Truly Scary Stuff

[The_Hanged_Man]

I don't know if y'all are up to speed on our new strategy for Iraq (Death Squads modelled after El Salvadore's priest- and nun-killers). It's bad. Very bad. But worse was the response of some fellow Americans, like most of these guys over at freerepublic.

This crap is downright frightening. It's bad enough that we're contemplating terrorism, assassination, and fear as a strategy for the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, but to see American citizens saying stuff like we should blow up Sunni mosques, that'd solve the problem . . .

What's happened to us?

edit - fbmf, it turns out that certain naughty words aren't being replaced in subject headings. I edited it. Sorry . . .

[Maj]

I don't mind pin-point assassination... At the right time. See, if Bush really wanted to just waste Saddam, he should have just sent in a totally covert team to kill the bastard. Would have saved time, money, and lives.

But now, we're pissed because we walked up to another country, hit it with a stick, and it's fighting back.

[Username17]

Assassination is a form of killing people. There is nothing, anywhere, that makes killing people on some kind of arbitrary "field of battle" any better than killing someone any other way. If it is actually successful, assassination makes a lot of sense. It's just like any other way of killing people - but with a lot less "collateral damage" (that lovely term they use for "killing a crap tonne of innocent people that don't have a damned thing to do with whatever argument we are having").

But... based on previous uses of this "tactic" (in Chile, El Salvador, Columbia, Guatemala, and Peru), we aren't really seeing a shift in combat emphasis from missiles to sniper rifles. We are seeing a shift from "shock and awe" to "extortive torture". Which is to say, we are taking the Abu Graib prison abuse and moving it outside into peoples' homes.

The thing is, while the CIA has been whining about how this is a necessary evil for like fifty years - we haven't actually seen any success stories out of it. Ever. Chile didn't miraculously become a nice place because people got their genitals electrocuted! Hell, Guatemala was our ally before we started torturing people. Now they hate us, who would have thought?

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

If you support any kind of collateral damage at all, then there's no reason you shouldn't support torture.

Personally, I find that the oft-accepted 'necessary evil' of collateral damage a lot more repulsive than torture, so my reponse is tepid at best.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Just counting the days until W launches ICBMs.

Hey, why not do this? The Islamic world has been saying that America is the Great Satan for decades, why not prove them right?

Just paying attention, because in 40 years, if I'm still alive, I want to be able to tell my grandkids how World War 3 started.

[Maj]

If you support any kind of collateral damage at all, then there's no reason you shouldn't support torture.

I don't like torture, but I understand that it can be an effective tool. What pisses me off the most about Abu Graib is that the US has this high and mighty position on being all great, nice, and restorers of values to dictator laden countries... And we were hypocrites. I could even forgive hypocracy as just a mistake or miscommunication, but damn! They were writing essays on how to get around the Geneva conventions...

The Islamic world has been saying that America is the Great Satan for decades

Um... There is no Islamic world. There are Islamic countries and Islamic people, but the notion of the Islamic world is as flawed as the notion of a Christian world. Just because a ton of people happen to claim the same religion doesn't mean it's this united monolithic religious structure.

We were lied to... It's not.

[Username17]

I don't like torture, but I understand that it can be an effective tool.

Then there are things you don't understand, obviously. Torture isn't an effective tool. It isn't a precision instrument. It isn't some kind of dangerous, yet potent elixir. It doesn't work very well!

That's the big tragedy out of this. Torture is an ineffective tool for the collection of information. It is an ineffective tool for quelling resistance. And it is an ineffective tool for asserting control over any situation.

The only thing that torture is good for is staining the jizz rags of people who get off on torturing people, and I'm not kidding.

---

Consider it like this: what is the logical thing to do when the state starts torturing you?

1. Word of people being tortured is going to anger a lot of people. It is laughable to assume that they will allow you to leave alive.

2. There are probably few people on earth that you hate more than the person applying electrodes to your penis.

3. If they think you know something that's worth torturing you for, they won't kill you until you spill it.

4. No regime lasts forever, and anyone is prison by the writ of this regime will likely be freed by the next.

.: You should spit in their face and drag things out as long as possible.

