The pro-gun, pro-abortion position is _vital_, in my opinion. I think that Democrats are losing votes that they should not lose by being aggressively gun control proponents. If they want to win, they need to choose one or the other.
That appears to be the case, at least hereabouts. Just about all winning candidates in the recent Minnesota elections took a strong position on gun issues. (Not, by any means, positions that us gun nuts support.) Pretty much everybody who tried to split the difference lost -- from Tim Penny, the Independence Party candidate, to several close House races. (Martha Robertson was the only split-the-difference senator that I can think of to win a seriously contested race.)
There are probably ten outstate DFL state senators, folks generally supportive of the big local hot-button gun issue, who will lose their seat if they're seen to waffle. (Most of them are in safely DFL districts, but they will be in trouble in the caucuses and primaries.)
As to Nader voters, seems to me that it's important for people to distinguish between close races and others. I'm not sure how important it is to put in a protest vote in a state that's clearly going to go one way, but it's a different thing than voting for a candidate who you know won't win when you have a race that could be decided by a very few votes.
What can individuals do towards keeping Lieberman from becoming a candidate on the Democratic ticket?Send money to the campaign of a viable alternative. My own guess is that that's probably Edwards.
Well, yes, it's about security. John Adams' take is primarily practical. That it's in accord with his (utterly laudable) desire not to put innocent people in jail is, perhaps, not utterly coincidental.
(The only way to be sure never to put an innocent person in prison is to never put anybody in prison. The best that the various checks and balances can do is to limit how often an innocent person gets screwed over. The analogy between torture imprisonment is, I think, not irrelevant -- talk to a prison guard sometime about how he feels about the fact that he's got some innocent guys locked up.)
And that's the problem with the way the whole torture question is being handled, it seems to me. Many people are very quick to decide that it can't ever be useful, no matter what the circumstances.
Many moral questions, it seems to me, don't get shortstopped on such easy practical grounders.
If you assume that it's always useless and/or counterproductive, you don't need to get to the morality of it.
If you conclude that it could be useful under some set of circumstances, then you've got both practical and moral problems. Both, I think, are tough. Practically: is *this* a situation in which it would be useful? Would the negative practical side-effects of using it outweigh the benefits to be gained? (And: should your answer to the practical questions come out the way you want it to morally?)
If you can honestly answer no, you don't get to the hard question: can it ever be right?
I don't think there's any question that torture can be useless, as has been pointed out. Utterly useless -- in more ways than one -- for convicting somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In other ways, the utility of it gets more likely, at least in theory. Sure -- apply the hot poker and, probably, he'll give you whatever names he thinks you want, even if they don't exist. But can he give you verifiable addresses? Bank account numbers? Phone numbers? Time and dates of meetings?
If you're interrogating the guy, wouldn't you want to know that stuff? The purpose of whatever interrogation he's going through isn't, after all, to generate evidence to prosecute him. It's to extract useful information out of him -- and I don't see anybody saying that he doesn't have any useful information, or that it wouldn't be a good idea to get him to share it by morally acceptable means.
The real practical question, it seems to me, is this: can torture, under at least some circumstances, get useful information more rapidly than other forms of interrogation?
If not, then you can stop there; no problem. No need to do something as ugly as torture if there's no benefit to be gained. You don't have to worry about what those circumstances might be, because they don't exist. The people who will die because some folks failed to stick the bamboo splinters under KSM's fingernails will die anyway. You don't have to get into the hard questions, because it's just as useless to torture him for information on Al Qaeda's plans as it is to grab some random kindergartner off the street and torture her for the same information.
That's easy.
Try a different set of assumptions. Assume that:
1. The operations chief of Al Qaeda has some information that would be useful in preventing further Al Qaeda murders. (I think that's a safe assumption.)
2. Assume that the sooner you get this information, the more useful it's likely to be. (Again, fairly safe, I think.)
2. Assume that verifiable information can be extracted more quickly by the use of torture than other techniques. I'm just assuming that; I dunno. But if you believe the folks who say that the tortured will quickly say whatever he believes will please his captors, that argues *for* the practicality of it, rather than against it -- as a practical matter, it comes down persuading the tortured that what will please his torturers is verifiable information.
Then you've got a difficult problem.
Morally/religiously, it can be easy.
"But if you could bring on the End of Days, with Heaven beyond, by torturing a small child to death 9696 just one small child, a sickly one, one that was likely to die momentarily anyway 9696 what would you do?"
That's easy, in some moral/religious contexts: such an offer can only come from the Devil, and it's a lie.
Me, I'm an agnostic, and I dunno.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 4 |
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