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what's funny to me in this thread is that the more conservative folk persist in trying to control the rules that shape how the question of torture is framed, to keep it away from legal matters and problems that follow from the state as actor and instead want to substitute some manly man nonsense the basis for which is really nothing other than "the notion of torture is for wimps."
that folk seem to confuse this with an actual argument about torture makes the whole thing funnier still.
but it's not like this manly man shit isn't an element of how american foreign policy has worked for the past 70-odd years--after all, similar kinds of arguments underpin the national security state--effectively that if stalin was a dictator who didn't require parliamentary approval to act, then the united states had to structure itself so that it too could act as a dictatorship under certain conditions ("national security" dontcha know)--and there has been a steady stream of ultra-rightwingers who've been in positions to institute this logic through such delights as fascist paramilitaries in latin america and africa. there's a side of the united states that's been one of the priniciple terrorist organizations on the planet since the late 1940s. the problem that the ineptness of the bush administration created really is that now these practices are surfacing, and they're running into the fact that this ultra-right dimension of american-ness has been allowed to happen because it happens in the shadows---exposed the self-evident contradiction between it and any meaningful sense of "rule of law" makes the continuation of this fascist extension of the american empire untenable.
in the end it was always the manly men of the ultra-right who thought not only that torture was for wimps, but that law was as well.
to argue that torture is not torture if you in your manly man fantasy-world imagine that you'd be able to stand up to it sets you and only you up as the ultimate arbiter of everything. psychological dysfunction aside (narcissism--a kind of arrested development that stopped out just after object permanence--so an infantile view of the world) in a curious way these folk make the entire idea of a "war on terror" into a joke because, fundamentally, they are what they oppose. except of course these folk imagine that their Cause is correct and they believe it absolutely and so they can't possibly be what they oppose because those they oppose believe their cause is correct and they believe it absolutely.
the idiocy of this is astonishing.
fortunately, confined to the space of a messageboard, it unfolds as a joke. so it's funny.
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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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