That's the logical thing to do. We aren't talking about funky edge cases of game theory like putting a gun to the heads of children. We are talking about winner-take-all pain sessions. The logical thing to do is to not cooperate.

And if you torture people to the point that they are unable to make logical choices, they are also unlikely to be able to give coherent and useful testimony about anything.

---

So yeah, if someone writes up a doctrine for why you should torture people, it's not because they are willing to use any tool at their disposal to beat enemies - it's because they like the idea of people having car batteries hooked up to their ass without consent.

The Bush administration has shown that they seriously would rather act out rape fantasies than pacify either of the nations they conquered. And in the future - history will show that.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

1105432793[/unixtime]]
Um... There is no Islamic world. There are Islamic countries and Islamic people, but the notion of the Islamic world is as flawed as the notion of a Christian world. Just because a ton of people happen to claim the same religion doesn't mean it's this united monolithic religious structure.

We were lied to... It's not.

Alright, pretend I used whatever word you would have preferred.

either way, they don't like us, and I can't say I blame them.

[Sir Neil]

Hey, why not do this? The Islamic world has been saying that America is the Great Satan for decades, why not prove them right?

Just paying attention, because in 40 years, if I'm still alive, I want to be able to tell my grandkids how World War 3 started.

We were proving them right. Satan is a tempter, not a destroyer. And by the CIA's count, this is World War 4. WWIII was against the communists.

[Username17]

If you really want to get technical, Satan is a character from a novel. Or if you wanted to be snide - you'd point out that the idea of Satan is an infection of Zoroastrian thought into Judaism.

Judaism historically recognizes many gods but worships only one.

Catholicism officially recognizes only one god, but various sects of Christianity worship one or three.

Zoroastrianism acknowledges two gods - one of good and one of evil.

---

Whenever people talk about SATAN in a Judeo-christian outlook, they are being dualistic heretics like unto the Cathars. Bust out the bible if you want on this - there aint no such thing as a god of evil in the original works.

-Username17

[User3]

1105469577[/unixtime]]If you really want to get technical, Satan is a character from a novel.

Paradise Lost? Or are you thinking of another?

[Maj]

Frank - My idea of what torture is is not limited to what you posted. The dictionary doesn't define torture as something you do in order to extract information, it's anguish of body or mind, something that causes agony or pain, or the infliction of intense pain.

And I think there's a place for that in society - namely, as punitive measures. I am not against the death penalty. I am not against castrating rapists. I am not against treating someone guilty of a crime just as they treated their victims.

Count - "The Great Satan" was made up by Ayatollah Khomeini, former leader of Iran. He doesn't speak for all Muslims - especially considering that most of the worlds Muslims aren't in the Middle East - they're in Indonesia. But considering that right now everyone dislikes us, we can still be The Great Satan if you want us to...

[Username17]

And I think there's a place for that in society - namely, as punitive measures. I am not against the death penalty. I am not against castrating rapists. I am not against treating someone guilty of a crime just as they treated their victims.

Why? So you can feel better?

Mutilations, murder, and prolonged infliction of pain does not, in actual application, reduce the incidence of crime. Killing people who kill people to somehow show that killing people is wrong is an obvious - and failed concept.

Cutting the heads off of murderers in the public square does not reduce the number of murders. Or aggravated assaults. Or anything else. However "justified" it may seem or be, it is not effective. And tht means that there is no place for it in society. Society isn't about making the family of a victim of homocide feel smug about the fate of the miscreant who killed him - it's about minimizing the number of families who have to deal with one of their members being murdered in the first place.

All the discussion about "justice" and "mercy" is obscuring the point. The point is that neither of those ideas mean shit, because the correct course of action is whatever it is that makes there be less call for justice or mercy in the future. And that course of action isn't cutting the balls off of rapists. Most rapists don't ejaculate anyway, and cutting off their balls just locks them into a cycle of domination and pain infliction - a castrated rapist is a more likely repeat offender than a whole one.

