DDL on 12/10/2012 at 10:54

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Pretty sure anyone over 6ft who's ever taken a long-haul flight will agree that serious posture uncomfort is "painful".

(and then they push the drinks trolley into your knee o dear fucking jesus kill me now)

june gloom on 12/10/2012 at 12:13

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sounds kinky

demagogue on 12/10/2012 at 12:21

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That's what it sounds like, but these are professionals coming up with this. Reports are it's agonizing... 10 hours in.

Muzman on 12/10/2012 at 13:05

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There aren't really studies since hard information is difficult to come by (they should probably just beat it out of someone I guess).
No shortage of articles though. Experts tend to agree there's no practical reason to use it though (as you're probably aware). It is only ever problematic.

(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/04/tortured_logic?page=full)
(http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/matthew_alexand.html)

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/22/neuroscientist-says-torture-produces-false-memories-and-bad-intel/)
(http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/05/23/soufan-debunks-rodriguez-on-torture/)


The pro argument generally comes from a common sense view that if someone is keeping a secret they'll give it up to avoid pain and another common sense view that we will know the right time and situations to apply this pain. It's got that dangerous ring to it where it seems clear and obvious, but it's not.

LarryG on 13/10/2012 at 06:34

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I don't know how I feel about the military usage of drones. But that's like saying I don't know how I feel about war. While true, it's not very helpful.

Let's talk about the use of long range weapons in war. Let's start with siege engines and move forward. As I understand it, siege engines were used against fortified positions containing both military and civilian targets. People got killed by them. There was no way to specifically target just military targets. The goal was to do so much damage that either those inside gave up or to breach the fortifications so that your army could enter and destroy the military targets close up.

Fast forward to the dawn of the age of artillery. When armies would line up nicely you could lob exploding cannon balls at them, or use them to knock down fortifications just like you could with siege engines. Again, the weapon was not very discriminating, and misaimed shots could easily damage civilians. More modern artillery was more accurate, but lobbing VW bus sized rounds of explosive is still pretty indiscriminate in terms of who get hurt.

What about bombing? From WW I through to Vietnam (say) bombers have dumped tons of explosives off target. And what were the targets when they were hit? Civilian run munitions factories were OK as targets, as were communications targets, civil leadership, and so on.

So what about drones? In some very real senses they are much more efficient in the target to collateral damage ratio. Much fewer non-targets get hurt than with any prior technology. The real problem currently is with defining who is a military (and legitimate) target and who is a civilian (and inappropriate / illegal) target.

We are at war not with another nation whose military is easily identifiable by their uniforms, but with extra national organizations whose members blend in with the local populations, and some of whom are American citizens engaged in what our nation defines as traitorous acts. Targeting of enemy combatants during war is long considered acceptable. On all sides of all wars in humankind's long history people who give aid and comfort to the enemy are considered fair game. It's just that the modern technology's precision in targeting turns what used to be a broadcast destruction into clear attempts at assassination. And we are uncomfortable with the idea of assassination, even in war. As long as the soldiers don't know who they are killing, that's somehow better than specifically targeting some key person.

To the extent that war has rules, I think that the use of drones falls inside the rules of war. Wars by their very nature are extrajudicial. However, torture does not fall inside the rules of war per the Geneva Convention. So maybe that's where the line is drawn.

I don't know. I don't know where I stand on the whole war thing, let alone all those picky litle details of who is OK to kill and who is not, or how it is OK to kill someone and how it is not. Somehow once you decide to do all that killing, mistakes will be made in who is killed and how they are killed. But at the end of the day, they are just as dead, aren't they?