We, as a people, desperately want to ignore this issue. We want to pretend it doesn't happen. And unless there is a constant media blitz forcing Americans to come to terms with our torture policy, we'll continue to ignore it.
The soldier accused of leaking material to WikiLeaks is currently being held in solitary. He hasn't been convicted of anything, and he wasn't on suicide watch (though now apparently we have to pump him full of anti-depressants to keep his brain intact). There is a solid case to be made, one this made in chilling detail in The New Yorker, that long-term solitary confinement rises to the level of torture.
But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, the New Yorker's question -- is solitary confinement torture? -- is no longer the most salient one. Years after Abu Gharib and waterboarding, years after a Bush administration that explicitly sanctioned torture and years into an Obama administration that has done its utmost to insure there is never any accountability for it, a more harrowing question emerges: Even if it is torture, would we even care?
I think the answer is clear. No. We would not. Much as we have with prison rape, we, as a society, have come to terms with permitting torture of those we detain -- convicts, military detainees, even the accused. It is now part of who we are as a nation. And it will take a great, soul-wrenching shift to turn us away from it.
31 comments:
May I repost this on Alas & TADA?
My recollection is that the Bush Admin didn't say torture was Ok; rather, they defined torture so narrowly that waterboarding didn't fall into the definition. The popularly-termed "torture memos" are lengthy legal exercises in explaining why this or that interrogation method ISN'T torture.
Abu Ghraib is a red herring in a discussion of whether Americans are Ok with torture. The people on the ground were prosecuted; the Bush Admin condemned; and the American people, with the exception of a few truly insane apologists like Rush Limbaugh, dismissed the whole episode as "a few bad apples."
Sure, Amp, go ahead.
Once upon a time - and I certainly do not advocate a return to that time - long term solitary confinement was viewed by many as a means to assist criminals reform themselves. Now, we have people who view long-term solitary confinement as, a priori, a form of torture.
My view is that we need to be careful not to yolk together related but distinguishable things. The end result of this conceptual yolk is a loss of the ability to make distinctions, which is most definitely not in society's interest - society needing to be able to make fine distinctions in order to understand the world in which we live.
The lawyer, of course, always wants to join things - as in, we advocate that this or that behavior fits this or that category of legal precedent. So, as a lawyer, I sympathize with your way of thinking.
However, as a citizen, I know that what lawyers do is not always applicable to what, as citizens, we should be doing. And, lumping together related things under the same concept, however tempting outside of the courtroom, should generally be avoided.
I'm not sure what work a priori is doing here. "A priori" means something that is true without an underlying reason -- e.g., solitary confinement just is torture. But the New Yorker article definitely creates a perfectly valid-sounding syllogism for why long-term solitary confinement is torture -- it wrecks peoples minds. It seems to have the capacity to drive one literally insane.
Assuming we think that infliction of severe psychological or mental trauma is torture (and we do -- that's why, for example, mock executions are barred), then, assuming the empirical assessment of long-term solitary's psychological effects is correct, it is a perfectly valid conclusion to say it is torture.
Of course, the point of this post isn't dependent on long-term solitary actually being torture, or tantamount to torture. The conclusion was that we don't care whether it is or not. We are indifferent to the prospect that it is torture. The question no longer interests us, because either answer -- yes or no -- is fine.
David,
We have lived centuries not thinking it to be torture. Lots of things cause injury and death without being called torture. Think of war, for example. So, I do not see your point.
Your argument assumes that we should care whether something is torture that, traditionally, was never thought of as torture. Torture is a word, a label. It is not a very accurate one for long term solitary confinement. But, it is only a word.
I am not indifferent to whether it is torture. I think that the argument claiming it to be torture is a nonsense view that harms discussion, based on yolking together actions that are quite different. My view is that long term solitary confinement is not a good thing, whether we mislabel it torture or correctly label it. And, I would prefer no long term solitary confinement. But, calling it torture merely confuses the matter.
"Torture" isn't defined simply by what has historically been thought of as torture. I'm not an originalist either in terms of law or language.
