A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Torture

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A Read more

  • Torture, truth, and the war

    Jonathan Schell connects the dots and makes some observations about the use of torture as a characteristic of declining powers. Read more

  • Catechesis FAIL

    Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings brought these depressing opinion poll results to my attention. Essentially, the more of a Bible-believing regular churchgoer you are, the more likely you are to approve of torture: 53% of white mainline protestants said that torture can rarely or never be justified, while 46% said that it could sometimes or often(!) Read more

  • The psychology of torture

    Marvin made the point in comments here that it’s depressing to even be arguing about the morality of torture. After all, the wrongness of torture is something we should all simply take for granted, and the fact that it’s become a contested topic says something really bad about where we are as a country. Personally, Read more

  • Tortured reading

    I haven’t been blogging on the torture issue, mostly because others are doing it far more justice than I even could. But, in case you aren’t already reading them, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, John Schwenkler, and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings have been my regular sources of info and analysis on this. Also see: this piece Read more

  • NRCAT statement on the torture memos

    The National Religious Campaign Against Torture is calling for a “commission of inquiry” in light of the Office of Legal Counsel memos released this week by the Obama Justice Department: We must, as a nation, address the fact that high-ranking officials in our government authorized torture and that agents representing our country carried out acts Read more

  • Not bad for week one

    Obama gives military’s interrogation rules to CIA (More here from NRCAT.) Obama orders CIA prisons, Gitmo shut Obama blocks some of Bush’s last-minute environmental decisions More of this, please. Read more

  • Paging “values voters”

    John offers a timely reminder of the importance of torture as a moral issue and the need for religious voters in particular to hold politicians’ feet to the fire here. National Religious Campaign Against Torture Read more

  • Conscience of a torturer

    I’ve really been enjoying the subscription to Mother Jones my in-laws got me for my birthday. They do exactly what you’d want a monthly magazine to do: run long, in-depth investigative articles that go beyond the surface coverage you tend to get in weeklies or dailies. I used to subcribe to half a dozen or Read more

  • Huckabee vs. torture

    It’s a depressing sign of the times when you feel like you should praise a politician who wants to hold America to a higher standard than, say, the Inquisition or the Khmer Rouge. Still, it’s good to see Mike Huckabee joining John McCain (and Ron Paul) as a Republican against torture: After the Iowa poll Read more