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It's easy to construct Jack Bauer scenarios in fiction, but they are exceedingly unlikely to come up in real life. Real life is a multithreaded narrative - ther
by glenra 13y ago
It's easy to construct Jack Bauer scenarios in fiction, but they are exceedingly unlikely to come up in real life. Real life is a multithreaded narrative - there's never just ONE lead to follow and you can never be that certain the lead you're looking at is the right one.
What made torture "work" in 24 is that Jack Bauer can't trust anybody else and never has more than one lead to follow at a time. Even though he talks to dozens of people who know parts of the big conspiracy, these people all magically disappear but only do so moments after they tell him one key bit of info that will lead him to the next clue. Sometimes they disappear by escaping custody, sometimes they disappear by being killed by the bad guys (or a traitor among the good guys), and sometimes they kill themselves. Through repetition of this pattern, we come to expect that each person who becomes the focus of Jack's attention will have some key bit of info he just has to get out of them. And he has to get that info from them now because he if he doesn't he'll never see them again.
Real life doesn't work that way.
In real life you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of possible leads at any given time. Because the bad guys aren't supernaturally good at their job, you can go back and ask followup questions. You can check one guy's testimony against the next guy's. And some of the people you think seem like pretty good leads don't know anything useful. Torturing those people will generate false leads which lead you to torture more people who generate more false leads until your entire organization is in the business of serially torturing innocent people until they tell you whatever you seem to want to hear rather than the business of finding out the actual truth.
Each person you torture into generating false leads makes it more likely people will die because it ties up your organizational resources. It also is likely to generate massive blowback - some of the people you torture become or inspire new enemies, whereas people you are nice to might become friends and voluntarily help the investigation.
- makeqaz 13y agoYou have no idea what it is like in life. You have a guess but it is entirly wrong. But I do. Simply put I've been there, and no there not hundreds of leads. The people you 'torture' are not random guys, They were linked to the case in question. And the information they give is always always somthing you know and something new, They of course don't know which is which. Otherwise the information is usless and you will need endless amount of time and money to sort it. Again. Your ideas about real life are entirely wrong.
- Zigurd 13y agoOne specific example of "torture works" would completely overturn everything that is known about the use of torture by the US. You are so very adamant that one would think you have that example ready to go. And yet you curiously stop before giving any examples, even though that invites thinking you might not be truthful. Strange.
- ctdonath 13y agoProving one is the intended target of bigotry is usually unhelpful. ETA: Downvote demonstrates the point.
- Zigurd 13y agoBigotry? Bigotry against torturers? Seriously?
- ctdonath 13y agoBigotry is defining a group as inherently evil, and rejecting any sensible discussion with a member thereof on the grounds that someone is (or sympathizes with) one. Never mind whether he may have saved lives thru "enhanced interrogation", your curiosity about what he did exists only insofar as his admission thereof justifies your labeling him as evil (no room for good-faith discourse possibly resulting in "hey, maybe you're not so bad after all").
- Zigurd 13y agoI find it amazing that there is pro-torture propaganda on TV, never mind that in the real world it is the darkest of the dark crimes against humanity. I find it amazing that the psychologists who designed tortures and the people at Guantanamo who carried out torture are walking free. Shouldn't they be on the run from the same kind of borderless manhunt as WWII era war criminals? You say I'm not leaving room for good faith discourse. I asked for an example of torture saying a life. I asked because, time after time, in all forums, no such example has ever come up. The real problem is that torture has been allowed to approach too close to where it's considered OK to use.
- gutnor 13y agoIndeed, we should not underestimate the effect of police/agencies behaviour on regular citizen. It is something that shocked me when talking to friends freshly immigrated from countries like South America to London. They have a general mistrust of cops, the more cop they see the less safe they feel. On the other hand, my wife and I, coming from other European countries are very happy to see cops around. That said, since Tony Blair's "we can hold you in custody for a month without rights", or the we just shoot random people in the back after 7/7 bombing, our attitude is slowly changing. I'm not sure I would volunteer information to the police related to any hot topic without studying the risks first.