>> ^spoco2:

>> ^smooman:
>> ^spoco2:
Shit, could someone just knock out the woman who kept saying 'Heavenly father, jesus,jesus, jesus'... 'Thankyou Jesus'. Right there is one of the fricken reasons why blind religion is so damn dangerous. It breeds a reliance on this 'god' fellow, it makes you abscond from having belief in yourself, from being able to handle things yourself, but rather you sit and wait for your damn 'heavenly father' to save you.

Bravo to the guys who took leadership and told people to stay calm and kept everyone safe, that was taking things into your own hands and helping others. A FAR more 'christian' thing to do than just weep to your lord. Bravo, bravo.

ya what was that woman thinking crying out to her personal lord in a moment of unspeakable vulnerability, fear, and traumatic angst?! I mean, her crying for help to the only being she perceives could help her in such a helpless event just paints her as the walking time bomb she really is!
we get it spoco, you hate religious people. they are beneath you. now fuck off

I know that you're religious, I know that you have a hard time not insulting anyone who disagrees with you (your commenting history shows it to be true), but if you can't see why her reaction to a crisis is a far worse reaction than those who actively helped, then we have nothing to talk about.


so lets, in your words, knock her out? keep trollin

>> ^smooman:

>> ^spoco2:
Shit, could someone just knock out the woman who kept saying 'Heavenly father, jesus,jesus, jesus'... 'Thankyou Jesus'. Right there is one of the fricken reasons why blind religion is so damn dangerous. It breeds a reliance on this 'god' fellow, it makes you abscond from having belief in yourself, from being able to handle things yourself, but rather you sit and wait for your damn 'heavenly father' to save you.

Bravo to the guys who took leadership and told people to stay calm and kept everyone safe, that was taking things into your own hands and helping others. A FAR more 'christian' thing to do than just weep to your lord. Bravo, bravo.

ya what was that woman thinking crying out to her personal lord in a moment of unspeakable vulnerability, fear, and traumatic angst?! I mean, her crying for help to the only being she perceives could help her in such a helpless event just paints her as the walking time bomb she really is!
we get it spoco, you hate religious people. they are beneath you. now fuck off


I know that you're religious, I know that you have a hard time not insulting anyone who disagrees with you (your commenting history shows it to be true), but if you can't see why her reaction to a crisis is a far worse reaction than those who actively helped, then we have nothing to talk about.

>> ^spoco2:

Shit, could someone just knock out the woman who kept saying 'Heavenly father, jesus,jesus, jesus'... 'Thankyou Jesus'. Right there is one of the fricken reasons why blind religion is so damn dangerous. It breeds a reliance on this 'god' fellow, it makes you abscond from having belief in yourself, from being able to handle things yourself, but rather you sit and wait for your damn 'heavenly father' to save you.

Bravo to the guys who took leadership and told people to stay calm and kept everyone safe, that was taking things into your own hands and helping others. A FAR more 'christian' thing to do than just weep to your lord. Bravo, bravo.


ya what was that woman thinking crying out to her personal lord in a moment of unspeakable vulnerability, fear, and traumatic angst?! I mean, her crying for help to the only being she perceives could help her in such a helpless event just paints her as the walking time bomb she really is!

we get it spoco, you hate religious people. they are beneath you. now fuck off

Expert: Despite Japanese Gov’t Claims of Decreasing Radiation, Fukushima a "Ticking Time Bomb"
13 April 2011

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, Tokyo Electric has been in denial, trying to downplay the full impact of this nuclear accident. However, there’s a formula, a mathematical formula, by which you can determine what level this accident is. This accident has already released something on the order of 50,000 trillion becquerels of radiation. You do the math. That puts it right smack in the middle of a level 7 nuclear accident. Still, less than Chernobyl. However, radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors. The situation is not stable at all. So, you’re looking at basically a ticking time bomb. It appears stable, but the slightest disturbance—a secondary earthquake, a pipe break, evacuation of the crew at Fukushima—could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.

