Digby has a great post up about the conflict between the actual scientific evidence about torture’s efficacy and the folk beliefs about it. In sum, being under a lot of stress is a surefire way to stop remembering things correctly, and to produce misleading information. And that’s just on top of the fact that a lot of people being rounded up and tortured don’t know anything, and the well-established fact that people who are being tortured will quickly and rationally cough up false confessions in hopes that the torture will cease. (Indeed, Searching for Whitopia, and the one thing that comes up again and again is how allergic the residents of what he deems Whitopia are to reality. He describes their existence as much like those Russian nesting dolls. They escape not just the cities but the suburbs to live in a community that’s main value is that you don’t face much in the way of challenges from reality. And then you move into a gated community, and inside your gated community is your giant house that isolates you from the neighbors and likely has a super high tech security system to protect your from the imaginary criminals. Indeed, their commitment to living in a fantasy world is such that Benjamin goes house-hunting, and discovers that a charming house with an official historical landmark designation languishes on the market while ugly monstrosities that reference certain architectural traditions in a way that’s almost deliberately cheesy and fake get snatched up. The tacky wins hands down every time. Too much reality is unsettling.
And so the residents of these fantasy bubble worlds get most of their information about how the world works from TV. They get it from fictional shows that aren’t trying to reflect reality at all, and they get it from Fox News, which deliberately distorts reality. They have no reality-based reference point to check their assumptions against.
Once in awhile, you really get a glimpse of how out of control the American detachment from reality is getting. This ACORN nonsense is a classic example. You have two kids that have been demonstrated to have been lying about what happened when they decided to “catch” some ACORN members doing unethical shit. But they’re being taken seriously, while their victim—-who has not been proven to be a liar—-is mostly being ignored.
But that’s not even the worst of it. The thing that I think is making reality-based thinkers absolutely crazy is that anyone with two fucking brain cells to rub together should immediately have, as Auguste did, taken a look at what those kids were wearing and realized the insanely low odds that anyone they encountered could possibly think they were telling the truth. If you had even the barest understanding of what the world actually is like, then your first assumption should be that the few ACORN employees that did humor them thought this was all a harmless prank, and played along because they are good people with a sense of humor. Now, you can point out that they were being naive, and should have had their guard up since they had to know that the right wing has made them the next target in their continual effort to hurt and destroy at random, but that doesn’t mean that the most obvious narrative that a reality-based person would have come up with—-that this looked like a joke, and was reacted to like a joke—-should be dismissed.
And lookee here! The most obvious narrative has been confirmed by one of the people wrapped up in this who hasn’t been proven to be a liar.
Because she thought that it was a stunt by the three youngsters who came to her office—two of whom were later revealed to be videographer James O’Keefe, 25, and college student Hannah Giles, 20, of the new conservative news site BigGovernment.com, along with a third man she says was around their age but “a silent partner”—she decided to fight fire with fire, she said. “The crazy answers that came from me were in response to lies and shocking things they said to me,” she said. “They played with me, and I played back. It’s just that simple.”
And yet, everyone is caught up in this weird need to play along with the obviously stupid supposition that these kids made convincing pimps and prostitutes, while wearing what is obviously a costume they probably first put together for one of those charming “pimps and hos” parties that white college kids think are so funny. But you think about the American right wing, and how they naturally prefer the cheesy to the tasteful, the obviously fake to the authentic, and suddenly it makes sense. The basic ability to grasp the fundamentals of reality has been completely distorted. Believing these two made convincing members of the street prostitution community is a lark if you think god created everything 4,000 years ago and Stephen Baldwin is a serious person.
With that being what we’re up against, trying to get through the message that torture doesn’t work is damn near impossible.
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) (Also, it’s in New York because that’s where the UN is, not because New York is just so cool.)
I’ve been borrowing seasons of Buffy & Angel from the library (on your recommendation) & those rare scenes in which torture or physical threats produce information are more disturbing than those of torture for its own sake.
At this point I can’t stand torture portrayed as successful wherever it appears. It’s a very old trope & a real comic book cliche. I recall one of the first Superman stories (the first?) either had Supes dangling the bad guy out the window or leaping about the skyscrapers with him in order to terrify him into talking. It probably goes back further than that in pop culture.
FWIW, Wonder Woman used a magic lasso which caused no discomfort but compelled its prisoner to tell the truth.