Torture generally refers to the infliction of massive, sustained physical or mental trauma (I also think there is an implicit atomization in the term -- torture refers to discrete acts, not wideranging events [even deeply traumatic ones]). What constitutes sufficiently massive trauma is debatable (both in terms of the empirical assessment of how much trauma a given act causes, and the normative assessment as to the threshold whereby the trauma transitions into torture).
But assuming long-term solitary confinement has a facially plausible case for leaping those bars (empirically causes a sufficient degree of trauma so as to cross a plausible normative threshold for torture) -- which I think it does -- I see no reason why it should be excluded from the notion simply due to historical practice. Ironically, you're the one making an a priori argument here -- claiming that long-term solitary should not be seen as torture regardless of what underlying syllogistic arguments we might make to warrant it being so labeled.
Wait, lawyers always want to join things? Then how can they split hairs?
David,
I was not making the argument that, due to history, we should not call long term solitary confinement "torture." Your use does not follow how the word is normally understood, as your effort to toss long term solitary confinement into the "torture" folder shows.
My point is quite different. We make a mistake yolking unlikes together, thus eliminating distinctions that relate to how we understand the world.
I honestly had no idea that "a discrete event causing massive physical or mental trauma" was not in accord with the normal use or understanding of the word "torture". I have to say I simply disagree with your assessment -- I think that definition is well within normal parameters of the usage of the term.
I'm going to assume the word actually meant is "yoke," as in yoking oxen together, and not "yolk" as in the yellowy high-cholesterol bit of an egg.
What's considered torture, just as what's considered "cruel and unusual punishment," has changed over time. Unless one wants to make an overtly originalist sort of argument ("The Founders thought the stocks perfectly acceptable, thus they can't be cruel and unusual"), there's no point in saying that because something hasn't been thought to be torture in the past, it can't be thought torture today. Moreover, such a claim with regard to solitary confinement is simply erroneous; read literature contemporaneous with the 18th and 19th centuries, and you'll find writers ranging from Dumas to LM Montgomery who use the word "torture" to describe the effect on some individuals of being utterly deprived of the society of their fellows.
Or try reading the news from the UK and Germany in the early 1970s (or a summary in "New Scientist," Nov. 28, 1974), when those nations revivied the use of long-term solitary confinement on IRA and Red Army terrorists respectively, and raised an outcry from their own citizenry when the effects on the prisoners' mental health became known. The New Yorker didn't originate the idea of solitary confinement being torture for the social beings that humans are. Prolonged solitary confinement stopped being used in the UK and USA in the late 1800s and was condemned by human rights groups when used in the 20th century by apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union. Jeremy Bentham referred to it as a species of torture in his critiques of imprisonment for debtors.
David,
One has to ask the limit of where you would apply the torture label. Being in prison is, as I understand it, something that causes mental and physical trauma. Should it be called "torture"? What about the school bully? I see no limitation that distinguishes "torture" from other horrendous things.
I do not deny that one can say that solitary confinement can be akin to torture. I do not deny that the word "torture" might occasionally be used in that context. I am, however, noting your goal, which appears to be to ban torture and, by slight of hand, include long term solitary confinement as a type of torture. That, to me, amounts to misusing the word.
PG,
You are correct that I should have used the word "Yoke." I also agree that words change over time. I do not, however, see much, other than among the very far left, interest in redefining "torture" to include long term solitary confinement. And, as we have or should have learned from the last election, acting decades ahead of what the public thinks and wants (or, for that matter, may ever think or want) breeds ressentiment, as that term is understood by Nietzsche.
I chose the word "Yoke" as David's article brought to mind an article by famed British novelist Howard Jacobson, who argued that yoking together ideas was what brutes do and is a sign of a barbarous time, which, to me, is what many in the far left in the US (and elsewhere) are doing. Distinctions should be maintained wherever possible so that we can understand and realize the importance of the differences between government acts involving the pulling out of nails and teeth, etc., from the merely terrible things like long term solitary confinement. If it is all undifferentiated torture, we lose our ability to understand torture. It is akin to words like "Fascist" which has come to mean any detested view held by those on the far right - yet, "Fascism" was a specific thing and is important to understand as it really is.
