She’s just pointing out that the argument in question relies on torture not being effective, which is a condition subject to change.

What?

Seriously, what?

The efficacy of torture as an information-gathering tool is conditional?

That’s news to the CIA, the US Army, the NSA, and lots & lots of folks whose actual livelyhood involves the gathering of information by utilizing a variety of tools. That’s news to the psi-ops divisions of our military which have frequently and repeatedly pointed out that unless you immediately kill the folks you torture to prevent news from getting out, the long-term cost of torture is in social capital, which is essential in minimzing casualties and effectively gathering information. (ie enemies are more likely to fight to the death than surrender if they believe you will torture them; once the practice of torture is associated with your side, other conventional forms of information gathering become more difficult while the opposition gains a useful recruiting tool…. etc. etc. etc.)

From teh original stupids:

“Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they’ll also say anything to avoid imprisonment.”

False dilemma; information can and often is gained through a variety of methods beyond applying some measure of threat to a captured prisoner. The quality of information gained through traditional intelligence-gathering activites, such as creating an informational network within a community, tends to run on the ‘high’ side but also requires establishing trust and rapport with contacts. It’s slow, its unsexy, and when its working right, it produces no visible results other than the information it provides. (in fact, a good network of contacts should actually be protected from visibility; a covert agent working for a front company is really only useful as long as no one knows what they really do. Once that cat is out of the bag, not only is the agent burned, but so is the front company, anyone else who used the front company, and every single contact that agent had)

Torture, on the other hand, doesn’t take very long at all, it’s terribly exciting if you’re a sadist thug, and once you’re done torturing someone, you can hold them up to try and intimidate the rest of the population. It may not get you any useful information, but by god it gets a visceral response from everyone who hears about it, and if intimidation is your goal, you shout it from the rooftops!

Sorry, but torture simply isn’t effective [b]ever[/b], except in bad fiction scenarios that involve suspension of disbelief. It isn’t effective as intelligence gathering, it isn’t effective as deterrant or intimidation, and it isn’t effective at preventing or limiting hostilities. The practice of torture during wartime is like throwing gasoline on a fire. While wearing a vest of Roman Candles. And smoking. While applying hair spray.

Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983.

Attempts to identify who John Galt is for followup were unsuccessful.

For instance, if you run across a sociopath, your odds of convincing them that torture is morally wrong are slim to none. However, you can still argue fairly effectively that torture will not get the desired results, and spare the poor victim a bit of “discomfort”.

And here’s the other issue: the utilitarian argument eliminates the need for the moral argument. If it doesn’t work, torture is a bad call whether it’s “moral” or not. If you presuppose that torture does work, then the moral argument becomes an issue, and you end up with the stupid bullshit “ticking nuclear bomb” scenarios we hear on Fox news.

With enough imagination, you can construct a hypothetical situtation where any action, no matter how obhorrent, becomes accepted as the “moral choice” by the majority of society. With enough control over the media, you can even manage to convince the majority of society that your hypothetical situation has come about or is imminent.

What you cannot do, however, regardless of your wealth, imagination, power, or psychopathology, is change a simple fact: torture does not now–and has never done throughout history–yield accurate, actionable information.

Also, what you cannot do, apparantly, is convince an immature, self-important, ridiculously-entitled, faux-libertarian “pundit” that she can’t change reality no matter how right or wrong something “seems to her”, and that if she doesn’t know the actual facts that are readily available, then she should just shut up.

Seriously. If your column can’t pass middle-school “five-paragraph essay” muster, you need to step away from the keyboard before you embarrass yourself further..

Is McArdle saying that we should have kept the levees from breaking by not building the levees in the first place?

I’m having trouble understanding the rest of that sentence, so maybe there was a point buried in there that I didn’t see.

“I’d like to ask you if you could briefly describe your thoughts in the governments role in the Katrina effort?”

McArdle:
Um, well, I think it’s obviously not gone well, but I also, to some extent, there’s two separate questions: how did FEMA do? F. The tendency was just to blame the Bush administration, which I don’t think is right. The way FEMA was set up, the problems were certainly enhanced by bureaucratic incompetence, but also the constraints on the way that FEMA acts, um, and the rules that were set up for other emergencies, just tended to make things worse, they bought all these trailers, for example, because

CSPAN: (interrupting)
But where does FEMA exist in a libertarian state?

McArdle:
Um, it doesn’t'! however, I think it should be noted there was an enormous outpouring of private charity, and the private charity was vastly more effective, while FEMA was struggling to get water into New Orleans, WALMART sent trucks and trucks of the stuff down, whereas FEMA, because of all these bureaucratic constraints, couldn’t get going. Um, um, in a libertarian world, without FEMA, you would have seen, the problem is, everything would be so different, you wouldn’t have had the Army Corps of Engineers building all the levys that then broke, New Orleans would have looked like a different city, so, at that point, you’re going so far back to first principles, given that FEMA existed, which I think I have to take, I think there was bureaucratic incompetence, but there were also structural problems with the way that the government hems in the discretion of emergency management bureaucracies and makes all these incredibly tight rules about what they’re supposed to do, if you have an emergency, I think you want as few rules as possible because god knows what the emergency is going to be.

The biggest problem with mccardle’s writing, as I’ve seen is that it’s tedious. It’s boring. She doesn’t really add anything to the general discourse.

When I read here, I read funny shit I would not have thought up myself. Sometimes I get some news I had not heard otherwise. That’s cool.

When I read at Ezra Klein’s place I often get news and insight on issues I’m not as conversant on as he is. I enjoy that.

When I read mccardle all I get is the navl gazing and opinionatering of someone maybe not quite as bright as I am talking about fairly mundane shit. In other words, I’m not entertained, I’m not more informed. Basically, I’ve just wasted a few minutes reading the inane maunderings of some random randite.

If anything, I think that is one of the worst indictments of the atlantic’s decision.

Shorter “Allahpundit”
I am outraged and insulted by this so called ‘study’ that has ‘determined’ that conservatives don’t read books. So, honestly, how many have you guys read lately, Hot Air fans? I’ll be honest – I’ve hardly read any.

Republican logic at work here…

How exactly DO you torture someone who’s on a suicide mission?
If they’ve come to terms with flying an airplane at 400 mph into a skyscraper, I doubt waterboarding or “the comfy chair” are going to have much of an effect.

Besides, even if you did get info out of them, type it single-spaced in a report, title it, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” and hand it personally to George Bush, he’s still just going to go on vacation anyway.

She wrote two paragraphs and one of them was incredibly stupid. The entire thing was just an excuse to cluck cluck at a straw man. Silly libruls, why don’t you argue against torture the right way!?!?

Someone shooting her mouth off?

It was the screaming and all the blood that distracted me.