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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing anyway. [1]

Fast-forward a few years and you find there were in fact many such "heroes" in reality - in Abu Ghraib and in the Black Sites - and the situation weren't exceptional at all.

So accountability sinks can also be used as calculated ways to undermine your own ostensible ethical guardrails.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack...

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well:

> Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Section_31

DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero[0]? Not sure that one led anywhere, beyond being a very disturbing way to do character development.

Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide. The Dominion was known to systematically subjugate and ultimately eradicate solid life, and other than the Federation Alliance bloc (that prevailed only because of Section 31's bioweapon short-circuiting the war[2]), the only power left in the known galaxy strong enough to resist the Dominion would be... the Borg Collective, which wasn't really that much better[3].

So, as much as I love DS9, I feel the show (and the larger franchise) has so much unintentional depth, that most obvious takes don't work with fans, because they don't survive scrutiny :).

[0] - The simple tailor was anything but.

[1] - At least as far as I recall, Section 31 were written to be the rotten apples that got revealed and removed by the heroes, in a pretty straightforward way - but IMO, they failed at this, and instead created something more of Deus Ex Realpolitik.

[2] - And a little bit of actual fleet-eating Deus Ex Machina, on the account of having a demi-god in their midst.

[3] - And nobody in or out of universe really wants to talk about what happened to the latter, except the last season of PIC that tacitly acknowledged it in a "blink and you'll miss it" way.

> DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero

If you’re talking about Garak torturing Odo, that seems different than the 24 case because in that instance Garak was explicitly working for “the bad guys”. And even so he was doing the torturing reluctantly and only doing so because the alternative was the torturing being done by another operative which wouldn’t restrain themselves. In other words, in that instance the show was explicitly treating torture as bad.

> made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough. Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).

> Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough.

It put a countdown clock on their remaining lifespan. Infecting all the Founders simultaneously with a lethal disease made the entire war (that they were very much winning) moot. For the Founders, the entire reason behind the conflict was to ensure their own safety from hypothetical future threats (they were a paranoid bunch); that obviously is not achieved when all Founders are dead, so the entire calculus changes.

That's what I mean by saying that the virus short-circuited the war. It may have been the compassionate and extremely risky act of Odo that, in true Star Trek fashion, changed hearts and minds and got everyone back to the negotiating table, but even without it, the virus would've ended the war within a week or such - leaving alpha and beta quadrants in a bad state (fighting against now feral but still superior Dominion invasion force), but still much better and more survivable than the war itself was.

> Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).

The show was very much not approving of Section 31; that one was communicated quite clearly. What I'm saying is that, if you ignore what you're being told and look at what you're being shown - the events that happened, not the main characters' opinions on them - it's becomes much harder to paint Section 31 as villains of the story.

I believe this outcome was not intended by the writers; it's just what the whole storyline ended up adding up to.

> Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

I mean, Jack Bauer, too, saved America from all kinds of unspeakable evil by his clever use of torture. I'd say it's not tricky at all. The morally gray "it's bad but we'd be even worse off without it" justification is kind of the point of those narratives.

Yes, but the difference is that Section 31 in DS9 is obviously "the baddies" to the heroes and the audience, and writers meant it to be "the baddies", and everyone in and out of universe was supposed to be appalled at the mutagenic virus subplot, and yet, taken in context of the larger events in the show, Section 31 came out as a light shade of gray instead of black.

It's one thing if them doing their thing was merely convenient, but the rest of the writing in the show converged into a situation where the Federation was under the wall, with no way to talk or shoot their way out of total defeat (and Earth being glassed to make a point). For Star Trek, that's pretty much a franchise-terminating event; they needed to write their way out of that corner - and Section 31 plot basically did that, before they realized it.

AFAIK the writers did not intend Section 31 plot to be posing the question whether any means are justified if the alternative is being exterminated - but it's what they inadvertently ended up doing.

(It's not the only time they hit a problem like this. AFAIR, the episode "Waltz" was made specifically because fans found more depth in the character of Dukat than the writers intended; as such, the whole point of that episode was to drive home that yes, Dukat is just that evil, period.)

Sounds a lot like Special Circumstances in The Culture books.

I watched a season of Chicago PD, and noticed that they had a convenient "plot accelerator."

Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.

Every police show aggressively pushes the "civil rights bad" angle. Maybe once a season they will graciously consider "maybe civil rights good?" for part of an episode before concluding "no, civil rights bad."

It seems to be a hallmark of Dick Wolf's shows.

His son is getting into the act, but seems to be more interested in depicting "the right way."

His show is an Amazon show, named On Call: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14582876/

I enjoyed it.

I noticed the difference in this show as well, and I hope it continues.

Besides any conscious philosophy of the producers & writers, perhaps making the show more character driven as opposed to procedural has an impact on the stories. Maybe it's easier to understand when a suspect's rights are being violated (and to not be banal about it) when you're writing a deeper portrayal of the person who wields the power.

I always wanted to see a "pop up video" take on a cop show, where they have expository information and trivia from actual legal experts.

