Chamblee54

There is some chattage recently about whether waterboarding is torture. There are some studies showing that the press called WB torture before 2004, when the USA began to practice WB as a part of the GWOT. Now, PG maintains that it doesn’t matter much what the press calls WB…these people are terrorists, and they deserve whatever is done to them. That is how Amerika sees things.
This is one of the corollaries of a blogfest going on today at obsidian wings . The blogfest quotes a previous post at Unqualified Offerings .
The thesis that generated this term paper is : “Across a whole range of problems there’s a class of responses I’ll dub the “low road” and another class I’ll call the “high road.” Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; “dominance”-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).”
The basic concept here is that the low road is seen as strength, and the high road as weakness, even when the high road is tougher to take, and arrives at the destination. The idea is that people are wild animals, who get off on combat. The goal of the aggression is not as important as proving how bad you are. It is a touch more complex than that, and if you have the time the seminal post and the comments are worth your time.
This avalanche was set in motion by an (subscription required to read) editorial in the Wall Street Journal about, of all things, Cuba . In an era when Communist regimes the world over are imploding, the one 90 miles from Florida continues to operate. This is in spite of an undeclared war by the USA, and much political shenanigans. The bottom line is, after fifty years of low road conflict by the USA, the commies are still in charge of Cuba. (There are rumors of drug smuggling protected by the commies, with nod and wink approval of the yankee regime. Sometimes the status quo, no matter how many lives are ruined, is too convenient for the powers that be.)