sheer potentiality

“In the land of the selfless, the selfish man is king.”

That is all.

I think that, in order to prevent small populations from unduly affecting national politics, we should seek to even out the population differences between states. One important way to do this is to merge together less populous states. What would be the results of such a reorganization? Following are a few state names I have devised:

Wydahontana
Dakota
Carolina
Nebraskansas
Arklahoma
Kennessee (alternatively, West Pennsyltucky)
Utazonah
Alaskaii

And finally, the merger of Iowa and Connecticut, which shall be dubbed “Disconnecticut”.

A lot of people arguing to justify torture are arguing that torture is necessary in order to protect our civilization from a terrorist threat. What they are missing is something I consider a far more important point: why does our civilization deserve to survive? The greatest achievement of American civilization is, by far, individual rights. We are the first people to found a nation based upon ideals of democracy and individual freedom. Our civilization is at no greater risk from the terrorists than we were from the British at our outset, and yet we did not torture the British. Our civilization is at no greater risk from the terrorists than we were from the Nazis, yet we did not torture German troops. But even assuming we were facing a threat that absolutely necessitated torture, this still leaves an important question unanswered. To become a civilization that engages in torture, widescale espionage against our own people, and arbitrary imprisonments *without* the right for those imprisoned and tortured to contest their treatment in court would be a significant betrayal of the founding principles of our civilization. We are a nation of laws, checks, and balances, in which no group is given unchecked power and in which significant human rights are recognized. To betray these principles is treason. For years, our civilization placed itself at the peril of absolute destruction in order to prevail over fascism and communism simply because the fascists and communists engaged in the very tactics that we are now adopting. For those of you serving in the military: your predecessors fought and died on the shores of Normandy, the islands of the Pacific, the streets and fields of western Germany and France, the frozen wilderness of the Chosin Reservoir, and the jungles of Vietnam in order to preserve civilizations where people were not tortured or imprisoned at the whim of their leaders. How dare you betray them by allowing your own civilization to become the very evil they fought to destroy?

You also claim that torture is an effective means of interrogation—in other words, that torture elicits useful information. It is interesting, then, to note that coercive interrogation techniques are generally considered ineffective by almost everyone who’s seriously studied the question. For instance: Somebody placed under torture does not necessarily tell the truth; they tell you what you want to hear so you stop torturing them. If you capture and torture an innocent person by accident, they will confess to being a terrorist and invent whatever details they think will convince the interrogator. I think a lot of what motivates torture isn’t the belief or the hope that torture will be effective. Rather, the motivation appears to be a bit more primal than that. Simply put, “the terrorists” murdered 3,000 Americans five years ago, and you want revenge. I don’t blame anyone for feeling that way, but we are intelligent human beings, and one of our responsibilities as such is to recognize our primitive urges for what they are instead of trying to rationalize them. What in essence is happening in this country is that, out of fear, we are abandoning our principles in order to satisfy primal urges. We are abandoning our humanity.