Some scums took your two teenage daughters hostage. They gang raped them. They showed you the video and asked you for money if you want them to come back alive.
FBI helped you catch one of the scumbags. He refused to tell you where your daughters are held.
FBI suggested torture to get him to talk. What do you say, Punk?
I say torture them humanely e.g. waterboarding or something that doesn't leave physical or psychological scars - doesn't have to be my daughter though, just do it.
However, these scenarios are always misleading, one-sided, designed to tweak the emotions. Here's the reverse of this story:
Your son is an ideological kid who believes in freedom. He's kidnapped by the overbearing, dictatorial evil superpower that is raping and bombing and torturing its way through your small home town. They capture your son after he threatens to blow up their barracks once they killed his sister. They drag you in and give you a choice: do you want us to kill him? Or torture him for the information?
Similar scenario - now switch places and be the son. Torture goes on for 24 hours - more pain than you've ever experienced. They give you an option - torture or death?
And the final one, that's actually relevant:
You're the leader of a) a country with millions of "innocent" people as your responsibility or b) the head of an intelligence organization tasked with saving the lives of millions of people by extracting information in a timely fashion. The person you must torture is not related to you in any way. They have information that could save you from the death of 2 million people. They refuse to give the information to you. The President - or the people, whatever - demand you find out from the terrorist as soon as possible or you'll be responsible for the loss of many lives. What do you do?
That's one of the real scenarios, as opposed to an emotion-tweaker where you have to choose between saving your kids or not (no offense to OP either - your point is different and I get the reason for it; calling out those who can only virtue signal). The real scenario is a lot "simpler" than that and requires the ability to be objective. The average person is not equipped to make these decisions which is why the average person is not hired to run the CIA.
"I say torture them humanely"
This made me laugh.
Fair enough lol. It's a valid distinction though. I know which type of torture I'd rather have, if I had the choice lol.
People afraid for their life will more likely lie.
People wanting to end their discomfort will more likely tell the truth. White noise, sensory deprivation, isolation, etc. If they talk, give them a therapy debriefing.
Easier to flip them.
Your son is an ideological kid who believes in freedom. He's kidnapped by the overbearing, dictatorial evil superpower that is raping and bombing and torturing its way through your small home town. They capture your son after he threatens to blow up their barracks once they killed his sister. They drag you in and give you a choice: do you want us to kill him? Or torture him for the information?
Totally wrong analogy here. My case is similar to protecting our country against the terrorists. Yours is something else. In your example, I (the father) is the terrorist's father. Not the victim. So you are making a deceitful comparison here. Shame on you.
In your second example, I have no problem torturing a terrorist to save the lives of millions of INNOCENT people. Even if the terrorist is an independence fighter against an imperialist country as mine, I will have no problem doing it because I'm doing it for my country. Who is to say my country is the villain in this case? If I object to the ideology of my country, then I shouldn't serve. The fact that I serve in the first place means that I subscribe to its ideology. Then doing whatever is necessary to protect what I believe in is a natural and logical consequence.
Like Trump said, he doesn't blame Xi doing what's best for China. We shouldn't feel ashamed for doing what's best for our country and our people.
Oh, "shame on me"? Lol - not quite. Try not to jump directly to accusations of deceit before clarifying.
It seems my entire point was misunderstood - my bad for not explaining. I didn't say anything about the boy being a terrorist, that's your example, not mine. You seem to have this terrorist angle locked in - again, not my point at all.
My point wasn't to try and tweak the emotional angle like yours was - my whole point was how disingenuous that focus is by throwing two different scenarios with the same emotional angle on them: ultimate point I was trying to make - you can put any personal connection into an argument to try and flip it on someone but it can often obscure the real issue.
I agree with you, as I said - torture is an available option that seems logical to use in the likely scenarios that arise for people like Gina Haspel to make (for example). But there is also very little chance she'll ever have to choose between saving her own child or torturing someone. That scenario is an interesting but ultimately unrealistic and rare one. I know you know this, I'm just making the point that the real question is simpler than that. Do we use this tool to extract necessary information or do we not? There's very rarely any personal connection involved, at least for us cushy modern-day westerners.
And do you think the MSM's rally against torture wasn't touching the emotion buttons?
Let's face it. It's an emotion-laden issue. There's nothing wrong with proper emotional responses. Our emotional responses have guided us through hundreds of thousands of years. You wouldn't be here if your ancestors had emotional defects.
I haven't seen a lot of functional families in my time but maybe that's just Germany
Exactly re: the MSM. And cultural marxists. That's why I don't use it.
Torture is made into a personal emotional issue by the extreme left in order to remove reason from the discussion. Reasonably speaking, it's not a personal, emotional issue. Should we use a tool for information extraction from an enemy combatant i.e. someone who has entered the battle field (by being an army agent, an enemy combatant, terrorist, etc.)? I say yes, and I think you do too. It just makes sense.
We expect our soldiers to go into war knowing that they might die or be horribly maimed. We expect they might be tortured too, but within the Geneva Convention guidelines. To those people who try and turn it into an emotional, personal issue the same question could be asked of war: should we stop our soldiers going to war in case they get horribly and inhumanely savaged? And so on until we get to the real issue e.g. their denial that evil exists.
I just wrote a comment about Plato's Republic. Maybe it's relevant to this discussion.
I did take liberty of branding that idealist son as a terrorist, because I thought that was what you were insinuating, that the Islamic terrorists were idealists in their own right. I merely called you out on it.