Well I guess you can justify anything off of "what if", coward. 'What if" I thought you were an idiot? "what if" I thought you were a danger to society with your love of torture? "What if" I took a dump on your lawn. Get a fvcking clue dipshit, "what if" land is for fairy tales where people like you and TLC get their rocks off thinking about this shit. No you can't justify torture dumbass and each time you try to do it the more your compassion, humanity, literacy, honesty and integrity are shown to not exist. The true coward is you, the infantile ramblings of a scared child introducing "what if" so he can sleep at night.
Well I guess you can justify anything off of "what if", coward. 'What if" I thought you were an idiot? "what if" I thought you were a danger to society with your love of torture? "What if" I took a dump on your lawn. Get a fvcking clue dipshit, "what if" land is for fairy tales where people like you and TLC get their rocks off thinking about this shit. No you can't justify torture dumbass and each time you try to do it the more your compassion, humanity, literacy, honesty and integrity are shown to not exist. The true coward is you, the infantile ramblings of a scared child introducing "what if" so he can sleep at night.
I have clearly defined what I thought the reasoning for supporting it is. Its not 'What if you shit on my lawn'.. Its 'Does the President of the United States believe it will save American lives'. Not ME, not YOU, not Joe the Plumber.. The PRESIDENT. I doubt Obama will torture you for shitting on my lawn.. I could be wrong though. Again, I don't care about "compassion, humanity, literacy (wtf?), honesty and integrity" if I am fucking DEAD. I can't be compassionate literate (wtf?) honest human being with integrity if I am six feet underground.
Here, I can go on a rant too. The true coward is YOU who will happily sacrifice the lives of their fellow Americans so you can stay literate. The true coward is YOU will does not believe that Obama has the ability to determine when torture is justified and when its not. The true coward is YOU who would rather be passing around the joint with their friends talking about how evil Bush is and how wonderful the world would be if we could just get along. The REAL world is a dangerous place.. not a fucking fantasy land where people all love one another and if we just distribute our wealth a little more evenly everything will be rainbows and unicorns.
I agree with you there. Thats why I find it frustrating when someone wants to assume certain labels for me as a conservative or someone else a liberal just becuase of how their leaders are missing the boat on the ideals of thier supporters.
The majority of Americans probably have a mix of traditional liberal and conservative ideals.
As far as Shep goes, i guess its a small example of that fair and balanced slogan
.
retrospooty
Platinum Member
- Apr 3, 2002
- 2,031
- 74
- 86
That is just it... Its not about you and your family - or me and mine. Its about our govt.'s behavior and abiding by the Geneva convention and not torturing people.
You can hypothetically ask "what if it were my family on the line"... I can just as easily hypothetically ask - what if the guy they are torturing was the wrong guy, innocent of any crime and has no info to offer. Hypothetical questions mean zero - we need to abide by the international laws set up on the treatment of prisoners... In other words, throw him in jail and let him get butt raped like the rest of the criminals LOL
Would you torture a terrorist to obtain information about where another terrorist is preparing to torture your spouse/child/so?
The thing is, you are immoral; you have a double standard; you treat non-Americans badly. I've never seen you stand against the US government's policies that selfishly hurt non-Americans, when we choose to exploit another nation through means such as propping up a government that will do our bidding and not the people's, and harm ranging from economic injustice to political repression to torturee and murder are the result.
You take a "who cares if ti's them, as long as it's not hurting us, as long as we benefit" position, it seems (deny it, I'll be glad to hear the denial. Many here fit my description.)
That is the immorality I'm talking about. I'm not even going to discuss the situations in which doing that turns the non-Americans into enemies, because that excludes the times that these immoral policies are effective enough that the people are repressed and unable to harm Americans in response. For example, when we provided Indonesia the weapons with which they invaded East Timmor and killed 250,000 with our permission, I'm not aware of East Timor's people striking back at America - yet it was wrong. We got the benefit we wanted of the 'goodwill' of Indonesia, for our own benefit, at the expense of innocent people. Where's your outrage over that?
It's easy to be the lazy citizen who just says 'torture away, to protect us', to be 'corrupted by power' as the saying goes. And it's immoral.
That's the bottom line. I can't deny, for all the times such immoral policies do bite us, that you won't prosper materially from the immoral policies. But they're wrong.
As for it being 'our families' when we restrict torturee - it is. If you would stop dehumanizing other people and start to be a member of the human race, not just 'us versus them', you might come to understand that you are advocating torture against members of your larger family, the human race. But our families are as much at risk as yours.
The right loves to make accusations of hypocrisy - but they're wrong much of the time. For example, Ted Kennedy, that opponent of the death penalty - bet he'll change his tune on Sirhan Sirhan, now that it's his own brother! Oh, wait, he came out requesting that Sirhan not get the death penalty, following his principles when it was his own family.
If you would rather 'be alive and tainted than killed holding the moral high ground' - a false dilemma used to justify immorality, as far as our nation being destroyed - why would you not support nuking the entire rest of the world, or at least any 'enemy' nation (if we could without harming our own nation), just to be really safe? If you really just treat them as dehumanized people? Because your logic allows that, if you are really following it, and not some confused mix of 'oh, not that extreme, but torture, that's an ok taint'.
Your false dilemma is how much of the unnecessary war in the world happens.
War isn't all that complicated. It always has at least one side without justification IMO - but often that's the winning side, and the story doesn't say they were unjustified. As in the Mexican-American war, which makes Saddam's invasion of Kuwait look small-time - but which doesn't get recognized in our history by many as the same basic wrong. More recently, we could look at our organizing a coup in Chile under Nixon. Justification? More recently, our backing the aborted coup in Venezuela. Justification? Our economic benefit, at the expense of the Venezuelan people's economic and political rights. But our public had only a minority of people concerned much, when we do it for our own benefit.
