Despite his apparent random and brief moments of lucidity, I cant say Im a 'big fan' of Oklahoma senator and physician Tom Coburn (click here to read his completely insane 'analysis' of HIV/AIDS). He says hes 'PRO-LIFE' yet he held up funds for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in Africa because some of the organizations that would receive this funding offer family planning services which include abortion services.
Killing 'babies' while they are unfeeling, unthinking barely multicellular organisms: BAD!
Killing very real, very thinking, very feeling babies via long, painful deaths via AIDS: PRO-LIFE!!
But Coburn isnt just PRO-LIFE!
He is also PRO-WOMAN!
See, there was an 'anti-prostitution' pledge required for any clinic in the US or world-wide accepting US anti-HIV/AIDS money. This means if you are a clinic in Africa, you cannot discuss prostitution with your patients. You can say "DONT BE A PROSTITUTE!" You can say "DONT VISIT PROSTITUTES!" You cannot say "Are you a prostitute? Lets talk about how you can protect yourself and your clients." You cannot say "Do you visit prostitutes? Lets talk about how you can protect yourself and the prostitutes."
If you try to discuss HIV/AIDS and prostitution, Coburn asserts this means you completely support sex-slave-trade and all the 'bad sides' of prostitution, and it means you also are part of the HIV/AIDS problem:
In addition to exploiting women and children, Thailand's approach to prostitution as a legitimate form of commerce has encouraged the practice and contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS.
... Clearly, addressing prostitution is an important topic for HIV prevention, but condoning or encouraging acceptance of the practice, as will be done at this conference, will not prevent HIV or protect the health of women or girls.
Not that Coburn think condoms work anyway Why even talk about them?:
Also worth noting, Thailand's "100% Condom Use" policy, which has often been hailed as an example of an HIV prevention success story, has not lived up to its hype under closer scrutiny.
LOL, condoms for the prevention of HIV infection is 'hype'. Doesnt work perfectly like abstinence only education.
And this is not an isolated incident:
Coburn wrote that PSI's funding is up for renewal, and PSI has applied for tens of millions more to continue the project, adding, "There is something seriously askew at USAID when the agency's response to a dehumanising and abusive practice that exploits women and young girls is parties and games."
PIS is a group that goes to bars and clubs and educates the public about HIV/AIDS and prostitution, giving out free condoms to everyone, including prostitutes and Johns. But to Coburn, thats 'dehumanising and abusive practice that exploits women and young girls is parties and games'.
Coburn does this all the time when it comes to HIV/AIDS. He wraps himself in PRO-WOMAN language while behaving in a manner that absolutely has a negative impact on men, women, and children. He is using 'PRO-WOMAN' as a shield for his own personal cause, in this case, his Southern Baptist religion and political motives, which no one with a semi-functional brain would characterize as 'pro-woman'. He then uses this 'pseudo-pro-woman' language to paint his political and medical opponents as 'ANTI-WOMEN', when that couldnt be further from the truth.
GOOD NEWS!
His beloved 'anti-prostitution pledge' has been ruled unconstitutional!
"The government may not place a condition on the receipt of a benefit or subsidy that infringes upon the recipient's constitutionally protected rights," the ruling said.
Examining the facts in light of a series of U.S. Supreme Court and Second Circuit cases, Judge Parker said that, here, "silence, or neutrality, is not an option for the plaintiffs.""In order to avoid losing Leadership Act funding, they must declare their opposition to prostitution," he said. "The policy requirement is also viewpoint-based, because it requires recipients to take the government's side on a particular issue. It is well established that viewpoint-based intrusions on free speech offend the First Amendment."
While the latter point did not mean an automatic violation of the First Amendment for purposes of the court's decision, the judge said context was important.
The "targeted speech, concerning prostitution in the context of the international HIV/AIDS prevention effort, is subject to international debate," Judge Parker said. "The right to communicate freely on such matters of public concern lies at the heart of the First Amendment."
