Continued

Yours truly is, of course, not the only one feeling this way.


My friend Chris Phan also offered the following in response to my words on the subject:

We need to change the discourse. We need to get Americans to understand:

1. We are at war with al-Queda, not with "terror".
2. For the foreseeable future, we cannot completely eliminate terrorist attacks, no more than we can completely eliminate murder. Our goal should be to reduce the risk.
3. There are certain extremely important principles upon which our nation is based. Due process and not torturing people (even guilty people) are two of them.
4. "They do it, why can't we?" is not a valid argument. My mom was not convinced by this argument when I made it at age five. It is rather upsetting to see it made by adults.
5. Maintaining our principles is more important than reducing the risk of terrorist attacks. There is no point in living if you have to sacrifice your decency to do so.
6. The good news is that we don't have to make that choice! Most of the principle-violating shit that has occurred in the past six years hasn't actually made us any safer.

Which I think is well put, and well worth repeating.

And as a tangent to Chris's remarks--the Slacktivist thread also mentions Jim Henley's Reason piece on the subject, which should be more famous than it is. You may remember it; it's the one where the hypothetical ...and the only way to get him to talk is to torture him is replaced with ...and the only way to get him to talk is to rape your child. (You could probably get banned from LiveJournal for linking to the piece, now that I think of it...)

This is a clue to the real misdirection of the ticking bomb scenario. It’s always presented as a “What would you do?” dilemma, but in truth it has nothing to do with you. The proper question is: “What should we allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity? What shall we let their bosses order without legal repercussion?”

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I think a great many people feel at a loss right now, but in a way that has not diminished our desire to fight for change. A very intelligent scientist friend of mine who is not generally given to public activism has been corresponding with me since I asked the questions in my initial post. (This is one of the reasons that it matters to continue having the conversation, and having it loudly and publicly, even when we feel low on options, and even when it feels like everything's been said. You may be one of millions of tiny voices asking the same question, but every time it's asked it sets minds to the question who weren't working on it before.)

My friend said he felt compelled to involve himself seriously with the problem as best he knows how, and with the serious and long-term commitment that it calls for, though political action is something that isn't usual or easy for him. He closed with this:

I really, really hope I can keep thinking about this, and that I don't sink back into feeling apathetic about it. Thioesters may in fact reveal a very deep point about the origin of life via the way that they couple group transfer with redox reactions, but right now it is probably more important that the US is holding people indefinitely without trial and torturing them.

I don't think I can add to that.