We're not alone - others do wrongs as well, of course. Sometimes our policies are aimed at people who do a lot of wrong, as with Saddam. But it's all too easy for immoral policies to be hidden behind phony excuses - and even moreso when people choose, as you do, to say it's fine to wrong 'to protect our interests' - which you try to say is to keep your family alive, but of course that does not stand up to any scrutiny, as the risk to your family is small, and more typically, the issues are to protect our economic exploitation.
What is the House of Saud, for example, but a regime that trades the rights of the people of that nation, for the mutual ecooic benefit of the family, and of we who prop them up?
Same with Egypt. But we won't hear anything from you, will we, about the moral problems with those policies - if they give you some economic benefit.
And that's immoral. We condemn Hitler and Japan for their 'aggressive wars', yet you will defend the effectively same thing, if we are the beneficiaries.
If I tell you an innocent man is tortured to see if he has information, do you only oppose that if it's your father or son? Or at least a fellow American?
We can peace - if people renounce your dehumanizing approach. It leaves plenty of room for us to defend our nation with many other means - intelligence gathering, diplomacy, alliances, arrests, and violent responses to violent threats. But you are similar to other oppressive powers of the past in your positions. And you threaten the moral character of our country, something the enemies cannot do.
When some leader comes along and hides an evil policy behind the excuse of it being to 'protect our nation', you salute and approve him, with a nudge nudge wink wink.
Eventually, down the road, your descendants become the victim - when we run out of foreign enemies to battle, and the oppression comes home.
You either defend justice for all - or you practice an immoral policy if not risk your own.
If anyone wonders why the moral argument was so inefffective in the South on slavery when the price was their economic well-being, look no further than our defenders of modern policies of our own policies that are morally the same basic issue. While I'm glad that our nation now has a majority who least put someone in office who has generally banned torture, you are not on his side; you are still advocating immorality. That should be an important issue, but sadly, for you it's not.
How much of the wrongs in human history are the same basic issue you are on the wrong side of?
That's a clueless response. The issue is not you personally being in the government, the issue is your rule as a voter in this republic - we have representatives in government, and they are elected or not, they are able to pursue policies or not, based on the support of the citizens.
The issue is the same whether you are in the government, or you are a voter - it's about whether you support a moral or immoral policy.
The argument you imply here - that you can advocate any policy and have no accountability for it if you merely advocate it, vote for it, condone it - is quite wrong.
He probably would, but it's irrelevant. You are making an argument that emotions should rule over sound, objective judgment.
There's a reason we don't let the family members of victims sit on juries.
More "what if" nonsense. How about you come back from fairy land where all the big boogey men are out to get us and discuss reality. But Whatifers like you will never reason, because they can't, their world is set off in some distant place. Thats the only place your arguments make sense, in whatifland.
Atomic Playboy
Lifer
- Feb 6, 2007
- 16,432
- 1
- 81
So you place the entire notion of whether or not the United States should torture on the decisions of the President? One man should decide our entire policy? We don't live in a monarchy, we don't live in a dictatorship, and saying that the President should unilaterally decide our nation's policy on torture can only be answered with this quote from Teddy Roosevelt:
It is downright unAmerican to make so bold a proclamation that we should place any domestic policy solely in the hands of one person, even if we happen to have elected him President. It's completely against every ideal this Republic was founded under. You may be uncomfortable thinking for yourself and need to rally behind whatever leader you can, but that's not the principles this country is based on. If this were 1775, you'd be the one telling King George how he could crush the rebels.
And how is it cowardice to say, "I'm OK with dying as long as I have the moral high ground"? That seems like the exact opposite of cowardice to me. You're the one saying you'll do whatever it takes to ensure that you survive, even if it means killing everyone else on the planet. That's courage? Then call me a coward; being courageous sounds an awful lot like being a complete waste of humanity.
And those options might not work. At some point you may have to pick the torture option. I'm not against that.. thats all I am saying. I don't think it should be abused, but I don't think it should be unilaterally dismissed as well.
jonks
Lifer
- Feb 7, 2005
- 13,918
- 20
- 81
You will be labeled, mostly as someone who doesn't seem to peer too deeply into complex issues. "What, it might save lives? Torture him!"
Your "wife held hostage" scenario is forgive me, retarded, for the same reason we don't let the families of murder victims sit on the jury of the accused.
Even the hard right wingers who defend waterboarding go to great linguistic lenghts to not call that technique torture because even they know torture is always wrong as a policy. You don't see them saying "we needed to torture KSM and it saved lives." They always say "we needed to interrogate him, but we didn't torture him."
If you have the "never once happened outside Jack Bauer 24" ticking atomic time bomb scenario and you have the guy who planted the bomb in custody and have an hour to avoid 10 million people being incinerated, well, in that situation you do what you have to do. But what you don't do is create an interrogation policy based on this most extreme and unlikely and heretofore never occuring situation.
And OP: Shep has been a fairly balanced voice at the network this past election season. He made several stands to establish he's not a dittohead.
Lol yep Shep Smith is awesome, look at the one where he makes fun of glenn beck, it's pretty hysterically.
Yes, I trust the President to make that decision. Just as we trust him to order troops to kill 100's, thousands, or 100's of thousands of people. I trusted Bush to do it, I trust Obama to do it. They can certainly keep congress informed and ask for their advice if they want (Which Bush did, and nobody objected..).. But ultimately, the President's job is to insure the safety of the American citizens. If that means using torture in some cases, I am for it. Like I said though, it has to be under the guidelines that if American lives could be saved by doing it.
Thats not a dictatorship, thats the power we have given the President.. to make the ultimate decision on issues like this. On some issues you just have to have a 'buck stops here' type of person, and I believe this is one of them.
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