even more depressing than a dead computer
I finally finished reading Dude, Where's My Country?
Yeah, Michael Moore can be annoying. Scratch that--he is annoying. But if he's correct about even a single one of those accusations. . . even if the accusation is only partially correct . . .There are far worse things than being annoying.
The drive for money and power are apparently the only motivators for Bush and Co. What ugly souls they must possess.
Do I believe it all? I'd go look at the rebuttals that are plastered all over the internet, but just now I can't bear to read another sentence about the issue. Maybe later.
Ugh.
oh and this is the best answer ever for Cheney's love o' torture:
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon to Berthier 11 Nov 1798, Corres., V, no. 3606 p. 128 quoted in Napoleon on the Art of War)
Granted, Bonaparte eventually lost but he was a kick-ass general, dude. Just watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. . . .ziggy piggy! ziggy piggy!
Yeah, Michael Moore can be annoying. Scratch that--he is annoying. But if he's correct about even a single one of those accusations. . . even if the accusation is only partially correct . . .There are far worse things than being annoying.
The drive for money and power are apparently the only motivators for Bush and Co. What ugly souls they must possess.
Do I believe it all? I'd go look at the rebuttals that are plastered all over the internet, but just now I can't bear to read another sentence about the issue. Maybe later.
Ugh.
* * * * *
oh and this is the best answer ever for Cheney's love o' torture:
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon to Berthier 11 Nov 1798, Corres., V, no. 3606 p. 128 quoted in Napoleon on the Art of War)
Granted, Bonaparte eventually lost but he was a kick-ass general, dude. Just watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. . . .ziggy piggy! ziggy piggy!
I heard Jimmy Carter speaking about his new book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis. I had to buy it. I'm afraid I do regard what is going on in our country as a moral crisis. Carter sounds so reasonable when he talks about things that get most people shouting, I just need to hear more of what he has to say.
ReplyDeleteSee...I have no problem with torture under certain circumstances. That scumbag who killed that entire family in Idaho so he could kidnap, torture, and rape the two children? Yeah, he deserved to be tortured when they first found him, when he said he didn't know where the brother was. Yes, the kid was already dead, but the cops didn't know that, and if that poor boy had been suffering somewhere and had died while waiting for the scumbag to speak...OMG.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm all for torture in certain circumstances.
But I do understand the arguments for and against, and why legalizing, legitimizing, and allowing can be a bad thing.
Still...if anyone took my kid and refused to talk, and all the while he could be starving to death or suffering...*I* would be the first to step up and perform the torture.
it isn't emotionally clear at all, is it, not when you give that example Larissa. Not an easy question.
ReplyDeleteStill to give anything like torture approval means we're jumping right into a side of humanity that is best suppressed.
The argument of the "bad guys" do it and we need their tools so we won't be at a disadvantage makes me literally sick to my stomach. . . And when did their tools work? and when did they become our role model?
Larissa: your support for torture is based on the assumption that it works, when really, it generally DOESN'T. Information extracted under torture is notoriously unreliable, if only because the victim will say anything to make the pain stop, up to and including false things that the torturers want to hear.
ReplyDeleteIt's also very difficult to take the moral high ground, make like you're the good guys when your behavior, in effect, doesn't differentiate us from the bad guys. They torture, we torture. They kills civillians, we kill civillians (only we call it "collateral damage").
"But our INTENTIONS are righteous!" is the standard rebuttal for this, and it's true, intentions count--it's the difference between murder 1 and manslaughter. But if your religion dictates that you kill those who don't believe the same way you do, isn't that right a righteous cause FOR YOU? And let's not even go into the terrorists vs. freedom fighter difference, because once you do a lot of reading on what's been going on in the Middle East, Ireland and South/Central America, a lot of black-and-white becomes grey. People look at what's happening in the world as though the events sprang from some sort of weird vacuum, like "Ohhh, what did WE do, we never deserved any of this!" when we're talking about the culmination of hundreds of years of history and bad decisions and bad blood.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. What it boils down to is: if torture is OK for the US to use against terrorists and insurgents, then torture is also OK for terrorist organizations to use against people who work for the US. If you fight fire with fire, you can't complain about the increased heat. You can't take the moral high ground. It's like a vegan bitching somebody out for eating meat when they're sneaking some hamburger on the sly.