Best I’ve got. The article was focused largely on the science, but emphasized the legal pathologies that Scalia engaged in, including faceabouts on legal justifications.
His “giant slug” notion alone gives away that he wasn’t serious about any kind of reasoning, but was only there to get Christianity back into the schools.
He was not a “great judicial mind,” but a diseased hack, who put his determined decision first and then argue his way to it, like the kid who shoots the arrow at the wall, then paints in the colored bullseye rings around it.
I’m not glad he’s dead, but he was a really shitty jurist, and this country is safer and stronger today than it was when he was a justice.
I suggest that you, and the article’s author, mistake a common legal argument technique. Creating a hypothetical is not necessarily intended to advance the hypothetical, but to expose an unexplored weakness or strength in the framework under discussion.
How do you reconcile that view with assessments from people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Elena Kagan, who both oppose his political desires but laud him as a great judicial mind?
Perhaps beneath his harsh and sarcastic exterior beat a heart of purest gold? Perhaps he wept while penning (quilling?) his oppressive and reactionary opinions, but the compelling force of Pure Reason left him no options? Perhaps it was all just humble obedience to Almighty God, and His stern and unforgiving Incarnation, Jesus of Nazareth?
Or maybe he just really liked lawyers? Somebody has to.
Yeah, torture works in make-believe-land. In the real world, it doesn’t.
Firefighters regularly break windows to save people. Yet, somehow, we still manage to have laws against vandalism. Prosecutors are smart enough to know that sometimes a window needs to be broken, and they don’t prosecute cases like that.
We have laws against torture. If by some amazing happenstance one of those silly 24 scenarios actually comes true, the prosecution can decline to prosecute, or the jury can decline to convict. We don’t need to make it legal to break windows to protect firefighters from being convicted of vandalism.
Scalia was glib. He was smart for a lawyer, but he wasn’t a great thinker. He was blind to his own biases, and much better at inventing clever rationalizations than logically thinking through the implications of a set of premises.
It does in certain circumstances. It doesn’t work very well at all as a tool for fishing expeditions where the subject may not have actual knowledge of what’s being asked and is therefore likely to say anything to get it to stop. In other cases, where the subject clearly or unquestionably has knowledge of the issue at hand, torture would work very well indeed.
Imagine for a moment that some asshole abducts a little girl from her bedroom, takes her off somewhere and sexually assaults her and then kills her and hides the body. His DNA is found in the little girl’s bedroom and hers is found in his car, and furthermore he admits the crime but refuses to disclose where her body is hidden.
In my opinion it is much more cruel to force her parents and loved ones to spend the rest of their lives not knowing where her body is, and to deprive them of what little closure comes from giving her a funeral and burial service.
So I would be 100% in favor of torture to get the asshole to reveal where her body is hidden. In the vast majority of times I doubt it would even be needed because the murderer would cough up the info voluntarily in order to avoid the torture.
Another example would be if someone is known to have sent lethal poisons through the mail or has planted bombs to go off to is known to have information that would prevent terrorist activity of some kind. Again, torture would be highly effective in getting him to cough up the info and save lives.
Why on Earth it’s considered preferable to let people suffer needlessly over crimes committed against their loved ones or to knowingly allow lives to be lost just so the bad guys don’t get the option of coughing up the info or being forced to divulge it is way beyond me.
You are just a willful ignorant Starving Artist. Past discussions demonstrated that your examples only happen in fantasy land, in reality the most common reason for torture is for the powerful to find justifications for a reprehensible course of action.
For Kadaffi it was finding finding “evidence” that the European doctors were infecting Libyan kids with AIDS. Everyone in Europe and the rest of the world realized that the testimonies from the medical people obtained with torture were poppycock.
And then one should not forget how torture allowed us to find false reasons to invade Iraq.
And like that there are many examples from the past (torture found “evidence” for witches and satanists among us, but only ignoramuses would make the point that torture found the truth then); the objective of torture is to keep the low information citizens from asking inconvenient questions about a reprehensible action from the government, because the powers that be offer the false “evidence” from torture to those citizens to justify (and thanks to the gullibility of autocratic voters) even more bad actions.
Of course, but many past discussions demonstrated that you are using fantasy for your justification, the real world examples of torture “working” (“working” as in finding justifications for really bad actions) do point towards more reprehensible forms of government, and they do point to your real ideals.
Ideals that make many republicans justify giving support to dictatorial military governments around the world. And to want to see similar things to be done with the “rabble” in America.
Multiple reasons – even in your hypothetical, guilt is not 100% confirmed. Are you willing to take the chance on torturing someone who might just be extremely deluded, but not guilty (due to DNA contamination/error, or some other reason)? Also, who does the torture? Would you do it? Would you force others to do it? Would you have the family member do it (and do you think that would really be good for them, psychologically)? Is it worth setting the precedent that torture is sometimes okay, and the government is allowed to do this? Do you trust that the government will only torture the right people, for all time?
The ticking-time bomb scenario, absurd as it is, is the only possible scenario I can imagine in which torture might be morally acceptable. In my opinion, that’s what Presidential pardons are for. There’s no need to legalize torture in extreme situations – if some hypothetical Jack Bauer has the right guy, with the right knowledge, and tortures him to get the codes to save a city, then the President can pardon him. In all other circumstances, including one in which Jack Bauer guesses wrong, prosecute the bastard.
I had the good sense to put Starving Artist on my Ignore list some time in 2009 (early on the the SRIOTD thread), figuring that if he did ever accidentally post something valid and useful that I needed to read, it would be such a commonplace and patent truth that it would surely be posted by someone else, and I could read it from them.
This is exactly correct. I’ve never understood the meme of late that people just lie under torture. I’m sure there are a few, a very few, who do, but results can be checked, and I have a notion those guys ain’t gonna be lying the second time around. The movie tough guys who can withstand torture are few and far between. Torture is actually tried and true over the ages.
The real issue is it’s just plain wrong and immoral. Do you really want to lower yourself to the level of, say, a Thai police officer?