Yesterday, PZ Myers linked to a Vanity Fair article for which Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Hitch wanted to decide for himself whether or not it’s torture. In short:
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
That’s pretty interesting, and I considered posting it at the time. But, lacking anything to add, I passed. Then today Scott Kaufman brought back the reaction from the wingnut frontier, and it included bits like this:
The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.
They think we’re weak, and Hitchens is to blame? You mean, this Hitchens: “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer”? How hard-assed do they want our rhetoric to be? Perhaps from now on, whenever you write about terrorists, you should pretend to be that the masked dude from the Saw franchise or Arnold’s character from Predator. Then you’ll have the right levels of machismo and sadism to sound like a patriot.