This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It
is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it
sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about
torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of
those lives is your child’s?
It’s not, actually. It’s not complicated by questions of its efficacy because torture isn’t effective.Read your own newspaper. Jesus tits.
Next?
Seriously, what if it saves the life of YOUR CHILD? What a dickhead. I regret not having children because without them I can’t tell RIchard Cohen to keep his ideological ugliness to himself and stop using them as an excuse to be the asshole he really wants to be.
There are many things to which this argument could be applied. What if universal, absolutely free, single-payer health care (which indisputably works, wingnut myths about Britain and Canada notwithstanding) saved lives? What if it saved many lives? What if one of those lives is YOUR CHILD’S? Then do we have a moral imperative to provide it regardless of how many Republicans sign on to support it? I mean, if we’re going to raise the incredibly stupid idea that anything that saves YOUR CHILD is therefore worthy of consideration, let’s spin the argument out to its absolute bitterest end.
And not for nothing, but let me be cold here for a moment. Of course you’re in favor of saving your children. Of course you are. And what you say in that scenario is that you’d sign on to any bloodthirsty thing on the planet in order to make your children okay. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s your job as a parent. It’s not, however, your job as a politician, an interrogator, or a journalist. There’s a reason we don’t let the families of murder victims pronounce sentence on the murderers of their loved ones. There’s a reason we institutionalized some balance of power in this country, to give ourselves the necessary distance to make decisions like this. Not that anyone remembers that now.
Don’t shove your shit onto me with pronouncements about YOUR CHILD and dark fantasies about what kinds of threats would let you waterboard some imaginary terrorist. Cohen and his ilk like to talk about liberal pussies who prize “our national soul” and “the idea of America” over their hysterical concept of AMERICAN LIVES ARE AT STAKE when it comes to talking about national security. As if it’s the height of courage not to refrain from insane behavior in the face of terror but to give in to every wild impulse they’ve ever had. Don’t you care about YOUR CHILD? That isn’t the argument.
If it saved MY CHILD? Absolutely, I would want to torture everybody on the planet.
So?
A.
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