policy
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Politics v. Policy . . . and Politics
The breaking news about Cuba is electrifying: the last vestiges of the (old) Cold War may finally be starting to thaw. (I was born in the late ’60s so, as far as my own experience is concerned, the U.S. and Cuba have always been at odds.) It’s notable to me that little more than an… Continue reading
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An Unlikely Contrast Between Torture and Social Media
Continuing the point about the good and the right in discussions of the CIA torture program, my attention has been drawn to a domain in which arguments from the right seem more easily to yield to arguments from the good, almost to the point of reducing the discussion entirely to terms of benefits and costs.… Continue reading
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The Torture Report: Further Clarification
Since it is such a sensitive issue, I want to be especially careful in the language I use to discuss torture. Reading over yesterday’s note, it seems I could have drawn the point more precisely. Here’s some of what I wrote: That said, a number of commentators have hastened to say that even if the… Continue reading
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The Torture Report: Efficacy v. Ethics?
There’s not a lot I can add to the conversation of this past week about the CIA torture report that came out of Sen. Feinstein’s committee. I did note, however, that many politicians and commentators fell into a narrative about the report according to which the question of whether torture worked has no bearing at… Continue reading