“Today I don’t want to talk about the morality or the political implications of torture. I’m only addressing the question of whether it works better than conventional interrogation in some cases. If torture doesn’t work better than the alternatives – not ever – then you don’t need to address morality because torture doesn’t even pass the first filter.”

It’s all very good to get on your high horse — this is, after all, an issue people feel strongly about — but it would help if you understood the scope of the debate before firing the cannons. Perhaps legality or morality is the first filter in your estimation; that is not the way Mr. Adams initially framed the debate.

> confessions, whether truthful or not. It’s not so good for getting

> information out of someone.

It’s nice that we can be so blasé and analytical about the torture. It’s very managerialist to look at its rightness or wrongness in terms of results. However, that is complete bullshit. Funny old concepts like the rule of law, and freedom from arbitrary measures, should probably also be considered, eh?

Besides, he’s just presenting a strictly pragmatic approach to a problem, drained of moral/societal-norm tone. It’s an interesting tool for debate — I’ve used it from time to time effectively: “Even if you remove the moral aspect of action X, it’s still a bad idea because…”.

As for his leaning towards libertarianism, you can see it in the other posts in his blog. Besides, it’s a leaning.

The Alexa numbers also seem to suggest that he’s got a fairly big blog following. Here’s a chart comparing his numbers with an 800-pound gorilla in the tech blogosphere, Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky.

As for torture, I agree that it seems to be good for eliciting confessions, whether truthful or not. It’s not so good for getting information out of someone.

“whose opinion matters among the educated, rationalist, leaning-towards-libertarian crowd (geeks, technologists and such)”

He’s just a smart guy that draws funny cartoons, after all — not a lifestyle guru. =)

The interesting thing about Mr. Adams’ post is that he avoids the most compelling argument against torture: Unless you already have a pretty good idea of what kind of information the torturee knows, you have no idea how accurate his confessions are. A guilty party may eventually confess the truth; an innocent party will say whatever he has to make the torture stop.

This comment lays it all out very succinctly.

He thinks the problem with state torture is that it might be ineffective? And that’s all? He has no moral compass, apparently.

And how can he be said to lean toward libertarianism if he holds this position?