Its really too bad the US court system is filled with misogynists and pedophiles who own sex-slaves, amirite?? Who knew the desire to completely dehumanize woman and young girls was so wide-spread?? Get those privileged rich old white heterosexual men off the bench and let rich old heterosexual white men who 'get it' legislate how to deal with HIV/AIDS.
Ms. Diller called the majority's ruling "excellent" and "important from a public health and HIV prevention perspective."
She added, "It means the plaintiffs that really provide the bulk of the humanitarian work can continue providing services in a most effective way. It's important for ensuring that those who receive government funds can speak freely for themselves."
Pfff. Gender traitor.
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Killing very real, very thinking, very feeling babies via long, painful deaths via AIDS: PRO-LIFE!!
That's because they believe in the nobility of suffering.
You mean *others* suffering.
When they 'suffer', they prefer its pseudosuffering. And dont you dare call it pseudosuffering, because if you do, you are trivializing suffering.
Aye, when it comes to "we're all in this together", they DO NOT WANT tax cuts or losses for them. EVERYONE ELSE can lose their jobs, dammit!
Ah, yes, policy by "If I can't see it, it can't see me" and other forms of magical thinking. Always so effective.
Taken by their words and actions, what do Christians, Muslims, and Jews have in common? They all hate women, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they consider women to be a lower life form. Something akin to rodents, perhaps.
I have never understood how any woman could belong to any of the Abrahamic religions, nor tolerate a man who did.
I liked your post. It think Coburn is a jackass, and I appreciate you calling him out.
I thought your attempt to draw a parallel to the recent schism was pretty awkward, though.
Tom Coburn is indeed odd. He can be amazingly pragmatic right up until it is time to address a social issue and then his head goes "Ptang!" smokes and he starts to make pronouncements from baptist deacon bizzaro world.
You can't say you're going to block something that will improve everyone's life because what they do is bad if you don't have a better alternative to solve that bad thing they're doing. We can agree or not about prostitution in theory, but meanwhile, condoms and AIDS prevention will help people and it's something we can do right now.
I'm inclined to think he like the pope just doesn't like condoms and says all the dehumanizing stuff because it sounds good, like Oh, look at him, he's so pro woman, he's totally not doing that because of his religion.
When I first saw the headline my first guess was this entry was going to be more on the latest intra-skeptic drama issues. I don't know how to feel about the fact that it isn't but is instead about people in the US government making policies that kill people.
My first impression when I read the title was that this was going to be another post on the fallout from Elevatorgate...
Onto the topic at hand:
As you've made pretty clear, the guy is fucking nuts. (Come to think of it, Ed does a good job making that clear, too!) The 'pro-life' hypocrisy is astonishing and while this shouldn't surprise me any more, I always find it somewhat shocking (and completely useless) when people attempt to legislate morality in regards to prostitution by sacrificing people to STDs rather than encouraging well meaning non-profits that educate people and hand out condoms. Any politicians (or trolls) who want to start the 'seedy underbelly of prostitution' shit should take a look at what life is like for (legal) prostitutes in Nevada and compare it to elsewhere in the country where human trafficking, beatings, and other forms of abuse are much more common precisely because of the illicit nature of the job. But, I digress, I'm here to argue for generalized sanity and display my disgust at stupidity, not argue for legalization of prostitution.
Speaking of disgust at stupidity, does anyone remember the debate over the HPV vaccine several years ago? Certain Republicans (I hate to say 'conservatives' because this idea is as big government nanny state bullshit as it gets) argued that the vaccine should not be legalized because it would encourage pre-marital sex. As horrible as that is, at least those dicks had the honesty to say something pretty close to their real sentiments of 'THOSE FILTY WHORES DESERVE TO DIE!' and didn't try hard to hide it.
