Sigh... deep and mournful

It's a sad day when learns one of one's friends, even a distant one with whom one is pretty much out of touch, turns out to be out of touch in a way one finds, at best disturbing; at worst, reprehensible.

Eugene Volokh thinks torture, as a norm in judicial punishment isn't wrong. Worse, he seems to think it laudatory.

I've not been reading the Volokh Conspiracy much lately because I have been a coward. I dislike the amount of time I have spent in the past year or so defending what I do for a living, while trying to correct those who either see it as evil, or needing torture to work best. Eugene's various comments on the matter (that torture, per se, isn't necessarily to be shunned... the Ticking Bomb defense, writ large) made me unwilling to wade in much where so many others, with wider followings than mine, were doing yeoman's work.

But this, gives me the willies.

If you look at the bottom you will see links to more of his general philosophy on the matter, but in brief I think it can be summed up like this. "Make criminals suffer, not so much to discourage others, but because vengeance is good for society."

His summation of his views is this, One can certainly reach a different judgment than I do: Even if one thinks there's some moral benefit to executing the Eichmanns or even the serial rapist-killers, one might say that the benefit is small enough that it's exceeded by the risk of error, and the very serious moral cost of that error. As I mentioned at the outset, I am keenly aware that I may be wrong on this general question, and the matter that causes me the most trouble is precisely this one. Yet my tentative current sense is that for a small number of extraordinarily monstrous crimes, the need for retribution is so strong — and the risk of error can be made so low — that not just death but deliberately painful death is the proper punishment.

The part I have the most disagreement with is this one, from higher up the piece,

"5. Humanity: Likewise, I think, with Mark's argument that deliberate infliction of pain, even on monsters, "makes the person who engages in it a little bit more of a beast, and a little bit less of a human being, than he would otherwise be." First, we should recognize that this is a metaphor; I may be mistaken, but my sense is that most literal beasts (i.e., animals) don't actually try to inflict pain as punishment for wrongs. Literally speaking, this desire is quite characteristic of human beings (though perhaps some other higher primates might be included; I'm not sure). This doesn't make Mark's argument wrong, but only shows that we need to look behind the metaphor.

So what's behind the metaphor? It could be a judgment that it's beastly, less-than-human, and thus morally improper to succumb to our visceral emotional impulses. But I don't think that's what Mark literally means. Love, empathy, the desire to pick a mate, the desire to have children, and other worthy emotions are also visceral emotional impulses; while we should certainly indulge in them with rational caution and care, there's nothing wrong in following emotions, and it's sometimes bad to resist them.

I take it, then, Mark's point is that it's beastly, less-than-human, and improper to indulge this particular emotion. But that too, I think, assumes the conclusion. When someone rapes and murders twenty children, why is it a "beastly" impulse as opposed to a worthy one to try to exact a harsh retribution? Mark acknowledges that retribution in general is a proper goal of punishment — but his argument doesn't, I think, explain why this particular sort of retribution is not. (To be fair, he does say "in my eyes, at least" — here we may be returning to a point I mentioned in my original post, which is that a lot in this debate rests on people's visceral moral intuitions.)

My response to this is that I have met people who have crossed the line, and been torturers, most of those in the pursuit of what they deemed to be higher moral aims (that is to say they were not indulging personal desires, not wallowing in some deviant urge, whereby they got a specific pleasure from inflicting pain on those who were not able to avoid it) and they are now damaged, mentally, and morally. They no longer see people as people. They see some as being not-quite people (I don't know how better to put it) and therefore not to be treated with the same respect, humanity; if you will, that everyone else gets.

The problem is, that as time goes on, they seem to have put more and more of the world into the category of, "not quite human."

This is not a new thing. A huge amount of the shift in human relations, the benefit of nations, even of empire, is to increase the number of people who counted as people. The Clans of the Highlands used to exterminate each other, root and branch, because those not in one's own family weren't quite as human. The scale shifted too, after all, those who weren't speakers of some form of Gaelic were less human still.

Read the Icelandic sagas; we see people casually settling scores by killing people's slaves. Person A (a family member) had given grave offense, so that night person B whacked person A's favorite slave in the side of the neck with an axe. It made him feel better, proved a point to his father (person A), but wasn't all that nice to the slave. More interesting, one must presume Person B knew the slave, had known him for years, but didn't think his life was as important as making the point.