Me: Torture is "a discrete event causing massive physical or mental trauma."
You: School bullies cause trauma! Where's the limit?
Me: See the now helpfully italicized words, both which provide limitations.
So in the case of bullying, I don't think bullying is generally massive enough to qualify. And even where it is cumulatively, I don't think usually any atomized event by the bully is (but if it were -- if a middle school bully waterboarded another student -- sure I'd call that torture). Whereas long-term solitary (which I consider to be a single act perpetrated on the subject) is both discrete, and seems sufficiently massive, to qualify.
Of course, any time a concept is limited by an inherently inexact term like "massive", there is room for disagreement. But that doesn't make it wholly arbitrary either, any more than we can't use words like "pile" (how many grains of sand make a ...).
I'd note that NF hasn't provided a counter-definition for establishing what is and isn't torture, except for an argument from specific historical application which (a) I don't accept as a valid limitation on the meaning of a normative term (anymore than the historical treatment of "seditious libel" was a valid normative limitation on "free speech") and (b) PG notes is historically dubious anyway, given that long-term solitary has at least been suggested as a species of torture dating back to the 1800s and such luminous figures like Bentham. Other than that, there's no standard for telling us what is and isn't torture, making it impossible to know whether I'm yoking unlike bad things together under one label, or accurately characterizing a particular bad thing under the label it very much belongs.
David,
In that, for hundreds of years, long term solitary confinement was thought to be a good thing, that Bentham thought otherwise makes him the exception that proves the rule.
Again, we have had kids bullied to death. And, lest you believe it or not, kids who are bullied do suffer massive mental trauma - and sometimes physical as well.
And, then there is war, which is normally thought of as traumatic for soldiers, both mentally and physically.
So, again, your "massive" theory simply does not do much to help define torture.
And, as always, you have not addressed the massive harm that your manner of argument does to real reformers who, rather than play with words, want to help people - which is not to suggest you do not want to help people. Again, you are doing to torture what leftists have done to fascism, deprive it of its real significance and meaning, making what you do not like into torture. It is a huge error in your thinking.
"'The exception proves the rule' is an expression constantly upon the lips of the ignorant, who parrot it from one another with never a thought of its absurdity. In the Latin, 'Exceptio probat regulam' means that the exception tests the rule, puts it to the proof, not confirms it. The malefactor who drew the meaning from this excellent dictum and substituted a contrary one of his own exerted an evil power which appears to be immortal." -- Ambrose Bierce
But that isn't the half of it. I forwarded what I take to be a rather reasonable definition of torture: "a discrete event causing massive physical or mental trauma." I even italicized the key limiting words: "discrete" and "massive". And in response to the bullying hypothetical, I said that generally bullying doesn't cause massive enough trauma to qualify, and even where it does cumulatively no discrete (atomized) act does, but if an act of bullying did meet both those qualifiers (as in the bully who waterboards his victim), then I'd be perfectly content to refer to that as torture. And I think that comports with normal usage.
As best I can tell, my helpful italicizing not withstanding, you simply ignored the "discrete" portion of my definition, then happily loped along as if your position could be remotely responsive to my definition without it.
What is missing here, once again, is any coherent standard, aside from the as-noted-dubious (both normatively -- it doesn't allow for systematic misapplication of an accepted principle, as we saw when seditious libel laws coexisted with "Congress shall make no law" abridging free speech -- and descriptively -- as PG notes, Bentham is hardly the only thinker to argue that solitary confinement was torture) assertion of historical usage, for how to determine what is and isn't torture. You simply beg the question: assuming, a priori that long-term solitary isn't and couldn't be torture, and then demanding I account for how the various ailments my alleged error of categorization apparently will causes.
But I continue to demand, at the very least, a valid counter-definition before I concede so easily. I'm not going to take a dive simply because you chirp about the draining words of their true meaning, without explaining what that meaning actually is or why I'm operated outside the "true" meaning of the word in question. Make an argument that isn't such an obvious petitio principii, and perhaps I'll be more amenable.
