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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

ALWAYS RIGHT (CONT). Torture is a confused and confusing subject these days, so I won't try to hide the fact that the thoughts which inspired this post's title emerged from a series of confused, almost random responses to the Time Magazine interview with Stephen King. Here are some excerpts. Read the whole thing if you think the ellipses might be obscuring King's brilliance.


Here are some of the random comments that ran through my mind as I read, in no particular order:


I actually don't disagree with Stephen King that Time Magazine should name Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan as their "Persons of the Year." Although I would also add Paris Hilton. The trio does symbolically embody the transformation in the body politic (NSFW) the MSM are working so indefatigably to bring about. The citizens of the modern progressive state they deem necessary and desirable are weak, brainless, greedy, corrupt, vulnerable, and somehow aggressively supine. The  government the media elite envision for us is well equipped to service those who have the animal instinct to fall on their backs and submit to the sugar daddy who already owns them.

That's why there's such a disconnect between the pyrotechnical outrage over waterboarding and the comparatively blase treatment of real torture. King's deliberate mixing of the subjects of torture and voyeurism forcibly invoked the memory of a photo so awful, and yet so sickeningly relevant, that I'm posting it only as a link. But I demand that you go look at it, especially if you're one of the ones who rant about waterboarding as torture and believe that our media are more disposed to flaunt sexuality than cover "substantive" matters like egregious human rights violations.

Here's the link. Here's the story that documents the facts:


Sound a bit like waterboarding? Unspeakable. Where's Amnesty International? Where's the New York Times? Somebody should do something. Somebody did. Her guards.


So, all you hyper-moral pacifist purists, if you could learn Ms. Wang's location and save her by waterboarding a captured guard, would you do it? Or is her permanent crippling and disfigurement a satisfactory consequence of your own personal interpretation of right and wrong? That's what you seem to be saying by your absolute opposition to any form of physical coercion, even if it doesn't maim or kill.

But if that's really your position, then you've entered the paradox zone. You have to explain -- to your own satisfaction -- why it is less moral to commit a lesser crime in order to prevent a larger crime than it is to enable a larger crime by refusing to commit a lesser crime. You can't allow the SWAT sniper to shoot the kidnapper who's holding a knife to your spouse's throat. You can't acquit the woman who kills her rapist in an act of self defense. You can't acquit the father who kills a child-molester in the act of sodomizing his infant daughter. In all these examples the killers are guilty of the same order of crime you're too moral to commit.

Not the same thing? Well, not quite the same as the media depiction of such choices. Ordinarily, the comparison is put to us in terms of individual torture versus mass murder; i.e., would you torture a terrorist to prevent the nuking of New York? It's a deceptive shift in perspective, intended to be disorienting. It's so much harder to imagine death on a vast scale than prolonged, painful suffering on an individual scale. Your mind isn't wired to imagine a single horrible death multiplied by five million and further multiplied by five million varied individual experiences of suffering and loss. There's a subtle misdirection at work. Most of us fear pain and suffering even more than we fear death. Here's the better queston: would you commit one act of torture to prevent five million acts of slow, agonizing, sadistic, dehumanizing torture? If not, why not?

What's really odd is that the reputedly moral stance against any form of torture is so often adopted by the so-called progressives who are so busily insisting on atheism as a superior philosophical stance for the national culture. The anti-waterboarding lobby probably has more members in common with Richard Dawkins's anti-God army than with the backward Christian soldiers who are willing to torture a terrorist to save a city. But it's the Christians who are risking irrational damnation. The rationalists are defying their own devotion to mathematics as the ruling principle by refusing to take personal responsibility for a reprehensible act by one unit on behalf of millions of other units of their own species. Ironically, such sacrifices make more empirical sense in a godless universe than in a divinely judged universe in which death is not the final, fatal end of accountability.

