Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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Didn't listen to Joy Division
[Read the article: "Control"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But your article convinced me that I should. You captured the feeling of that era perfectly, and it seems like the movie does as well.
I remember growing up, also in Upstate New York, and discovering punk a while before it blew up. The feeling of discovery but also the feeling of being more out on the edge than your peers, and for all the right reasons. Technically alot of it was awful, but musically and emotionally alot of it was good. It was better than sex in some ways, because everybody was going to get laid sooner or later and you could go through the entire Kama Sutra and the "enlightened" folks up in Woodstock wouldn't bat an eye, but when they learned you were into punk they would pretend to be accepting while they looked down on you from their Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix album lined peaks. We ate the condecension of the posers like candy, knowing that their idols would have been on our side if they weren't all dead.
Ah, those were the days. I have to check this movie out.
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Missing the point - completely.
[Read the article: We must ban secretive U.S. torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why am I not suprised?
The Geneva Convention is an agreement between governments. Doesn't apply here. Individual acts and acts against individuals aren't covered.
The real travesty at Abu Grabe wasn't the way we treated the prisoners, it was the danger we put our own people in. That's what should have led to courts martial. As long as the prisoners were fed and had a place to sleep we were doing our job. The legitimate acts of torture there got buried under a mountain of cries that we "embarrassed" the prisoners and failed to honor their customs and beliefs - by the same people who believe that failing to provide American convicts with cable television is cruel and unusual.
No, we shouldn't torture people. It's unreliable and we have far better methods of extracting information. But we have long since stopped being a country where senators would object based on the fact that we can do better, unless "better" is a figurative term that means "more politically correct".
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@Portlander
[Read the article: We must ban secretive U.S. torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is a treaty, one that Al Queda never entered into and therefore isn't protected by.
And it doesn't apply to individuals not operating as agents of the state, or else it would cover Americans in Turkish prisons. Hell it would cover Americans in American prisons. These are not prisoners of war by any real (aka not invented by The Great Retard) definition of the word war.
I agree that we are violating the spirit of the convention, but not the letter. And torture doesn't work as well as chemicals, or that cool brain scan the FBI has that measures response to visual stimuli. Probably doesn't work as well as making them watch American Idol for 72 straight hours, which I believe to be in a gray area as regards torture. The only real reason's to use torture are laziness, psychotic tendencies, or the belief that you were Torquemada in a past life.