Torture

A few random thoughts....

1. With the new info out, it seems clear that people were tortured. People died in our custody, as a result of interrogation techniques. If death isn't torture, what is?

2. As per 1, its obvious now that no dignified lawyer could have actually believed these techniques were legal.

3. Which means that the only defense left for the defenders (like Cheney and Rep. King) is that laws can be overridden given enough reason. But that is an extremely dangerous precedent to set. We might as well have one and only one law on the books: "Do whatever is best, in each case."

4. Which makes me think...it is rare when news items effect my philosophical views (though conversations with friends tends to), but these events have definitely made me think that pure act consequentialism is false, at the very least at the political level, but probably at the individual level as well.

5. Now before someone responds to these thoughts along these lines: "Preston, you bleeding heart. These are terrorists. The worst people in the world. They would kill your family in front of you in a heartbeat. They deserve to be tortured. I could give a shit about their 'feelings.' Cut their balls off if that's what it takes." Let me remind you that none of these people have been tried as criminals. Now sure, a few of them are definitely guilty. Most of them are probably guilty. But a lot (don't misread this as most) of the people at Guantanamo are most likely innocent, victims of being in the wrong place t the wrong time. Torturing suspected criminals? That's an even worse precedent.

6. With all of this in mind, I think I'm justified in saying I am ashamed of many of the leaders of this country.

7. Oh, and by the way--if you appreciate this new transparency and you think the public deserves to know this kind of stuff, don't thank the big media. Thank the ACLU. They're the ones who sued to get this info out.

Ideolocide

If Stephen Colbert can have 'truthiness', then I can have 'ideolocide'.
I invent the word 'ideolocide' at the risk of looking like a fool, because it seems to me there probably already is a word for what I am thinking of, but I just don't know what that word is.
'Ideolocide' shall be defined as the attempted destruction of an ideology--this is not to be confused with 'genocide', which could be broadly construed as the attempted destruction of a political group (though I think most of us traditionally think of it as a race or culture being destroyed).
So ideolocide is the attempted elimination of an idea, or group of ideas.
Ideolocide is seemingly what the 'war on terror' is attempting to do: Destroy the idea of religious fanatacism. I want to talk about this from two directions: 1. Is ideolocide possible? 2. Is ideolocide ethical?

1. Is ideolocide possible?
I'm not really sure if the possibility of ideolocide is a necessary precursor to an attempted ideolocide; after all, the Bush administration has suggested that the war on terror is unending. This is sort of strange--the idea of a war being, in principle, 'unwinnable'. (The logical positivists certainly would have argued it to be meaningless.) Nevertheless, it being strange certainly doesn't disqualify it.
So what would have to happen for an ideolocide to be a success? Well, for starters, we would have to eliminate the idea/ideology in its believer's heads. This could seemingly be done by killing and/or brainwashing all believers.
This isn't all, of course. To complete an ideolocide, we would also need to brainwash (or, rationally convince) anyone who would 'contemplate' believing the idea/ideology in the future. This would probably involve some sort of education program, which would have to be reinstated worldwide. Even if we were only attempting a national ideolocide, our education program would need to be worldwide--ideas can cross borders, regardless of how isolationist a nation may be.
This education program might not be quite as tough as it seems. All we would need to do is create a culture which would render the idea/ideology unthinkable. Certainly there have been cultures historically who have rendered certain ideologies unthinkable: In the middle ages, for example, atheism was considered so unthinkable that people actually considered atheism an impossible belief--they thought God's existence was so self-evident that anyone who denied it was delusional.
So, something like this is what we would need to put into place to make an ideolocide successful.
Also, let's not forget: we would need to eliminate any literature which spoke of the idea/ideology. We couldn't just eliminate literature which promoted or condoned the idea/ideology, but anything which could spark the idea in a critical reader's mind. Now I'm not sure this would be possible, at least for any ideas we find threatening. To eliminate religious fanatacism, we would have to eliminate all religious books! This seems impossible. We could burn millions of books, but chances are quite high that copies would remain, in hiding. Soviet Russia tried to do this, with minimal success--and that was just nationwide. A worldwide attempt at this would probably be impossible.
So it seems rather clear that what would have to be done for a successful ideolocide is impossible. For it is not just a matter of killing or brainwashing a group of people, but of killing or brainwashing anyone who would even critically examine an idea/ideology without rejecting it out of hand.

