So two posts of mine went POOF at HuffPo. They were in response to some Freeper posts in favor of torture. I thought they were civil and posed good questions. Nonetheless they were gone in two hours. POOF With a little luck someone can tell me what happened. Details on the "incident" below the fold.
Marty Kaplan writes a decent anti-torture postover at HuffPo.
Torture is Magic
Needless to say, the right-wing torture afficionados put in their 1 cent in the comments. Notable among the group was a guy calling himself "Overdog" who wanted to argue that torture was effective and necessary. My take is always that these guys get off on the idea of torturing the supposed perpetrators of 9/11 and are just looking for a more socially acceptable justification. If anyone has read some of my past diaries or posts, they would know that this is a topic that I "give a shit" about. Which is why it irked me when my comments disappeared.
Post #1 by Overdog:
You may know better, but you're wrong. Torture does get good data, just not reliably. Unfortunately, no way of getting data is 100% reliable.
This was in response to someone pooh-poohing the effectiveness of torture. My response to Overdog:
Can you cite one example of a war that would have been lost that was won due to intel gained by torture? Take your time.
I minored in military history and have spent an inordinate amount of time looking for an example where intel gained by torture turned the tables in a war. I have never found it and was pretty confident in posing that question.
Post #2 by Overdog:
It only results in bad intelligence". This is quite a statement. Can you please supply the statistics that show it is 0% effective? Of course you can't. You are blowing hot air, like many of the enlightened geniuses on this board.
My response, which didn't directly question his statement, but was relevant to much of the rest of the discussion and addressed a commonly held notion of the torture afficionados:
Can you cite one example where torture was used to successfully resolve a "ticking bomb scenario". Again take your time.
Both comments made it up at HuffPo and then disappeared within a few hours while other comments that were anti-torture but quite frankly struck me as inane stayed up. I don't post there much so I was hoping someone could help me understand what happened. Here is HuffPo's posting rules:
We only delete those comments that include the following transgressions:
• are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language
• include ad hominem attacks including comments that celebrate the death or illness of any person, public figure or otherwise
• contain racist, sexist, homophobic and other slurs
• are solicitations and/or advertising for personal blogs and websites
• thread spamming (you've posted this same comment elsewhere on the site
• are posted with the explicit intention of provoking other commenters or the staff at Huffington Post.
Did the Freepers troll-rate me because I had to be stopped at all costs? I don't really subscribe to that theory myself. Did I really violate that last bullet? I mean maintaining some civility in the internet discussion is great, but if so, that seems like extreme overkill to me. Overdog sounded downright insulting in his posts which I was not. Are centrist and left-leaning posts getting wiped out to avoid insulting fragile Freeper egos?
Anyway, if someone has any thoughts, it would be much appreciated. I gotta say that it sort of left a bad taste in my mouth.