That's horrible. I can still understand people having unethical opinions about torture, but making light of an innocent man being tortured? I'm all for "edgy jokes," but this is just vitriolic.
I think this is the worst thing I've read on HN.
(By the way, if you had exposed an email, I would have asked you about this in private. I don't mean to embarrass you in a public forum. Perhaps you weren't thinking.)
It was a cynical remark. I did not intend that reaction, I hold no opinions on torture.
As an aside, what I said was factually accurate (it's in the article - he gave them the information they wanted), yet people think it was wrong for me to say it. I don't think I'll ever understand that.
I do. Some of it is obvious trolling, and some of it is ranty nonsense. But torture of the innocent is where I draw the line. It struck a nerve with me.
Did it? Even if you get actionable information from torture - a very big 'if' mind you - you're also going to get a bunch of specious bullshit that you'll waste time following up. If you arrive at the truth at all, which again is not likely, it will have been after being misled. You will be, by any objective measure, dumber for doing torture, even if you eventually arrive at the truth.
I try to act in such a way that I am made more intelligent, and I believe that governments probably should too (in particular the parts of government that we refer to as motherfucking intelligence agencies). But, to each, his own.
