Fire Bad Tree Pretty

Sometimes I boggle at the thinking of others.

If things are black and white - then there's a purity of condemnation, all torture is bad, say.

Norm puts it beautifully:

"...the prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment should not be up for discussion; it is not something that should have been problematized. As I have said before on this blog, torture is an abomination. The right protecting people against it must be treated as absolute."

So if that's clear, then all terrorism is an abomination too, right?

Aw oh:

"...why Gearty, lavish with his criticisms of the Bush administration about this ('moves away from... the rule of law and human dignity', 'the challenge to human rights is manifest'), and a stout defender of human rights ('the human rights idea needs to stand firmly against this kind of distortion of its essence'), should

(a) have no interest in whether the bad policies of the Bush administration might themselves be thought to have 'grown out of' anything, and

(b) fail to notice (or at any rate to speak about) the way in which acts of terrorism also challenge human rights, violating the rights of the maimed and the murdered; they also distort the essence of the human rights idea."

Hey, I know why! Americans bad, Palestinians/terrorists good.

Feel free to smash your planes into skyscrapers, the intellectual zen masters running my country will contemplate it all calmly.

See how easy life is when you know every line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer by heart?