23/11: Yes, it's pretty funny
18/11: This blog needs more bourbon
There are several. But let’s take four and call ‘em out specifically.
First, in any halfway civilized nation of this world, once you start torturing people, you’ve pretty much written off convicting them of anything later. And note yes, there is a story today on this, but it’s hardly what I’d call news, exactly.
This is of some importance, and leads to a great deal of trouble, as time goes by. Let’s imagine you’re pretty sure the people in question present some trouble to your own policy aims. You’ve got strong anecdotal evidence for this, say. Like that they were shooting at you. And videotapes turn up of them saying, ‘Hey, let’s shoot at the international troops when they come here to displace the current government’.
Once you torture them (we’ll get into why you might do such a thing shortly, and why it’s actually a pretty stupid reason), you’ve got a problem. Most legitimate courts take a dim view of that sort of thing, and for some pretty good reasons. They’ll almost certainly dismiss any ‘evidence’ you believe you procured by torturing people. Generally, if you’re a law enforcement agency and you’ve been mistreating your prisoners, you may also find yourself brought up on charges later, too, for having done so. The judiciary may also balance any charges you manage to make stick in the matter at hand without that evidence against the fact that, well, you’ve already tortured them, and the state responsible now pretty much owes them restitution, which kind of skews sentencing in the accused’s favour. All very complicated. It generally makes such moves as waterboarding people extremely inadvisable, if you’d actually like them to do time for any alleged crimes.
Reason number two I’ve mentioned in this space previously: note also that it does rather disgrace your own government, doing this, too. Let’s say you’re trying to convince people they really, really don’t want an Islamist government, that they can do better. Like, let’s try democracy, now. That’s the sort of thing we do, and life that way is pretty okay…
But then, when you catch the Islamists, you torture them…
Doesn’t look good. Trust me. That’s sort of undermining your whole argument, right there. Sure, you can hope the man in the street in Kabul will think, practically, ‘Well, the Taliban chopped people’s hands off and stoned people, but the Westerners so far have just been waterboarding people and incarcerating them without a trial… I guess that’s incrementally better… I get to keep my hands once I get out in eight years’, but let’s face it, you’re not really offering him what anyone’s going to see as a real inspiring choice, there.
Note also that it hands one hell of a weapon to ideological enemies. They can say to their recruitees-to-be: look, these are the evil bastards we are fighting. This is how corrupt, how cruel, how vicious they are. Our methods, however barbaric and mediaeval, are thus now justified. It goes from ‘they are corrupt and spoiled and eat too much fast food and dress too immodestly’ to ‘they torture us and hold us for years without redress to justice’. The former, some folk might not actually find so convincing. The latter, it’s got a bit more weight, I’m afraid.
Reason number three is the real kicker, so if you’ve been nodding off, pay attention here. Reason number three is: so far as anyone knows, torture really doesn’t work well at all if your goal is actually getting quality information. It’s funny (if you’ve a slightly demented sense of humour), I know, but yes, the chief argument certain apologists for torture make—that sometimes ya gotta cause a little trauma in some extremely unlikeable dark-skinned, bearded guy’s soft tissue to forestall the potential imminent dirty bomb explosion—is pretty much bullshit. It’s a Hollywood fantasy. Torture is perhaps unsurprisingly popular with pissed off people and frightened people and, frankly, sadistic people (and let’s face it—that covers us all, at some time or other) as simply satisfying our urge that people who scare us or threaten us suffer in sufficiently viscerally satisfying ways. But that’s the only reason you see it used on prime-time dramas. Because the audience, I’m afraid, does rather like it. Bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him. The gruff hero says, okay, the security cameras are off, you’re all alone with me and I’ve got a lead pipe, so let’s dance, asshole… Oh, yeah! What fun.
But the experts will tell you: so far as anyone’s really demonstrated, when you actually do that (and yes, they’ve tried it), it doesn’t get you particularly good intel. It can absolutely get people to say what you want to hear—which is why it’s used rather heavily in nasty authoritarian hellholes who’d like to hear people accused of crimes against the state confess to them in sufficiently lurid and appalling detail. Makes great propaganda. See ‘show trials’. And which is also why it was used by the Inquisition and by Protestant witch hunters to get accused witches and heretics to accuse more witches and heretics and thus keep them in business.
Now here’s the thing. You can take my word for it. Or you can take the word of these guys at the National Defense Intelligence College. Either way, I guess.
Reason number four is more exotic. But it’s a real kicker, too.
Reason number four is: because it runs away with you. Because maybe you did it in the first place in good faith, so far as that goes. You were stressed, your public was (or some of them were) on your ass, you figured you’d go for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, see if it gets the job done… And what about those damned dirty bombs in packing crates we keep hearing about?