David,
I read your arguments including the word "discrete." I have trouble understanding how it fails to apply to war or bullying, which involve discrete events and massive trauma and injury, not to mention death. I have had the misfortune to speak with people thrown in jail. Believe me, these are discrete events which massively traumatize people.
Now, you quote someone to object to my off hand comment that the exception proves the rule. My point is that, by common understanding of its time, solitary confinement was considered commendable to those who suffered it. That was the dominant view, whether you can find 50 or 100 people who, out of a large population, agreed with Bentham. In this regard, read some books about the history of efforts to "reform" criminals.
As for my point about corrupting language, if your viewpoint were the common one, there would be no need for a trailblazing article claiming that longer term solitary confinement was torture. It would be commonly accepted, something we both know it is not.
As for my concern for language, I again remind you that, at one time, fascism was a specific thing. Now, due to idiots on our side of the ledger, no one knows what fascism is. And, as a result, we do not recognize real fascists from other distasteful viewpoints. That, frankly, is what you are doing to the torture debate.
I left out about jail also being a form of torture. That is the basis for my comment about being in jail being a form of torture.
Somehow, my original comment vaporized.
I'll try to remember it.
I understood your discussion about discrete. I do not, however, see why you think that war or bullying (or, as noted in the comment above, jail time more generally) do not include discrete episodes involving massive trauma and injury. I have spoken with people thrown in jail. It is exactly that for them.
My point about the exception proving the rule was an off hand remark. My point is that there may be 50 or 100 people who agreed with Bentham. However, long term solitary confinement was widely believed to be good for prisoners, tending to reform them. This was the case for a very long time. So, Bentham's point of view was very much the exception
Today, his view is the exception, which explains the need for a groundbreaking article to which you cite. Otherwise, it would be commonly accepted and you would not have to point to the NewYorker Magazine for support.
Lastly, as I see it, the outcome of your article is to do for torture what leftists did for fascism, where very few people even know what fascism was before leftists decided to use it for propaganda purposes to paint their political enemies in dark terms. That would be the impact of adding confinement to the list of things called torture.
My definition of torture concerns hurting people (e.g. pulling out their nails, putting their heads in water, beating them, and the like) in order to extract information from them. And, that is what most people understand torture to be, as you know full well.
N. Friendman had a comment vaporized -- I'm reposting it below (no hyperlink either, another mystery).
* * *
I read your arguments including the word "discrete." I have trouble understanding how it fails to apply to war or bullying, which involve discrete events and massive trauma and injury, not to mention death. I have had the misfortune to speak with people thrown in jail. Believe me, these are discrete events which massively traumatize people.
Now, you quote someone to object to my off hand comment that the exception proves the rule. My point is that, by common understanding of its time, solitary confinement was considered commendable to those who suffered it. That was the dominant view, whether you can find 50 or 100 people who, out of a large population, agreed with Bentham. In this regard, read some books about the history of efforts to "reform" criminals.
As for my point about corrupting language, if your viewpoint were the common one, there would be no need for a trailblazing article claiming that longer term solitary confinement was torture. It would be commonly accepted, something we both know it is not.
As for my concern for language, I again remind you that, at one time, fascism was a specific thing. Now, due to idiots on our side of the ledger, no one knows what fascism is. And, as a result, we do not recognize real fascists from other distasteful viewpoints. That, frankly, is what you are doing to the torture debate.
Correction:
Strike: "Lastly, as I see it, the outcome of your article is to do for torture what leftists did for fascism, where very few people even know what fascism was before leftists decided to use it for propaganda purposes to paint their political enemies in dark terms."
Substitute:
Lastly, as I see it, the outcome of your article is to do for torture what leftists did for fascism, where very few people still know what fascism is because leftists decided to use it for propaganda purposes to paint their political enemies in dark terms.
David,
Another post vaporized. However, I prefer the original. You can cut my correction that now follows it, if you like.
And now back to me being me.
"Discrete" refers to an act being atomized, as opposed to something serial whose impact accrues by via accumulation. For example, "bullying" is a serial act (each day John punches Joe and steals his lunch money), but the individual acts (each day's punch) are discrete. It's a little fuzzy, but I think conceptually solid enough to hold up.
