagined you'd be in denial about it.

I never imagined you were amicus.

For the record.

For me, morality is on tap, all the time, an intimate part of the mind's equipment, like the sense of time passing or the notion of existing in space. I can always find my ability to reason and my imaginative faculty. I always can use my memory or my intuition. Likewise, I have ready to hand a sense of the common good and a moral compass. All the same, in junior high my moral ideas were quite different.

Even though everyone has a different notion of what's right, depending on their age and circumstance, their spiritual maturity-- I find that moral development falls into broad categories. The people bombing churches and so on to whom you referred are very likely in the same moral plane with the people who ordered Shock and Awe, to take an example.

Both are group-centered thinkers. They have espoused a group, and to that group they have given loyalty. The nationalists who ordered Shock and Awe or the firebombing of Dresden gave loyalty to the nation. They see the world in Us and Them terms, and they have both defined for themselves the Enemy, whom it is moral to despoil, moral to injure, moral to kill. Killing an enemy, to a nationalist or other group-centered moral thinker, is no murder, and taking his goods no theft.

I am in another moral universe. For me, the whole human race is worthy, and I see the acts of bombing churches or ordering Shock and Awe as evil acts. I have no grudges, I can forgive, I have no enemy.

Being able to forgive, I can un-blind myself enough to realize that nationalists or partisans of religious groups are still acting morally, so far as they can see morality.

With that in mind, mrs, have a new look at evil. If such acts as torturing dissidents or bombing cities, slaughtering enemy neighborhoods, blowing up churches-- if those acts are being done for good reasons and not with an impulse to do evil, then what is left? What is left that is actually evil, and not simply misguided?

This understanding opens the door to realizing that there isn't any such thing as evil, not in the absolute way nationalists see it. It's just people, not yet spiritually matured enough, making terrible mistakes. Because they have slain the women and children and blasted their hopes, ruined their crops, laid to waste their future, in the mistaken conviction that they are morally right to do it. Due, ultimately, to a shallow morality-- Us and Them-- which exempts whatever is done to enemies from being measured as evil. How sharp their regret will be, later, when they see that all humans are as worthy and precious, as flawed and foolish, as all others!

 

[wmrs2]

please do not post personal attacks, here.

further, if personally attacked, please do not respond, here.

note: it is not a personal attack to say 'the views of x are wrong on this subject...'

neither is it a personal attack or response to one to say, 'y is not correctly representing my views on the subject. they are, in fact, as follows.'

[the above are personal, not official, statements related to being a moderator of another forum]

I did not understand the meaning of this post. You do recognize that cantdog and I were having a civilized conversation and sr71plt and slyc willie butted in with smart ass remarks that had nothing to do with your thread. That is the type of treatment I have been getting from these people from the time I came on the forum. You are very welcome to police your thread but I am interested if you will be fair in your judgment. Be specific please.

 

[matriarch]

I can't answer the poll.

My view is that it is against international conventions and that any country using torture diminishes its stature in the world.

It is wrong because it gets the answers the interrogator wants rather than the truth and isn't worth the damage it does to international relations.

How can we criticise other nations for abuse of human rights if we use torture?

Og

*gentle, but most approving applause*.

I agree completely.

 

[cantdog]

What I draw from this, among other things, is that there is no Force of Evil. Just the usual folly and inane cruelty of house apes to one another.

Evil as a thing evaporates when you see this. And at the same time, all mankind is the same as I am. I am no better. I can no longer condemn, no longer despair, in the end, because all of them are me, and I them. I have to love them, despite it all. Love is the force which demolishes evil.

 

[wmrs2]

What I draw from this, among other things, is that there is no Force of Evil. Just the usual folly and inane cruelty of house apes to one another.

Evil as a thing evaporates when you see this. And at the same time, all mankind is the same as I am. I am no better. I can no longer condemn, no longer despair, in the end, because all of them are me, and I them. I have to love them, despite it all. Love is the force which demolishes evil.

I simply do not understand your reasoning. You say in one thread that it is a moral act to bow up schools. You are looking at it from the view point of your country that this is the moral thing to do.

How does this miss your definition of insane cruelty of house of apes to one another? If you did not maintain it was just what these evil countries do to others as policy, I would listen better to you. There is too much hypocrisy in pleading for love and compassion and then to make assertions like this.