But once you’ve done that, you’ve locked your key in the trunk. Because anyone you’ve done that to now has to be guilty, or you know you’re going to jail and/or you’re going to be facing some really, really harsh judgements in the histories about to be written. And if they’re not especially guilty… or just not so guilty as you’d been thinking they might be… well, what can you do?
Well, you could torture ‘em some more, I guess. Get ‘em to say they are guilty, or a hell of a lot more than they are. Maybe someone’ll buy the confession’s good, never mind how it was secured. Maybe you’ll believe it yourself. Might help you to sleep at night a little better, anyway…
I could spin this on into what else can happen, and what happens when you reason that you can’t let them face a real court or you’re cooked, so you decide to cook up your own… But seriously, let’s move on. Looks to me like it’s maybe seven years past time we did.
So, speaking of, there’s a simple piece of advice I can offer with respect to that last reason—that way it runs away with you. Someone—possibly your father—I find parents often manage to come up with this sort of generic advice sooner or later—has already illuminated you on this really quite simple principle:
When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Seriously, that’s your advice, right there, and the one thing I’d say to a certain president-elect on the subject of a certain offshore prison he’s going to have to deal with shortly, and, in fact, the one thing I’d say to everyone in the chain of command involved in it. I appreciate that a whole ugly mess is going to go down once Guantanamo is properly shuttered—that the prisoners shuttled off to various formal and independent legal systems are, in fact, going to be acquitted for lack of solid and untainted evidence, and there’s going to be political fallout up the wazoo, with the hawks bitching that the bad guys are getting away, and some probably actually pretty bad guys happily waltzing around the world on speaking tours, flaunting their scars and telling the world that America is a Great Satan that tortures Moslems and there is nothing to suggest democratic governments are in any way more just that Islamist ones. Hell, some of them are probably going to get right back to doing what they were doing before they got nailed…
And then again, it’s quite possible there are some relatively innocent men some very, very confused jailers put away for way too long for misbegotten reasons that built incestuously the way we have long known such reasons do—on nothing but the previous set of misbegotten reasons—some relatively innocent men who, by that action, will get a limited measure of justice at least, after all of this, and go free… I don’t know if that moves you, especially. I don’t really know whether ‘innocent until proven guilty’ still means anything to any of you, I guess.
But seriously, I’m not sure I care what it means to anyone anymore. I can’t afford to. Seen enough bad justifications for incredibly stupid moves in the last eight years, if I got too worked up about one more fucking moron who’s completely lost track of just what makes his civilization worth defending in the first place, I’d just spend three hundred and sixty five by twenty four hours of every year watching my blood pressure climb and listening to the valves failing in my chest cavity.
So, for this practical reason, I have to say: I now cannot afford to care if you actually care.
And so, accordingly, all I can actually practically ask of anyone involved in this mess from hereon in is: just keep in mind that bit of advice about the hole.
Your parents weren’t wrong, there.
First, in any halfway civilized nation of this world, once you start torturing people, you’ve pretty much written off convicting them of anything later. And note yes, there is a story today on this, but it’s hardly what I’d call news, exactly.
This is of some importance, and leads to a great deal of trouble, as time goes by. Let’s imagine you’re pretty sure the people in question present some trouble to your own policy aims. You’ve got strong anecdotal evidence for this, say. Like that they were shooting at you. And videotapes turn up of them saying, ‘Hey, let’s shoot at the international troops when they come here to displace the current government’.
Once you torture them (we’ll get into why you might do such a thing shortly, and why it’s actually a pretty stupid reason), you’ve got a problem. Most legitimate courts take a dim view of that sort of thing, and for some pretty good reasons. They’ll almost certainly dismiss any ‘evidence’ you believe you procured by torturing people. Generally, if you’re a law enforcement agency and you’ve been mistreating your prisoners, you may also find yourself brought up on charges later, too, for having done so. The judiciary may also balance any charges you manage to make stick in the matter at hand without that evidence against the fact that, well, you’ve already tortured them, and the state responsible now pretty much owes them restitution, which kind of skews sentencing in the accused’s favour. All very complicated. It generally makes such moves as waterboarding people extremely inadvisable, if you’d actually like them to do time for any alleged crimes.