Generally, to the extent bullying causes massive trauma, it's due to the accumulation -- being subject to bullying day after day for an inordinate period of time, each individual day's act not being massively traumatic in itself (though certainly bad), but the sum being so. But, we could imagine a single, atomized instantiation of bullying activity that was so individually scarring that it ought be labeled torture (e.g., a bully waterboarding his prey). As stated, I am content with that.
As I've noted, I honestly don't care whether or not a given principle has historically been understood to encompass a specific act or not. That's (one reason) why I'm not a legal originalist. America's experience with banning seditious libel almost immediately after passing the First Amendment has convinced me that specific historical application is a very bad way of determining what principles mean. That laws forbidding "seditious libel" historically weren't considered laws abridging the freedom of speech doesn't mean that determination was correct -- much the opposite, it means that historically, there was a systematic misapprehension of what the principle of "free speech" ought to encompass.
And so it might be with torture, and whether long-term solitary qualifies (though there it seems like something subject to a live historical debate, with important and influential figures on both sides). In order to determine whether my view is correct, it is utterly insufficient to just look to majoritarian determination -- for it's quite possible the majority simply wrong (as, assuming it was a majority view, I am indeed asserting). We must first define the principle (which I've attempted to do, and which you have steadfastly evaded doing), and then try to analyze what does and doesn't fall into it.
Actually, the real debate is whether it is more important to us that "torture" be given a definition like "discrete infliction of massive physical or mental trauma", or that long-term solitary confinement not be labeled torture. You seem to find the latter extremely important -- but for reasons which are fundamentally question-begging (we shouldn't call it torture because it really isn't torture). There's a stronger point lurking in there (we shouldn't call it torture because doing so has negative political impacts, including on our ability to eradicate the evil of long-term solitary confinement), but your empirical warrant for that assertion is dependent on the corruption of language argument which is question begging.
My point is that, by common understanding of its time, solitary confinement was considered commendable to those who suffered it. That was the dominant view, whether you can find 50 or 100 people who, out of a large population, agreed with Bentham. In this regard, read some books about the history of efforts to "reform" criminals.
Precisely what time are we talking about here? I've already directed attention to a "New Scientist" article that predates the New Yorker piece by 35 years and discusses how long-term solitary confinement had by the late 19th century come to be seen as a form of torture and had been largely abandoned by Western democracies except in rare instances (e.g. for IRA or Red Army terrorists). If you actually read the New Yorker article, you'll find that the author is aware of this history and cites a Supreme Court decision that came quite close to barring long-term solitary as a violation of the 8th Amendment.
The argument that once upon a time, solitary confinement was thought beneficial to prisoners is utterly worthless. Once upon a time, pretending that adopted children were actually the biological offspring of their adoptive parents was thought to be the best thing for those kids.
The New Yorker article was not groundbreaking for saying that long-term solitary was torturous; again, as it points out, many people including John McCain have said that they found such confinement to be worse than physical abuse.
Also, what on earth does it matter, in a discussion of state actors who have signed treaties promising that they will not torture persons in state custody, whether one schoolkid bullying another is engaging in torture? This is so obviously an attempt to demean the issues at hand, I'm surprised David responded to it at all.
David,
A number of points here.
Words are labels, not themselves realities. They are a means to interpret events. I thus do not see how you can say that those who passed the Alien and Sedition Act got free speech wrong. They did not get it wrong. People just use the words involved differently today than in those days.
The issue to opinion makers in those days was that they not be bad mouthed, whether with the truth or otherwise (and, at common law, truth was not always or even usually a defense to defamation - I might add, the law in at least Massachusetts does not always, even today, make truth a complete defense) while the right to speak freely about political matters was rather open then, perhaps more open than today. There was, after all, no politically correct crowd that attempts, often but not always unsuccessfully, to cut off speech by screaming the word "racist" at the drop of the hat and with little regard to whether speech is or is not racist.
Now, I hear your definition of torture. I have a better one, I think. Torture is violence being committed by someone held against his or her will, especially (but not only) for purposes of extracting information or vengeance. Hence, pulling teeth or nails out, putting a person's head in a bucket of water, beating someone up, hanging someone by the arms and whipping someone are examples of torture, when used against a person held against his or her will. By contrast, bullying, while torturous to the person impacted, is not torture. War, while horrible on its own merits, is not torture.