It is like the Israeli and Arab conflict. The Arab says it is just to bomb Isreal but it is unfair for Israel to bomb the Arabs. Children are children no matter whose these children are. You can not refuse to stop killing and demand that the other party stop killing. That does not make sense to me. I may be immature in my reasoning but it sure makes sense to me to kill every Muslim who participated in 9/11 and I include those who danced in the street of Mid-Eastern cities in this count also.

You did not say from which country you are from but it sounds to me like you would approve of bombing USA interest and call it an immoral act to bomb your country back into the stone age. Americans will never see it that way and if you take the opinion of members on this forum as America's opinion, you would be wrong. That is what I am afraid is going to happen as the terrorist are going to be encouraged to be bolder and bolder by moral relativist until one of these counties do another 9/11. Then, it will be the end of terrorism as we know it today because counties that think like your country will not exist any more.

 

[wmrs2]

What I draw from this, among other things, is that there is no Force of Evil. Just the usual folly and inane cruelty of house apes to one another.

Evil as a thing evaporates when you see this. And at the same time, all mankind is the same as I am. I am no better. I can no longer condemn, no longer despair, in the end, because all of them are me, and I them. I have to love them, despite it all. Love is the force which demolishes evil.

If there is no evil, how are you going to abolish it with love?

 

[caffieri]

Torture

It seems that if we believe that torture is an essential tool in interrogation we cannot challenge the same methods be used against our own troops. That's a horrible thought!

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[Verdad]

My fingers wanted to go straight for the absolutist option on this one, but as it goes with absolutist statements, that would mean I'd have to do some dancing around the exceptions. I refrained from voting in the end, though that's not to say there are many exceptions I can think of.

An obvious one is found in consensual SM scenarios. It doesn't look to me as though Pure had that in mind, but still, many SM scenes would qualify as torture, so there goes the absolute. Even there, however, there are things I consider plain wrong, no matter how many times a person might say they want them. Consent is not an all-encompassing excuse for springing any and all sorts of crazy shit on a willing party. The limits and decisions are still with the 'torturer'. That is perhaps the most relative situation of all.

Another exception, as one of the options in the poll suggests, would be historical/cultural. I don't really consider it an exception—I think it was as awful to torture a thousand years ago as it is now—but I'm willing to cut those people some relativistic slack on the basis of their society's values. The impulse, as has been mentioned and supported by Milgram, is there—chillingly so. Where it had the cultural blessing, I find it hard to condemn every single individual who partook of it, or even to call the entire culture morally corrupt. Certainly, the closer we come to the present times, the clearer it gets, so there's no justification for, say, Nazi Germany. If I go as far as some ancient warrior culture of Persia, though, it gets harder to pass judgment. The good thing is that we don't really have to; our time is now, and from our point of development, I see no excuses.

Then there's the up close and personal question of having in one's hands someone on whom the life of a loved one might depend. The way I resolve that one is by saying it's still wrong, but I can't promise I wouldn't do it. I don't have a need to rationalize it into being right just because it's within the realm of possibility for me or other fine people. It's wrong, it's horrible, it's probably ineffectual and stupid too. I might sympathize and recognize the attenuating circumstances, I might say that on a personal level it goes into the area of right and wrong losing any meaning, but I can't condone it.

Much less elevate it on the level of a societal principle, where it would be okay to torture so long as the other is a really bad guy and there's some faint chance of torture yielding something of use. Others have already explained very well how faint that chance is, anyhow.

I'm most curious now as to what constitutes torture, though. It's been asked already, and I might as well confess I'm poorly informed on what, if anything, the conventions say. I was just intrigued by the examples offered by 3113 and sr.

Would unleashing some harmless but nasty looking spiders on an arachnophobe count? It certainly seems so to me, plus it evokes some particularly disturbing Orwellian overtones.

Pilot, I think, was joking with Alvin and Chipmunks (the cruelty!) but then, where does something like that cross from an interrogating technique into a full-blown brainwashing torture?

 

[Verdad]

Define torture.

I'd like to say I opposed it completely, but if you defined playing "Alvin and Chipmunks" over and over again as torture, I'd have to backpeddle on that.