Reason number two I’ve mentioned in this space previously: note also that it does rather disgrace your own government, doing this, too. Let’s say you’re trying to convince people they really, really don’t want an Islamist government, that they can do better. Like, let’s try democracy, now. That’s the sort of thing we do, and life that way is pretty okay…
But then, when you catch the Islamists, you torture them…
Doesn’t look good. Trust me. That’s sort of undermining your whole argument, right there. Sure, you can hope the man in the street in Kabul will think, practically, ‘Well, the Taliban chopped people’s hands off and stoned people, but the Westerners so far have just been waterboarding people and incarcerating them without a trial… I guess that’s incrementally better… I get to keep my hands once I get out in eight years’, but let’s face it, you’re not really offering him what anyone’s going to see as a real inspiring choice, there.
Note also that it hands one hell of a weapon to ideological enemies. They can say to their recruitees-to-be: look, these are the evil bastards we are fighting. This is how corrupt, how cruel, how vicious they are. Our methods, however barbaric and mediaeval, are thus now justified. It goes from ‘they are corrupt and spoiled and eat too much fast food and dress too immodestly’ to ‘they torture us and hold us for years without redress to justice’. The former, some folk might not actually find so convincing. The latter, it’s got a bit more weight, I’m afraid.
Reason number three is the real kicker, so if you’ve been nodding off, pay attention here. Reason number three is: so far as anyone knows, torture really doesn’t work well at all if your goal is actually getting quality information. It’s funny (if you’ve a slightly demented sense of humour), I know, but yes, the chief argument certain apologists for torture make—that sometimes ya gotta cause a little trauma in some extremely unlikeable dark-skinned, bearded guy’s soft tissue to forestall the potential imminent dirty bomb explosion—is pretty much bullshit. It’s a Hollywood fantasy. Torture is perhaps unsurprisingly popular with pissed off people and frightened people and, frankly, sadistic people (and let’s face it—that covers us all, at some time or other) as simply satisfying our urge that people who scare us or threaten us suffer in sufficiently viscerally satisfying ways. But that’s the only reason you see it used on prime-time dramas. Because the audience, I’m afraid, does rather like it. Bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him. The gruff hero says, okay, the security cameras are off, you’re all alone with me and I’ve got a lead pipe, so let’s dance, asshole… Oh, yeah! What fun.
But the experts will tell you: so far as anyone’s really demonstrated, when you actually do that (and yes, they’ve tried it), it doesn’t get you particularly good intel. It can absolutely get people to say what you want to hear—which is why it’s used rather heavily in nasty authoritarian hellholes who’d like to hear people accused of crimes against the state confess to them in sufficiently lurid and appalling detail. Makes great propaganda. See ‘show trials’. And which is also why it was used by the Inquisition and by Protestant witch hunters to get accused witches and heretics to accuse more witches and heretics and thus keep them in business.
Now here’s the thing. You can take my word for it. Or you can take the word of these guys at the National Defense Intelligence College. Either way, I guess.
Reason number four is more exotic. But it’s a real kicker, too.
Reason number four is: because it runs away with you. Because maybe you did it in the first place in good faith, so far as that goes. You were stressed, your public was (or some of them were) on your ass, you figured you’d go for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, see if it gets the job done… And what about those damned dirty bombs in packing crates we keep hearing about?
But once you’ve done that, you’ve locked your key in the trunk. Because anyone you’ve done that to now has to be guilty, or you know you’re going to jail and/or you’re going to be facing some really, really harsh judgements in the histories about to be written. And if they’re not especially guilty… or just not so guilty as you’d been thinking they might be… well, what can you do?
Well, you could torture ‘em some more, I guess. Get ‘em to say they are guilty, or a hell of a lot more than they are. Maybe someone’ll buy the confession’s good, never mind how it was secured. Maybe you’ll believe it yourself. Might help you to sleep at night a little better, anyway…
I could spin this on into what else can happen, and what happens when you reason that you can’t let them face a real court or you’re cooked, so you decide to cook up your own… But seriously, let’s move on. Looks to me like it’s maybe seven years past time we did.
So, speaking of, there’s a simple piece of advice I can offer with respect to that last reason—that way it runs away with you. Someone—possibly your father—I find parents often manage to come up with this sort of generic advice sooner or later—has already illuminated you on this really quite simple principle:
When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Seriously, that’s your advice, right there, and the one thing I’d say to a certain president-elect on the subject of a certain offshore prison he’s going to have to deal with shortly, and, in fact, the one thing I’d say to everyone in the chain of command involved in it. I appreciate that a whole ugly mess is going to go down once Guantanamo is properly shuttered—that the prisoners shuttled off to various formal and independent legal systems are, in fact, going to be acquitted for lack of solid and untainted evidence, and there’s going to be political fallout up the wazoo, with the hawks bitching that the bad guys are getting away, and some probably actually pretty bad guys happily waltzing around the world on speaking tours, flaunting their scars and telling the world that America is a Great Satan that tortures Moslems and there is nothing to suggest democratic governments are in any way more just that Islamist ones. Hell, some of them are probably going to get right back to doing what they were doing before they got nailed…
And then again, it’s quite possible there are some relatively innocent men some very, very confused jailers put away for way too long for misbegotten reasons that built incestuously the way we have long known such reasons do—on nothing but the previous set of misbegotten reasons—some relatively innocent men who, by that action, will get a limited measure of justice at least, after all of this, and go free… I don’t know if that moves you, especially. I don’t really know whether ‘innocent until proven guilty’ still means anything to any of you, I guess.