Your version of reality substitutes "long-term" for violence. To me, that is a stretch. Now, long term solitary confinement causes people to go crazy, as was common for those placed in long-term confinement for purposes of "reform" from criminality. So, it is a bad thing in and of itself. The practice, with respect to criminals at least, ended, and without the need to call it torture, because evidence piled up that criminals were not reformed by long term solitary confinement. And, calling it torture would not have hurried up the process of undermining long term solitary confinement.
You want the word torture to include non-violent acts. That, to me, is a mistake. It amounts to robbing the word of its significance, as a bad thing by blurring it with other bad things. As I noted, the same thing occurred to the word "fascist." The same thing is occurring now, I might add, to the word "genocide," which is being applied to events that are not, as the word is normally understood, genocide. It is happening in other areas.
I shall, and I know you do not like quoting others at length, quote in the next post, from Howard Jacobson, so that you will understand my point a bit better. My apology for doing so but, I think, you might better understand him than me.
Jacobson:
One thing is not another thing. What makes a thing the thing it is and not something else is not just a question for artists and intellectuals, it is the question. Where all things look the same, there is no life of the mind.
************
When Jews demur from the word Holocaust each time there is an instance of man's inhumanity to man, it is not because they think their suffering is keener, or somehow more pristine, than anyone else's. It is simply that one thing is not another thing. When next there is an attempt first to slander and then to wipe out a whole people, to burn away every trace of them and their beliefs from the face of the earth, to make it as though they never were and to ensure they never will be again, Jews will accept that Holocaust is the word.
This is not a species of scholasticism, verbal fastidiousness for its own sake. If we do not properly describe what a thing is like and not like, we do not know what it is. It is in the nature of hatred not to know what a thing is like and not to care. Which is why we say that hatred is blind. Indeed, one of the signs that hatred is being brewed, in an individual or a community, is the deliberate wedding of like to unlike. Brutes yoke unlikes together in haste, enjoying that surge in emotional violence that blurring all distinctions brings.
Your system at my post, which was before the Jacobson post. I shall break it up into two posts, so that maybe it will survive.
Here is part I.
David,
A number of points here.
Words are labels, not themselves realities. They are a means to interpret events. I thus do not see how you can say that those who passed the Alien and Sedition Act got free speech wrong. They did not get it wrong. People just use the words involved differently today than in those days.
The issue to opinion makers in those days was that they not be bad mouthed, whether with the truth or otherwise (and, at common law, truth was not always or even usually a defense to defamation - I might add, the law in at least Massachusetts does not always, even today, make truth a complete defense) while the right to speak freely about political matters was rather open then, perhaps more open than today. There was, after all, no politically correct crowd that attempts, often but not always unsuccessfully, to cut off speech by screaming the word "racist" at the drop of the hat and with little regard to whether speech is or is not racist.
Now, I hear your definition of torture. I have a better one, I think. Torture is violence being committed by someone held against his or her will, especially (but not only) for purposes of extracting information or vengeance. Hence, pulling teeth or nails out, putting a person's head in a bucket of water, beating someone up, hanging someone by the arms and whipping someone are examples of torture, when used against a person held against his or her will. By contrast, bullying, while torturous to the person impacted, is not torture. War, while horrible on its own merits, is not torture.
Here is part II:
Your version of reality substitutes "long-term" for violence. To me, that is a stretch. Now, long term solitary confinement causes people to go crazy, as was common for those placed in long-term confinement for purposes of "reform" from criminality. So, it is a bad thing in and of itself. The practice, with respect to criminals at least, ended, and without the need to call it torture, because evidence piled up that criminals were not reformed by long term solitary confinement. And, calling it torture would not have hurried up the process of undermining long term solitary confinement.
You want the word torture to include non-violent acts. That, to me, is a mistake. It amounts to robbing the word of its significance, as a bad thing by blurring it with other bad things. As I noted, the same thing occurred to the word "fascist." The same thing is occurring now, I might add, to the word "genocide," which is being applied to events that are not, as the word is normally understood, genocide. It is happening in other areas.
