[mburbank]

Preech has a wider point (I think) and it's an excellent one. It's all about the arbitrary lines societies draw.

Why are cluster bombs and land mines (which we know kill innocents) acceptable to us and torture is not?

Why is war acceptable to us at all, since it's always about wholesale slaughter?

Why is a car bomb terror and a bomb dropped from an airplane not terror?

There are two things we usually make a claim to taking into account, ie. civillians as opposed to soldiers and Hot blood battlefield situations as opposed to cold blood interrogations.

I think if anyone looks closely at this they'll see there's way more jutsification than meat here.

I think the ONLY rubric we should be using is what's unavoidable and what's avoidable. But people are either too savage for that or too afraid that they'll get killed while they're mulling it over.

AND as flip as my thread title was, I think people like to torture other people. I think there's a hard wired genetic tendency (not in everyone, but far and away the norm) to desire to control other people. Torture is just the far end of that spectrum.