Apropos aural torture, you've reminded me of Fassbinder's movie Lili Marleen. There's a scene in it of a Jewish composer being tortured for days by being locked up in a small room, with the eponymous song, sang by his former lover, coming incessantly from the speakers, over and over again. He ends up quite fucked up.

I realize it's fiction and the reasons for showing that particular kind of torture were above all artistic, so I don't have any special point with that; it just was a great movie.

 

[cantdog]

If there is no evil, how are you going to abolish it with love?

I'm afraid you're not following me.

So skip it. Let's go with a less interior view. You have a Golden Rule somewhere in your kit, I daresay? Good enough, then. Nobody has the right to do this shit with impunity. There are not two classes of mankind, one of which can be tortured and one of which has the right to torture the other class of people.

Because that's what's going on here. The torturees, as it were, have been reclassified in such a way that it is okay. Well, I call bullshit; it's not okay, because all humans occupy the same moral level.

My position on this is not shared by most of the world. I know that. But wise men have been taking my position since the words of wise men were recorded. Jesus said the same thing, I guess we have to suppose, since it is central to being a Jew as well. I could cite the passages in the Gospels where Jesus reportedly spars with the legal scholar and is prodded into the parable of the Samaritan. Or Micah. On and on.

But you yourself very likely don't share this view. Most people are egoistic, morally, with the two moral classes Me and Them, or else group-centered, with Us and Them. All I'm saying, all Gandhi is saying, all Jesus is saying on this subject is that there really is no Them. All those Thems are You, man. Put it into your head.

Once it's in your head, who can you make an enemy of? That's part one.

 

[cantdog]

Part one-A

And it doesn't matter about the group you choose. Racists don't get to enslave blacks, beat up niggers, lynch people they don't have any use for, open up concentration camps and gas Jews, none of that. Nationalists don't get to nuke whole countries. Religionists don't get to stage pogroms and St. Batholomew's day massacres and Inquisitions. No. That's part of the scene here. You do that shit, you are fucking up.

Any ass can love his friends. Loving his enemies is what the ass is being told to start doing, by all these wise men.

Torture the same way. It's not rocket science, once you get it into your head that Love Your Neighbor doesn't just refer to the other people in the pews.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

jbj: I believe most people will torture if the information is important enough.//

this is possibly true, and applies to murder as well. but i did not intend a question about human psychology [behavior] under stress.

i intended a question about one's personal policy [one's morality; moral code], one's standards applied to others' actions [one's general moral views] and about public policy [the laws in our society; or the laws one would support as proper]; secondly i intended to look at the basis for any such policies, for one's moral views.

some around this forum talk about 'objective moral principles,' and i was curious about the results of 'objective' or rational analysis for this issue.

===
i think some of the points above about the efficacy of torture are *highly* relevant, since the defenders of torture often describe it as a 'magic bullet' [magic arm twist] applied in a perfectly clear situation where the suspect is *known* to be guilty and well informed, and where the immediate saving of a life is guaranteed to result. as soon as one adds uncertainly to the equation--is it the right person? does he really know?-- then the downside is rather apparent. the wrong person, under torture, will end up telling you anything to save himself and hence wild goose chases result, detracting from more efficacious approaches.

And my response answers your question exactly.

I exclude nothing from my tool bag of options. The trick is knowing when to use a tool and when to leave it alone.

 

[cantdog]

Part two

And of all the crapola to want to do to someone, why in the great overland cluck would you pick torture? 'Cause it doesn't get you anywhere for the purposes of intelligence gathering or other investigation, it creates a bunch of twisted people in the torture crews, it raises righteous wrath and recruits more people who will take great risks to bring you and your torturing pricks down, thus increasing your enemies' numbers and resolve. So why do it? Power. Power pure and simple.

People setting policy may be group centered, acting for a greater good than themselves, and all that yadda yadda, but the people you put on the torture squad are egoists. Give 'em impunity and authorize targets, and they will show you the difference between Me and Them. Look at the Abu Ghraib pictures, man. Open your eyes and look at them. See that wide wide grin and the thumbs up? Impunity and power, they are wallowing in it. That grin is the wide, horny, excited grin of sheer power.