The thing is, in reality, all of these philosophical paradoxes are beside the point. It's all so much simpler than that if we're a nation of brainless, characterless, spread-legged cows like Britney, Lindsey, and Paris. All the harping on waterboarding is undertaken in the certainty that most of us know we couldn't withstand even as mild a form of torture as this. In fact, waterboarding is about as far as our individual imaginations can take us. We're better able to envision not being able to breathe for a few seconds than to comprehend unanesthetized castration with a dull knife or public limb-by-limb amputation followed by disembowelment or -- well, something truly impossible -- like being beheaded live (!) on videotape by a religious fanatic with a rusty pruning saw.

If we can't imagine surviving it or doing it ourselves, that's supposed to be the end of the discussion. In the progressive egalitarian model, all people are basically the same. Regardless of our origins and cultures, we're no better and no worse than anyone else. If we couldn't commit acts of deliberate premeditated cruelty, neither could anyone else. Unless the evil handful of real oppressors in the world provoked us beyond endurance. So if ordinary people are committing acts of savage violence, it must be because of that handful of real oppressors, who are objectively evil -- because their crimes, even if they are nominally lesser, are codified and cold-blooded rather than spontaneous and passionate. The waterboarding of the oppressors is worse than the beheadings and mutilations of the universal everyman. There's no basis for comparison at all. Thus, no comparisons will be drawn.

But there's a hole in the egalitarian facade that is perfectly exemplified by Stephen King. Here's a man who has no problem at all with imagining in vivid detail the very worst things that can be done to a human being. Yet he still pretends that waterboarding is worse than any crime committed by the devotedly savage among us. His outrage about waterboarding has to be a pose. His suggestion that Jenna Bush be waterboarded for the purpose of  humiliating his political nemeses is both hypocrtical and voyeuristic. And Time Magazine's willingness to give him print space without interrogating his lifelong penchant for sadism is evidence of the phony moralism of those who presume to be our philosophical mentors.

So:  How do you pussies feel about all the MSM's Britney-Lindsey-Paris crotch shots (still NSFW) now that you know you're really leering at a portrait of what you've become? Don't know what to say? I'm sure America's Dickens would be happy to explain it to you better than I can.


I feel better already. How about you?

UPDATE. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link. If you're enjoying the comments here, you might also enjoy the reader comments on these posts at Vox Popoli (libertarian-Christian something-or-others) Transterrestrial Musings (Rand Simberg), and this forum (sci-fi/horror nerds?) What's most interesting is that those who are most critical of this post are unanimous in not attempting to answer the direct questions I asked here. They grab the hot potato and run off to some favorite ideological corner where they can deal exclusively in abstractions, statistics, and political/moral rhetoric. There's no sense that for them a debate of this sort ever passes from the academic to the reality of bitter choices and bloody consequences. They seem to think that war itself can be made sanitary if interrogations are polite. Simberg sums them up well as "morally unserious." I'm personally surprised at how many of them actually act out the dim, passive template I drew of them in this post. I'm less surprised at the additional evidence that many of them can't read, having misunderstood my argument as "we do it because they do it too." I'm amused that so few understand that what a fiction writer writes says a great deal about his psyche and desires. (If you're still not understanding me on this, try to write a fictional rape-murder scene. See if you can really do it. Then lecture me about why Stephen King's fiction isn't relevant because it's only fiction.)  But go read what the people have to say and see what you think.

UPDATE 2. Hats off to Eric Scheie at Classical Values. Unlike Christian-libertarians and other pillars of ultimate morality, he experienced a visceral reaction to the example of Chinese torture and failed to dismiss it as irrelevant to American foreign policy or the predictable result of an alien authoritarian government dealing with a weird cult, but called it out as a shocking illustration of the difference between torture and severe unpleasantness. Even Reynolds was more affected by Stephen King's provocative Person of the Year nominations than he was by a demonstration of real torture.

I have a bigger question for all of you who understand Eric's response. How do you interpret the non-response of so many aelf-avowed moralists to such repulsively documented facts? For my part, I think the latter generations are chock full of functional sociopaths. They think they're moral, they (many of them) think they believe in God, but in reality all their thinking is really only about themselves and the various poses they adopt to appear estimable in the eyes of those whose admiration they seek.

