Basat al reeh & dulab. Who Wouldn't Jack Bauer Torture?

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   ptosisposted 13 years ago

   Basat al reeh & dulab. Who Wouldn't Jack Bauer Torture?
   
   Over 1/2  of Americans say torture is justified to thwart terrorists. Do you think torture is OK?
   
   

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   junksellerposted 13 years ago

   Accepting torture is a moral blot on one's self. It not only taints the one accepting it, but it reduces one's legitimacy in the eyes of others and there is little or no evidence that it is in any way effective.
   
   What's really strange is how often torture is used to impugn others. Take any bad guy or nation in history and very often in the list of bad things they have done you will find torture. Yet somehow people accept it in themselves. I don't get it.
   
   The fear of terrorism is completely irrational (I guess that's kind of the point). Our chances of dying by a terrorist are less than our chances of dying by a dog or lightning bolt, yet the fear of it is massively larger than those other things. I hate to say it but people really need to man-up a bit. When we are ruled by irrational fears we enact terrible policies which generally do far more harm then good (e.g. 6 trillion dollars in war, torture, Patriot Act, NDAA, illegal wiretapping and surveillance, targeted killing of Americans, domestic drones, militarized police forces, genital rubbing TSA agents, etc).
   
   People don't seem to understand that terrorism wins not by blowing people up, but by terrifying them so much that they self-inflict harm on themselves. Bin laden beat us and didn't have to really do anything after 911. He just sat in his pad sipping martinis watching as we punched ourselves in the face for a decade. Kind of funny when you think about it.

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