But seriously, I’m not sure I care what it means to anyone anymore. I can’t afford to. Seen enough bad justifications for incredibly stupid moves in the last eight years, if I got too worked up about one more fucking moron who’s completely lost track of just what makes his civilization worth defending in the first place, I’d just spend three hundred and sixty five by twenty four hours of every year watching my blood pressure climb and listening to the valves failing in my chest cavity.
So, for this practical reason, I have to say: I now cannot afford to care if you actually care.
And so, accordingly, all I can actually practically ask of anyone involved in this mess from hereon in is: just keep in mind that bit of advice about the hole.
Your parents weren’t wrong, there.
07/11: Moral: try anything once
Background: I’m still tinkering on and off with free-flight, rubber-powered models. Turns out, despite the easy ability of electric and gasoline motors and digital radio-control gear, there’s this great and crazy and worldwide and small constituency of old-guard types who still figure tissue and stick and rubber and letting the pretty little thing fly off on its own into the wild blue yonder is the best way to build and fly. There’s plans and tips online, even fairly serious endurance contests (current world record holder flight: 45 minutes, presumably on a thermal). And when I’d found this model I was liking but no manufactured prop I could find to fit it anywhere, I got brave and thought: okay, maybe I can carve one from the helpful instructions these folk have left lying around. Sure, they look daunting, these tiny little things of delicate, helical aerodynamic wizardry, but I’m competent enough with a knife not to take my fingers off (usually), anyway… So let’s try.
The result is pictured, and seems to work nicely. First try came out pretty uneven; the part I was missing, apparently, is respect the edges of the blank and do not overcarve. Second try, I got this. And it’s considerably lighter than a plastic one of lesser dimensions I had for comparison, and looks prettier, besides.
So again, try anything at least twice. Or maybe, revised: try anything twice, with the possible exception of really stupid stuff obviously of little benefit and risking serious bodily harm. Like, say, sticking your hand in a blender. Or walking into a biker bar dressed as Liberace, and asking if anyone’s seen your candelabra. Those, don’t try, I guess. Otherwise, I think it’s probably twice.
I think I’m pretty much okay with that.
I’m also pretty okay with the durn serious voter turnout, the first-time voter turnout, and that whole Virginia thing…
Call it a nostalgia thing. And a sort of proxy pride. I lived there once, a while back, see.
(Stops, pinches self, checks the electoral maps again…) No, seriously, he really won Virginia? You’re just messing with me, the lot of you, right?
Anyway. I regret I didn’t have a nice little essay in the can for this occasion. It’s been a busy few weeks ‘round here. Brief comments follow, therefore, as has been sadly common of late on this here blog…
The first thing, the big thing: thank you, citizens of the US, for ending the Bush II era with appropriately unambiguous finality. Some of you may or may not recall that a few years back, I was blogging somewhat more regularly on the machinations in the US executive branch…
Hadda ease up on that. It was bad for the blood pressure.
MSNBC has a Chicago rally up, right now. Scenes of cheering supporters. A young black woman—I figure maybe early twenties—is in tears. They look like good tears.
I’m a bit sympathetic to some of the McCain folk. It does suck to lose. And as ugly as that campaign got, I do get there are good people who supported that ticket. And there were and are perfectly valid reasons to worry about how someone so new to the scene as Obama could be expected to perform in office. And hell, prior to the convention, I was quite happy to say either candidate would make me happy enough, as both seemed, each in his respective way, to serve as an appropriate riposte to the Bush II years…
And then McCain started getting a bit too equivocal for my tastes on certain issues surrounding torture, and selected an unusually nasty little demagogue for his running mate—yes, at the behest of his very Rovian campaign team, sure, but still—and I started, I guess you could say, to develop somewhat more of a preference…
Ahhh, enough of that. That’s over, for now, I guess… Moving on…
McCain speaking, now. The concession speech is a class act, I have to say, marking the historical nature of the occasion, calling Obama ‘a good man’. His crowd is starting out ugly, booing at the rival’s name, but it sounds like they’re getting onboard, now, sorta, anyway…
Somethin’ to be said for that.
