As does child labor, stoning heretics, and snake-handling. Not to mention bleeding by leeches.
The reference here is to Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) suggesting at a Senate hearing yesterday on detainee interrogations that torture is actually proven effective based on its venerability:
The Vice President is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.
Wow. Isn’t that special?
Yes, apparently they work. Someone who is tortured will certainly appear to give information. They’ll turn in friends (and enemies). They’ll talk a lot (and may include some truth). They’ll give up (and make up) secrets in order to get the torture to stop.
You can also get your wife to do the housework by smacking her around a bit. You can ensure religious purity through executing heretics. You can get workers to produce goods by running them on fourteen hour shifts in locked rooms. You can save costs by using child labor (just as WalMart). You can make money by selling patent medicine quack cures, or by prostituting yourself (or your kid) on a street corner.
All of these things work. They don’t work well, of course, but they work. And they’ve all been traditions and practices for hundreds and thousands of years. That means they work, and that should be the end of it, I guess.
Never mind that the moral cost of doing them far exceed the material gains. Or that they’re illegal to do. They’ve been around for a long time, and “appear to work,” so let’s move on!
Republicans like Graham used to be appalled and outraged at Soviet torture, at Chinese torture — heck, at Cuban torture. I guess if all those folks had simply explained that “torture worked,” and that they’d been doing it for a long time, that would make it all be okay.
Senator Graham seems to have committed the fallacy of appeal to tradition. The fact that humans have used torture for 500 years doesn’t mean that we should continue to do so, as your headline points out.
But I think it’s worse. The fact that humans have believed that torture works for 500 years doesn’t mean that it really does work. Humans believed for hundreds of years that the sun goes around the earth, but if we stuck to the traditional belief, we would not have switched to the heliocentric theory.
Maybe a new requirement for running for public office should be enacted: all candidates for public office must take a course in critical reasoning in the year before they run for office.
Hah!
The question is — does he believe it, or is he simply speaking to an audience he thinks believes it?
I think he is speaking to an audience that believes it. Or more aptly put, a constituency that believes it.
I live in the South, the Deep South, and am shocked on a daily basis at the people around me who believe that torture is “OK in certain instances” (!!!!!)
Of course some of these people believe that if you cut the tip of a dog’s tail off and bury it in your yard, he’ll never run off, and that if you fill your ice trays with hot water, it will freeze into cubes faster.
I am sure I am not Alone in my proximity to ignorance , so I’m not knocking The South. Heck, I’d love living here if it weren’t hot as blazes.
But…yes, the majority of people I have argued with lately on this subject believe it is OK if warranted. And that the only reason we haven’t had any more attacks since 9/11 is because of places like Gitmo.
And they are all Republicans .
Co-inky-dink ? Maybe. Maybe not.
Just think , if Jack Bauer was headed towards you with a pair of bolt cutters, wouldn’t you start screaming (immediately after saying “OMG Jack, you are SO HAWT!!) “My password is greeneyeball, I have money hidden in my freezer, Yes I DID wipe a booger under the car seat, One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People Eaters made me do it, and yes, I admit you were justified in driving drunk, and what else can I tell you?????????”
I’d admit to ANYTHING , make up ANYTHING to get it to stop. and I can be quite inventive on occasion. Imagine how inventive you could be if someone was shoving your head in the toilet for 45 second intervals.
I don’t know who Lisa Gaddy is, but I like her. 🙂
Please post here often, Lisa! You’re our kind of person.
Agreed. Thanks for commenting (twice!), Lisa.