torture

Does torture work?

Depends on how you define your terms, especially "work".

If what you want is to extract information from a person, and you torture them to acquire it, then no, it doesn't work. You get everything you want to hear, a bunch of stuff he thought you might want to hear, and a bunch of random guesses thinking the pain might be stopped long enough for his made-up story to be checked out. So, no, the information you get from torturing somebody is crap, and interrogators know it.

On the other hand, if you use torture as it was originally intended, it works wonderfully. It inspires terror and obedience in a population, makes them pliable and cooperative to know that if they are picked up for whatever crime they will be tortured until they confess to anything the interrogators.

In short, as an interrogation device, torture is a failure. But at inspiring a population to helplessness and stark terror, it's just ducky.

But that would mean that we are inspiring terror. Wouldn't that make us...........?

PTSD? Bad Taste Disorder? Annoying Bastard Syndrome?

I am treading on dangerous ground.

Can it be that my heart attack has driven me completely mad?

I am risking my marriage, I know it. And I am losing the respect of my son.....

Because I have chosen to begin downloading and watching every Doctor Who episode in existence.

What madness is this, gripping my mind?

FORCING ME, as tho completely against my will, enthralling me....

At night, I dream of explicit liasons between Sarah Jane Smith and ..... but some things are better left untyped.

I must have a scarf... or an opera cape or a recorder or some such....

HELP ME BEFORE I .....um...... WATCH AGAIN!

Thanks Meri

I downloaded "earth after people" that Meri recommended in the comments, and it is VERY educational, in that I thought traces of human habitation would be nearly permanent. Nope. 50 years and almost all of it is gone, 100 years and without serious excavating, there would be no trace. I think that rocks. In many ways we are a plague on the planet, but at least it is temporary.