It’s a day late, but here’s an amusing Hallowe’en comic courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele:
In torture-related news, Dilbert creator Scott Adams — whose opinion matters among the educated, rationalist, leaning-towards-libertarian crowd (geeks, technologists and such) — has shifted slightly in his opinion on torture, from “pro” to “undecided”:
The media have trotted out expert after expert to say that regular non-torture interrogation is MORE effective than torture. I discounted those experts as selectively chosen by the liberal media. One thing that all of the experts seemed to have in common is that none of them had USED torture. So how would they know torture was worse than the alternative?
But much time has passed since this debate began. You’d think that the proponents of torture (cough, cough, Fox New, cough) would have produced one credible torturer to say, “Torture works great! I get all of my information in minutes and I’m home to help the kids with homework by five!”
Or perhaps the media could find one torture victim who would say, “I wasn’t going to tell them anything until they started water-boarding me. Man, that stuff works!”
Now granted, it might be hard to find someone to confess to being a torturer. And it might be even harder to find someone who was tortured who is willing to endorse it. But it seems to me that with all the torturing going on, you could at least find a friend of a friend who saw it work. Or the American government could find some CIA operative who is willing to be filmed in silhouette with his voice garbled saying he’s seen torture produces excellent results.
But nothing? For years?
Move me to the skeptical column. The burden is on the proponents of torture to produce some proof that it works. I still don’t rule out the possibility that torture can be effective, but if it’s being done in my name, I want some fucking evidence.
6 replies on “Bobbing for Apples, Cheney-Style and "Dilbert’s" Change of Mind”
Not that I ever found Dilbert all that funny, but this puts Scott Adams on my shit list.
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?
I like Scott Adams’ wit and writing as much as the next guy — but I think you’re overselling him a tiny bit…
“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.
I think he’s got a fair bit of influence. In my recent travels to various geek conferences in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston as well as in a number of emails I’ve received, I keep hearing “did you see this post in the Dilbert Blog?
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.
He probably does have a moral compass — it’s just that moral compasses work differently in “I / it” relationships versus “I / thou” relationships.
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.
> 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.
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?
Anon, if you had read Scott Adams’ post — which is the basis for Joey’s commentary — it would be abundantly clear that he was deliberately excluding the moral and political dimensions of the debate:
“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.