These postings on torture would be disturbing to read, if anyone ever actually read them. I doubt very much that anyone will ever read them, but, if anyone ever does read them, it's worthwhile to consider that there is a terrible tendency of people to think that constructive criticism is uncivil or that the knowledge of disturbing things is something to be terrified of exploring. Unfortunately, there can be a tendency of people to think that they have the right to abuse other people as a means of "teaching" the people things, and this is a terrible thing to see. When one is in a society in which people have no capacity to explore damaging and disturbing aspects of human behavior in a cognitive sense, one tends to find groups of people who end up, somewhat unwittingly, seemingly, "recapitulating" or "re-inflicting" their own abusive and poisonous experiences on other people, ostensibly with the aim of showing the "young people" or other set of people the supposed value of gaining "strength through pain." It's very similar to the tendency, in the absence of some sort of self-awareness of the risk, of abuse victims, for example, to become abusers themselves. One sees this in the prison system, for example, in which people have set up a set of institutionalized mechanisms of abuse that have, ostensibly and absurdly, been set up to teach criminals not to abuse others.
Unfortunately, when an organization delivers some bogus arguments on tv and gets some lousy money together, the organization can persuade a lot of people that their approaches are characterized by a lot of complexity and subtlety. Stupid people generally are able to hide their stupidity by developing convoluted, circular forms of reasoning that they can condense into propaganda-like sound bites. One saw this in the buildup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which people were running around like fools and yammering about having the right to defend the US by setting up likely-to-be-permanent military occupations of foreign countries, etc.
I'll never understand it, as long as I live, and I'll never understand what goes on in the minds of people who are desperate to hold onto systems of power that do nothing but dominate large groups of people. It's a sign of weakness to hold onto secrets and to lie all the time, but, for whatever reason, people who are "leaders" of militaristic and totalitarian-like hierarchies have bought into the notion and succeeded in persuading people that the restriction of information is a characteristic of a powerful person or organization. The opposite is true. A secretive, exclusive type of power-hungry organization or system is unlikely to be able to maintain power, given the potential for internal strife to spread uncontrollably in such a penned-in, pathetic type of organization. And a person who is powerful doesn't need to hide information away and go around torturing people to get a few more little, pathetic tidbits of information that amount to garbage, in the long run. A person or "leader" who speaks openly about everything that they he or she is working on, at least in some general or honest and reasonable way, is a person who is confident that he or she will be able to develop new approaches or ideas, should some threat present itself. But the assumption that the revelation of information will automatically lead to the proliferation of uncontrollable threats, originating among the people who become aware of the information, is, essentially, totally irrational.
To maintain extreme secrecy and control is to lack confidence in one's own methods and abilities and to exhibit an irrational contempt for the people whom one is controlling or keeping secrets from. If you torture a person to death in some pathetic, hole-in-the-wall prison in a foreign country and honestly believe that your rational purpose for engaging in the torture is to obtain some information of great value, why not treat the person as an equal and obtain a thousand times as much information, over the long term. A lot of the old, standard approaches that stupid, secretive people have used, over the years, and that people deem to be valid are just profoundly irrational. Even when the most supremely-knowledgeable people who go around hurting people, the behavior is inherently stupid and irrational. When you engage in violence in a systematic way, you "lock in" and commit yourself to the assumption that there is no possibility that the person you are hurting could ever be smarter than you are or have better judgment than you do. Any violence that is on the level of the despicable acts of torture that the dummies talk about on talk shows shatters the most basic sense of trust that has to exist among people, if anything constructive is ever going to result from their interactions.
The profound violence that characterizes torture is always irrational, given that one who engages in irrational violence has decided that there is nothing of value, except the narrowly- and foolishly-defined information that one supposedly is trying to extract through the use of torture, that one could ever gain from the person who is being tortured. So anyone who says that he or she is getting something of value, through the use of torture, is lying, given that the destructiveness that results from the violence is necessarily going to obscure any attempt to understand the scope of the "value" that one might otherwise have had access to, through civil interactions, in the absence of torture. Anyone who tries to provide rational justifications for the use of torture (or for the bizarre, dehumanizing restriction of information that no one has ever had the right to restrict access to) is a fool and is lying to himself or herself.
I'm aware that it's disturbing to realize that people in positions of power can be at risk of being motivated by little more than a kind of semi-subconscious, "group imperative" to abuse other people, but, beneath all of the fancy jargon and monkey suits, that's basically what this stuff amounts to. I'm sorry if it upsets someone's delicate sensibilities, but a person who is older and more powerful than another person is not necessarily more wise than the other person. There are some things that no one has the right to keep secret, and there are some things that one can simply never do. You can't weasel your way out of being accountable for such a profoundly-violent action by saying you have some elaborate set of purposes in mind. Torture is one of those things that one can never do because the action undermines, in such an absolute and profound way, everything that human interactions are based on. You can't set up a fucking concentration camp to teach people about the evils of setting up concentration camps, and you can't justify an act of extreme violence by saying that you're aware that the action is unjustifiable and that you've simply decided that you've gotta do the violence. When one looks at the core of the reasoning that goes into this kind of violence, even among the most obscenely-despicable of individuals who have dominated people in these appalling and unfathomable ways, prancing around like a bunch of chicken-shit greek gods or something, with such a bankruptcy of emotion and reason, one finds that there's not really any reasoning, of substance, that has gone into the decision to engage in the violence. Torture is a stupid person's game, and anyone who tries to justify its use is just providing an elaborate set of bullshit excuses for abusing others.
