Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

Christopher Hitchens once again shows physical courage far beyond mine.

Several folks have pointed to Hitchens’ recounting of his experience as a volunteer target for waterboarding.  There is a lively discussion in the comments at Ann Althouse’s blog.

I have been a great fan of Hitchens ever since he turned tables on Sid Blumenthal. I even got all the way through Love, Poverty, and War, and though he still can’t quite shake his youthful infatuation with Trotsky and his opposition to the Viet Nam war, he is a man of formidable intellect and acuity. As far as I know, he is still the only journalist to visit all three members of the “Axis of Evil”.

Despite the selective publicizing of juicy quotes from this essay, it is a very nuanced piece of work. Like waterboarding itself, it appears to me that Hitchens lands in a gray area, somewhere between shaken and damaged.  He’s willing to admit that there are worse things than waterboarding. And after a few minutes recovering from his first panic, he even volunteered for a second go. But as the title of the essay says, “Believe me, it’s torture”.

There are a number of ways to frame the dilemma that American torture represents. Some have advocated applying the strictures of the Geneva Convention to all detainees, that is, the questioning stops after “name, rank, and serial number” (which, in the case of Al Qaeda, boils down to “name”). At the other end of the spectrum, some contemplate the nuclear scenario, with imminent, massive, loss of life, ostensibly preventable by suitably harsh interrogation, and tell us they are willing to countenance even graver methods than waterboarding. Others counter that coerced information is unreliable. Still others point to the U.S. prosecution of war crimes against foreigners who used water torture in various forms against our soldiers, and claims that this makes our soldiers prosecutable under the same provisions.

My first observation is that it is probably deleterious to apply the Third Geneva Convention to all comers. The Convention is explicitly and thoughtfully constructed to provide incentives for contracting parties to adhere to certain standards of warfare, not just POW administration, such as the wearing of uniforms, the open carrying of arms, and general adherence to the laws of warfare laid out in the other conventions. Now, it should go without saying that Al Qaeda rejects such Western niceties. They are probably not swayed by incentives of application or suspension of the Geneva Convention in any case. But I think it is important to maintain the principle that those incentives represent, that the idealistic treatment of prisoners of war is a reward, and not an entitlement.

Personally, I have no trouble endorsing the position that folks who join Al Qaeda need to be brought around to the view that joining Al Qaeda was the worst mistake of their lives. The day that Al Qaeda renounces barbarism and attacks against civilians, I will reconsider.

Regarding the efficacy of torture, it strikes me that simple questioning over drinks or card games also has no guarantee of generating reliable intelligence. It could be argued that torture bypasses some of the rational calculation of the prisoner, and thus conceivably generates more reliable information than less severe methods. The opposite view is that the individual concerned for his life will invent information to please his captors. Ultimately I’m not convinced either way. Our soldiers will do what they think necessary. Sometimes it works.

I am less convinced of the argument of hypocrisy. The case of Yukio Asano, convicted in 1947 by a war crimes tribunal, is often cited by waterboarding opponents. Does Asano’s case really parallel those who interrogated Khalid Sheik Mohammed? Waterboarding interrogation was part of the indictment. In his case, he was interrogating soldiers who were clearly covered by the Geneva Convention, unlike KSM. Waterboarding was cited as part of a larger pattern of abuse, which included burning with cigarettes and beating with a club. One can invent scenarios in which we might forgive Asano his sadism, for example, if he believed his captives held secrets that would have prevented the incineration of hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen. But American attacks on Japanese civilians were not on trial in 1947. So one is still left with an uneasy feeling of inconsistency in matters too grave to be left to lawyers.

So how viable is the nuclear scenario? The essential weakness of this argument is its apparent strength — given the prospective death of millions, what behavior would not be allowed? Could we torture American civilians? Could we chop off fingers and toes? Grind up pets? Execute loved ones? I have to say that this reductio ad absurdum is problematic at best, even if it does surface the seriousness of the threat.

