More Evidence That Torture Doesn't WorkFollow

I've actually been nearly drowned on more than one occasion, and It's not a walk in the park. And seeing is that's essentially the sensation caused by water boarding, I can say that it's a completely different type of torture than physical damage. From purely a game theory perspective, I'd prefer a resultant that causes less damage to me. That doesn't mean the other wouldn't suck.

Sure, so can bran muffens. Are either of them likely to cause lasting trauma? nah. These big manly women and children murdering terrorists (exvuse me, alleged terrorists) can take a bit of water without losing their sanity i'd imagine.

Maybe you should try a little water boarding and see if it causes you lasting trauma, then you will be able to judge.

And the whole "alleged" part? In a country like ours, that's a relevant distinction.

I think that's an unfair characterization of what we're doing though. We're saying that waterboarding, and by extension all interrogation techniques used by the US, should be judged on what they actually are, and not by playing word association tricks with the word "torture".



No one says "War isn't that bad" though. That's the problem here IMO. Many people will say that "war is better than the alternative", which is a vastly more correct analogy of what's going on here. But that's not as easy or satisfying for you to deal with, nor does it allow you to take an assumed moral high ground, so you ignore that position and invent an easier one to attack.


Look up "strawman" if you're not sure what you're doing here.





You also haven't ever in your life experienced real poverty, or hunger, or lived under despotic rule. Your own logic should lead you to conclude that you have no right to pass judgment on the less pristinely moral methods which might be employed to secure you from those things. It's easy for you to declare with absolute certainty that we should "never" engage in any sort of action of which you yourself don't approve. But you yourself are able to hold such moral high ground exactly because you yourself have never had to make a single truly difficult moral choice in your life. You've never actually had to choose whether or not to kill or even harm someone else in order to ensure the security and safety of your own family. You've lived your entire life in a world in which others act to protect you from having to make that choice, but you insist on judging them for doing so after the fact.


This is not to say that waterboarding or any of those other methods of extracting information are "good". Just to get you to think that perhaps your own life has been lived in such a bubble of protection that you can't really understand real difficult moral choices. In your life, those choices are academic matters and easy to make. But that's not really true. That's the sanitized world you've lived in.


It's funny. What you're doing reminds me of an old boss I had. He was taking over the business for his father. In the process, he looked over a bunch of the expenses involved in running the business. One of the things he saw was that we were spending money on a check approval service every month, but we very very rarely ever got a bad check. He concluded based on the numbers that we were spending more money each month on the service than we were saving on bad checks. He decided that it wasn't very nice to force customers to have to wait for their checks to be cleared, so he canceled the service and told us all to just accept any check that came in.

It should be obvious what happened. The number of bad checks we got skyrocketed. Once people realized that we weren't checking them anymore, they showed up with bad checks. Here's the thing though. From the perspective of someone already protected by the service, it appeared as though the "cost" of the protection was too high (I hope you see the parallel I'm getting at). He simply couldn't see that the cost was worth the protection. But he was viewing the situation through the lens of already being protected. Just as you are viewing this situation through the lens of someone who's protected from such moral choices. And similarly, if we stop doing things like engaging in war with nations like Iraq or Afghanistan, or we stop allowing our intelligence services to use "morally questionable" methods when interrogating, we run the risk of finding out just what the true "cost" of freedom is.


We haven't paid that cost. Not really. And not for a long time. And while I don't think the sorts of interrogation techniques being used are "good", I think we have to look at it as a relative issue. It's "better" than pulling off people's fingernails, or cutting off parts of their bodies. It's far far less harmful, far less permanent, and far less immoral. You're trying to treat this as some kind of moral absolute. Something is either right and therefore acceptable, or it's wrong and therefore unacceptable. But most of the time, those issues are relative. Is it ok to waterboard someone who's suspected of jaywalking? Absolutely not. Is it ok to waterboard someone who's suspected of being involved in a terrorist plot to kill thousands of people? Well... That's a less obvious question...

I've always been told that the longer someone explains something, the more full of **** they really are. I'm guessing that gbaji's ridiculous defense of waterboarding pretty much proves that theory.

gbaji, instead of trying to destroy stubs' credibility to judge about poverty, hunger, or making truly difficult moral choices, and of having him later correct you with details from his own life (that I will not reveal; it's up to him) you could very easily make an argument for why you should have credibility instead. You can, by the way, do that, because it's both a very common and good argument to make, that logic and empathy can enable you to understand and make judgments about situations that you haven't personally experienced. Try it; it would both be less embarrassing for you, as well as more presentable and respectful in terms of making your point.

Honestly that entire post sounded like you're trying to channel smash when he excoriates people for being completely ******* ignorant about the subject matter, but picking a really bad target, and doing a very poor job of it.

Edited, Sep 26th 2009 2:45pm by Pensive

Also



Your entire post is an amalgam of strawmen, begging your question, circumstantial ad hominem, red herrings, equivocation, and false dilemma.

Shut up.

It amazes me that we lost Illia and somehow managed to keep your stupid *** on board here. The sum of your contributions to this thread is "wah wah, it involves water so it must be just like a bath, LOLZ!! liberalz!!"

Yeah, trolling. That's what's happening here.

My opinion of you is based on far more than this one thread, anyway. It's a very consistent pattern of illogical, emotional and often immature behavior that makes me question why this site retains you.

You forgot petty and vindictive. Also, "often"? not the word I would have gone for there. "always" would have been more effective, since often allows for some leeway. You might try impunging upon my ancestory next. I can find you some pointer threads around here somewhere if you like?

I do take issue with your implication that my continued employment had anything to do with the Illia and Allakhazam situation. That is a mess, and I will be very sorry to see them both go. I'm really not at liberty to discuss that situation at the moment though.

As for my oppinion of you, well, this is the first time you've ever popped up on my radar. Looks like you get norated alot though by other admins, so you must be kind of an idiot. I could really care less about what you think of me though. Sorry. You won't be the last person I **** off in a forum though. I'm not sure exactly how i'll sleep knowing there is someone on the internet who doesn't like me.

At least this time there were no death threats.

Anyways, back to the real point here. Exactly how often are we talking here with the bedwetting? should the rest of us be worried to stand anywhere near you when electrical equipment is in use?

"Alot" being, to the best of my knowledge, twice, one of which was a mistake which was later admitted because the admin failed to check that it was confined to a single thread, and only four or five posts in that thread. The other time I barely even remember, and was probably due to varus or some similar situation, since I've never cared enough about these forums to actually hunt down someone's posts.

I also never implied that your employment has anything to do with Illia and Allakhazam; simply that it's a shame you're still around while they aren't.

My "sockpuppet"? Maybe you mean my brother's account, though I'm pretty sure he hasn't posted in a year or two. Or maybe the one-post account I made as a joke, because it was a pun off of a common FFXI term. Unless you somehow got seriously confused about when I had a name change done on my account. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you banned my brother, though, unless having a university IP address accidentally hit some other guy.

As for karma camping, yeah.. no. To be camping I have to be deliberately hunting down posts. The fact that I read a lot of threads and consistently rate down the same morons is not enough to constitute camping.

In any case, you seem to be getting awfully vindictive here, all things considered. I mean, taking so much time out of your day to check my rating history, other accounts on the same IP, and reading past threads I've posted in seems to make you more the pissy one here.