As for the nobility of suffering/psuedosuffering comments: Right on the mark. A year or two back Shaun Hannity claimed that he would personally undergo waterboarding to prove that it wasn't torture if money was given to a charity for the time he spent being waterboarded. Keith Olbermann called his bluff and agreed to put up the funds. Hannity has been strangely silent on the issue since then! Contrast this with Christopher Hitchens: He willingly underwent water-boarding after being criticized for saying that it didn't constitute torture, and didn't put any hurdles in the way such as demanding a fee for it. He did it in the name of intellectual honesty and to prove a point to his critics. I know a lot of people lost their taste for him after he started supporting the Iraq war, but at least he puts his money where his mouth is. (In case anyone is wondering he came out of that experience concluding that water boarding is in fact torture.)
Sorry for the rant; one of these days I'll learn to stop shooting from the hip. Today is not that day.
I have never understood why so many people are opposed to using torture in any form.
Yes, torture is pointless if you're trying to get someone to admit to something. Anyone will eventually admit to anything under torture. You gain nothing. But it's different if you're seeking important and verifiable information that you reasonably suspect the torturee knows.
I remember a case not long ago where a man was on strong grounds believed to have buried a little girl alive. He refused to admit to the crime or to reveal where the little girl was buried. I said at that time that I'd be willing to take personal responsibility for torturing the shit out of this guy to find out what he knew, and that if it turned out the guy really hadn't been involved, they could torture the shit out of me. I'm sure many/most of the cops involved felt the same way, as did the little girl's family.
Or consider a situation where there are good reasons to believe that a nuke is going to be detonated in your city or terrorists are going to release, say, ebola or weaponized anthrax. You have good reason to believe that someone you have in custody knows the details that will allow you to stop the detonation or release. Would you torture him or her? I sure would, without a second thought. And I think that anyone who would refuse to torture on moral/ethical grounds is contemptible.
Robert Bruce Thompson:
Feel free to ignore this if your comment was meant as a general take-off on my statement than a direct argument against me:
I am not here to debate whether torture in any and every form is wrong or not, though as it is being employed now by the US government it does not fit the definition of 'seeking important and verifiable information that you reasonably suspect the torturee knows' given that the CIA has stated that anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 of Gitmo detainees/torture victims are innocent of any of the crimes they're accused of. The odds are likely similar in other torture prisons given that the method of picking up prisoners is pretty unreliable (standard procedure is asking locals if they know anyone involved with the Taliban or other anti-US forces and grabbing anyone they name). What I was speaking of was the hypocrisy of certain members of the right when it comes to pretending that certain forms of torture are not actually torture as justification for committing these acts without having a debate about the legal or moral ramifications of torture.
If Shaun Hannity truly believes that water boarding is not that bad he would keep his promise to undergo water boarding in exchange for a large donation to a charity of his choice. And yet, as soon as someone offers him the money he pretends that he never made that promise. Clearly he is afraid of something.
Killing 'babies' while they are unfeeling, unthinking barely multicellular organisms: BAD!
Killing very real, very thinking, very feeling babies via long, painful deaths via AIDS: PRO-LIFE!!
Ahhhhhhh, there's always room in every day for a little bit of morally blind, idiotic, specious, miscomparisons such as these! Thanks!
I have never understood why so many people are opposed to using torture in any form.
Ask people like John McCain (someone who actually was repeatedly tortured), it doesn't work. If someone like McCain can bullshit his way through repeated torture sessions just to get them to stop, giving them the names of the Greenbay Packers instead of real names... do you think a potentially psychotic mass murderer would give a shit?
Let's go with your ticking time-bomb/nuclear weapon scenario. It's going to go off in 30 mins. You begin torturing. He tells you it's in a building in Baltimore, Maryland. (It's actually in a suitcase in Times Square) You send you team off to find it in Baltimore. *BOOOOOM*
Torture only makes the torturer feel good. "Well at least I did all I could." When in fact he didn't. Not even close.
