Keeping up with the Joneses

[pecunium]

A bunch of the Glenn Reynolds types are all up in arms, because people who oppose the U.S. using torture aren't all up in arms that Al Qaeda in Iraq endorses it.

Well, that's not news. Al Qaeda (in Iraq, and everywhere else) is a bunch of terrorists.

I don't think we should be measuring ourselves against them; as if they were the benchmark of civilisation.

Then again, maybe the pearl clutchers of the world did learn everything they needed to know in kindergarten, "but Jimmy hit me too," can be be heard in defense on any playground, anywhere.

The grown-ups, however, tend to dismiss it.

Comments

I think some ideas are being conflated here...

[karl-lembke.livejournal.com]

Terry gave his post the header, "Keeping up with the Joneses", and seems to be casting the argument in the form of "X is doing it, so why can't I?"

And of course, the response is always, "If X jumped off a bridge, would you also?" This is a lazy response, and it ignores the fact that there are lots of Xs doing stuff that is perfectly fine, and even good. No one ever says, "If X donated blood, would you also?" (Maybe they should. I donate at the Woodland Hills apheresis center. See you there?)

I see a difference between this copycat/peer pressure situation and the other classic line from grade school, "He started it."

This line also generates a popular canned response: "I don't care who started it, you're both in trouble."

This is one of the more profoundly stupid things adults say to kids. It's inherently unfair. No one proposes arresting a mugging victim along with the mugger – the law cares very deeply "who started it". It's also counterproductive. At schools with "zero tolerance" policies regarding fighting, kids who finally hit back when bullied will occasionally go all out. Since they'll both be punished, and the punishment is the same no matter how much damage was done, the only way they see to get justice is to inflict it themselves.

I guess I'm having trouble with what I see as black-and-white thinking, completely lacking in nuance. There are lots of things that other people do, that you'd be perfectly happy if your own child did. There's a difference between a fight that you started, and a fight you're trying to finish.

And there's a difference between four solid weeks of front page coverage of Abu Ghraib, and any coverage of stuff that might show that "gee, maybe Bush has a point about that 'axis of evil'."

Re: I think some ideas are being conflated here...

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem to me that "why can't" is involved in any substantial sense. Terry knows perfectly well that we (our Government Officials) _can_ torture anyone one we wish to torture (just as we can bomb Tehran to rubble with nuclear missiles, or gas the entire population of Iraq and turn those oil fields over to U.S. Corporations, or re-arrange the U.S. Government so that one person has dictatorial powers). The question is "Should we do this -- would it be to our ultimate benefit?" Terry, and others (elsewhere) have produced persuasive -- and, to me, convincing -- indications that the use of torture produces useful information so rarely that its use does not balance the downside factors.

I hadn't noticed Terry's heading, especially, but it does seem to be apt. Except for a few people with serious psychological problems, ostentatiously emulating ones neighbors is simply a matter of choice -- there's no _need_ to do it, any more than there is a _need_ to torture people, or to imprison them indefinitely on whim. We got along very well indeed for more than two hundred years without doing those things, and I see no good reason why we should or need to change now.

For most of my life, I've been pleased (even, irrationally, proud) that my country was One of The Good Guys. During the nearly-seventy years I've been observing such things we've certainly done a good many embarrassingly sleazy things, but our general framework has been that of The Good Guys. In the less-than-a-decade past, however, we've (mostly overtly) adopted what I consider the hall-marks of The Bad Guys. I don't think I'm going to be persuaded to accept this.

As you say, some -- perhaps many -- of the "things the other kids do" are perfectly fine & even admirable. What we're talking about here, however, is things that I (& other liberals and moderates) see as things done by other kids who are (in any decent society) done by the kids who are going to spend most of their lives in prison. For me, the desire not to have my country take that path quite overwhelms any desire I might have to gain Points in rhetorical debate.