Re: Zero Dark Thirty inspires Islamaphobia

by bazinga Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:34 am

VivaStPauli wrote:

The huge problem is displaying torture as useful - people will say anything that pops into their head to make it stop. Just because you're good at making people talk doesn't mean they tell you the truth.

And frankly, if you're waterboarded 200 times, you probably started making shit up at about, oh I don't know, THE FIRST F*CKING TIME.

Would you say torturing criminals does not lead to useful info? I must disagree wholeheartedly.

by rwo power Tue Jan 29, 2013 7:56 am

bazinga wrote:Would you say torturing criminals does not lead to useful info? I must disagree wholeheartedly.

You might want to look up what the inquisition did. Neither were any of the tortured women (and a few men) witches, nor were the people they accused under torture. They practically all did confess, though.

by VivaStPauli Tue Jan 29, 2013 8:23 am

bazinga wrote:
Would you say torturing criminals does not lead to useful info? I must disagree wholeheartedly.

Lol of course it doesn't. Torture gives you an incentive to talk, not to tell the truth. No respecting criminologist endorses it.

Torture victims tell you what you want to hear to make it stop, not the truth.

And that's perfectly logical when you think about it. And no police force in any of the industrialized nations does torture, and those also happen to be the countries with both the lowest crime rates, as well as the highest rate of conviction.

But mostly: logic.
Really.
If you were tortured, why would you tell the truth? You want it to stop, and the quickest way to make that happen, is to tell the torturer what he wants to hear. That can or can not be the truth, depending on whether they got the right guy. It's basically luck.

I'm sure it leads to loads of confessions, it's just that that doesn't mean they're true.

by bazinga Tue Jan 29, 2013 8:24 am

rwo power wrote:
bazinga wrote:Would you say torturing criminals does not lead to useful info? I must disagree wholeheartedly.
You might want to look up what the inquisition did. Neither were any of the tortured women (and a few men) witches, nor were the people they accused under torture. They practically all did confess, though.

Being as I am a fan of Carl Sagan, I have of course read of witch burnings and "confessions" in the Demon Haunted World.

However, torture with the specific intention of finding information is often successful. Would you not reveal all you knew to escape severe duress?

by Eman Thu Feb 14, 2013 1:43 pm

If this was about any other mission to take down any other terrorist who had done any amount of harm to any other country, it probably wouldn't have been anywhere near as popular of a movie or as big of a deal in relation to the torturing issues. Even though the mission was justified and whatnot, the sheer delight some people had about killing a man is immoral to me.

by VivaStPauli Thu Feb 14, 2013 1:47 pm

Eman wrote:the sheer delight some people had about killing a man is immoral to me.

I agree with that. While I accept a certain (large^^) amount of grim satisfaction as perfectly healthy, the sheer joy and cheering of the killing of a man was a bit chilling for me.

I know Bin Laden was as close to someone who deserves a bullet to the face as we're ever gonna get, but still, I tend to think of us "civilized" people as better than that.

That being said, I don't think it's true what you said about the popularity of the movie - Catherine Bigelow is a great director, and the Hurt Locker got it's bag full o' Oscars deservedly a while back, so her making another gritty war-related movie was always gonna get tons of attention.

by Eman Thu Feb 14, 2013 2:51 pm

VivaStPauli wrote:That being said, I don't think it's true what you said about the popularity of the movie - Catherine Bigelow is a great director, and the Hurt Locker got it's bag full o' Oscars deservedly a while back, so her making another gritty war-related movie was always gonna get tons of attention.

Hmm, perhaps. I might just be going off of what I heard about the movie, since most of the commercials on my TV mentioned little of the director and mostly just flashed quotes about how any 'true American' needed to see the movie. In fairness, I live right by the US border. It was certainly just a way to get more people to go see it, but the artistic quality of the film took a backseat to the patriotic form of promotion around these parts.

by VivaStPauli Thu Feb 14, 2013 2:58 pm

Well, I obviously don't watch American TV-ads, so I wouldn't know. I haven't even seen Zero Dark Thirty yet, but I have seen The Hurt Locker, and I quite liked it, also, I don't remember it as overly patriotic.

by Eman Thu Feb 14, 2013 3:07 pm

Yeah, The Hurt Locker was just a plain good movie. Maybe this one is too (I've only seen part of it through a torrent my friend was watching), but I didn't even know who the director was until after it was out, so maybe my opinion is skewed.

by bazinga Thu Feb 14, 2013 5:15 pm

I'm an Indian and I enjoyed the movie.

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