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

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

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.

Ooh. Which ones?

[firepower.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Reynolds ("silence = complicity) which is pretty funny, since he thinks torture is ok, so long as it's done to "them". Somehow "them" doing it to people (esp. "us") is bad, but us doing it to "them is good.

Media Research Center

Newsbusters

I am sure Malkin will have something up soon.

My favorite piece of "criticism" of the failings of the media to report this was in a comment at Balloon Juice.

I’ll bet that if the President sodomized a nun, the left-leaning media would be out in front of reporting that, even though it suppressed the fact that the Clenis engaged in consensual sexual activity with an intern.

To which the only reply worth making was made,

Demi- Wow! How to respond? First, I love how sodomizing a nun is, to you, the equivalent to consensual sex with a young woman. Second, the fact that every person in the world knows about Clinton and Monica must have obscured for me that fact that this information was suppressed.

TK

[ashiegrrrl.livejournal.com]

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.

Agreed, whole-heartedly.

I'm not pro-torture, but if they are doing it to us, why they hell can't we dish out the same?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Has it occurred to any of them that it isn't news that terrorists favor, and use, torture? And that getting "up in arms" about it would be a waste of time and energy because, well, Al Qaeda doesn't exactly care what we think of their methods?

But some of us in the U.S. hoped that we were better than a terrorist group. I am less optimistic each day.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

John Cole (Balloon Juice) did.

His post, to which the comments I posted above were appended was short, pithy, and dead on point.

It isn’t news because they are terrorists, you fucking simpletons. Yesterday, my cat scratched himself then shit in a box. The media didn’t report that, either.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Short answer, because it's wrong.

Utilitarian anwer, because it doesn't work.

For details of my previous expositions on the subject.

You can look here, or here.

TK

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that.

[ashiegrrrl.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I agree that it's wrong, but when someone punches me in the face I usually want to punch them back.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't approve a policy that would condone torture. I may want to for vindictive reasons, but no, I really, honestly couldn't.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup. I think the difference between being a little kid and being an adult began to be clear to me when I not only understood that "but some of the other kids do it" wouldn't work, but got some glimmering (which took longer) of _why_ it wouldn't work.

Fair Warning (though I don't think you'll mind): several phrases you've used recently seem to have engrafted themselves into my thinking/speaking centers and I might not always use the time & effort to put them into quotes and credit you as the source.

Um... A couple of points

[karl-lembke.livejournal.com]

Short answer, because it's wrong.

Apparently, only when we do it.

The sense I get from Glenn Reynolds and others is not so much that we should have permission to live down to their standards, it's that no one has any expectation that they should be required to live up to our standards.

Think about it. Abu Ghraib was deemed worthy of 28 straight days of condemnation on the front page of the New York Times. By the time that story broke, the Army had discovered it, and was investigating. The people involved were arrested and sent to prison, and at least one high-ranking officer lost his job over it.

Now, we have much worse being done at Al Qaeda sites, and it's greeted with a yawn.

Some folks think if torture is appalling, it's appalling no matter who does it. If it's not considered appalling when certain people do it, then I have to wonder if the agenda is not opposition to torture, but opposition to something else.

Utilitarian answer, because it doesn't work.

I've linked to two sources (Brian Ross of ABC News, New York Times) which say it does work, and cite examples of it working. Are they stupid, are they lying, or does torture sometimes work?

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.

Re: Um... A couple of points

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

Apparently, only when we do it.

Because we're supposed to be better than they are. We're supposed to be the good guys. That means we don't get to play with the same set of toys. We don't get to firebomb whole neighborhoods to get one enemy combatant. We don't get to kidnap and hold their relatives hostage so that they surrender. We don't get to detain people just because they're "a fucking Hajji". We don't get to bash in the door of every house in a village just because some informant (whose motives we don't know, because he speaks English and we don't speak Persian or Pashtun) says there were Al Qaeda or Taliban operatives there.

We don't get to torture suspects. We don't even get to torture people we know are guilty.

The other guys are terrorists. We expect them to do fucked up shit. It's not news when some Al Qaeda "operative" whips out a knife and saws some dude's wang off, or nails him out on an anthill, or does some other guro shit, just as we expect them to drive carbombs into souks and detonate them. They aren't primarily trying to impress people with how noble and righteous they are - they're trying to impress on people how far they will go, how committed they are.

If we're the good guys, we should act that way. For a long time, we managed (somehow) to keep a mostly positive image in the world theatre (for the most part) - the Americans were self-absorbed, self-centered, a little greedy, and sometimes bumbling - but they were also honest joes, who would be at your back (and not with a shiv to stick it in) when you needed help, generous to a fault, brilliant scientists, and could be counted on to do the right thing - if, sometimes, only after doing every other thing (thank you, Mr. Churchill). Too bad the last five years or so have pretty much burned that opinion out of the world memeset altogether - all the good done by WWII, and the Marshall Plan, and everything that came after, burned up in one administration - something all our dirty dealings in South and Central America, in Africa, and in the Middle East couldn't do.

Good guys don't torture people. Countries that want to keep a good public relations image (and anyone who does not think this is, in fact, as much a war of public relations and memetic engineering as it is a war of bullets and explosives is a damn fool) don't torture people. Because nobody sees torture as a good act - nobody wants bamboo slivers shoved up their fingernails, nobody wants to be waterboarded, nobody wants to have glass rods shoved up their urethra and then tapped with a hammer, nobody wants to find out how much current a car battery can dump through wet sponges, nobody wants to be beaten, or forced to stay awake for seventy-two hours straight (except maybe medical residents - and I hardly think they want to), or see their holy works shat upon, or be forced to eat unclean goods (whether that's a pork roast, meat on Friday, or something some dude urinated in). Nobody wants to be tortured.

In the end, it wouldn't matter if torture did work - and everyone I know who knows something of the subject states that, in the aggregate, torture is a somewhat useful tool for subjugation and squashing dissent (but not as useful as certain dictators would like it to be - it enrages as much as it terrifies), and a rotten, damn-near useless tool for actually gathering useful, timely intelligence. Because even if it did work - even if we had a magic drug that made lying under torture impossible - that doesn't mean it's right.

The old saying is "crime doesn't pay" - but, realistically, it really does, if you're smart and know how not to get too greedy - there are plenty of drug dealers, counterfeiters, bank robbers, and breaking & entering guys who never go to jail, never get caught. Even murder has only about 50% conviction rate. But just because it works - just because you could make a decent living robbing banks, or breaking into other's homes, or stealing cars or killing people - doesn't mean it would be right to do so.