Unfortunately, when an organization delivers some bogus arguments on tv and gets some lousy money together, the organization can persuade a lot of people that their approaches are characterized by a lot of complexity and subtlety. Stupid people generally are able to hide their stupidity by developing convoluted, circular forms of reasoning that they can condense into propaganda-like sound bites. One saw this in the buildup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which people were running around like fools and yammering about having the right to defend the US by setting up likely-to-be-permanent military occupations of foreign countries, etc.
I'll never understand it, as long as I live, and I'll never understand what goes on in the minds of people who are desperate to hold onto systems of power that do nothing but dominate large groups of people. It's a sign of weakness to hold onto secrets and to lie all the time, but, for whatever reason, people who are "leaders" of militaristic and totalitarian-like hierarchies have bought into the notion and succeeded in persuading people that the restriction of information is a characteristic of a powerful person or organization. The opposite is true. A secretive, exclusive type of power-hungry organization or system is unlikely to be able to maintain power, given the potential for internal strife to spread uncontrollably in such a penned-in, pathetic type of organization. And a person who is powerful doesn't need to hide information away and go around torturing people to get a few more little, pathetic tidbits of information that amount to garbage, in the long run. A person or "leader" who speaks openly about everything that they he or she is working on, at least in some general or honest and reasonable way, is a person who is confident that he or she will be able to develop new approaches or ideas, should some threat present itself. But the assumption that the revelation of information will automatically lead to the proliferation of uncontrollable threats, originating among the people who become aware of the information, is, essentially, totally irrational.
To maintain extreme secrecy and control is to lack confidence in one's own methods and abilities and to exhibit an irrational contempt for the people whom one is controlling or keeping secrets from. If you torture a person to death in some pathetic, hole-in-the-wall prison in a foreign country and honestly believe that your rational purpose for engaging in the torture is to obtain some information of great value, why not treat the person as an equal and obtain a thousand times as much information, over the long term. A lot of the old, standard approaches that stupid, secretive people have used, over the years, and that people deem to be valid are just profoundly irrational. Even when the most supremely-knowledgeable people who go around hurting people, the behavior is inherently stupid and irrational. When you engage in violence in a systematic way, you "lock in" and commit yourself to the assumption that there is no possibility that the person you are hurting could ever be smarter than you are or have better judgment than you do. Any violence that is on the level of the despicable acts of torture that the dummies talk about on talk shows shatters the most basic sense of trust that has to exist among people, if anything constructive is ever going to result from their interactions.
The profound violence that characterizes torture is always irrational, given that one who engages in irrational violence has decided that there is nothing of value, except the narrowly- and foolishly-defined information that one supposedly is trying to extract through the use of torture, that one could ever gain from the person who is being tortured. So anyone who says that he or she is getting something of value, through the use of torture, is lying, given that the destructiveness that results from the violence is necessarily going to obscure any attempt to understand the scope of the "value" that one might otherwise have had access to, through civil interactions, in the absence of torture. Anyone who tries to provide rational justifications for the use of torture (or for the bizarre, dehumanizing restriction of information that no one has ever had the right to restrict access to) is a fool and is lying to himself or herself.
I'm aware that it's disturbing to realize that people in positions of power can be at risk of being motivated by little more than a kind of semi-subconscious, "group imperative" to abuse other people, but, beneath all of the fancy jargon and monkey suits, that's basically what this stuff amounts to. I'm sorry if it upsets someone's delicate sensibilities, but a person who is older and more powerful than another person is not necessarily more wise than the other person. There are some things that no one has the right to keep secret, and there are some things that one can simply never do. You can't weasel your way out of being accountable for such a profoundly-violent action by saying you have some elaborate set of purposes in mind. Torture is one of those things that one can never do because the action undermines, in such an absolute and profound way, everything that human interactions are based on. You can't set up a fucking concentration camp to teach people about the evils of setting up concentration camps, and you can't justify an act of extreme violence by saying that you're aware that the action is unjustifiable and that you've simply decided that you've gotta do the violence. When one looks at the core of the reasoning that goes into this kind of violence, even among the most obscenely-despicable of individuals who have dominated people in these appalling and unfathomable ways, prancing around like a bunch of chicken-shit greek gods or something, with such a bankruptcy of emotion and reason, one finds that there's not really any reasoning, of substance, that has gone into the decision to engage in the violence. Torture is a stupid person's game, and anyone who tries to justify its use is just providing an elaborate set of bullshit excuses for abusing others.
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