...

So, when the utility says that things are stable, it’s only stable in the sense that you’re dangling from a cliff hanging by your fingernails. And as the time goes by, each fingernail starts to crack. That’s the situation now.

>> ^blankfist:

I wish more parents would smack the shit out of their kids.


And make these meek little time bombs that can't wait to grow up and grab daddy's rifle and show all those motherfucking parents who's the motherfucking boss! BLAM! Not so tough NOW are you?!?!?! BLAM! BLAM! TOP OF THE WORLD MA!!!!

So those are my dreams
And these are my eyes
Stand tall like a man
Head strong like a horse

When it's all mixed up
Better break it down
In the world of secrets
In the world of sound

It's in the way you're always hiding from the light
See for yourself you have been sitting on a time bomb
No revolution maybe someone somewhere else
Could show you something new about you and your inner song
And all the love and all the love in the world
Won't stop the rain from falling
Waste seeping underground
I want to break it down

Break it down again

So those are my schemes
And these are my plans
Hot tips for the boys
Fresh news from the force

When it's all mixed up
Better break it down
In the world of silence
In the world of sound

" No sleep for dreaming" say the architects of life
Big bouncing babies, bread and butter can I have a slice
They make no mention of the beauty of decay
Blue, yellow, pink umbrella save it for a rainy day
And all the love and all the love in the world
Won't stop the rain from falling
Waste seeping underground
I want to break it down

Horsin' around
Pray to power
Play to the crowd with your big hit sound
And they won't simmer won't simmer, won't simmer down
Play to the crowd
Pay to the crowd
Play yeah yeah

It's in the way you're always hiding from the light
Fast off to heaven just like Moses on a motorbike
No revolution maybe someone somewhere else
Could show you something new to help
With the ups and downs
I want to break it down
Break it down again

Break it down again
No more sleepy dreaming
No more building up
It is time to dissolve
Break it down it again
No more sleepy dreaming

huh i posted this too. looks like I will discard mine
http://videosift.com/video/BP-s-Newest-Ticking-Time-Bomb-Atlantis

lying

Rubber - meet glue. Of course it isn't lying. It's truth. You just don't like it. I already said Reagan increased military spending. No denying that he did. He cut taxes as well, but those tax cuts resulted in an increase in federal tax recipts, rather than a decrease in budgets. The missing piece of the puzzle - which took place in 1982 - was not having Congress to push through on domestic spending decreases. It was Democrat control of congress that stymied that 3rd (and arguably most critical) pieces.

So yes - despite what you're being spoon fed on leftist blogs or liberal revisionist history pages - Reagan was a fiscal conservative. Sadly, without Congress on board he wasn't able to force through domestic spending cuts like he did the tax cuts in 80-81. That left him with only two-thirds of his agenda. It was enough to give the country over 20 years of prosperity, but with ever-increasing domestic spending it was borrowed prosperity.

I hope you get what's coming to you

Why - thank you. I appreciate when people acknowledge my hard work, personal diligence, self-sacrifice, and financial prudence with the suggestion of appropriate rewards. Your realization of my deserved remuneration and accolades certainly indicates that you are not without wisdom even though you allow your reason to occasionally be eclipsed by stooping to profanity and generalized name calling. Keep working on it!

while maintaining popular support

I'd cut all these spending programs and reduce the Federal budget to 1930 levels because it is necessary for the survival of the Republic. There is no money to support our network of socialist inspired domestic programs any longer. We have gone too far, and it has to be cut. Not reduced. Not 'frozen'. CUT. People will be unhappy with that. I understand that reality. I also understand that the nation is destined for financial collapse and subsequent balkanization (or worse) unless we cut federal spending radically, painfully, and permenantly. That is how I see this debt problem. The debt is a time bomb that is leading to the eventual collapse of the entire system. The loss of a few cushy social programs pales in comparison. So - in all honesty - I don't care about 'public support' for the cuts. The cuts are necessities. The programs are luxuries. People who cling to luxuries at the expense of necessities are either selfish or stupid - and I don't have any sympathy for such persons.