I shall, and I know you do not like quoting others at length, quote in the next post, from Howard Jacobson, so that you will understand my point a bit better. My apology for doing so but, I think, you might better understand him than me.
And this one is from PG:
My point is that, by common understanding of its time, solitary confinement was considered commendable to those who suffered it. That was the dominant view, whether you can find 50 or 100 people who, out of a large population, agreed with Bentham. In this regard, read some books about the history of efforts to "reform" criminals.
Precisely what time are we talking about here? I've already directed attention to a "New Scientist" article that predates the New Yorker piece by 35 years and discusses how long-term solitary confinement had by the late 19th century come to be seen as a form of torture and had been largely abandoned by Western democracies except in rare instances (e.g. for IRA or Red Army terrorists). If you actually read the New Yorker article, you'll find that the author is aware of this history and cites a Supreme Court decision that came quite close to barring long-term solitary as a violation of the 8th Amendment.
The argument that once upon a time, solitary confinement was thought beneficial to prisoners is utterly worthless. Once upon a time, pretending that adopted children were actually the biological offspring of their adoptive parents was thought to be the best thing for those kids.
The New Yorker article was not groundbreaking for saying that long-term solitary was torturous; again, as it points out, many people including John McCain have said that they found such confinement to be worse than physical abuse.
Also, what on earth does it matter, in a discussion of state actors who have signed treaties promising that they will not torture persons in state custody, whether one schoolkid bullying another is engaging in torture? This is so obviously an attempt to demean the issues at hand, I'm surprised David responded to it at all.
A reply to PG,
I have not read the New Scientist article but have read the NewYorker article. In any event, I have read a bit about solitary confinement and about how it was understood in the US. As you note, it was not found to violate the Constitution (- almost does not count), which ought to tell you that it was not commonly considered torture.
My view remains that long term solitary confinement should not occur, not because it is torture but because it is a bad thing to do to someone. It is, as I see it, cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Constitution. It does not require the "torture" label to be bad.
Dragging the word "torture" to cover non-violent acts does to torture what dragging fascism to cover GW Bush's government does for fascism - i.e., rob the word of its particular meaning, as normally understood in the language. In that, on my view, words are merely labels (or, as Nietzsche put it, the point at which we stop thinking about something) used to interpret things and, of themselves, words are anything and nothing, you can call anything by any word you want but - and here is the problem - expect that the meaning of such word will become so blurred.
Where dealing with horrendous activities, it is critical that we not allow blurring to occur because the end result is to lose words to interpret certain distinct and awful kinds of events. This has occurred to genocide. It is occurring to Holocaust. It occurred to fascism. It is occurring to racism - which is the fault of the Politically Correct morons. Language has been robbed of the tools to describe reality.
My post was eaten again. I am reposting, this time breaking the post up into two posts:
Part I
A reply to PG,
I have not read the New Scientist article but have read the NewYorker article. In any event, I have read a bit about solitary confinement and about how it was understood in the US. As you note, it was not found to violate the Constitution (- almost does not count), which ought to tell you that it was not commonly considered torture.
My view remains that long term solitary confinement should not occur, not because it is torture but because it is a bad thing to do to someone. It is, as I see it, cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Constitution. It does not require the "torture" label to be bad.
Part II:
Dragging the word "torture" to cover non-violent acts does to torture what dragging fascism to cover GW Bush's government does for fascism - i.e., rob the word of its particular meaning, as normally understood in the language. In that, on my view, words are merely labels (or, as Nietzsche put it, the point at which we stop thinking about something) used to interpret things and, of themselves, words are anything and nothing, you can call anything by any word you want but - and here is the problem - expect that the meaning of such word will become so blurred.
Where dealing with horrendous activities, it is critical that we not allow blurring to occur because the end result is to lose words to interpret certain distinct and awful kinds of events. This has occurred to genocide. It is occurring to Holocaust. It occurred to fascism. It is occurring to racism - which is the fault of the Politically Correct morons. Language has been robbed of the tools to describe reality.
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