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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (229247)	5/1/2007 10:16:00 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You are a nut

To: michael97123 who wrote (229247)	5/1/2007 2:30:19 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Michael, is there a cute little kitty playing with a ball of yarn in the soon to be bombed school? And maybe a puppy? I'm trying to work up enough emotion to overcome my rejection of the cartoon character of the hypothetical and my revulsion of torture and agree with you. How about if we allow torture but if the torturer was wrong about his assumptions he has to undergo exactly the same torture for the same duration? Do you think we'd have a long line of "I'm absolutely sure that guy's a terrorist with a ticking bomb" hooded guys lined up and eager to "beat the truth out of them?" And would it really work? Men and women who fly their bodies into buildings at hundreds of miles an hour aren't likely to tell the truth, and obviously not in the first hour or so, even with torture. They will certainly talk, but what will they say and how reliable will it be? Having said all that, if you take everything in your hypothetical as totally factual and you can be absolutely certain that the choices are torturing a bomber into telling the location of the bomb or a bunch of dead kids...let the screaming begin. But the real world NEVER works that way. The other guy is just as tough, just as smart, and just as committed. The people that are willing to torture others are usually sadistic bastards who get sicker and sicker. Society changes when such behaviors are accepted so that the rules of civilization erode along with the codes of behavior that protect all of us. It's just a bad idea if you live in the real world instead of a Bruce Willis Hollywood world. Ed