It's not widely-known, but Tom Coburn holds the World Record for Biggest Fucking Asshole Currently Living.
True story.
11:
Not this OMG BOMB bullshit again. As MK points out in #14, there's an easy way to deal with this. LIE WELL. send them on a wild goose chase. If you only have to bullshit them for a few hours, well, that's pretty easy.
The other line of crap is "Well, we know the city and we know the time, we just don't know the precise location" So wait, let me get this straight. You have the following VERIFIED intelligence:
1) the precise nature of the weapon
2) The city it is located in
3) One of the people involved
4) The precise date and time it's going to go off
and yet with all that you don't know where in the city it is? Bullshit, and again, just blow you off for a few hours, and none of your torture matters. If you're dealing with someone who believes in martyrdom, what are you going to really do to them? You can't blow off what they're telling you, you have to investigate it. So they either give you plausible leads, thereby temporarily ending the torture, or they spout line after line of bullshit, because they realize no matter what they tell you, you're not going to stop torturing them.
it's a lose-lose, and even a light analysis of things tells you this.
Way to set up a straw man. I specified none of the items you list other than that you have a reasonable belief that you have one of the people involved under your control.
All of your nice theories fail in the face of indisputable fact. Torture works when it's used to obtain verifiable information. (The Vietnamese tortured McCain just because they could, not because he had any verifiable information they wanted. Their goal was to force captured US servicemen to make propaganda confession videos, at which they succeeded.)
Our forces in Viet Nam also used helicopter interrogations quite effectively. Put two prisoners in a chopper, ascend to about 1,000 feet, and toss one of them out the door. With very few exceptions, the remaining prisoner left skid marks trying to tell everything he knew before he joined his friend. (After which, they usually tossed him out the door anyway.) And the information extracted that way saved a lot of American lives. This isn't theory. I knew several guys who actually participated in such interrogations, and those being interrogated didn't lie. And, whatever its status under international law may be, I don't care. I'd have done the same, and I would do the same now if the information I wanted was important enough.
They'll lie if you aren't willing to accept their statement.
Torture gives you the answer you're looking for. And unless you're REALLY well trained, you WILL be looking for an answer, rather than the truth.
"And, whatever its status under international law may be, I don't care. I'd have done the same"
Then don't complain when you find your fellow soldiers tortured to death or beheaded by those barbarians.
There was a reason for the Geneva Convention. I guess that it's only OK when those bad things are being done to you.
Honestly, I don't know what I would do in such a situation, but who gets to decide what 'good reasons' are, and how is torturing the torturer going to ameliorate the damage? The current legal position was presumably arrived at by an evolutionary process which considered the ramifications of various alternative positions. Given that, I would tend to go with the pre-Shrub status quo .
On the subject at hand, the whole Watson/Pharyngula debacle has made me very wary of applying the word 'hate' too loosely. There can be many reasons why people hold positions which discriminate against and are harmful to women and it's too easy and simplistic to make the 'hate' accusation against the likes of Coburn, odious as he is. I'm not saying he doesn't hate women, he may well do and this may all come across as preachy and a bit tone-trolly. It's just the speed with which dissent with mob opinion has been getting reduced to 'you over-privileged, white, women- hating ...' without anything by way of evidence in certain circles of late. Just needed to get that off my chest, it's not even that I take issue with anything in this post as the overall sentiment is quite understandable.
Meant the internationally recognised position.
@mk #14
What would you propose in that situation instead?
@Rhology...
I honestly don't know.
In any case, torture is about control. About exerting power over your detainee. It's not about getting to any kind of truth. In many cases it appears to be about sex as well. The photos from abu Ghraib come to mind, as does Abner Louima. Making the emphatic (almost gleeful) way Robert Bruce Thompson talks about his willingness to torture especially interesting.
@mk #22
If you don't know, why are you criticising w/o offering a better solution?
