Blogroll Amnesty Day
If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake.
Here I am, visiting the Oregon coast, where internet access is spotty and depends on a satellite signal punching through the ever-changing cloud layer, and it turns out to be Blogroll Amnesty Day. (Who knew?)
As I understand it, the idea is for proprietors of progressive blogs with large traffic to 'spread the love', as it were, by linking to smaller yet worthy blogs. The hope is that this will build and broaden the audience for those blogs. By linking on this day, the theory goes, big popular blogs can get 'amnesty' for their failure to add these smaller blogs to their regular blogroll, (the list of links to other blogs that usually occupies one side of a blog page.) Jon Swift explains.
In keeping with the spirit of the day, the ever-generous maha, of The Mahablog, has linked to me. This is despite the fact that she needs no amnesty from me, since I'm already on her blogroll. (Here's a secret: on my bad days, I go there just to revel in the fact that someone puts me in a category with Digby, Ezra and TRex.)
It's nice enough that she lets me clutter up her comments section, (where I post under my nom du web biggerbox) and she's left me a set of keys to her online place for when she's out of town. So, imagine my embarrassment to discover that she's done me this nice deed, I've got incoming traffic and my latest post is from before the State of the Union. Crikey. (Let's just say I'm an iconoclast on that whole 'multiple posts a day' thing, shall we?)
If I weren't so hypnotized by the view and the changing light on the waves and sea stacks, I'd rush up a fresh batch of bile and snark to offer my new guests. But I'm afraid you'll have to make do with some warmed-over dudgeon from the other night.
I had dropped by maha's place, when during a discussion of water-boarding, a commenter trooped out yet another version of the ticking time bomb scenario. Since the friggin' Attorney General of the United States of America is dancing around the acceptance of torture, I was in no mood to read yet another rationalizing, enabling scenario.
What would you do, he asked? What if it was Sept. 8, 2001 and
"First, how do I know I have one of the gang, and how do I know their plans? How do I know I don’t have some crazy person, or someone who is trying to get me to massively mobilize resources, or panic an American city, with no more ability to enact an attack than my cat? Many similar thought experiments seem to postulate a sort of perfect knowledge that I find implausible. How is it that I’d have certainty that this was the guy who could tell me, yet not already know or be able to find out where they were planning to attack or have a more reliable way of getting the info?
"Because, second, he might just lie to me under torture, and tell me what he figured I wanted to hear, and I might not end up saving anyone. In your scenario, I’d be torturing him to find out where they were planning on setting off a massive explosion somewhere. Had my prisoner told me there was a bomb somewhere, even in the World Trade Center, we’d have believed him and scrambled cops to search. Maybe he would have given me the names of innocents (perhaps enemies or rivals of his) as part of his cell, and we’d have spent time rounding them up and torturing them. But on Sept. 11, they’d have hijacked airplanes and crashed them. There was no bomb. Looking for a bomb in New York instead of hijackers in Boston could easily have been the result of your hypothetical torture session. The 9/11 technique took advantage of short flight times following the hijacking, and the assumption that hijackers wouldn’t kill themselves. Torture wouldn’t have helped us stop it. It might have made it worse.
"Torture is NOT a “less polite means of extracting the information”, it’s a reprehensible, abusive means of inflicting pain and getting absolutely no trustworthy information whatever. The alternative is not to “simply hope for the best”, but to use more reliable interrogation methods, and other investigative techniques, while maintaining one’s membership in the ranks of civilized human beings.
"Still, in the gedanken-welt where it would happen as you say, and if, despite the numerous reasons why it would be stupid and an enormous unreliable gamble, I found myself using water-boarding, then afterward I would expect to turn myself over to the legal authorities, confess, and be punished to the full extent of the law. I would know I was guilty of a crime, whatever my good intentions. In a system of laws, that has consequences. I would hope that, perhaps, serving my long sentence might help me expiate my shame and self-loathing for having committed such a heinous and illegal deed, no matter how many (if any) were saved. I might have gotten useful information, but I’d have had no way to know that I would, so there could be no way that it would forgive my motive in torturing my prisoner.
"Torture is an immoral and illegal act. It is also remarkably unreliable. Various versions of the ‘ticking time bomb’ fantasy may enable some to blur their awareness of all that, but it is nonetheless true.
"I would not ordinarily bother making all these arguments at length, since they should be obvious. Sadly, since so many insist on repeating a ‘time bomb’ justification, it is part of my patriotic duty to insist on knocking it down, every time I see it, for as long as it takes until we Americans regain our moral compass."
Feel free to adopt and adapt these arguments for your own use, next time you encounter a 'ticking time bomb'. I firmly believe that it's important for people to speak out against that kind of "maybe, to stop 9/11" kind of thinking.
Seventy-five years to the day before Mr. Mukasey's shameful statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a new Chancellor was taking office in Germany. People need to speak out.
Since, in terms of things the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, I think I rate somewhere like Protein Molecule With Pretensions, I can't pass the linky goodness on to blogs smaller than me.
But I'll do what I can to get a few more people speaking out.
Here I am, visiting the Oregon coast, where internet access is spotty and depends on a satellite signal punching through the ever-changing cloud layer, and it turns out to be Blogroll Amnesty Day. (Who knew?)