Nevertheless, it still may be argued that an attempted or partial ideolocide would be helpful, even if it could never be completed. So let us address our second question:
2. Is ideolocide ethical?
Ok, so I think it would be trivial to say ideolocide is unethical with respect to certain ideas/ideologies. That it not the question I have in mind. What I want to ask is, is ideolocide ever ethical? or, Is ideolocide unethical in principle?
I think the best way to ask this question is to look at a morally reprehensible idea, such as "The Aryan Race is the master race", and ask whether an attempted ideolocide of that is ethical.
I think it is clear to a Kantian that ideolocide is unethical, as it involves categorically unethical acts: Killing, Brainwashing (Taking away the free will of another rational being), destruction of knowledge (Because, after all, even if the idea/ideology itself was false, some of the things which don't promote the idea/ideology itself but still mention it would certainly contain valuable information.)
But hey, who is a Kantian anymore anyway?
What about to a utilitarian? Well, this seems like the best route to take for an ideolocide advocate. It basically reduces the question to this: Are there any circumstances in which the attempted destruction of an idea/ideology would create more pleasure/less pain than failing to destroy an idea/ideology would?
And it seems, at least to me, that there could be certain extreme situations in which the answer to this question would be 'Yes', and thus, ideolocide would not be wrong in principle.
But don't worry, hippies, this doesn't open up the floodgates. Because think about what would have to be taken into account when we do our utilitarian calculation:
1. Severely reduced freedom, worldwide, of education, religion, speech, press.
2. Imprisonment and 'reeducation' program to anyone who attempted to exercise freedoms. If this failed (or if there was risk their idea/ideology could be spread to others) it seems like death would be the only other solution.
3. Not only would you have to punish anyone who exercised freedoms of speech, but you would have to somehow destroy the idea from their heads. This couldn't even be a matter of convincing them not to hold the ideology--it would be a matter of eliminating the ideology completely and all traces of it.
4. A limitation of freedom would be a) fascism, and b) The suppression involved in the attempted ideolocide would drive people to develop negative ideologies toward the state, risking rebellion.
5. The risk of a slippery slope; resulting in the attempted ideolocide of any ideas/ideologies that disagreed with official state policy.

As we can see, this world resembles something close to Orwell's 1984. It is hard to imagine a situation which would necessitate ideolocide, short of threat of the genocide of the entire human race.
And, in terrorism, I fail to see this. Terrorists do want to kill people, but not everyone. And the amount of people we would have to kill to commit ideolocide of Islamic fascism would probably be around the same amount of people they would have to kill of ours to succeed. Not to mention, the fascism we would have to attempt would probably be just as bad as Islamic fascism, short of it being based in religion. So it doesn't seem like ideolocide in this situation fits the bill of 'ethical', even to a utilitarian. Stooping to the level of an enemy, or even to a level above that of an enemy that is still morally reprehensible, is not worth fighting an indestructible ideology. It seems the best thing to do is to attempt to protect ourselves, and attempt to show that our ideology is better than the Islamic fundamentalists'. Patience and self-protection. And yeah, we can protect those that are with us on this fight as well. But protection at the cost of giving up our ethics would be wrong, as is, in my opinion, the attempted ideolocide of religious fundamentalism.
Conservatives think that the free market should guide us as far as products, supply and demand, and economics goes. So why do they want the government to limit the marketplace of ideas? Certainly the threatening and unethical ones will be weeded out, right?

Health Care vs. Homeland Security

Alright--first, a note for those of you who don't want to read another political entry. I am thinking about learning Esperanto. I have decided to learn it on the condition that at least five other people will learn it with me, so it will actually have a tiny bit of practical worth. Let me know if you are interested.
on to the post!

Alright, if you will permit me to be a cold and calculated utilitarian for a minute, I would like to illustrate why, even if you give them all the benefit of the doubt, given $x amount of money, it would be smarter to put it towards Universal health care than homeland security. But, in keeping with my promise of giving them the benefit of the doubt, let's call it "Socialized Medicine", so they can have the rhetorical advantage as well.

