Your “popularity” is that of a chronic masturbator whose daily fouling of unattended laundry has rendered him a primary topic of neighborhood discourse.
That was another problem during those years. The Justice Department saw its responsibilities as being toward the President, not the people. That became so ingrained that many people came to think of it as proper.
I don’t think there’s anybody left to inform, really. We all, with a few prominent but irrelevant exceptions, KNOW we used torture, along with kidnapping and degrading treatment etc. We’ve all known for years, and we’ve all reached our conclusions about its propriety. Those who think Jack Bauer is an authentic action hero (including Scalia, btw) aren’t soon going to decide that an action they had supported and cheered on was so immoral that they’re not only going to finally admit it but demand that the instigators be brought to trial.
This is it - this is all the outrage we’re ever going to see, right now. The further into the past it recedes, the less the outrage will be and the less supportable prosecution will be.
The reason for saying it is the administration’s repeated request to all of us to, in effect, just get over it.
You say “chronic” like it’s a disease or something. FTR, I prefer regular.
Well, Rand Rover can lick his balls, too. But he’ll have to get him drunk first…
This is just another way Rand is arguing that both that norms do not exist and even if they did, are unsuccessful.
The first is a metaphysical question. There are plenty of good arguments on both sides, but Rand just dismisses all of them with his naked assertions. This shuts down conversation and makes most normal people very irritated for good reason.
The second is even more insidious. Rand essentially believes that norms, and by extension, normative propositions are just matters of opinion and have no binding force. This is also a frustrating assertion, but it is easier to deal with because he is completely wrong. Norms inform the very law and legal process that he so fetishizes. The fact that a particular law might not exist in such a way around the relevant norm does not mean that the norm itself does not govern. It is also perfectly easy to derive a legal opinion from a reading of the law that undermines the very norm it is itself derived from. That and four bucks will get you a venti frappucino. Or, apparently, a job as a tax lawyer at Rand’s firm.
Rand brings this same tedious line of reasoning to every argument. He tries to reduce every consideration to the level of a legal opinion, devoid of context, devoid of the norms from which norms are derived, and devoid of the actual responsibility people have for propagating opinions and institutions. This is certainly consistent with his world view, but really, who gives a fuck?
For all we know, he’s only one campaign contribution away from a federal judgeship. Bet you’d give a fuck then.
Interpreting the law and figuring out what governs in a given situation would be his job. I think he a defective person, but I think he can do that job.
I have no doubt he would be a staunch and unyielding protector of property rights. And maybe some of those other ones.
Meh. I prefer my judges to apply a little bit of common sense as well as the law.
Me too, for what it’s worth. I mean, at least he would be technically competent and would keep the bench warm. I would not expect any great legal insights from him.
Whether an action is torture for purposes of a statute forbidding torture is a legal question upon which different people can have different opinions. A layman’s familiarity with similar concepts doesn’t really amount to anything.
Also, your opinion of “false” on my issue ilustrates my point nicely. My opinion is that it’s true (at about a 60 percent confidence level). Neither of us is evil, we just have different opinions. I would also humbly submit that our different experience levels with the relevant issues renders my opinion more valuable than yours.
You know what we call a government that has the unaccountable power to torture? Tyranny. You might enjoy living under a government that can torture anyone it likes. The rest of us prefer freedom, thank you.
Government officials don’t have the legal authority to torture prisoners. They don’t have the authority to slam prisoner’s heads into walls, they don’t have the authority to sting them with insects, they don’t have the authority to leave them chained to walls in piles of their own filth for weeks, they don’t have the authority to subject them to hypothermia, they don’t have the authority to starve them, they don’t have the authority to sodomize them.
Are you getting the picture? It’s not that terrorists don’t deserve to be tortured. It’s that government bureaucrats don’t deserve the authority to torture. You want to give a government bureaucrat the authority to torture you whenever he feels like it. What does that make you?
For some actions, perhaps. Many of the things the CIA did, like waterboarding, are not subject to differences of opinion. They’re just plain torture. And note that we prosecuted many people on the other side in WWII for things that we’re doing now. If it was torture then, why isn’t it now?
I’d like to use that as a new snowclone for “crazy”, specifically applicable to legal fetishists.
Uh, yes it does mean that. When a norm crystallizes into a law, then the law is all that exists to govern behavior. Those that had a different view of the norm were unable to get that view into the law, so they lost. They can keep trying to change the law if they want to.
Also, I agree that the norm that caused the enactment of the law should inform the interpretation of the law, but saying this doesn’t get us anywhere. Exactly which norms animated the law and the exact nature of those norms is still a matter of opinion.
I haven’t read the opinions yet. Based on articles about them, t seems reasonable to say that the opinion writer believed that the norm that animated the law saying “do not torture” was the norm “it is wrong to cause prolonged suffering for its own sake.” The acts that were the subject of the opinion did not cause prolonged suffering and did so for the purpose of extracting information.
I wonder how much of our reaction is grounded in our naive innocence of the things done in our name for many, many years. From Central America in the Reagan years, Viet Nam in the time of Nixon to the Philippines in the time of Mark Twain. Torture isn’t an aberration, torture is a tradition.
Who cares? As long as, you know, they don’t take his stuff.
-Joe
That’s true, and it’s a good reason for the Obama administration to take serious steps to stop the tradition. One such step would be for the US to ratify international treaties against torture.
The tradition needs to stop because it does enormous damage to US reputation, and that damage lasts a very long time.
Government raises taxes? That’s tyranny. Government tortures? Well, if it was for a good cause, then fine.
This is your opinion. Human society on the whole tends to believe the opposite. Whether or not norms are “facts” is beside the point. They govern behavior in the absence of law and in its interstices. The law, in its slow, blunt, and lumbering way tries to keep up with norms. It often fails, as law itself is a living thing and its creation is a political process. Perhaps you are familiar with the making sausage analogy.
That is just an ex post facto assertion. That is like the legal version of the efficient market hypothesis. It makes even less sense in a legal context than it does in a financial one. I would argue that this is both logically and empirically false.
But then you run the risk of not seeing the forest for the trees. One can chase fine distinctions in the law and become quite lost in the details, especially when different statutes or precedents do not completely agree with each other or apply to the matter at hand. I presume this is the “common sense” factor. We are not talking about bureaucratic niceties, we are talking about taking a man’s head and slamming it forcefully into a wall. Not giving due consideration to the act itself and how it intersects with our norms and our laws in other contexts is exactly what causes this sort of banal, bureaucratic evil.