Thoughts on Beheading and Torture

I saw a video of the behead­ing. I’m not sure if it was uncut or not, as it was a bit jumpy. It def­i­nite­ly stuck in my craw to watch it, but I don’t feel the out­rage that so many oth­ers seem to feel. I’ve cut the heads off of liv­ing crea­tures before [most­ly just fish] and that sticks in my craw too. Still, cut­ting the head off of a human boils down to noth­ing more than killing anoth­er crit­ter. See­ing some­thing liv­ing die isn’t dis­turb­ing to me. That isn’t to say that I find the idea of the exe­cu­tion appeal­ing. I don’t think any type of killing is appeal­ing — it all sticks in my craw, but I think plen­ty of peo­ple are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish between the act of killing and the no good rea­soning behind it. What makes the behead­ing so abhor­rent is that it was done in cold blood for no good rea­sons relat­ed to per­son­al sur­vival. Instead it was a polit­i­cal killing and the video is a ter­ror­ist act. That is what is most dis­gust­ing to me, the no good rea­sonable­ness¹ of it.

In the same vein I equal­ly exco­ri­ate the tor­ture of any crea­ture. Tor­ture serves no good pur­pose- it does­n’t mat­ter if it is a human or a less adapt­able crit­ter. Hon­or and shame are very pow­er­ful tools that are always wield­ed with dan­ger and it seems that tor­ture is one of the more fool­ish ways that hon­or and shame are expressed for humans. Beyond that, how­ev­er, is the pure­ly vis­cer­al pain of tor­ture. There ain’t no good rea­son for that shit peri­od

A quick time­line of my feel­ings on the this whole clus­ter­fuck in Iraq [I’ve not said much on it the entire time its been going on]:

1. We should­n’t have gone in there in the first place, there was no good rea­son for it. And I am still wait­ing to hear one.
2. Well, we went in and fucked things up, so now we’d bet­ter stay there and fix it, and;
3. cur­rent­ly I think the quick­est way to fix it might be to get the fuck out since we are so unwant­ed.

It is a shame that this war seems to be caus­ing more prob­lems than it solved, but that kind of stuff hap­pens when deci­sions are made for no good rea­son.

1: I think the word ‘rea­son­able’ is used incor­rect­ly. Ani­mal behav­ior seems much more rea­son­able than human behav­ior. They most­ly kill each oth­er for food. They most­ly don’t kill their same species. They most­ly don’t tor­ture their same species. I’m sure there are excep­tions but for the most part, that seems quite rea­son­able to me. Yet, if ani­mal behav­ior is ‘unrea­son­able,’ then I’m going to start learn­ing from them. Unrea­son might be the way to go.²

2: My assump­tions regard­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of rea­son are shal­low, but I am try­ing to use the word as I think it is most com­mon­ly used. That is, I’m not using the aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly exam­ined, philo­soph­i­cal­ly chal­lenged, and trea­tise-heavy dis­sec­tion of what the word ‘rea­son’ means. I’m using it like those peo­ple who toss out sound bites say­ing ‘There is no rea­son for this kind of behav­ior!’ Well of course there is a rea­son, it might just hap­pen to be a no good rea­son and much of it was prob­a­bly rea­soned through before act­ing upon it. That ver­sion of rea­son sucks.