Or maybe you chose a bad example with the ticking time bomb (I'd add that you seem to have done so to reinforce some moral grandstanding about the evil of torture)?
Do you have any evidence that, for example, American interrogators' ideas about torture equate to its being about control, rather than its being about obtaining information?
@17
Sorry?
Who won in Viet Nam again?
RIght around this paragraph:
"Its really too bad the US court system is filled with misogynists and pedophiles who own sex-slaves, amirite?? ...."
... The sarcasm lapped itself in my brain and I forgot which point you were actually trying to make.
Torture, baby, torture!
From a letter from a prisoner to Phillip Zimbardo. (An actual prisoner, not one of his experiments.)
"I was recently released from solitary confinement after being held therein for thirty-seven months. The silence system was imposed upon me and if I even whispered to the man in the next cell resulted in being beaten by guards, sprayed with chemical mace, black jacked, stomped, and thrown into a strip cell naked to sleep on a concrete floor without bedding, covering, wash basin, or even a toilet....I know that thieves must be punished, and I don't justify stealing even though I am a thief myself. But now I don't think I will be a thief when I am released. No, I am not rehabilitated either. It is just that I no longer think of becoming wealthy or stealing. I now only think of killing -- killing those who have beaten me and treated me as if I were a dog. I hope and pray for the sake of my own soul and future life of freedom that I am able to overcome the bitterness and hatred which eats daily at my soul. But I know to overcome it will not be easy."
Torture and interrogation. Not the same thing.
The only good thing I can think of to say about Coburn is that he's a marginal improvement on Nickles, his predecessor. And believe me when I say that's damning with the faintest possible praise.
Crazies like Nickles and Coburn make me ashamed to be from Oklahoma originally.
Who won in Viet Nam again?
Mike Kelly, if an American supporter of the war fell asleep in 1965 and woke up today, he might think we won.
http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=61589
"If you don't know, why are you criticising w/o offering a better solution?"
Sorry, I don't have to show a better solution than that because your solution is no solution at all.
You're like a little kid hammering nails into the table and when asked to stop saying "If you don't have a better solution, don't tell me this is bad".
"Or consider a situation where there are good reasons to believe that a nuke is going to be detonated in your city or terrorists are going to release, say, ebola or.."
You mean like consider a situation where there are good reasons to believe Saddam Hussein has WMDs and is going to use them on your country?
Yes, we did that.
You know what? Turns out he didn't had wasn't.
Consider that now.
You torture someone to find out where the bomb is. There is no bomb, but you don't know that.
So you torture them and they tell you there is no bomb. You have good reason to believe they're lying, though: you have good reason to think there IS a bomb.
So you torture some more. And some more. And you keep torturing until you get an answer that you believe: the bomb is being build by someone else, ask them.
You stop torturing them.
You now have an extra bit of proof there's a bomb: a confession that one is being made.
You see your query there is the Bauer syndrome. You KNOW that Bauer is on the right track because they just showed you them building a bomb. You see Jack torture and beat people up to get to the truth. You know that it's the truth because the opening scene showed them making the bomb.
What you never see is Jack finding out that there was no bomb and the scene was a re-creation of a fictitious event.
The real irony is that since you SAW the bomb being made and know who did it, there was no need for Jack Bauer to interrogate anyone, they could just have asked you, the viewer, who did it.
"Do you have any evidence that, for example, American interrogators' ideas about torture equate to its being about control, rather than its being about obtaining information?"
Yes.
Count the number of detainees who have been tortured that have then gone on to be put before a court and the evidence shown.
Now compare to the number of people who were tortured.
It isn't very effective, so why are they doing it?
Now count the number of people in detention as potential terrorists that haven't been released.
If torture worked, they'd have found out the potential was unrealised by now, wouldn't they.
Unless the answer wasn't one they believed.
So why continue to torture?
Now look at the pictures that were released.
In what way does taking a photograph of someone tied up like a Gimp and blindfolded aid in the torture? They can't see they're being photographed. The only ones who can see it are the guards.
