demagogue on 11/10/2012 at 06:47

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Anyway the point is the most basic interrogation technique is to fatigue & disorient the subject -- a lot of different ways -- so they're put in a similar kind of stupor as that drug.

Kolya on 11/10/2012 at 08:13

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In before Tocky alters the suspect.

Torture is punishment without a trial. So if there's overwhelming evidence against him, it's okay to go and lynch the guy, right? [ATTACH=CONFIG]1280[/ATTACH]
Or do we still need to wait for the judge? You know he's old and slow and often not much of a crowd pleaser...

DDL on 11/10/2012 at 08:46

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I was thinking about this last night, and I'm not sure I agree: pretty much every prerequisite for torture is exquisitely human. It is (as far as I am aware) something uniquely restricted to humans. You need to have an information culture, you need to have ways of communicating that information, you need to intelligence to think "associating painful stimuli with the withholding of information will reduce withholding of information", and you need sufficient mirror neurons (or whatever the current neurological hypothesis is) to confer a fairly sophisticated level of empathy: for maximum efficacy, a torturer really needs to understand the torturee, what makes them tick, what would (if the roles were reversed) make the torturer talk, and so on. You need to get inside the head of someone before you can start dismantling them.
It's...a terrifying twist on empathy, really.

So yeah, I'd say it's an exquisitely human concept. It's us at our most hyperfocussed edge. It probably could also be argued to have an evolutionary (at the cultural level) advantage, too: torturing outgroup individuals really encourages ingroup individuals to remain ingroup.

Is it still cuturally advantageous, though? Evidence suggests overwhelmingly no, at least for most western cultures where oppression by fear is less important (or where fox news can do that for you :p).


In general, I think the privacy of your own head is one of the few remaining truly private environments we have, and torture (aside from all the other reasons to dislike it) feels like a particularly crude invasion of that. Yes, hypothetically a few individuals will use that privacy to withhold information that could save lives, but that's not enough of a justification to endorse (on any level) the crude, pain-based invasion of that privacy.

Briareos H on 11/10/2012 at 08:53

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Upholding inflexible moral standards is both worthy of praise and not completely in tune with our nature. I prefer not to do it, but I won't try to convince you otherwise.

demagogue on 11/10/2012 at 09:25

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Haha, now you're flipping my common way of arguing against me, and even then you're not going as far as I'd go. I'd say most intentional behavior of humans is driven by characteristically human norms and semantic cognition, the stuff that requires a long period of social learning, anything that isn't nakedly about pure individual utility (which other primates are also quite good at recognizing and acting on).

But that's not what I meant by the term "inhuman". In this case, I meant the legal term of art "inhuman" as a technical term (using it like a lawyer would use that term), which isn't about what humans are like, but more like a laundry list of practices that liberal democratic countries at least have universally agreed should be prohibited as improper treatment of other humans ... I mean treating humans like non-human objects where there's no regard for their right to live or live with dignity and you're humiliating them for its own sake... things like ridiculously bloody public execution spectacles, drowning people in raw sewage, indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with chemical weapons like they were roaches, etc...

Part of being a liberal democracy is that even when the government needs to use force or coercion against people to secure public order, it at least treats them as humans that should be responsible for their actions, so you have trials in their presence with evidence, punishment isn't made public or into a spectacle, etc. And part of the torture debate is making sure, whatever interrogation techniques you want to use, that you don't inadvertently open up a platform for inhuman treatment of other people, so you don't get what happened in Abu Ghraib where soldiers were posing naked inmates in humiliating ways to take pictures, defecating on Korans, that sort of thing, which seems to be going way past any technique to get information and just flat out inhuman treatment of other persons purely for the sake of humiliating them. (Unfortunately some argued the humiliation was part of the interrogation techniques. I just think there's way too much potential for abuse once you open that can of worms.)