As I understand it, the idea is for proprietors of progressive blogs with large traffic to 'spread the love', as it were, by linking to smaller yet worthy blogs. The hope is that this will build and broaden the audience for those blogs. By linking on this day, the theory goes, big popular blogs can get 'amnesty' for their failure to add these smaller blogs to their regular blogroll, (the list of links to other blogs that usually occupies one side of a blog page.) Jon Swift explains.
In keeping with the spirit of the day, the ever-generous maha, of The Mahablog, has linked to me. This is despite the fact that she needs no amnesty from me, since I'm already on her blogroll. (Here's a secret: on my bad days, I go there just to revel in the fact that someone puts me in a category with Digby, Ezra and TRex.)
It's nice enough that she lets me clutter up her comments section, (where I post under my nom du web biggerbox) and she's left me a set of keys to her online place for when she's out of town. So, imagine my embarrassment to discover that she's done me this nice deed, I've got incoming traffic and my latest post is from before the State of the Union. Crikey. (Let's just say I'm an iconoclast on that whole 'multiple posts a day' thing, shall we?)
If I weren't so hypnotized by the view and the changing light on the waves and sea stacks, I'd rush up a fresh batch of bile and snark to offer my new guests. But I'm afraid you'll have to make do with some warmed-over dudgeon from the other night.
I had dropped by maha's place, when during a discussion of water-boarding, a commenter trooped out yet another version of the ticking time bomb scenario. Since the friggin' Attorney General of the United States of America is dancing around the acceptance of torture, I was in no mood to read yet another rationalizing, enabling scenario.
What would you do, he asked? What if it was Sept. 8, 2001 and
"you learn that a group of terrorists is planning in three days to set off a massive explosion in a US city that could murder thousands of people. As it happens, you have one of the gang in your custody. Despite your persistent and demanding interrogation, he refuses to provide the information you need to stop the planned attack. Do you resort to your less polite means of extracting the necessary information from him or do you simply hope for the best?"To which I replied:
"First, how do I know I have one of the gang, and how do I know their plans? How do I know I don’t have some crazy person, or someone who is trying to get me to massively mobilize resources, or panic an American city, with no more ability to enact an attack than my cat? Many similar thought experiments seem to postulate a sort of perfect knowledge that I find implausible. How is it that I’d have certainty that this was the guy who could tell me, yet not already know or be able to find out where they were planning to attack or have a more reliable way of getting the info?
"Because, second, he might just lie to me under torture, and tell me what he figured I wanted to hear, and I might not end up saving anyone. In your scenario, I’d be torturing him to find out where they were planning on setting off a massive explosion somewhere. Had my prisoner told me there was a bomb somewhere, even in the World Trade Center, we’d have believed him and scrambled cops to search. Maybe he would have given me the names of innocents (perhaps enemies or rivals of his) as part of his cell, and we’d have spent time rounding them up and torturing them. But on Sept. 11, they’d have hijacked airplanes and crashed them. There was no bomb. Looking for a bomb in New York instead of hijackers in Boston could easily have been the result of your hypothetical torture session. The 9/11 technique took advantage of short flight times following the hijacking, and the assumption that hijackers wouldn’t kill themselves. Torture wouldn’t have helped us stop it. It might have made it worse.
"Torture is NOT a “less polite means of extracting the information”, it’s a reprehensible, abusive means of inflicting pain and getting absolutely no trustworthy information whatever. The alternative is not to “simply hope for the best”, but to use more reliable interrogation methods, and other investigative techniques, while maintaining one’s membership in the ranks of civilized human beings.
"Still, in the gedanken-welt where it would happen as you say, and if, despite the numerous reasons why it would be stupid and an enormous unreliable gamble, I found myself using water-boarding, then afterward I would expect to turn myself over to the legal authorities, confess, and be punished to the full extent of the law. I would know I was guilty of a crime, whatever my good intentions. In a system of laws, that has consequences. I would hope that, perhaps, serving my long sentence might help me expiate my shame and self-loathing for having committed such a heinous and illegal deed, no matter how many (if any) were saved. I might have gotten useful information, but I’d have had no way to know that I would, so there could be no way that it would forgive my motive in torturing my prisoner.
"Torture is an immoral and illegal act. It is also remarkably unreliable. Various versions of the ‘ticking time bomb’ fantasy may enable some to blur their awareness of all that, but it is nonetheless true.
"I would not ordinarily bother making all these arguments at length, since they should be obvious. Sadly, since so many insist on repeating a ‘time bomb’ justification, it is part of my patriotic duty to insist on knocking it down, every time I see it, for as long as it takes until we Americans regain our moral compass."
Feel free to adopt and adapt these arguments for your own use, next time you encounter a 'ticking time bomb'. I firmly believe that it's important for people to speak out against that kind of "maybe, to stop 9/11" kind of thinking.
Seventy-five years to the day before Mr. Mukasey's shameful statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a new Chancellor was taking office in Germany. People need to speak out.
Since, in terms of things the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, I think I rate somewhere like Protein Molecule With Pretensions, I can't pass the linky goodness on to blogs smaller than me.
But I'll do what I can to get a few more people speaking out.
posted by Paul at 11:47 AM |
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