Morality doesn't even enter into this debate. It's just a question of what works and what doesn't work. If for some reason the best way to reduce the number of murders was to give every murderer a hundred dollars, a lollipop, and blowjob, then that's what we as a society should do - fairness be damned.*

Eye for an Eye bullshit has consistently shown itself to increase crime. Especially violent crime. The most explosive example, of course, is the Legalist doctrine of the 2nd century BCE in China. The theory was that by increasing the severity of punishments for minor offenses, they could scare everyone away from even contemplating major offenses. This ended, naturally, in road crews overthrowing the entire country because their rain-inspired tardiness doomed them to judicial execution anyway and they had nothing to lose.

-Username17

*: It's not, btw. While I doubt that it's been tried, similar incentive programs in El Salvador and Peru have shown corresponding increases in murder rates. It is logical to assume, therefore, that the ideal course of action would be dissimilar to the example proposal.

[Maj]

Frank, could it just be that I'm an evil woman who thinks that people who do bad things shouldn't get better treatment than what they gave?

I don't give a damn about whether or not punishing people raises or lowers the crime rate. What pisses me off is the fact that people who commit crimes can end up with a better life than what they had before, and in our weak-ass society, they are pretty much unproductive leeches. Damn it, I'm all for slave labor - using those people who gave up their rights when they tromped all over the rights of others.

[Username17]

It could indeed. Slave labor, of course, has a depressionary effect on the value of labor generally and its mere presence in society hurts you - the person on the street - by lowering the available number of jobs and possible asking price for labor. If prisoners work for free, free people don't eat. Period.

Laws aren't about making you feel good. They aren't about punishing the guilty, or even rewarding the good. It's all about rewarding compliance. That's all it's about, and that's all it should be about.

Every act of society, every chastisement and reward, is all about making the choice for every individual to cooperate with society or not be, on the whole, a positive for cooperation. This is, in general, extremely easy to achieve. The average person cannot simultaneously make all of their own needed food and shelter while performing medical research relevent to their own situation and producing their own diagnosis and caring for themselves while still producing their own entertainment. It's just not practical. The rewards, therefore, for cooperating with society have the potential to be vast. Every person can cooperate by performing some task that is desired by the whole, and specialization provides so much excess production that every person can have all of their needs taken care of and more besides.

But there has to be a stick, in addition to the formiddable carrot. And that stick has to be able to increase in boginess for increasing levels of non-cooperation all the way up to the ultimate "crime" - which is of course armed revolt against the state. That is the maximum possible form of non-cooperation, so only it can justify state-sanctioned murder, which is in turn the ultimate penalty that can be leveled against a non-cooperator. As long as the prospective punishment for any lesser form of non-cooperation is still less than that, the choice to cooperate with your punishment can still be seen in a positive light.

Making a system of laws is just like making a character. There are things you put in, and things you get out. It can be min/maxed, and not doing so is letting your party members down. And since in this case, the "party" is "every man, woman, and child in your society" - that's completely unacceptable behavior.

If you ever make it so that there is no perceived benefit in cooperating with your society - people will not cooperate with it. And they will make a new society which does encourage their cooperation.

Police are welcome, nay encouraged to shoot people who are running around with a gun. But the penalty for any level of cooperation more than none has to be less than that. There has to be a reason for people to voluntarily sit around for their trial and accepting their punishment instead of headbutting the bailiff and taking however small a chance there is to run out of the courthouse, jack a car, drive to Canada, and plot the overthrow of their former nation. There has to be. Always. Or people will do that shit.

Desiring capital punishment isn't evil. It's stupid. It's like saying that people should play "Fighters" because the flavor text says that they are good in melee. Society doesn't read the damned flavor text. It's all numbers. And those numbers are peoples' lives. Hundreds of millions of peoples' lives. We can't afford to screw this up.

-Username17

[Maj]

Slave labor, of course, has a depressionary effect on the value of labor generally and its mere presence in society hurts you - the person on the street - by lowering the available number of jobs and possible asking price for labor. If prisoners work for free, free people don't eat. Period.

It's only been recently that societies have not used slave labor because it's morally bankrupt. In the past, some of the most successful civilizations have been based on slavery. I find your explanation a little difficult to accept.

