After two years of war in Ukraine, videos of death and torture have become commonplace in Russia. And methods of torture once only spoken about in witness testimonials are now being promoted online by the perpetrators themselves as they publish photos and videos of brutality for bragging rights.
There was that US TV series basically celebrating torture called 24. Not to mention every other movie or TV series with an interrogation scene.
You compare a TV series with the actual cheering of russian people for rape and torture in ukraine? When the pictures of Guantanamo and other black sides went public the outcry and protest were big. Please, show me the protest in russia about the revelations that their own people rape and torture. I will wait here.
It was literally in the article:
The Crew Against Torture, a Russian NGO that was previously known as the Committee Against Torture, said with regards to the original attack that “the answer to barbarism must not be barbarism”, and that that the value of testimony extracted by law enforcement agents under torture was critically low.
A Supreme Court judge (Scalia) made the case that torture was legal under the US Constitution, as it only prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So, torture for other reasons is obviously fine.
I think, never stopping to consider the implications must count as an example of “white privilege”.
Yeah it’s only punishment if they’re guilty. The founders obviously intended that the feds could torture any innocent person for any reason.
What a psychopath. Glad he’s dead.
I will also never understand that whole obsession in the US with what the founders intended over what makes sense. It reminds me of people reading religious books.
It is absolutely absurd and I realize that my comment could be seen as endorsing this thinking. I only point it out because such arguments underpinned many of Scalia’s legal opinions and he was a big proponent of this reasoning, not only in the public sphere but in law.
Of course it was all nonsense that was never consistently applied, as this example demonstrates. The real reasoning is that some people like Scalia want to reinforce the dominance of people at the top of various social hierarchies and remove protections for people at the bottom. Since the founders were all wealthy, white landowners, their views are fairly compatible with this ideology, making it a useful fiction for people with such goals. And for the rest of us, it gives us some vague fuzzy feeling to believe our great ancestors will be smiling down on us or something.