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

Tags for this video have been changed from 'rancid, music video, punk, ska' to 'rancid, time bomb, and out come the wolves, punk, ska, 90s, 1995' - edited by kronosposeidon

>> ^deedub81:
^We have to discuss this hypothetically because we don't have a ticking time bomb scenario. This is all hypothetical.
How about this:
Your family has been kidnapped and the police say that they have a kidnapper in custody. They are 100% sure this guy is a kidnapper. He has a history of kidnapping and he lived next door to you, but they aren't sure if this is the actual perpetrator. You've received a ransom note that the real kidnapper (whoever he is) has your family hidden somewhere and they've been without food or water for 2 days. Would you torture him to find out where your family is?


this is an irrelevant hypothetical. i am a single person, not a head of state, or even head of an organization making decisions on behalf of the whole giving orders that others must carry out. i will accept the consequences of my own actions. someone steals my children and holds them without food or water and is doing god knows what else? well sure i will probably go balls out crazy on some bitches. but in the end, i alone accept the responsibility, culpability, and consequences for whatever immoral atrocities i may commit.

oh and nevermind that the evidence suggests torture is an ineffective means to extract truthful information from an individual.

and a nation, a military power has far more tools at its disposal and emotional detatchment.

now dear, you are a beating a dead horse. most people do not agree with your position. ever. under any circumstances. because 2 wrongs dont make something right. because the evidence suggests torture doesnt work. because there is no empirical data suggestive of its eficacy. because there are better ways to do this. because we see the difference between a single person trying to save their family and world leaders violating their own laws. because noone trusts the motives of the war on terror. because people are actually compassionate and dont want to watch others suffer. ever.

You asked us to think of how things are, not how they ought to be. Well, the fact is that there will probably never be a "ticking time bomb" scenario to the extent that we discuss it in our torture debates. Why don't we just make the decision never to use torture RIGHT NOW, and then we will never have to make the decision again however sorely we are tempted?

I have been using this idea for most of my life. A very mild example is my decision to never drive my car to school because I live close to campus. I made that decision once, and I never have to make it again. It may be raining out, I may be late for class, I may be tired that day, but those things don't tempt me because I already made my decision. However, I know that there are certain situations that are unlikely but which may force me to drive or to get a ride. If I injured myself, for instance.

What is we made the decision never to use torture so that we were never tempted to use it, even for a really good reason? That is what our government has been doing: Using torture for really good reasons.

We all agree that torture is wrong, but it isn't black and white (only Sith deal in absolutes). However, I think that we should make the decision NOW to never use torture. We know that torture works and that we have prevented tragedies by its use. But torture is wrong. We have to think about the precedence that we are setting, the example that we are to the rest of the world, and our moral obligation. In the long run, the lives that are immediately at stake are less valuable than the ideal. The ideal must be kept and the moral upheld.

One theory of Ethics is that human suffering determines whether something is moral or immoral. If it decreases the happiness in the world, it is right. If it increases the happiness in the world, it is wrong. I don't agree with this usually, but it is pertinent to our discussion. We don't like death because it causes great suffering, but is death really the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody? No, not at all. Torture also causes suffering. So, if we break a moral code and torture someone to save 10,000 lives, will we ultimately be causing more suffering by giving the world and ourselves permission to do it in the future? I think we might. If the United States of America tortures, what are we saying to the world? How much suffering are we causing by losing our high moral ground? Probably a lot more that we realize.

But there is still that big question: WHAT IF? The way that I see it is that we either need to set a very specific, very strict line at which torture is justified, or else we never, ever use it no matter what. If we use torture only for "really good reasons," the situation will deteriorate. We will continually be tempted by a lower standard each time we do it. But if we make the decision only to "use our car" when we are injured and have no choice, we'll never be tempted to use our car when it's raining.

