The dumb pieces of trash that run around and come up with justifications for the use of torture in interrogations tend to not be very capable of thinking carefully about anything, but a person who goes around torturing people tend to "unconsciously" or consciously assume that he or she can manage the consequences of his or her actions. It's sort of like the person thinks that he or she is "weighing" the risks that he or she will be held accountable against the expectations that he or she will accrue "benefits" from the malicious and premeditated violence. Anyone who has any intellectual capacity should be able to see, as I've discussed in recent postings, that the use of torture in interrogations can be viewed as being analogous to either a continuous sexual assault or to a continuous form of attempted murder or both, given the way in which all of the hopes and rights of the person being tortured are utterly disregarded by the people engaging in the torture. Everyone decries the behaviors that the Nazis engaged in, by imprisoning and torturing (and, subsequently, murdering them) people, without charges, in concentration camps, in part because of the torture and subsequent murder and also because of the ways in which the Nazis singled out specific groups of people and tried to blame Jewish people and other groups of people for all of the ills of the Nazi society that had become so devoid of life and humanity. People who defend the use of torture in interrogations of people who are suspected to be terrorists are using, essentially, the same types of approaches and forms of reasoning that people in Nazi Germany used, when they rounded up Jewish people for the purposes of torturing and murdering them. The main difference is that, today, the approach is used to round up fewer people, on a smaller scale, and to, supposedly, torture mainly people who are not US citizens. For some reason, I think that many people buy into the notion that people who were not born in the US should not expect to be kept out of concentration-camp-like secret prisons and tortured in appalling ways, as they are likely to be, in my opinion.
The "managerial" mindset that is sort of implicit in the notion that one can "prudently" use torture to sustain all of the wonderful aspects of life in the US is very disturbing to me, in part because there is this notion that one can find coldly-rational uses for extreme violence. It is sometimes helpful to look at things in new ways, and one way to look at the use of torture in interrogations is to ask oneself if one would be upset if government interrogators were taking women from other countries to secret prisons and raping them for years, continuously, while making money off of a "gambling" operation, connected to the public sexual assault, and paying people to come up with ever-more-abusive statements that they might shout at the woman being assaulted, so as to intensify the psychological damage being inflicted. Is a man less susceptible than a woman to the damaging effects of prolonged sexual assaults? People certainly seem to think that it's A-ok for men to be raped in prison, and some assumptions that could be said to go along with that notion, about men, are that the psychological health of men is less fragile than that of women (this is a very commonly-held notion, even among psychologists whose thinking is enlightened or "progressive") and that the men must have done something to cause them to be imprisoned and to lose their basic, human rights. Particularly in the case of a male detainee who is being held in a secret prison without charges, these assumptions are unlikely to be true. Thus, if one is willing to accept the notion that chronic, sexual violence is no less heinous when perpetrated against men than against women, one can begin to look at the use of torture in a way that is different from the way in which people commonly frame the discussion of the use of torture. The similarity of the use of torture to a continuous, sexual assault is appropriate, in my opinion, because, as I have discussed, the set of cognitive responses that govern the person's sources of pleasure, or reward, and pain are being hijacked and controlled, during torture, in a systematic and vicious way and are being coupled with inherently-unmanageable, physical violence. To torture a person physically is to engage in the absolute violation of the person's mind and body by shattering the most basic aspects of life that a person needs to be a human and to have anything resembling a life. A person needs to feel that he or she can have physical privacy in his or her body and that someone is not going to use the person's most basic desires and fears against that person. One of the reasons that people think the crime of rape is especially heinous is that rape involves the violent control of a person's most basic physical and mental processes. It is characterized by the profound violation of a person's sense of personal, physical and mental boundaries. Within the context of the use of torture during interrogations, a commonly-accepted notion is that the person can "work" to extricate himself or herself from the assaults by revealing information. Of course, in my opinion, this is never true, given the open-ended quality of torture and given the fact that torturers use psychological manipulation to strip away a person's will and a person's hope of ever being released. When one considers this type of perspective and also considers that government workers would probably have to have set up a sophisticated information-gathering system and collected detailed information about the specifics of a person's knowledge and social habits and communications, in order to even suspect that a person would, at a particular time, possess specific knowledge about a specific set of plans [(http://hardcorephysiologyfun2.blogspot.com/2011/07/presentation-of-false-choices-and.html)], the notion that the purpose of torture is to extract information is, in a real sense, not true, in my opinion. When one uses this type of reasoning, one can expose the use of torture as being the obscene form of, essentially, purposeless abuse that it, in my view, actually is. After one begins to see torture for "what it is," it is possible to see that a torturer who tells a detainee that he or she can "help himself/herself" by answering the questions honestly or truthfully or "correctly" (something the person is unlikely to ever be able to do, in the eyes of the torturer) is basically someone who is shouting and sneering at a person being sexually assaulted, saying things such as "How can you let them do that to you?" or "Why don't you get yourself out of that situation, you stupid fool" or some such thing. I realize that this is a disturbing way of looking at the use of torture, but it should disturb people that anyone could support the use of government-sanctioned, "purposeless" violence of this magnitude.
