andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Not that there's anything wrong with torture, right Carrol?
>
> DP
>
> Not according to that distinguished civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz
> -- or the US govt, which is torturing Taliban internees in Afghanistan
> (and Camp Delta) even now. Anyone see the WP article on that (also
> quoted in the cover story of The Economist a week or so back. "If
> you're not violating someone's human rights, you're not doing your
> job," one Special Forces guard said. Makes me proud to be an
> Amerirrican. And when there's stuff that our boys won't, we hand
> the internee over to the Pakistanis with a list of questions we want
> answered. So, Dennis, shut the fuck up with the Stalinist baiting.
> It's tired. Our very own liberal democracy is right now up to its
> elbows in torture, and there are no more Stalinist regimes (except N.
> Korea) to rave about any more. jks
Not that "us stalinists" are apt to have a chance to torture anyone even if we approved of it -- but leaving that aside, I have severe objections to torture by anyone of anyone for any reason. (I'll append to this post an interesting passage from Engels I posted on Pen-L the other day: It deals with the way in which subjective moral objections can achieve the status of historical fact.) Perhaps a partial reason is that I've felt enough pain in my life that I have come to hate even the imagining of it. But I also can't see how the exercise of torture is not utterly corrupting of all parties to it.
U.S. TV and movies are constantly imagining situtions to justify torture -- often making it seem like the mere bubbling over of understandable moral indignation or desperate need. (I assume that Dennis P buys this argument for torture: he doesn't really object to Stalinist Torture; he's just looking for a rationale for the type of torture Justin describes.) It seems impossible to convict cops in a U.S. court for using torture, and almost as impossible to convince juries not to accept evidence obtained by torture.
There is one thing that bothers me about DP's ravings -- he contributes to Doug's side of a long-standing argument between Doug and me. Doug very frequently resorts to suggesting that some argument or other is so irrational that it must have a "psychological cause"; I've usually disagreed. But DP's obsession with Yoshie and me does seem to call for medical assistance.
But I think I would still argue for social and historical grounds rather than motives unique to DP's psyche,
Carrol