Yet More Fascism

To follow-up on my earlier post, I think liberal and libertarian accusations of creeping totalitarianism are as obnoxious and counterproductive as the histrionics of their conservative counterparts. Yes, John Yoo’s skewed interpretation of the Constitution is downright scary, and yes, the Bush Administration’s approach to detainee treatment and warrantless surveillance was Kafka-esque. But we certainly [...]

You set yourself up for that one

Andrew Sullivan lands a clean blow.

Tortuous Distinctions

John Schwenkler’s short post on Phi Kappa Gitmo provoked an interesting exchange on detainee mistreatment in the comments section. One point that’s worth addressing is from commenter “Pan Cascadian”:
I think torture should carry very heavy penalties. Having said that, I can understand a particular commander feeling that torture was warranted or necessary in a given [...]

Bad Framing (II)

Mother Jones takes 24 to task for normalizing torture. Here’s Kevin Drum:
After all, here in the blogosphere we opponents of torture like to argue that we don’t live in the world of 24, guys. And we don’t. But Jack Bauer, needless to say, does live in the world of 24. And in that world, [...]

Bad Framing

This strikes me as a bad way to go about arguing against torture:
There’s something intuitive about torture. Hurt something until it breaks. The phrasing of the the 24 scenario plays implicitly on that intuition: Do you do the thing that works and saves lives? Or do you let abstract principle ensure the deaths of thousands? [...]

Victor Davis Cassandra

Greenwald the Indispensable highlights a noticeable shift in rhetoric from Senators Feinstein and Wyden on torture. The worst part about this nonsense is that Democrats are literally following a script laid out by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review’s resident classics scholar fire-breathing populist. Hanson remains serenely self-confident that his absurdly inflated assessment of the [...]

The Benefit of the Doubt

Andrew Sullivan fisks Kristol’s latest on torture and presidential pardons. Obviously, I don’t want to see anyone implicated in torture get away scot free, but focusing on lower-level implementers – rather than the policymakers who implicitly or explicitly authorized their actions – strikes me as a bad idea. CIA agents who participated in waterboarding were [...]

Torture

JL Wall and Mark were kind enough to respond to my original post on torture (read the comments section – Mark offers a few thought-provoking scenarios). The discussion at John Schwenkler’s place has also been excellent. My thinking on this subject isn’t particularly systematic, so I’ll restrain myself to two additional points:

I think the War [...]

It’s Just Wrong

Does it make sense to work your way back to first principles with a preferred outcome in mind? For example, I agree entirely with JL Wall when he writes:
Basic status as human beings: this is distinct from the concept of universal human rights. It is not a statement that there is a basic natural right [...]

Dissent is Conservative

Jonah Goldberg recounts National Review’s clashes with the Bush Administration:
We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, his steel tariffs and his [...]

Has pacifism dulled my senses?

Cliff May kindly excerpts his review of The Dark Side (the rest is stuck behind a subscription firewall). Here’s the key bit:
For Mayer, it is axiomatic that the aftermath of September 11, and what it revealed about the flaws in the American security apparatus that made the jihadist attack possible, did not necessitate any new [...]

Light Reading

In comments, Jina Moore highlights her excellent article on the doctors who treat torture victims. This is real, live journalism folks, and it’s quite good. Go read it.

Bad Words

Having re-read Kyle Erickson’s post on language and finally gotten to Stephen Fry’s entry on the subject, I’ve belatedly realized there’s something of a distinction between the natural evolution of a word’s meaning and imposing a new terminology to obscure comprehension. So, for example, if the American public gradually replaced the word “torture” with the [...]

George Weigel’s Most Catholic Decision-Making Calculus

After thoroughly demolishing the pro-life case for Obama, George Weigel goes on to explain why abortion is an a priori issue for Catholic voters:
As Cardinal George’s letter indicated, the Catholic Church’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion involves a first principle of justice that can be known by reason, that’s one of the building [...]