The Dominos Topple
digamma yields in the matter of 24 and torture. Can Kevin Drum be far behind?
Dave Intermittent communicates on the matter the old-fashioned way, via e-mail, about the structural problems of “torture television”:
On a TV show, though, watching through God’s omniscient third person eyes, the viewer watches the bad guy go about his daily evil. No question of possible innocence, and who cares about the guilty? Watching from the priveleged position most shows put viewers in radically changes the moral calculus absent active counters by the show; look at the way cop shows invite applause for police brutality against villians who, we as viewers are shown, deserve far worse than the rubber hose treatment. Hey, I abhor police violence, and have caught myself hoping some random perp on L&O takes the hard fall. And worse, once a show establishes that only bad guys get tortured, torture itself becomes self-justifying; we know the rightness of our cause by the fact that the bad guys are so bad as to warrant torture. I don’t think that people instantly internalize this logic, but at the margins, and especially when fed back to them by smiling government faces saying “trust us”….
What TV needs is more unreliable narrators. And no, haven’t watched BSG yet.
Meanwhile, my muse appears to have been sneakin’ around with Kieran Healy. But the absolute gob-stopper, as I think they say on his side of the pond, is this quote from Alan Dershowitz:
When you torture somebody to death … everybody would acknowledge that’s torture. But placing a sterilized needle under somebody’s fingernails for fifteen minutes, causing excruciating pain but no permanent physical damage – is that torture?
Let me respond as clearly and calmly as I can to this one. Let me, as it were, be the kind of blogger my dog thinks I am.
OF COURSE IT’S TORTURE YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!
Like Delany wrote in the prologue to Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.
Comment by Carlos —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:22 am
Like, is he offering to test his theory? Because I think I have some needles I could sterilize. And some duct tape.
Comment by norbizness —
March 16, 2005 @ 10:43 am
When Ron Silver played him in Reversal of Fortune, did that set in motion a series of events that would eventually infect his brain with madness a decade later?
Comment by Kip Manley —
March 16, 2005 @ 10:46 am
I think maybe the Poor Man has a dark horse contender for Stupidest Question Ever.
Comment by ash —
March 16, 2005 @ 8:05 pm
I know all about needles (well, pins) under the fingernails.
Of course it’s torture.
The one thing you can say for it, is that it is neither lethal, or permanantly damaging, unlike the that stuff that happened at Abu Ghraib, which seems to involve breaking people’s jaws (when you’re trying to get them to TALK), suffocation (why not just kill them) and ’sexual abuse’ (in the name of destroying them so they can be reinjected as moles in the community).
It’s not just that it’s torture, which is awful and will eventually be inflicted on Americans should this charade continue, but also that it’s incompetent.
Brutal, body-damaging, incompetant torture of every target you find is the worst possible thing you can do. The US gets nothing out of it.
ash
['.']
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:21 pm
I’ve been thinking that the world needs a tv series set in a torture rehabilitation center.
Comment by Nell Lancaster —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:33 pm
Doctor Slack makes the same point as Dave Intermittent in comment #39 on the Kieran Healy post you link to (as well as several other excellent ones; that Doc needs a blog. )
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:41 pm
Dr. Slack doesn’t have a blog? I thought he did.
Comment by jamie —
March 16, 2005 @ 9:49 pm
But placing a sterilized needle under somebody’s fingernails for fifteen minutes…
“Placing”. I like that. One of the chilling aspects of the emerging torture discourse is the amount of thought its advocates give to euphemism.
Comment by ChrisS —
March 17, 2005 @ 12:06 am
“But placing a sterilized needle under somebody’s fingernails for fifteen minutes…”
Just thinking about that causes shivers to go up and down my spine. I think that’s a good indication that it’s torture.
Comment by Dave Intermittent —
March 17, 2005 @ 1:15 am
Didn’t see the Dr. Slack post before my email; I really should check through a comment thread before I open my mouth.
W/r/t Dershowitz, if he has to ask the question, he already knows the answer he wants, now doesn’t he? Also, note the really high threshold he imposes on torture: death. So anything less than that becomes arguable….
Comment by Andrew —
March 17, 2005 @ 3:38 am
It is disturbing to think that someone could even ask that question, unless there’s some context missing that explains it (which I doubt, but I don’t have time to listen to the speech right now). I would love to see a real debate on torture, as opposed to people posturing, but if Dershowitz is the best the pro-torture side has, it might not be much of a debate.
Comment by Gary Farber —
March 17, 2005 @ 8:01 am
Incidentally, while this also makes the *24* producers look stupid, I thought you might be interested.
Gotta say I’m getting pretty tired of having to retype my personal info, by the way (particularly since *Crooked Timber* and some other blogs have also now switched to a half-broken commenting system, with no line breaking, etc).
Comment by Glaivester —
March 17, 2005 @ 9:59 am
I think that Law and Order is a bad example of a show where we know he’s guilty so we justify torture. Generally, in Law and Order we only know what the police know.
.
By the way, we aren’t allowed to copy and paste quotes from previous posters/ Every time I do, I get “XHTML not formed correctly.”
Comment by Dick Durata —
March 17, 2005 @ 11:29 am
Good old Dershy has moved from talking about torture needing a special torture warrent, issued by Judge Dershy, to saying needles under the fingernails never killed anybody, so it’s not torture. Soon he’ll issue his legal view on nailing peoples head to the floor. Well, it all depends on the size of the nail.
Comment by Kevin Carson —
March 18, 2005 @ 12:55 am
What I find most horrifying of all (from my self-centered perspective) is that so many MPs in the reserves are policemen in their civilian lives. And when they come back home, guess what they’ll be doing?
Given the militarization of police, and the cultural cross contamination between the military and law enforcement over the past thirty years, how can we expect this NOT to spill over into the civilian world?
Comment by M. Simon —
March 18, 2005 @ 11:09 pm
One thing you get is changes in the amygdala. Depending on your genetics the changes could last a life time.
These changes if long lasting lead people to alcohol and other drugs for relief.
Dersh is way too glib about no permanent damage