Obama’s got one hell of a full plate, now, sure. Economy in the sewer, the armed forces deeply enmeshed in an ugly little quagmire half a world away… And who knows what level of division domestically, however hard we cross our fingers for that. The treasury numbers are gonna make things daunting, all on their own…
He’s young, enthusiastic, not terribly experienced, sure. Looks thoroughly bright, tho’, I’ll give ‘im that, and that’s more than a little reassuring. I think you can safely assume he’ll be needing that.
I’m glad, I guess, on balance, that people are enthusiastic about him. I worry a bit, now and then, seeing people apparently so swept up in rhetoric and ideals… There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you stand for, but you’ve got to get your feet on the ground, now and then, too…
Speaking of: It’s Obama up, now. “The dream of our founders is alive in our time.”
Okay. Well said. Mr. President-Elect.
And so speaking of, and then again, if they must be moved by fine words, at least they’re words of a man more looking to inspire optimism, ambition, and hope than to find scapegoats to blame, or to widen divisions and fear of the other, the better to exploit them… Better than I can say for some speakers I’ve heard, lately…
And look, the young actually showing up to vote, actually appearing to give a damn, actually trying to engage positively with their political system that’s something of value, make no mistake.
So okay, America. No one asked me, but I’ll say it all the same: I think you probably did pretty good, this eve.
I’m also pretty okay with the durn serious voter turnout, the first-time voter turnout, and that whole Virginia thing…
Call it a nostalgia thing. And a sort of proxy pride. I lived there once, a while back, see.
(Stops, pinches self, checks the electoral maps again…) No, seriously, he really won Virginia? You’re just messing with me, the lot of you, right?
Anyway. I regret I didn’t have a nice little essay in the can for this occasion. It’s been a busy few weeks ‘round here. Brief comments follow, therefore, as has been sadly common of late on this here blog…
The first thing, the big thing: thank you, citizens of the US, for ending the Bush II era with appropriately unambiguous finality. Some of you may or may not recall that a few years back, I was blogging somewhat more regularly on the machinations in the US executive branch…
Hadda ease up on that. It was bad for the blood pressure.
MSNBC has a Chicago rally up, right now. Scenes of cheering supporters. A young black woman—I figure maybe early twenties—is in tears. They look like good tears.
I’m a bit sympathetic to some of the McCain folk. It does suck to lose. And as ugly as that campaign got, I do get there are good people who supported that ticket. And there were and are perfectly valid reasons to worry about how someone so new to the scene as Obama could be expected to perform in office. And hell, prior to the convention, I was quite happy to say either candidate would make me happy enough, as both seemed, each in his respective way, to serve as an appropriate riposte to the Bush II years…
And then McCain started getting a bit too equivocal for my tastes on certain issues surrounding torture, and selected an unusually nasty little demagogue for his running mate—yes, at the behest of his very Rovian campaign team, sure, but still—and I started, I guess you could say, to develop somewhat more of a preference…
Ahhh, enough of that. That’s over, for now, I guess… Moving on…
McCain speaking, now. The concession speech is a class act, I have to say, marking the historical nature of the occasion, calling Obama ‘a good man’. His crowd is starting out ugly, booing at the rival’s name, but it sounds like they’re getting onboard, now, sorta, anyway…
Somethin’ to be said for that.
Obama’s got one hell of a full plate, now, sure. Economy in the sewer, the armed forces deeply enmeshed in an ugly little quagmire half a world away… And who knows what level of division domestically, however hard we cross our fingers for that. The treasury numbers are gonna make things daunting, all on their own…
He’s young, enthusiastic, not terribly experienced, sure. Looks thoroughly bright, tho’, I’ll give ‘im that, and that’s more than a little reassuring. I think you can safely assume he’ll be needing that.
I’m glad, I guess, on balance, that people are enthusiastic about him. I worry a bit, now and then, seeing people apparently so swept up in rhetoric and ideals… There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you stand for, but you’ve got to get your feet on the ground, now and then, too…
Speaking of: It’s Obama up, now. “The dream of our founders is alive in our time.”
Okay. Well said. Mr. President-Elect.
And so speaking of, and then again, if they must be moved by fine words, at least they’re words of a man more looking to inspire optimism, ambition, and hope than to find scapegoats to blame, or to widen divisions and fear of the other, the better to exploit them… Better than I can say for some speakers I’ve heard, lately…
And look, the young actually showing up to vote, actually appearing to give a damn, actually trying to engage positively with their political system that’s something of value, make no mistake.
So okay, America. No one asked me, but I’ll say it all the same: I think you probably did pretty good, this eve.
