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November 10, 2005
Damn The Definitions, Full Speed Ahead
John Derbyshire hits on something that has been severely bugging me:
After saying my piece & reading the comeback emails, I realized that to a great many folk, "torture" does not refer to the pulling out of fingernails, beating senseless with rubber truncheons, having your infant daughter raped before your eyes, or any of the other things I had always supposed it meant. To a lot of people, it embraces the merest roughness or unkindness -- a shove, a kick, a slap, sleep deprivation, and so on.
I'm sorry, but that ain't torture, and a person who says it is is either (a) the product of a very sheltered life, or (b) just looking for any old reason to say how horrid GWB and his administration are.
Exactly. Whenever I hear a news story on the role of "torture" in the war on terror, the first thought that pops into my mind is: "How are you defining torture? Is sleep deprivation torture? How about keeping a prisoner's cell temperature at 55 degrees? Or subjecting the prisoner to psychological pressure by bending or breaking cultural taboos?"
As usual, the combination of sloppy, inexact language and stunted critical thinking skills has thrown up a cloud of confusion around a critical topic. Here's yet another opportunity for an MSM journalist to do some work of real and lasting value--"change the world" kind of work--but it won't happen. The sloppy words and bad thinking will get repeated ad nauseum on CNN and in the New York Times until it becomes fodder for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Comments
Here's a thought: if sleep deprevation is torture, the under-3 crowd is in a lot of trouble with John McCain...
Derbyshire is right. Annoying someone, making them uncomfortable or even offending them isn't torture.
Posted by: AcademicElephant at November 10, 2005 09:04 PM
