Ulukai on 10/10/2012 at 19:01

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Probably is, but I don't have any experience of Tokyo.

London is getting its (http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2012/1/17/8331/96133/hotels/London_Moves_Forward_With_a_600-Room_Capsule_Hotel_In_Picadilly_Circus) very own Capsule Hotel now too.

Sorry, drifted off topic.

I vote: Iron Maiden for n'er do wells

Al_B on 10/10/2012 at 20:59

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I thought we'd stopped with the London thread derail?

Pyrian on 11/10/2012 at 01:38

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We should have plenty of examples. Instead, we have none.

Every such case I'm aware of where the victim was found at all, they were either still alive when found or dead before the perp was caught. In practice, discretely tracking suspects is considerably more effective than any form of interrogation.

But your wording brings up something else I've neglected: in a "ticking bomb" scenario, we're inevitably talking about a suspect, not a convict. We presume a suspect is innocent until proven guilty for a very good reason: sometimes they are, and even more often we cannot prove that they're not.

How comfortable are you with torturing the innocent?

It's certainly been done enough; indeed, I think if the U.S. military's "enhanced interrogation" program had been successful, they'd've trumpeted the evidence to the high hills and beyond long ago. Really, shouldn't there be plenty of classic cases of success? Instead, most of the few cases that get dredged up generally turn out to be exaggerated or outright fabricated. Meanwhile cases where torture produced distractingly false results are plentiful and relatively well-documented.

You can't exactly do controlled studies, but historical analyses are around.

Lots of references in this paper (free download):
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1316949)

demagogue on 11/10/2012 at 05:50

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Considering the Convention on Torture was a big part of the course I just taught, I have a lot to say... But too much, since of course I'd have to get all into liberal democratic theory and the whole thing with limited gov't powers, and when you can put restrictions or derogations on fundamental human rights (like the prohibition against inhuman treatment & torture), and how to treat extra-legal prerogatives in law.

A lot of the actual debate in practice hasn't been is torture itself justifiable -- practically universally the answer is no, so it's an academic debate without a place in the real world. Even despotic gov'ts that regularly torture normal criminals don't claim a right to it. They just do it and either say it's rogue action when they're caught, or it doesn't amount to torture. The debate in practice is usually more along how far enhanced interrogation techniques can go before it crosses the line into unjustifiable torture, and how do you have oversight over it & have a legal regime that can cabin it... You do not want to be talking about this topic in the abstract. You want to be talking about it as actual regulations you're drafting for police and military to follow in interrogations, what techniques they can use and when, and how to train them to stay within legal boundaries.

A big legal issue when you allow derogations on fundamental rights is that you're already saying the actor is outside the normal law for this action; it's very hard to bring that regime back under some higher law, which often in practice gives them carte blanche in the law to go as far as they want without limit, which is *not* what you want as a policy decision... Then you'll have the police and military torturing all manner of people. But even if you could find a way to put limits on the hole you want to open up in the law, how do you deal with figuring out what's in and what's out... For derogating fundamental rights you'll usually see qualifiers like you have to be saving lives or there's some "national security threat to the very survival of the state". You want that bar pretty high and very specific (any ambiguity and we're torturing grandmothers).

But all of this is aside from its justifiability under liberal democratic theory, which I haven't mentioned. I don't think it is justifiable because it's a form of inhuman treatment governments can't get a right from the people to engage in... And you'd have to have an overwhelmingly compelling interest like absolutely necessary to the guaranteed survival of thousands of people to bend it, that as mentioned above doesn't really work the way the real world does. But to really give the topic justice I'd really have to just start giving full lectures over 5 hour-long classes or something.

demagogue on 11/10/2012 at 06:12

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It doesn't literally make you tell the truth. It stupors your attention so you're more susceptible to suggestion. And it's expensive and probably not the easiest to distribute. But you can get basically the same effect with simple sleep deprivation, fatigue, & time disorientation, which is a common enhanced technique.