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the reason it seems to obfuscate the position you're starting from, cyn, is that i don't think it makes sense to start from that position.
it seemed to me when i responded to you initially that there were two different conversations happening that converged in some ways, but which were nonetheless different from each other. you're really talking more to will in this one than to me. but again the conversations overlap in some ways, so it's not surprising that there'd be a bit of confusion about it.
i'm not really concerned with whether you as an individual can justify torture as an ethical question. this because the situation is that the bush administration authorized the use of torture, wrote a series of legal positions that fashioned a rationale for it, and the fact that it happened generated a significant political Problem for the united states, one that continues to ramify, and as it does it poses other problems. these all happen at a level quite independent of what you or i might personally feel about the question of torture. it's involved with legal and political questions that operate at basically different scales than do questions of individual ethics.
the obvious connection is that one's individual position on the ethical questions--or other questions if you like--concerning torture inform the positions that one might take with respect to what the bush administration did. but if that's the way you want to go, then you're approaching it from a strange angle, which has more to do with a sense that you shouldn't have to take position x or y on the question. the reason it's strange is that i don't think that's being asked of you. but maybe will is asking that of you. it just isn't something i think particularly relevant--and that because (again) the situation at hand unfolds along dynamics and in registers quite independent of this sort of question, really.
anyway, two different conversations.
as often happens in debates, the real argument is not over the content of one's position but over the starting point from which that position is built. your position is internally consistent. i just don't think the place you start from makes sense situationally.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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