So these people want to see the detainees humiliated.
If you have a better reason for their actions than "they want to control, denigrate the prisoners and feel powerful in themselves", then let us know.
@wow #31
If you have a better reason for their actions than "they want to control, denigrate the prisoners and feel powerful in themselves", then let us know.
Interrogation techniques that could debatably be described as torture have led to important breakthroughs in the fight against Al-Qaeda. I was discussing this issue in light of information extraction, in the terms that mk had set up - the ticking time bomb, etc.
I don't know of anyone who would argue that the Abu Ghraib photos were of any value or had any moral justification.
"Interrogation techniques that could debatably be described as torture have led to important breakthroughs in the fight against Al-Qaeda."
What? New and improved ways of making the USA the most despised country on earth? I'm afraid that your actions caused radicalism in the middle east to gain massively in power and recruitment.
This isn't an important breakthrough unless you consider the increase in international terrorism to be a worthwhile goal.
"I was discussing this issue in light of information extraction, in the terms that mk had set up - the ticking time bomb, etc."
We already had one "Ticking Time-Bomb": Saddam Hussein's WMDs.
Turned out that it didn't exist.
So AS LONG AS YOU KNOW there;s a bomb, your torture can give useful information. HOWEVER, if you already know there's a bomb, why the FECK are you torturing people rather than removing the bomb?
"I don't know of anyone who would argue that the Abu Ghraib photos were of any value or had any moral justification."
You just did:
"Do you have any evidence that, for example, American interrogators' ideas about torture equate to its being about control, rather than its being about obtaining information?"
Post 23.
You justified it there with your denial that it was about anything other than obtaining information.
Do you not even read what you're saying?
PS a read for those who love the idea of torturing people:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2011/07/getting_away_with_torture.php
Which of these chickenhawks on this thread think they know better than Maj Gen Antonio Taguba?
I'd also like to point out that in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, etc... there are many, many men, young and old, saying essentially the same things as our local tough guys Rhology and Robert Bruce Thompson. Not only that, but they are even more avid due to things like Gitmo, abu Ghraib and reports like the one Wow linked to above.
So, ya know... we got that goin' for us!
@wow #33
New and improved ways of making the USA the most despised country on earth? I'm afraid that your actions caused radicalism in the middle east to gain massively in power and recruitment.
I was referring to the capture and also the killing of various high-ups in Al Qaeda.
We already had one "Ticking Time-Bomb": Saddam Hussein's WMDs
1) Whom did US interrogators interrogate by torture to ascertain their location?
2) Is it your contention that if something doesn't work one time, it will never work?
HOWEVER, if you already know there's a bomb, why the FECK are you torturing people rather than removing the bomb?
What a ridiculous question, I'm sorry. KNowing THAT there is a bomb â knowing WHERE the bomb is.
"I don't know of anyone who would argue that the Abu Ghraib photos were of any value or had any moral justification."
You just did:
"Do you have any evidence that, for example, American interrogators' ideas about torture equate to its being about control, rather than its being about obtaining information?"
Post 23
Where precisely in that quote did I say that they had value or were justified? Please be specific in your exegesis and letting me know what I meant.
You justified it there with your denial that it was about anything other than obtaining information.
Those Abu Ghraib abuse photos were interrogations? How do you know?
Looks to me like they were piling naked men on top of each other for their own jollies. You're straining at gnats here and failing badly at it.
"I was referring to the capture and also the killing of various high-ups in Al Qaeda."
None of which as far as has been shown were due to torture giving information out.
Since the USA named and armed them too, this is rather hypocritical of the USA.
"Those Abu Ghraib abuse photos were interrogations? How do you know?"
So US soldiers do that sort of thing as a Recreational thing?
You're not helping the USA soldiers here, kid.
Nice post, just found your blog on my travels around the Internet. Definitely will come back.