Here’s O’Reilly trying to get military experts to agree with him.
Here are two from Shepard Smith who is violently opposed.
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#60 Rick Cain
Point taken, but political prestige is the least of our worries. We have at the helm a lunatic who thinks he’s some kind of messiah. The reality is that he is a fool forcing classroom ideology onto the real world.
No good can come of this.
Bobbo,
Sorry I hacked up your name in #59. Some idiot put the “p” key right beside the “o” on my keyboard. This laptop keyboard is a little difficult to get used to.
#62–Fusion==I am the worst typist on this blog. You humble me by any apology.
That said: define evil.
Just amusing that people will say “The ends don’t justify the means” thinking they have made any sort of analysis. They haven’t. All they have concluded is that they don’t like the ends or the means used. Asked for the rule/concept/value they are using to make this determination never goes well.
This illustrates the role of dogma over thinking. Goes right along with people who can’t answer a hypothetical they disagree with.
#63, Bobbo,
first,
This illustrates the role of dogma over thinking. Goes right along with people who can’t answer a hypothetical they disagree with.
I disagree. Most of the time I will refuse to answer a hypothetical for the simple reason that the answer would also be hypothetical. I can’t answer how I would react if my daughter was kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I can tell you today when I am in a clear frame of mind, but if I am faced with the actual choice, I know that I don’t know what I would do. Anyone that tells you they would do something exactly is just full of crap.
Second,
“The ends don’t justify the means” thinking they have made any sort of analysis. They haven’t.
Wrong. In the specific case of torture, it is always wrong. The same as killing someone just because you think they might harm you sometime in the future. Our society is based upon laws and regulations in order to be orderly. We have drawn bright lines on what is acceptable behavior and what is not.
When we start making excuses for reasons we ignored or stepped over the line, we have lost our moral right to have those lines in the first place. You can’t say on a whim that person “A” has the protection of society from abuse then turn around and say that person “B” doesn’t have any protections and may be abused. If it is illegal to torture a prisoner to find out where the meth labs are, it is still illegal to torture a prisoner to find out where the camps were last month.
Third,
Asked for the rule/concept/value they are using to make this determination never goes well.
The rule is simple. No one deserves to be tortured. To toss in a hypothetical such as “if there is a nuke and the choice …” is bullshit. There was no nuke. There was no “dirty bomb”. There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. These are all attempts to justify an illegal act.
Bobbo’s confusion about the implications of letting the ends justify the means is a perfect diagnosis of one of the primary diseases in the conservative brain.
If the ends can *ever* justify the means, Bobbo, then that means there are no “means” that could ever be absolutely wrong. If the ends are ever seen to be more important than the means, then that means *any* means are acceptable — including death camps, etc. — in order to get to what matters: the ends.
This is something that most thinking people understand the first three minutes they think about this subject. The fact that there are conservatives on this board who still haven’t got there is… Well, let’s just say I’m waiting for the next Tim McVeigh to emerge from pretty soon…