This is what you are sponsoring, what you want your government to be doing all over the world? (In your name, too, but that's another argument.) I don't fuckin think so, but that's for a couple of reasons. One is, I like my free speech and i know that I could be the next designated target. Political prisoners are tortured quite consistently, in the places around the world where they set up a state apparatus which exists to torture people. But even without that I have it in my head that we are all on the same moral level, and so, nobody gets to torture anybody.

 

[cantdog]

How we doing so far?

 

[cantdog]

And if that ain't enough for ya, consider og's argument. Not only does torture as a policy strengthen and augment your enemy, it makes your friends uneasy, too. Stalin was not a lot of fun to work with, for instance. We'd have never countenanced him if we hadn't needed him so bad. Once Hitler was down, we went somewhere else to wash our hands, where we might have touched him. Torturers are slime. You wanna be slime?

 

[Belegon]

How would it change your views on torture if you decided that you were responsible to a higher good or being than that of society? Maybe you are more responsible to the well being of your children than some scum bag of a terrorist? I would torture his ass to save my children and would not think twice about it. Then again, I do not have the idea that I am more responsible to society than I am to God.

To simply say "I do not believe in torture" and based on this, allow innocent people to die, is far more evil than crossing any line of morality based on moral relativity. There is something to be said for being kind to your enemy but being stupid and sacrificing your children is beyond the scope of human reasoning.

I reject that reasoning, completely and totally.

And so should you, if you claim to be the Christian and God-fearing person you have elsewhere in this forum.

My beliefs have changed in the last thirty years and I am no longer a Christian in the sense that I do not believe in the divinity of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

However, I do believe in much of his philosophy.

You, on the other hand, apparently believe in his divinity but reject his teachings, as evidenced by the fact that you would be willing to inflict the kind of things you were taught he suffered on your behalf.

Which of us would he consider more "Christian," I wonder?

I will not become that which I wish to eliminate from the world. I will be that which I want the world to become.

Doing evil in the pursuit of good leads to more evil.

If you wish a more populist approach?

Luke: And sacrifice Han and Leia?

Yoda: If you honor what they fight for? Yes.

 

[wmrs2]

It seems that if we believe that torture is an essential tool in interrogation we cannot challenge the same methods be used against our own troops. That's a horrible thought!

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True as rhetoric goes but the fact is that our enemies will torture our soldiers whether we torture theirs or not. To torture our soldiers is seen as the moral thing to do because their use of moral relativity principles.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Dont Ask, Dont Tell

Dont fool yourselves.

My guess is the US hands prisoners over to contractors who quiz the prisoners at secluded places far from reporters and snoopy investigators.

All our self-righteous bullshit simply makes the spooks better at concealing what they do.

 

[Pure]

a classic study

zimbardo's 'stanford prison experiment,' in which a model prison [or jail, more exactly] was created and randomly some students were made 'guards' and others prisoners. all were normal.

the guards' behavior became increasingly sadistic. some of the prisoners underwent great stress and suffered trauma. there was a 'rebellion' which fizzled.

the principal experimenter himself was initially blind to the evil that was being created. a student made the case [for stopping] to him, and on day 6, of the planned 14, the experiment was discontinued.

there is an account at
http://www.holah.karoo.net/zimbardostudy.htm

and in wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

zimbardo testified in defense of some of the prison guards at abu ghraib, iow, offered a defence based on the dehumanizing context and the authority structure. as in the Stanford experiment, some guards who became extreme had no previous history of such behavior.

 

[wmrs2]

I'm saying that if they do torture because the information is important enough, they deceive themselves and have acted against their interests.

I would also add that the use of torture as a political tool doesn't work very well either. The macoutes are gone, the Stasi is gone, the Gestapo is gone, and so on.

If you support this statement:

Originally Posted by Mahatma_Gandhi
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Then it must follow that Gandhi believed in a universal truth that does not change with the maturation of thinking. Truth is like this, truth does not change but is reveled throgh mature thinking.

 

[Trinique_Fire]

I thought this was about good torture. I guess I'm in the wrong forum for that.

No, I don't think torture is appropriate unless you're a pedophile/rapist/child molester. Then I think on all accounts such torture IS appropriate. That being said, I don't think there is a way to justify torture or an argument to convince me that it's acceptable.