Archive for February 25th, 2010
Torture
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 02/25/2010
You notice all the water boarders were kids in uniform.
Reporters are always asking if people would use torture in questioning. If you watch the experts on that closely, their body language is impatience. The REASON reporters ask this is because torture is sexy topic. By contrast real professional interrogation is BORING.
But torture is not the question. Torture simply does not work. Torture, from the Inquisition to the Democratic Peace Loving Peoples’ Republics, has always been used when you know what you want someone to say. It makes them say it.
Asking a pro about torture is like asking a jockey about carrying the horse.
To yield results, you want your subject caught quickly and BORED. Torture is a lot of things, but it isn’t boring. A bored man will TALK. He will give you all those little reactions you need so badly. You can find reasons to talk about a list of towns, one by one. You can see the one that hits home, something is going on there.
You don’t know WHAT, but you’ve got a WHERE. Then you need to think about it and orient your discussion accordingly, preferably days later. For the press, this is useless. As I said, a real description of that dramatic word Interrogation would lose readers fast.
As to whether one might be WILLING use torture, one thing I have never heard a Nam vet talk about was looking at a village after the Peace Loving Liberation Army got through with it. The media do NOT want to discuss that. All that kind of thing was done by the Nazis, and any discovery on that is publishable.
Stalin killed millions of people before and after the War, but during the War he never hurt a soul but the Enemy
I saw what the Anti-Racist Liberation Fighters did to people in Africa and South America, but none of that was ever discussed in the media or in the World Council of Churches, which supported them. But when terrorism hit New York, the whole thing changed.
I still wonder what the media’s reaction would have been if it was their beloved Idealists who did 9-11. They devoted untold resources for decades to proving that Oswald, fellow Idealist, did not kill Kennedy.
Nobody discusses this Idealistic Communist theme of the media. A lot people were for torture after 9/11. I can’t tell you my attitude because the question is thrilling but totally irrelevant. I cannot say I would not use torture to prevent what I saw happen. But the point is torture is useless.
As usual when the media take a topic up, it’s just STUPID.
Anyone who knows instances where torture was useful are welcome to correct me. I never saw any hint of it myself, and it is totally out of synch with any interrogation technique I know about. We were trying to find out information. Torture is used to make people say what you WANT them to say.
SAY IT!
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 02/25/2010
“Integration is like mixing sugar with s***. It doesn’t help the s*** and it RUINS the sugar.” A NORTHERN senator said that in the 1950s. Our whole society today is based on the idea that when groups mix, it helps correct the problems of the deprived group.
That is not how things work in general. “One rotten apple spoils the barrel.”
How many sane people would believe that if you take a bunch of largely foul-mouthed hostile kids and put them in with normal kids, the result will ALWAYS be that it affects the normal children not at all, but it ALWAYS improves the former group?
Every time, without exception.
Well, that is what EVERY, repeat EVERY “scientific” study of racial busing, EVERYWHERE, shows.
Once again, no one ever puts in these simple Mantra terms. Just STATING the thing makes it a laughing stock. But no one will do that. You cannot explain this in terms of “bias.” The information STARTS this way, it isn’t a group of otherwise serious people who happen to show bias in one area.
You can’t start with this bias crap. You have to START with the question, “Why was this information PRODUCED?” There is racial busing, therefore there MUST be public studies on it. This is entirely different from saying that academics are really interested in the subject. In a society where you can be ruined or arrested for debating diversity or integration, there is simply no demand, no grant money, no publication and no curiosity about any actual results, and we call know it.
But no one ever SAYS this. It makes the Professional Academics, whom respectable conservatives have to worship with their butts in the air, into paid actors. Bit you simply cannot state the question without he answer being obvious.
So no one states the question. For those who don’t like these “studies,” what you can SELL, the information you can PRODUCE, is a Conspiracy Theory. The conspiracy theory is the only opposition.
Go back to the god damn BASIC QUESTION: Why is this information PRODUCED?
Our information is NOT produced because no one is interested in the BASIC question.
You will find that you will always find people wanting got get you off boring reality, your repeatedly returning to Why is this information produced? They want to talk about something they can enjoy, like Jews or Conspiracies or their the sort of pet theories we see in so many comments.
Over many, many years of trying to make people see the obvious, an alarm bell goes off in my mind when I find the talk has become lively. It used to always mean that we had gotten off the subject. I am fascinated by seeing the obvious realities. Most people do all that when they are in school or trying to impress others. When they talk they want to be entertained.
For that reason basic questions are ignored. To put this in basic terms: No one demands that THAT information be produced.
When I point out that in every area where there is money and power there is headline corruptions, except one, the press, almost everybody responds with the same two answers:
1) Of course, and
2) That’s paranoid Conspiracy stuff.
But the critical stuff here is that 1) and 2) are not replies from two different groups. In a long conversation, almost every average person will say BOTH things. Again, other people don’t notice it because they don’t reduce what is said to BASIC terms. They don’t KNOW that what they are saying is simply “Of course” and “That is paranoid thinking.”
Most people would not understand the progression of this article. I started with a criticism of studies on integration, but instead of repeating all the contradictions of those studies, I went on to THINKING ABOUT why these errors are made. You won’t find a discussion like this elsewhere.
Mention warped studies on race and you will face a deluge of statistics and denunciations. No one analyzes, IN DEPTH, what everybody knows, how studies that are paid for and get published, are produced. This leaves the other side at least as strong as you are. In the end, we just quote other studies. They’re ready for that.
What they are not ready for is an explanation of why everybody knows what studies are going to say. Everybody knows it, but nobody SAYS it.
The ONLY cure for this is BUGS and Mantra Thinking.
THINK, then and Say It.
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