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   Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?
 The federal government is supposed to issue new rules about debt levels for students in for-profit colleges. In the meantime, the states are working on their own regulations.
 Washingtons budget hawks want to decimate the federal workforce to shrink the deficit. It will have the opposite effect.
 There arent nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of Americas police. So we got these guys instead.
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November 23, 2005
By: THE MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST TORTURE....Over at Unfogged, Ogged picks up on my biggest frustration with the current state of the torture debate: namely that it's almost impossible to convincingly make the moral case against torture to anyone who's not already predisposed to think it's immoral. Stripped to its core, I realize that the only real argument I have against torture is "But don't you see that it's wrong? Don't you?" And that's just immensely frustrating, because if you don't see it then I have no ammunition left. I wish I could do better. In the end, though, the strongest argument I can make is the one Dick Durbin made: if you didn't know better when you hear about U.S. practices in the war on terror, you'd think we were talking about Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union and a big part of the reason that we judge those regimes to have been immoral was because of their use of routine, state sanctioned torture. Is that really the company we want to keep? I supposed it's best not to feel too frustrated, though. Changing public opinion takes a long time, and continual repetition of the simple assertion that torture is morally repugnant along with public disclosure of how commonplace it's become might eventually do the trick even if movement in the right direction often seems imperceptible. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. —Kevin Drum 9:10 PM Permalink | Trackbacks
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