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Via Andrew, Matthew Schmitz of Plumb Lines doesn’t think we should be imputing bad motives to torture advocates: … when we do so we cease to do the important work of figuring out how so many well-intentioned people ended up supporting an abominable practice. As recent debates have shown, torture advocates used the ends to [...]
Filed under: torture
How would history have judged a man who could have saved thousands of American lives but chose instead to adhere to some misplaced and misguided sense of idealism? – Michael Goldfarb I’m sure that there are others who could do a better job of this than I, but for the time being how about: likely [...]
Via Will, Julian Sanchez tries to explain to Michael Goldfarb that the fact that Harry Truman was a war criminal does not mean that Bush and Cheney weren’t. Here’s key graf: I realize it’s probably not a position taken often at the offices of the Weekly Standard, but the suggestion that the bombings of Hiroshima [...]
Rod pronounces the Pew Forum’s finding that Christians – and Catholic, Evangelical, and frequently churchgoing ones in particular – are more supportive of torture than non-Christians to be “shocking”, but of course it’s not that at all. There are plenty of data showing that Christians’ attitudes toward abortion, contraception, and the rest don’t differ very [...]
Manzi steps forward.
Filed under: conservatism, morality, torture
Reflecting on Ross’s debut from his new perch at – yes, them again – First Things, my friend and former colleague James Poulos is at his best: The issue is not whether torture is capable of producing results, or even the quality of those results. A million monkeys at a million waterboards will eventually produce [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, government/law, torture
… and better unambiguous in commitment to principle than willing to entertain that moral weakness that so often masquerades as nuance. First Things associate editor Russell Saltzman has got an absolutely first-rate essay up on the Imago Dei and torture as “mental murder”.
I pretty much shared Daniel’s opinion of Jim Manzi’s demand for a non-pacifist case against torture, but I’ve got a brief post up at the Scene trying to meet the challenge with some good ol’ Phil 101ing.
Filed under: morality, personal, philosophy, torture
I have many dear friends, colleagues, and acquaintances closely associated with First Things and am generally inclined against public spats with magazines that were highly influential in my intellectual development, but come now: the staff blog finally gets around to breaking the silence on the torture interrogation memos, and what we get is the EPPC’s [...]
Total number of posts at The Corner so far over the weekend: 11. Total number of those posts that had to do with torture “torture”: 9. Total number of those posts doing anything other than defending the Bush administration: Zero. Total number of shreds of moral seriousness left among the Republican mainstream: Yes, you know [...]
Filed under: conservatism, torture