Ok. So. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 Americans died from lack of health insurance in 2002. Now, I take the IOM as being a credible institute (it is non-partisan, and all of their studies are subject to blind peer-review by scientists).
But a conservative may be able to find some reason why this study was biased. So let's lower that number to 12,000. Cutting it by a third seems very generous to me.
Now, selecting the number of estimated Americans who actually died from not having health insurance is giving another benefit of the doubt to conservatives. Because the figures of who doesn't have insurance and why is controversial--illegal immigrants are sometimes included in the count, as well as people eligible for government programs who just don't sign up. But we will ignore the fact that besides flat out death, not having health insurance decreases quality of life as well.
(An interesting analysis of this can be found here.)
Ok, so let's take our next step of helping our conservative friends out. The conservatives may say, "Well, yes. We certainly can agree that there are a lot of uninsured people out there, and the solution is to be found in the private sector." Of course, I am not sure what this would mean. Giuliani is the GOP frontrunner, and he wants to do something with tax credits for the poor. That is not a private solution. In fact, that is is similar to democratic proposals, and as such, we are going to have to call it weak "socialized medicine". Though, his proposal is absolutely unclear, since 'Health Care' is not listed on his website anywhere.
But let's not let it end there. Conservatives don't like Giuliani; moderates do. So let's take a look at Mitt 'double Guantanamo' Romney. Romney's site has Health Care as an issue list, but fails to mention anything besides that health coverage should be provided through market-reform rather than government reform.
Its hard to see exactly what this would be, since he says nothing at all about it. However, I could hardly see it being something other than tax credits.
The problem is, even with tax credits younger adults can choose not to have health insurance, and then just claim bankruptcy if something goes wrong.
Ok though, let's not stop this benefit of the doubt stuff. Let's say these conservative reforms cause half of those deaths to go away.
We are down to 6,000 deaths in an average year caused by lack of insurance. And remember, this is assuming all possible ways the number could be lowered from its original number, 18,000.
Remember that number: 6,000 per year.

Terrorism is a worldwide problem. But in the United States, how many people die from terrorism in a given year? In 2001, 3,000 people died. Since then...none...in the United States at least. But maybe my memory is mistaken. Let's say 50 more die every year. And let's count citizens of the U.S. in foreign countries. About 1,000 contractors have died in Iraq since the war started. Let's just pretend they were all American. And let's say another 50 citizens die from random terrorist attacks across the globe each year. You know, those minor attacks...at hotels and what-not. I admit, I really have no idea about that number, but it seems about right. Hell, call me out on it if I'm wrong.
And, though its quite debatable, and I don't think this is a fair move because these deaths could have seemingly been prevented (not to mention, terrorism is a little rough here because 7 in 10 Iraqis approve of attacks on soldiers), let's include American soldiers in Iraq. As of my last count, about 3838 American soldiers have been killed in the War in Iraq. Let's round that up to 3900. Another 450 in Afghanistan makes 4350.
Ok, I think I've been generous enough. Let's add it all up.
4350 American soldiers
600 random traveling citizens
3000 Sept. 11.
1000 contractors in Iraq
equals
8950
divide that by 6 (years this total makes up)
1491 and 2/3. (average number of American deaths, per year, from terrorism, including American soldiers and contractors in Iraq.)

So, let's look at our raw data:
Being completely generous to our conservative friends:
6000 Americans die per year from lack of health insurance.
1491 and 2/3 die per year from terrorism.

Now am I saying defund homeland security? Of course not. Terrorism is a big deal. What I am saying is this: All Republican candidates (except Ron Paul, who has his own issues) are using fear to try and turn people's attention away from real issues. Terrorism is very frightening. Republicans want people to be so afraid of terrorism that they will vote for whoever will keep them safe from it. But if we look at the raw facts here, rationally, we should care more about a quality health care plan than doubling the size of the military. And on health care, I think it is pretty clear the Democrats win. (After all, if they didn't have the better positions, why would the Republicans downplay the issue so much?)