Of course, as I was saying, extreme violence can never really have any purpose to it, and the notion that one can make cold, calculating, rational assessments of the supposed benefits of obscene forms of violence, such as the use of torture in interrogations, compounds the violence and, in my opinion, undermines many of the most basic, foundational "elements" of human society. On some level, I think that torturers are aware of the extremely-unacceptable aspects of the violence, and the decision to "do it anyway" amounts to a kind of calculated "devaluation" of the life of the particular individual being tortured. Does anyone believe that people are going to engage in appalling acts of violence, even in the absence of any evidence that the person has ever committed any crime, and then turn around and do wonderful things, using all of the wonderful pieces of bullshit "intelligence" that they have obtained through the use of that violence? In my view, people who go around making calculated determinations that such-and-such a person's self and life, referring to the person's most personal and intimate, human characteristics and traits and feelings that make the person human, can be assumed to be worth exactly nothing, ostensibly for some "limited" duration of time, are unlikely to have much regard for the basic characteristics of human life in general. But, hey, that's just my opinion. I don't see how one can exhibit absolute contempt for human life, with one set of people, on the one hand, and then claim to be turning around capitalizing on that contempt (using all of the "good things" that one has obtained through the exhibition of that contempt), as a way of defending or sustaining the social framework that allows people to expect to have basic human rights.
The "managerial" mindset that is sort of implicit in the notion that one can "prudently" use torture to sustain all of the wonderful aspects of life in the US is very disturbing to me, in part because there is this notion that one can find coldly-rational uses for extreme violence. It is sometimes helpful to look at things in new ways, and one way to look at the use of torture in interrogations is to ask oneself if one would be upset if government interrogators were taking women from other countries to secret prisons and raping them for years, continuously, while making money off of a "gambling" operation, connected to the public sexual assault, and paying people to come up with ever-more-abusive statements that they might shout at the woman being assaulted, so as to intensify the psychological damage being inflicted. Is a man less susceptible than a woman to the damaging effects of prolonged sexual assaults? People certainly seem to think that it's A-ok for men to be raped in prison, and some assumptions that could be said to go along with that notion, about men, are that the psychological health of men is less fragile than that of women (this is a very commonly-held notion, even among psychologists whose thinking is enlightened or "progressive") and that the men must have done something to cause them to be imprisoned and to lose their basic, human rights. Particularly in the case of a male detainee who is being held in a secret prison without charges, these assumptions are unlikely to be true. Thus, if one is willing to accept the notion that chronic, sexual violence is no less heinous when perpetrated against men than against women, one can begin to look at the use of torture in a way that is different from the way in which people commonly frame the discussion of the use of torture. The similarity of the use of torture to a continuous, sexual assault is appropriate, in my opinion, because, as I have discussed, the set of cognitive responses that govern the person's sources of pleasure, or reward, and pain are being hijacked and controlled, during torture, in a systematic and vicious way and are being coupled with inherently-unmanageable, physical violence. To torture a person physically is to engage in the absolute violation of the person's mind and body by shattering the most basic aspects of life that a person needs to be a human and to have anything resembling a life. A person needs to feel that he or she can have physical privacy in his or her body and that someone is not going to use the person's most basic desires and fears against that person. One of the reasons that people think the crime of rape is especially heinous is that rape involves the violent control of a person's most basic physical and mental processes. It is characterized by the profound violation of a person's sense of personal, physical and mental boundaries. Within the context of the use of torture during interrogations, a commonly-accepted notion is that the person can "work" to extricate himself or herself from the assaults by revealing information. Of course, in my opinion, this is never true, given the open-ended quality of torture and given the fact that torturers use psychological manipulation to strip away a person's will and a person's hope of ever being released. When one considers this type of perspective and also considers that government workers would probably have to have set up a sophisticated information-gathering system and collected detailed information about the specifics of a person's knowledge and social habits and communications, in order to even suspect that a person would, at a particular time, possess specific knowledge about a specific set of plans [(http://hardcorephysiologyfun2.blogspot.com/2011/07/presentation-of-false-choices-and.html)], the notion that the purpose of torture is to extract information is, in a real sense, not true, in my opinion. When one uses this type of reasoning, one can expose the use of torture as being the obscene form of, essentially, purposeless abuse that it, in my view, actually is. After one begins to see torture for "what it is," it is possible to see that a torturer who tells a detainee that he or she can "help himself/herself" by answering the questions honestly or truthfully or "correctly" (something the person is unlikely to ever be able to do, in the eyes of the torturer) is basically someone who is shouting and sneering at a person being sexually assaulted, saying things such as "How can you let them do that to you?" or "Why don't you get yourself out of that situation, you stupid fool" or some such thing. I realize that this is a disturbing way of looking at the use of torture, but it should disturb people that anyone could support the use of government-sanctioned, "purposeless" violence of this magnitude.
Of course, as I was saying, extreme violence can never really have any purpose to it, and the notion that one can make cold, calculating, rational assessments of the supposed benefits of obscene forms of violence, such as the use of torture in interrogations, compounds the violence and, in my opinion, undermines many of the most basic, foundational "elements" of human society. On some level, I think that torturers are aware of the extremely-unacceptable aspects of the violence, and the decision to "do it anyway" amounts to a kind of calculated "devaluation" of the life of the particular individual being tortured. Does anyone believe that people are going to engage in appalling acts of violence, even in the absence of any evidence that the person has ever committed any crime, and then turn around and do wonderful things, using all of the wonderful pieces of bullshit "intelligence" that they have obtained through the use of that violence? In my view, people who go around making calculated determinations that such-and-such a person's self and life, referring to the person's most personal and intimate, human characteristics and traits and feelings that make the person human, can be assumed to be worth exactly nothing, ostensibly for some "limited" duration of time, are unlikely to have much regard for the basic characteristics of human life in general. But, hey, that's just my opinion. I don't see how one can exhibit absolute contempt for human life, with one set of people, on the one hand, and then claim to be turning around capitalizing on that contempt (using all of the "good things" that one has obtained through the exhibition of that contempt), as a way of defending or sustaining the social framework that allows people to expect to have basic human rights.
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