Comment by tacon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacon | Hacker News Reader

I'm still searching for a society in history that engages in torture against its opponents that doesn't eventually turn to torturing its own citizens. They will, of course, be labeled terrorists when that happens, but that time is coming.

When that story came out of Chicago a few years ago about a two decade history of torturing inmates to get them to confess to crimes, we asked how that could go on for so long. Well, apparently you can torture powerless people of color in Chicago without consequence. They were only torturing "bad" people, weren't they?

I get ill listening to the "arguments" for torture. "Well, it works." I want to drop my head into my hands. The efficiency expert's answer to moral questions. But what about a ticking bomb? Can't Jack Bauer put a bullet in a prisoner's knee to get him to talk? The Israeli's have the process down: They torture supposedly because of a ticking bomb, a time limit, whatever, but then they take a break for the Sabath. Gotta keep those priorities in mind.

If torture "worked", does that mean we have no limits? Just animals ripping the face off our prey?

I'm not very religious. What are Christians thinking when they allow this to happen? Has the iron law of Paul taken over from the Prince of Peace? If there is one piece of evidence that the US is a post-Christian country, this is it.

Not post-Christian enough: https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/12-20-14.jpg

The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.

Source data for that article is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/...

Select "Show results by: Race/Religion".

Thanks for that link. It seems to me that what that data says is: Americans are for torture, pretty much across the board. That's good to know...

The Ideology -- and to a lesser extent Party ID and Race -- breakdowns tell a different story.

I'm non-religious myself, but I have to think those results are conditioned by an underlying partisan divide. If there were sufficient numbers to support it, I'd want to see crosstabs for religiosity controlling for political ideology.

> The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.

Notice how all the "religious" groups aren't defined by religion alone, but also by the qualifier "White". That's important, because if you go to the source [0], you see that the Race/Religion combination suggests the conclusion you describe because of its blend of race and religion together in some of its categories, but if you look at the Race breakdown, you see that Whites have large majority support for torture (66/25), while Non-Whites do not. Which makes the fact that the Race/Religion breakdown shows that the identified "religious" groups it breaks out all have majority support -- when those "religious" groups are White evangelical protestant (69/20), White non-evangelical Protestant (75/22), and White Catholic (66/23)-- somewhat less significant in religious terms than it seems at first.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/...

Very good point. I can't find the breakdown for nonwhite religious or nonwhite nonreligious, alas.

If you follow public opinion polling in the US much, you'll find that this is quite common, and that many conclusions presented based on media polls about the relation between religiosity and other views are based entirely, for at least the Christian groups covered by the poll supporting the argument, on what White members of those religious groups believe.

Why did they break it down like that? It seems almost nonsensical.

Its extremely common in public opinion polling in the US, and I've never seen an explanation for it. If the subsamples of, e.g., various non-White Catholic, evangelical, etc., groups were too small to report, you'd expect that they'd just not do a race breakdown at all, and report the overall Catholic, evangelical, etc.

I suspect that the explanation might be that not only are the non-White subsamples too small, but the racial composition of the various religious groups in the polls is (because of sample size issues) often not representative of the racial composition of the groups in the population and the sample size of the non-White subgroups in the religious groups is too small, so that its quite likely that the overall numbers for the religious groups are distorted as a result of the racial demographics being non-representative, and they don't have meaningful numbers for most of the racial subgroups, but they do have meaningful numbers for the White subgroup.

OTOH, this often results in even more misleading presentation, where the White subgroup of each religious group is all that is reported, but news articles based on the poll still treat that as if it was a result for the religious group as a whole. And it doesn't explain why the non-religious group doesn't get the same treatment, because it almost certainly would have at least as much of the same problem.

It'd probably be better -- for media polls, and media coverage of polls at least -- to either do polls with a big enough sample that your sub-samples in various non-White race/religious subgroups are big enough to report on or just not report religious breakdowns at all where the only way you feel the numbers can be meaningful is just to report the White subgroup for religious groups.

Pretty much all oppressive states have at one time or another used torture to stay in power. The good news is that we can learn from their mistakes: No torture method publicly known has been shown to "work" in the sense that you can trust the results.

A person under torture will tell you whatever it is you want to hear. This has been shown again and again. The only time where this is useful is if you can keep the methods under wrap and use the confessions to your advantage PR-wise. This is important to keep in mind to understand a proponent's agenda.

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