Besides, we already have screwed up our society. Our system has fallen prey to too many laws and nigling little details. It's a victim of its own people's stupidity. We have so much bureaucracy that we aren't running efficiently. Slave labor, capital punishment, whatever isn't going to change the fact that we don't have our shit together.

The law is about lawyers who can find the most loopholes so stupid people can continue to break it. We pay people for the ability to be able to evade punishment, and we succeed.

Go US.

[RandomCasualty]

1105433549[/unixtime]]
.: You should spit in their face and drag things out as long as possible.

That's the logical thing to do. We aren't talking about funky edge cases of game theory like putting a gun to the heads of children. We are talking about winner-take-all pain sessions. The logical thing to do is to not cooperate.

But there's the flaw in your thinking, torture isn't an appeal to logic, it's about making pain and agony so great that logic no longer applies.

Sure, you hate the guy who is torturing you, but so what? The more you resist, the more painful things get, and waiting for a regime to get replaced so you get freed doesn't do you a heck of a lot of good now.

Torture can actually be effective in terms of breaking people. If you don't think that you will be rescued, it's very likely you'll break under torture after some time.

If your choices are

A) Being locked up but unharmed.
or
B) Being locked up and getting your genitals electrocuted each day.

Chances are people are going to choose A.

Also as far as the death penalty goes, while it's true that it isn't much of a deterrant, killing someone can be more efficient than locking him up, in that he's no longer consuming resources to feed and support. You can also use that to save lives as well, by taking thier organs and giving them to people in need of a transplant. Life imprisonment is just plain stupid... Why waste resources on someone who is never going to be let back into society?

[Neeek]

1105527526[/unixtime]]

Torture can actually be effective in terms of breaking people. If you don't think that you will be rescued, it's very likely you'll break under torture after some time.

If your choices are

A) Being locked up but unharmed.
or
B) Being locked up and getting your genitals electrocuted each day.

Chances are people are going to choose A.

Unfortunatly, that assumes that your torturers believe you when you start telling the truth, and that you actually know the truth in the first place. More realistically, once a person are broken, he is far more likely to just tell his tormentors what he thinks they want to know, to end the suffering. Which again, make torture unrelable and ineffective.

[Boulie_98]

1105490049[/unixtime]]Eye for an Eye bullshit has consistently shown itself to increase crime. Especially violent crime. The most explosive example, of course, is the Legalist doctrine of the 2nd century BCE in China. The theory was that by increasing the severity of punishments for minor offenses, they could scare everyone away from even contemplating major offenses. This ended, naturally, in road crews overthrowing the entire country because their rain-inspired tardiness doomed them to judicial execution anyway and they had nothing to lose.

Do you perchance have a link? I'd love to read more about it.

[RandomCasualty]

1105545868[/unixtime]]
Unfortunatly, that assumes that your torturers believe you when you start telling the truth, and that you actually know the truth in the first place. More realistically, once a person are broken, he is far more likely to just tell his tormentors what he thinks they want to know, to end the suffering. Which again, make torture unrelable and ineffective.

Yeah, the real problem too with torture is when you start torturing people who don't know anything, because they'll just start making up all sorts of shit.

Also, when you're known to torture people, you're much less likely to get people to surrender to you. Your enemies are much more likely to fight to the last man, since getting shot to death is preferable to getting tortured.

[Username17]

Do you perchance have a link? I'd love to read more about it.

Some literature on the subject.

Unfortunately, different transliterations of Chinese names make it really hard to find these things on the web. Sigh. Here's the really short version of the story:

The second emperor (Hu-Hai) continued the harsh punishment-theory of justice practiced by his father and devised by Li Ssu:

According to the laws of Lord Shang [Shang Yang], the scattering of ashes in the streets called for corporal punishment. Now, the scattering of ashes is a minor offense, whereas corporal punishment is a severe penalty. Only the astute rulers have the insight to apply severe punishments for minor offenses. If a minor offense is punished severely, people can imagine what will be done against a serious offense! Thus, people do not dare to violate the laws. [de Bary, Chan, and Watson, 1960]

However, torential rainfalls in the province of Chu left a group of draftees stranded in the mud. And while it is not known precisely what was said, it is known that once they determined that they were doomed to die regardless of whether they revolted or not - they killed their officers and took over the province.

