Letters to the Editor
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@aeschylus
Sometimes in order to be on the side that wins, one must cross over a line.
How do you know if you've never tried to do otherwise?
Arguments such as these are always made with both the clarity and the fog of hindsight. You have the ability to look at past actions and pick those that worked out, and you have the inability, due to the way complex systems become single pathways in reverse time, to understand what any of the alternate routes might have been or what their outcomes would be.
In emergency medicine, for example, there are constant pressures to step over the line, and even those who claim that no one ever saved anyone's life by sticking to the rules. But that's just because in all those cases where people stuck to the rules, the fact that the patient outcome could be good wasn't unexpected. It's very lucky for the general public that instead of some jerk who drools over the fantasy of performing an emergency laryngeal tracheostomy with a pen knife and a Bic pen, there are trained people who don't, who save lives that you never hear about because the methods they use are considered routine, and don't make it on TV.
Just like the non-torture interrogation methods used by trained people in the FBI.