If you’ve read this far, you are probably getting the idea that there are no neat answers.  But I have to thank Christopher Hitchens for once again throwing himself in harm’s way for the general good. Interestingly, his experiences echo the perils of Kari Byron, the bustiest Mythbuster, who underwent the “Chinese water torture” (not waterboarding) in the name of science. It didn’t end well, unless you enjoy seeing beautiful geeky redheads strapped to a table, crying. But that’s a post for another day.

[h/t Instapundit]

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Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

It is a hallmark of the culture in which we live that this particular scientific theory so offends the majority.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through variation and natural selection has been controversial among some religious groups since its introduction. To some, it represents a mortal challenge to a literal reading of Genesis — but then, so does the standard cosmology of modern physics, the theory of plate tectonics, and indeed much of the unified structure of modern science. A more serious threat is that, by fully integrating homo sapiens with the rest of the living world, it could be interpreted as undermining any worldview that gives special precedence to humanity.

I am not a subject matter expert when it comes to evolutionary biology. However, I am a scientist. The defective products that emerge from places like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute bears so little resemblance to actual science that I find it baffling that any schooled person could be fooled. Conversely, I have read On the Origin of Species and found it awe-inspiring.

But for me, the crux is the method.  The scientific method has proven its effectiveness countless times. It is not a democratic method. It is one where reason and evidence prevail over tradition and faith. Conversely, the legalistic and political strategies pursued by the creationist camp are obscurantist and sterile.

The scientific method is naturalistic. It is inconceivable that a Physical Review Letter will ever conclude “God is Responsible for Superconductivity in Laminar Cuprates”. To creationists, this appears to be a “chink in the armor”, their reasoning being that if science assumes there is no deity, then science’s reasoning about the non-existence of deities is circular. Some scientists try to compromise, and say that the hypothesis of the existence of God is testable. Good luck getting that past peer review. I am perfectly comfortable accepting that science has literally no contribution to the discussion of the supernatural, other than to provide explanations for phenomena that otherwise might tempt us to resort to superstition and religion. If there are supernatural phenomena that require explanation, I’m happy to let the shamans deal with it.

Steven Jay Gould popularized the notion that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria“,  a view he dubbed NOMA. I can’t quite purchase this epistemology. Science has inarguably invaded mindspace once occupied by priests and shamans, and seems poised to continue to do so. I think science will continue to generate new knowledge at an exponentially growing rate, but that it will be a long, long time before it can adequately address the questions of human individual and social behavior that are the bastion and bailiwick of religion, tradition, and superstition. We have only recently become equipped to explain the composition and interactions of atomic nuclei. Biology has only in the last generation become organized enough to support mathematical analysis. But even the idea that the practice of medicine should be based on evidence, and not anecdote, does not have universal support. And social sciences are struggling for legitimacy and a place of respect in the scientific community. I doubt this will come in my lifetime.

So, to all the creationists out there, I’m really not interested in your speculations on why God designed the eye so that we become presbyopic, or your criticisms of Darwin’s understanding of the mechanism of heritability. Your sin is the undermining of the method, and until you stop trying to legislate your results and start learning how to do real science, no one is going to take you seriously.

[h/t Rand Simberg]

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Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

The Atlantic is confused when social pathologies follow poor people to new neighborhoods.

In this article,  Hanna Rosin tells a sad story of unintended consequences: the dismantling of “the projects” in favor of dispersal and integration has brought crime to middle-class neighborhoods. In the liberal Weltanschauung, such an outcome is “surprising” (their word), one can guess because liberal doctrine stipulates that social pathologies are a result of social conditions. Take the pauper out of ghetto and send them to middle-class schools, and they will become middle-class, or so liberals have thought since Thomas More, if not before. A broad swath of conservatives disagree, anticipating this entirely predictable result. That race is a correlate of this phenomenon makes a sane discussion extremely difficult.

That this dilemma is a social tragedy cannot be denied. I am reminded of the tragedy of the American Indians. The unfolding of the American tapestry on this continent necessarily triggered the disruption and destruction of the native way of life. The panoply of treatments for the “Indian problem” included genocide, apartheid, integration, sovereignty, segregation, and, most recently, gaming (?!). I wonder if there is a “gaming” solution to America’s “original sin” of slavery. Until then, this story may not have a happy ending.

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