But THEN you're faced with the dilemma of choosing the point at which torture could be justified. How do you determine that? I don't know that it can possibly be done. I have difficulty with the idea that the justification increases with the number of lives lost. 5 lives aren't worth the torture of one man, but 10,000 lives are? There is no way to come to a conclusion about that. I think that it is an impossible standard to set.

That is my long-winded way of saying that the worst-case scenario will probably never happen and that torture should never, ever, ever be legal. Perhaps morally, we could justify using torture in certain situations. Perhaps. But I don't think that a government purposely allowing torture is ever, ever okay. Maybe at some future day we will be faced with a situation where we have a man in custody and we are 100% sure that he has knowledge that can save 1 million lives. We tried being "friendly", but it didn't work. If that ever occurs, I hope that we will have a law in place that forbids torture. I also hope that I am there to break the law and torture the fool.

deedub81: Well, some would say that you were morally justified under the circumstances. Regardless of the outcome, the fact that there is a 'ticking time-bomb' justifies the use of torture.

What circumstances? That there are people who want to kill Americans because of Britney Spears and our foreign interventionist policies? And regardless of what outcome? Any outcome? As long as there's a ticking time bomb it's okay to torture anyone even on a hunch or via hearsay? Then the answer is always no, because those are bad arguments in favor of torture.


What if we were talking about executing somebody to save lives?

How can you prove that? The fact that you must use torture proves it's torture brought out of suspicion - you have no proof he knows anything, it's just suspicion. Even if the government said they knew he was hiding something, they were also the same government that told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.


They are 100% sure this guy is a kidnapper. He has a history of kidnapping and he lived next door to you, but they aren't sure if this is the actual perpetrator.

Then they aren't 100% sure. This is the fallacy of all pro-torture arguments. "What if it's 100% absolutely true that this guy knows something, even though we can't be certain he does."

^We have to discuss this hypothetically because we don't have a ticking time bomb scenario. This is all hypothetical.


How about this:

Your family has been kidnapped and the police say that they have a kidnapper in custody. They are 100% sure this guy is a kidnapper. He has a history of kidnapping and he lived next door to you, but they aren't sure if this is the actual perpetrator. You've received a ransom note that the real kidnapper (whoever he is) has your family hidden somewhere and they've been without food or water for 2 days. Would you torture him to find out where your family is?



Your family (country/nation) has been kidnapped (is under attack) and the police say that they have a kidnapper(known terrorist) in custody. They are 100% sure this guy is a kidnapper (Al Qaeda opperative). He has a history of kidnapping(terrorism) and he lived next door to you (in a terrorist cell), but they aren't sure if this is the actual perpetrator (they are only 98% sure that he knows details). You've received a ransom note that the real kidnapper (terrorist cell) has your family hidden somewhere (is planning an attack against the US) and they've been without food or water for 2 days (it's going to take place sometime this week).

>> ^blankfist:
Waterboarding carried out by the government is wrong in any circumstance, because they're representing all of us when they do it. To me it's an easy issue.
The arguments that say 'what if it can be used to stop a massive attack on the US' are a fallacy, because you don't know if those techniques would prevent an attack unless you use them. What if you do use them and you weren't able to stop an attack? What then?



<Devil's Advocate> Well, some would say that you were morally justified under the circumstances. Regardless of the outcome, the fact that there is a 'ticking time-bomb' justifies the use of torture.

What if we were talking about executing somebody to save lives? If you could order the death of Osama Bin Laden knowing that it would thwart countless terrorist attacks in the future, would you do it? Most would say 'yes.' Now, what if you could save those same lives by torturing Bin Laden? </Devil's Advocate>

I don't think that torture is moral, but I don't think it's as black and white as some people believe it is.