This is a masterwork of numbskullery:
>I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don’t want our side to lose….As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the end, someone is bleeding and dying.
>You’d be amazed at how many people find these things nearly equivalent. A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid’s forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child’s bedroom. In his two-dimensional perception, the only important factor is that both resulted in a dead child. Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of “evil,” a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.
>John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.
>That was the motivation.
>The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don’t do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.
>At some point you have to decide if a known terrorist having a very bad day (after which he goes back to a hot meal and a cot) is more of a moral problem than allowing a terrorist to blow up a building full of people.
>Yes, it’s good if we do it, when it’s for the right reasons. So far, it’s been for the right reasons. And no, it isn’t good when it’s done to us, for the reasons it has been done to us. Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.
>Got it?
No, I don’t get it.
Because we’re right we should do whatever it takes to win.
I think I get it!
I think I posted something about the other torture argument: it’s not torture if we do it to our own people (to prepare them for torture).
I think what he means is that all of them are “bad” and all of us are “innocent,” and therefore all that we do is “right” and all that they do is “wrong.”
Note that I used the term “innocent” and not “good” (as in vs. “bad”) because of its specific use by the numbskulls; he used it four times in just what was quoted here.
A core principle of the Right that it is entirely OKAY to kill “bad” people. That “Thou shall not kill,” means that “Thou shall not kill the innocent.” And that all of us (on the Right) are always, entirely, without question, innocent. And that even the children of the “bad” are just as “bad”.
So, the (anonymous) writter wants to talk about evil. And also about how subjecting another human being, never subject to a trial, to a simulated death, over and over and over again, forcibly triggering their most primal reflexes, isn’t evil. And about the “valuable information” which results from subjects placed in the most hellish situation possible, who are tortured until they create fictions about Iraq’s training of Al Queda in chemical weapons, after which, unsurprisingly, the torture stops.
OK, so let’s talk about evil.
But first I’m going to go vomit up the brodo di polli I just ate, from having thought about waterboarding long enough to type the above.