Their leader in this endeavor, Chen Sheh, became King of Chu and eventually a proverb came out of the ordeal:

Even Chen Sheh can be King.

It's only been recently that societies have not used slave labor because it's morally bankrupt. In the past, some of the most successful civilizations have been based on slavery. I find your explanation a little difficult to accept.

It's only recently that having 40% of your population starving to death at any given time was considered unacceptable, what's your point?

The total amount of needed labor is not unlimited. Any particular economic system can only find use for however much labor it can distribute the production of. So in a Capitalist economy, like the one we have in the US, you can only use as much labor as there are dollars in the hands of consumers to purchase the production of that labor with.

So if you enslave some people, you use up jobs in two ways. First, you simply have people performing tasks - say putting the date stamp on milk cartons - and those people don't have jobs. So mechanically, there are less jobs available for you and me. The second way, of course, is that you now have milk cartons waiting to be sold for which no dollars went into the hands of consumers.

In short, not only are the jobs taken by slaves coming out of the jobs that could be worked by free people - it's substantially more than that. Slaves produce negative economy. They increase supply and reduce demand. In our modern era of industrialization, supply is virtually limitless, and the only thing that keeps our economy afloat is demand. That's why TV economists are always freaking out about consumer confidence.

Well guess what? Slavery reduces consumer confidence. It makes things to buy without making people to buy them - it drives any Capitalist economy into the dirt. It also drives Command economies and barter economies into the dirt, and if you'd really like I can draw you diagrams for why that happens too.

--

Now, many civilizations have had slavery in the past. Some even have it right now. And their economies sucked ass, and the current countries that do it are laughing stocks.

Simply, when slave labor has been employed it has acted as a depressionary effect on science, economic growth, and political stability. The wonderous city states of Greece are famous for the amount of thought produced by their slaveholding layabouts - but they aren't famous for actually producing any technical innovations. Sure they thought up steam engines, even made some working models. But they didn't put them into practice.

And why not? If you have a working steam engine, why the hell wouldn't you immediately make steam-powered transportation and fabrication devices? What the hell? Simply, the same thing that happens to jobs and demand in a capitalist economy happens to capital in a feudal economy.

There is again a finite amount of investment you can make, and if you have slavery then your capital investment gets continually used to keep the slaves down, because you'd have less slaves and less immediate production if you diverted your capital investment into anything else. Simply, once you have slaves at all, you can't afford to do anything else.

Athen's slave holding allowed Plato to sit around all day being a drunken idiot, but it also kept the city from ever getting out of the cycle of subsistence farming and raiding.

-Username17

[Boulie_98]

1105576442[/unixtime]]

Even Chen Sheh can be King.

Ha! I love that part. Thanks for the info!

[The_Hanged_Man]

To follow up on what Frank says, slavery is what in the end destroyed the South. If they had invested money in actual stuff, like railroads, factories, kewl machines that let one man instead of 8 harvest a field of wheat . . . that would have meant more than all those stupid "going back in time to the Civil War w/ AK-47's" fantasies that rednecks dream about. Instead, they invested their money in slaves. And a little bit in the home furnishing and clothing industries.

It's always kinda nice when you see Evil being it's Own Reward like that. I'm still hopeful we'll see a little o' that in 2006.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Yeah, one of the South's big wake up calls was when the civil war started and they realized that they can't eat cotton.

[Lago_AM3P]

Well guess what? Slavery reduces consumer confidence. It makes things to buy without making people to buy them - it drives any Capitalist economy into the dirt. It also drives Command economies and barter economies into the dirt, and if you'd really like I can draw you diagrams for why that happens too.

I would like a diagram of this, Frank.

It's always kinda nice when you see Evil being it's Own Reward like that. I'm still hopeful we'll see a little o' that in 2006.

Heh heh...