It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
A fellow writer demolishes the Ticking Time Bomb justification of torture: that torturing a prisoner is acceptable when the prisoner knows the location of a time bomb that's about to go off.

I'd only add one more problem with the Ticking Time Bomb justification: that prisoners are captured cackling about their knowledge of ticking time bombs only in movies starring Dennis Hopper, Anthony Hopkins or Kiefer Sutherland. In reality-land, when people are arrested under suspicion of connection to terrorist groups, they don't sing to the authorities about their knowledge of a ticking time bomb but tease them about how to stop it in cryptic riddles after sneering to their interrogators, "we are the same, you and I." (Their interrogators are also, most of the time, not named Jack.)

No, when suspects are apprehended, it is unclear precisely what (if anything -- remember the presumption of innocence?) they know. You might be torturing someone to get a piece of knowledge about a ticking time bomb. You might torture them into babbling untruths and half-truths just to get the torture to stop. You might be torturing someone who doesn't know any details a ticking time bomb. You might be torturing someone when there actually is no ticking time bomb. Life is not a Hollywood Movie, in which there is a convenient cutaway showing suspects planting a ticking time bomb; in life outside the movie theater, the truth is unknown. So if you're going to torture people as a policy to ferret out ticking time bomb information, you're going to have to torture a lot of innocent and ignorant people to get that information first.

Unless you have access to the Hollywood script, of course.

Posted by James Cook at 4:35 PM. # (permalink)




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