The first question I asked -- "If you could learn Ms. Wang's location and save her by waterboarding a captured guard, would you do it?" -- was an easy one for authentic Christians, as 'Joshua Chamberlain' explained in his comment. He said: "As a Christian, I would be happy to stand before God and explain that, if I had a choice between harming the guilty and seeing harm done to the innocent, I would choose protecting the innocent every single time. If the Lord chooses to damn that, so be it."

The Vox Popolis of the world will never understand that faith is not entirely about unquestioning submission; it's also about conviction in the spark of goodness we carry as individuals. If it should turn out that God disapproves of Christian morality, then damnation is preferable to betrayal of what we hold sacred. If it's wrong to hurt or kill the malevolent in order to save the innocent, there is no divine justice worth having.  And there's no secular logic that makes life worth living.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

THINKING. Conventional Wisdom should be renamed. Conventional Wishdom would be better. Some of us actually watched the Democratic debate last week. We were encouraged to do so by the reportage that a couple of Democrat presidential candidates were actually standing up to Hillary. Wow. No good can come of that, we thought. But it might be fun to watch.

In the event, it was as pitiful as we might have expected. Like the eunuchs of the MSM, we tuned in hoping against hope that some progressive male might actually stand up to the Medusa and tell her that being the wife of a hick governor and a corrupt president doesn't automatically qualify you to rule the world. We should have known better. Obama's balls repose in a drawer of Michelle's vanity. Edwards's balls have been missing so long the Discovery Channel is producing documentaries about them designed to run in tandem with their latest futile search for the body of Jimmy Hoffa.

Of course, Obama and Edwards tried to secrete some testosterone in their encounter with Hillary, but she just raised her voice and they shrank like high school boys in a cold shower. Incomprehensibly, Obama couldn't even answer the one question he had attacked Hillary for not answering. He didn't know what he'd do about drivers licenses for illegal aliens either. That's when all the progressive metrosexuals in the audience reached instinctively for their crotches, hoping their own jewels weren't sitting in the same jar with Obama's on Hillary's nightstand.

Well. The conventional wisdom had it that Hillary now "pwned" the little black boy from Illinois. What the CW of the MSM never took into account was that Obama has just figured out a new way to play The Card. The Gender Card. According to today's Drudge, Obama is now beating Hillary in Iowa:


Progressive men know the score. They know that women always win every argument. They know that men are hopelessly stupid, inept, inarticulate, and cowardly in every possible confrontation. And for that very reason, they're rallying like crazy behind the candidacy of the guy they can identify with as if he were their own brother. The guy who's so much like them his own wife can't stop ridiculing him long enough to make his biggest dream come true. The guy who's so much like them that with his whole future on the line, he still can't stand up to a woman even when she's sitting on the checkmate square and all he has to do is say the word.

I call it dirty politics. No man can be as castrated as Obama seems. What he's obviously doing is pretending to be the same kind of gutless emasculated schlub as 90 percent of technically male Democrats. Sure they have issues. We're all sorry for them. Sorry as can be. But that doesn't excuse this kind of cold-blooded pandering to the most pathetic demographic of the nation's most obnoxiously female party. It's just a disgusting ploy for male votes.

What the Republicans need to undo this sinister stratagem is akin to Watergate. They need to raid Hillary HQ and steal their most secret evidence of Obama scandal -- the videotape. It will blow the lid off this campaign. Obama nailing Michelle in their own bedroom, with her shuddering and screaming and weeping in orgasmic joy. That's Novak's scoop. If you're a Democrat, it's the end of the road. Especially the part at the end where Michelle meekly totters off to make her man a huge and well-earned Dagwood sandwich.

Why can't we have honest politics instead? You know the kind. A glorious mud wrestling match between Hllary and Michelle Obama. While Bill and Barack go off to pick up girls at elite colleges.


But it's way past time for the Democratic Party to forbid playing the Gender Card. It's pure exploitation to remind liberal men that they have no masculinity. It's cheap, easy, and shallow.

Oh. Never mind.

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