The Belmont Club: In marshalled order set by Lucifer, who left his station last: "Normblog reviews Michael Ignatieff's book on the moral problems of fighting terrorism. He also examines Conor Gearty's objection to Ignatieff's thesis. Ignatieff's reasoning is very close to my own: that maintaining morality, such as banning torture, comes at a price -- a price we should be willing to pay, up to a point. Gearty differs with Ignatieff, arguing that if human rights are held less than absolute or if the concepts of right or wrong are admitted into the debate then we are down the slippery slope to torture in some form."

A fine long post about torture, and the Left, and humanitarian absolute standards.

The moral problems for the US will be reduced in 2006, as the Shia majority take over more control of a "democratic" Iraq, and the US can let the Iraqis handle the prisoners.

Which, I think, will result in FAR MORE torture by Shia against Sunni -- and relatively soon, more Sunni pushing to stop Sunni terrorism.

The Left will complain that the US shouldn't have lost 2500 (?) soldiers "for this" -- but they'll be unwilling to say how many it WAS worth.


The real problem of the Left is the failure to understand systemic problems: type I and type II errors -- false positives and false negatives. The more a system avoids one type of error, the more of the other type it will make.

The more a system avoids falsely punishing the innocent, the more it will falsely let guilty go free.

For too many Leftists, and newswriters and even politicians, tradeoffs don't exist; so the illusion of an Unreal Perfection continues.