Where am I going with this? I don't want to live in a place where hanging someone with piano wire, from a meathook, is seen as not enough punishment (and Eugene makes exactly that argument).

Call me sentimental, but if we are to have a death penalty, I want it to be more parallel to putting down a rabid dog; distasteful, but a sad necessity; and done without passion, than to having heritics hung, drawn and quartered.

Appealing to the base in human nature seems to me a poor thing, and I don't see that vengeance has had a calming influence on the countries which put it's practice into graphic; even public methods of punishing malefactors.

Some visual food porn.

A few people have said I ought to take pictures of my food.

To them I say, "hah!". Food is notoriously hard to shoot.

On the other hand I had Maia take some pictures of me when I was butchering the meat Thursday, and I post them for the hell of it. Any apparent flaws are my fault, as this is not her camera, and my preferred settings make the auto-focus less reliable; for the non-familiar.

I may elect to use one of them, as an Icon, to let people know I'm doing food porn (as the Kelp Bubble is being used to let you know this is a photography post, though perhaps the line is blurred on this one).

The pictures are here Cutting Meat

Preparation was straightforward. Strip the table, cover it with plastic, lay out the knives, steels, a bowl and the cutting board.

One big knife (I'm fortunate to have a quartering knife, which is suitable, in size, for anything from sectioning a whole steer into primal cuts (but isn't really the tool for the job, it won't go through bone) to the big cuts I was doing.

One general knife. I used my favorite all-around knife. Straight backed, with just a touch of clip at the tip, and rounded on the edge-side. Moderately thick in the blade. I tend to like square handles.

And a flensing knife. The house has two of these because when one takes the beef-production class (which she an Alexa have both done, one must by both the knife, and the text (and for proof that tinkering with the tax code leads to funny things, meat is no longer butchered after slaughter [which is now called harvesting] but manufactured, which means commercial butcheries get the manufacturing credits of the first Bush II tax cut, but I digress. It took me awhile to find out why this infelicitous language was being used).

It's a handy little knife. The sharp rake means it will dig very deeply into a large piece of meat with a nominal amount of wrist action, but the short length makes it easy to work around things. It has a thin blade, and a lot of flexibility. I was happier with it in action than I thought I would be when I was sharpening it.

The steels. I use stones to put the shape, and edge on my knives. But use dulls them, so steels take off the damaged teeth (to simplify the mechanics of sharpness, the edge of a knife is like a microscopic saw, and the teeth break, and bend with use). I have a ceramic steel, for big repair, a fine steel after that, and a satin steel for the last bit of edge.

I don't have one of the block steels sold with knife sets. They are too coarse for the edge I keep on my knives (which is both sharper in angle, and finer in detail than that recommended by most cutlers, and even cooks [save those who make sushi). The satin steel comes out only when I need to do something like this, and a razor's edge is needful.

I think I touched up the knives three times, after the cutting started.

The procedure was about the same for both pieces of meat. Look at the whole thing, decide on a couple of uses, make the cuts, look at the rest and repeat, until I ran out of smaller cuts to make. Even at that, I left a couple of larger cuts for roasting/using for lots of people (we are planning to have weekly get-togethers, starting next quarter), and I can still cut them down.

The loin was sliced at the 1/3rd point, turned sideways and sliced again, and then cut into disks for medallions. I can also cut those down again for chili verde, or stir-fry.

The rest of the loin was easy, as I just made it into roasting pieces, from some I will probably cube, or sliver for ingredients, to the monster I'll use for a tuesday night when we expect to have eight people at the table. I got ten sub-cuts from it, which will probably, when leftovers are figured in, make for 12-13 meals.

The rib-eye was about the same. The shape of the parent cut is pointed oval. So I cut the narrow part off, which makes it easier to cut thick steaks and still have a reasonable portion size. It also made it easier to slice off the fat which runs along the edge, in a hard ridge ( about 1/12 lbs, clean, white and flaky. Too bad I don't have need of it. We'll use it to train the dogs).

I cut some steaks, about nine, made a couple of small roasts, one medium roast, sliced some, along the grain for stir fry and made a lot of stew chunks; for soup, chili, stews, with the really densely marbled bits, and the meat in, and around, the fat.

It took about an hour and-a-half, from slicing the first one open, to sealing the last piece into the vacuum bag.