History lesson with Joe Lieberman

[sethsez]

Certainly, the situations are different, but the philosophical underpinning remains the same and is discordant. By taking the stance that we should protect children from viewing simulations of torture he is establishing the following premises; 1.) children need to be protected, 2.) seeing torture makes children unsafe by either giving them the impression that torture is good or generally dissensitizing them to it, 3.) because we feel that children need to be protected from seeing it we are admitting that torture is itself a destructive act or at the very least one we do not want to promote in society by showing it to children.

Well, I also assume he's defining torture differently in both situations. Government-sanctioned torture is (theoretically) solely for the purpose of obtaining crucial information from those who are likely to have it. Casual torture (ie, the kind Joe thinks kids would come to enjoy) is solely for the enjoyment of another person's suffering.

You can take a man from his home and lock him up for ten years, but the difference between the state doing it in a jail for punishment and a civilian doing it in his basement for the hell of it is pretty crucial.

Is he not, be legitimizing torture through law, doing just as much harm as videogames would simulating it?

He's doing more harm if that's what you're asking, but it's a completely different (and far more important) kind of harm. That's the point. It's about as connected as saying that letting the military kill people in combat legitimizes murder (and for the record, I wouldn't show a kid footage of people dying in combat either).

Again, torture is wrong. We, as a country, should never use it if we want to even remotely retain our moral compass (and, ultimately, our place in the world). And it has fuck-all to do with violent videogames.

[Fe 26]

It's a little ironic that Hilliary is the one that we are using for a counter opinion in this debate, espically if we are trying to connect this with videogames.

If I recall correctly, she isn't a huge fan of our bread and butter, either.

[Diff-chan]

Wow, I didn't realize this bill has retroactive immunity. That is disgusting. This bill is fascist in virtually every definition of the word. I know that's an extreme word to use, but the sooner we use it, the better.

edit: by the way, I just used that Lieberman thing as a trojan horse to talk about the torture bill. I knew the logic was somewhat strained, but guess what, we do torture now in the US and Bush and et. al. say that Abu Ghraib was peachy-keen. Hell a lot of Red Staters and other neocon authoritarians like Mark Steyn got off on it. Nevertheless, Lieberman knows deep down that torture is wrong and he voted for the bill. He's a piece of shit.

[icarusfall]

No one should be tortured. I don't care if it's Osama himself. But, let's be clear, punching someone in the face isn't torture. Waterboarding is.

Here's the problem with torture: it doesn't work. It's been proven time and again that under torture people will confess to nonexistant crimes. People will give you false information just to make it stop. Remember the Spanish Inquisition? It turns out it was far too inquisitive. We're getting like that. It's not good.

This bears repeating. You guys are discussing the semantics of hypocrisy, not the real wrong here.

[sethsez]

Wow, I didn't realize this bill has retroactive immunity.

That's what really makes it so disgusting.

[Rumpy]

This is some fucked up shit. What news sites do you guys frequent to get a full view of shit going down? Obviously I'm not looking for cnn and fox news.

edit: Also, is there evidence of the US doing shall we call "wholesale" torture methods? Like ripping out fingernails, sleep deprevation, racks, limb severings, brutal beatings and the like?

And to further this discussion if we look back in history to world war i and ii where in the sake of home security, we did some extreme things. We put the japanese in internment camps for years, something that would never happen today. Now look at Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for treason (giving the soviet union nuclear weapons secrets). If individuals were found out to be doing that today (like passing on chemical warefare info, building blueprints for a bomb attack) how do you think it would be, and should be handled? How should they be treated (american or foreign)? Would execution still be the end result?

[sethsez]

Also, is there evidence of the US doing shall we call "wholesale" torture methods? Like ripping out fingernails, sleep deprevation, racks, limb severings, brutal beatings and the like?

Sleep deprivation and waterboarding are two big ones, because they're brutally effective (at getting confessions, anyway... they're shitty methods for getting actual information) while simultainiously leaving no incriminating marks.

[Razor Ramon]

And to further this discussion if we look back in history to world war i and ii where in the sake of home security, we did some extreme things. We put the japanese in internment camps for years, something that would never happen today.

Actually being held in an off-shore prison without being charged is pretty much the same thing.

[Fe 26]

And to further this discussion if we look back in history to world war i and ii where in the sake of home security, we did some extreme things. We put the japanese in internment camps for years, something that would never happen today.

we wouldn't do that today because to many people in power would lose face for being called racist.