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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it. I suppose if you have a large enough group of people you'll always find some one like that, but pre modern people didn't always have such large groups.

You don't have to be morally deformed when you torture the first prisoner. You just need to believe that this time there really is the ticking bomb in the school, and that you are being morally serious and avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread. So you hold your nose and turn the handle.

Then you hear the screams. The screams of the hated, defeated enemy. It feels good. An better still, he screamed a name. You got actionable intelligence - you did the right thing. (You don't know at that point that he gave the same name to the FBI in exchange for coffee and a hot meal three weeks ago). And you did this. You had to overcome your fear of the tofu-eating wokists of North London to do the right thing. Actually, you're kind of a hero. The sense of power is good for the ego too. Your testosterone levels go through the roof. The sex with your wife that night is special.

They bring the guy he named in. The second time is easier. You get another name. But perhaps he is holding back - he is supposed to be the higher-up after all. So you arrange another session. Nobody broke after only one round of torture in the old books, after all.

The third time is even easier. You tell him he needs to name names to make the torture stop. In between the cries, you get name after name.

They bring those people in. You start to realise that they don't talk as easily. They must be particularly hard cases - you have hard evidence that they are baddies, after all. The second guy said so under torture, and if he was lying you would have put him through another session, and he wouldn't want that. You don't consider the possibility that they aren't talking is that they weren't baddies and don't know anything. It would mean you are out of a lucrative job. So you dial up the pain.

Two days later you hear that one of the guys you left in the cold cell overnight died of hypothermia. Can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, after all. But you aren't morally deformed. You are just doing a difficult, unpleasant job that most people are too prissy to do. And you have also tortured an innocent man to death.

You have also booked a one-way ticket to the eight circle of Hell and your family is accursed down to the thirteenth generation.

avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread

Hey. Asshole.

I think it is good to avoid torture. It is an excellent thing to do.

Do not do it from a position of lies, especially putting lies in my mouth.

There's a short story by the horror writer John Langan called "In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos" and it involves ex-soldiers who have been tried and convicted for the kinds of Abu Ghraib misconduct, and worse. There's a way of getting into that mindset:

After that, it had been learning the restraints that would cause the prisoner maximum discomfort, expose him (or occasionally, her) to optimum harm. It was hoisting the prisoner off the ground first without dislocating his shoulders, then with. Waterboarding, yes, together with the repurposing of all manner of daily objects, from nail files to pliers to dental floss. Each case was different. Of course you couldn’t believe any of the things the prisoners said when they were turned over to you, their protestations of innocence. But even after it appeared you’d broken them, you couldn’t be sure they weren’t engaged in a more subtle deception, acting as if you’d succeeded in order to preserve the truly valuable information. For this reason, it was necessary to keep the interrogation open, to continue to revisit those prisoners who swore they’d told you everything they knew. These people are not like you and me, Just-Call-Me-Bill had said, confirming the impression that had dogged Vasquez when she’d walked patrol, past women draped in white or slate burqas, men whose pokool proclaimed their loyalty to the mujahideen. These are not a reasonable people. You cannot sit down and talk to them, Bill went on, come to an understanding with them. They would rather fly an airplane into a building full of innocent women and men. They would rather strap a bomb to their daughter and send her to give you a hug. They get their hands on a nuke, and there’ll be a mushroom cloud where Manhattan used to be. What they understand is pain. Enough suffering, and their tongues will loosen.

Vasquez had learned that her father’s stories of the Villa Grimaldi—which he had withheld from her until she was fifteen, when over the course of the evening after her birthday she had been first incredulous, then horrified, then filled with righteous fury on his behalf—had little bearing on her duties in the Closet. Her father had been an innocent man, a poet, for God’s sake, picked up by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte because they were engaged in a program of terrorizing their own populace. The men (and occasional women) at whose interrogations she assisted were terrorists themselves, spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms, his chest, his back, his thighs, who had scored his mind with nightmares from which he still woke screaming, decades later. They were not like you and me, and that difference authorized and legitimized whatever was required to start them talking.

Spending all day is cruel, executioners should unionize and limit it to 8-hour work shifts.

...

They probably got paid, and maybe even explained why their work is important.

"Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it."

You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, however, there are a depressing number of morally deformed people in this world (both now and historically).

Pre-modern life, with its constant wars, famines and other horrors, would have surely resulted in a greater proportion of morally deformed people.

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