"Officer Jones just blew the entire chain of custody around the bloody knife"

"Flabbodell vs Borkweather says they have to give you access to counsel within X hours and they just ran out the clock"

"This type of traffic stop is explicitly forbidden in 17 states, including the one this show is nominally set in"

The sad thing about all those observations is, all these things surely happen anyway, and lots of people end up in jail anyway, because they don't have good representation to point out how they've been railroaded and they've got a plea bargain dangling in front of them.

People at least know "Nobody read me my rights", "I want to plead the Fifth", and "I want my lawyer" from seeing it on TV. If your arrestee-- or your jury pool-- has a higher level of awareness of common legal gotchas, they'd be able to demand a better deal. "I know you screwed up, the plea deal isn't good enough."

s/show/department/

It is an accurate depiction of how Chicago police operated, unfortunately. In fact, one Chicago detective who tortured suspects went on to work as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay[2]. It's terrible that the series would glamorize that behavior.

1. https://chicagoreader.com/news/the-police-torture-scandals-a...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Zuley

I’d like to see more:

Main character tortures a low-level grunt

Gets false confession

Goes off on wild goose chase based on that confession

Bad guys get away with their plot as a result

“Yes, you were torturing me, I’d obviously have said anything to get you to stop.”

I feel like I’ve seen this sequence once or twice, but I can’t remember what it was in. It actually seems like something that is more likely to be put in a comedy, where the protagonist can be shown to be stupid occasionally. Maybe Brooklyn 99, or Barry, or something like that?

Well, it's the motive behind any atrocity committed during war, what's a few cracked eggs if there is a grand goal in mind. There are always people in places who feel like it's a historical duty to carry out those plans. And the war crimes stay in the past and get forgotten but nobody can deny the new reality on the ground. You can ethnically cleanse an area and in a 100 years that becomes barely a historical footnote and a new reality emerges and nobody can dispute that the area is occupied by a nation that claims rights based on self determination. Same for settler colonialism, they're not invading, just changing the actual conditions as a precursor to claiming political legitimacy.

What’s also interesting is that the tortured always turn out to be the bad guys. It never happens that he mistakenly tortured a good guy.

But dear sir, we have an autocracy <cough cough> a known corruption-free society with infallible and omniscient leaders, so you are not even allowed <cough cough> only reptilian slanderers would question the authorities.

If they were good guys, we wouldn't be torturing them in the first place, obviously.

Convictions aren't convictions if you abandon them when it's hard. It's just cosplay

Also, if you do something every day, it is not an exception.

This is simplifying the definition to the point of defining the term out of existence. No one actually has any convictions in this world. This is actually kinda bad if your goal is for people to really think about ethical issues and try to maintain a degree of rational consistency.

Plus being so black and white in the manner you're describing would.. well actually be really stupid a lot of the times. The fact that Batman doesn't kill the Joker is a storytelling device, in the real world it would be monumentally stupid to do anything other than blow his brains out. Literally millions of lives saved. But it also makes sense, and his good, that Batman still maintain is strong conviction to not kill despite choosing to do it sometimes.

Rules necessarily have exceptions and it's healthy to do so, black and white thinking should be for the jedi/sith, not real life humans.

It’s interesting that you picked up The Dark Knight. The Joker says that he’s only holding a mirror to the society which I tend to agree with somewhat. He used the people from inside the system to take on Batman and in fact succeeds. Killing him would achieve absolutely nothing when the system is so insidiously corrupt.

Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" comes to mind here.

Another perspective is that it's a clever way of asking for consent. Like a trial balloon, except not even carried out for real. You get to see if the public approves of the character or not, and then you decide how to proceed with that information.

Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer ?

Antonio Scalia name dropped Jack Bauer.

That shows you the true depth of his legal thinking. Good riddance.

One of the things that strikes me about 24 is that it started running about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a debate about running it or edits, but in retrospect it does seem like the timing worked and fit with the public mood of the time. What would be interesting is how 9/11 and following real life events influenced the show's writing in later series.

You don't put together and film a show in 2 months if that's what you're implying here. it was planned for a long time before that

They are suggesting that the events of 9/11 would have made the showrunners debate whether they should delay the release of 24, or edit it to change the content somewhat.

You're right, you plan them both together before the fact.

There is no connection between Ab Ghraib and 24, a fictional TV series. If you think this stuff didn't happen before 24 then I'd like some proof. TV reflects reality (or a very stretched version of it), not the other way around, and 24 also wasn't the first version of such a thing. It's just that Abu G they used people who were young and not professionals so it leaked. It has probably been happening as long as the USA has had police forces like the CIA, military intelligence, and even cops.

There is a direct connection.

Antonin Scalia was one of the architects of substantial limitations on the 8th amendment and was a key figure in a number of cases specifically about extraordinary rendition and "enhanced interrogation."

Scalia has multiple times in public referenced Jack Bauer as an argument for why prohibitions on torture are unworkable. At a panel on the very topic, Scalia responded to "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?'" with "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles" and "are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

Christ, what a ghoul.

"The ends justify the means" is a horrific way to run a society in any case, but of course it skips over the question of whether the means actually caused the ends, let alone were the only way to do so. Even if torture did save lives, it isn't a great justification - but then pile on top that your only evidence that it actually does work is fiction and it starts to look like the means were what you really wanted in the first place.

In real world, that stuff happens to innocent people, to people guilty of completely different or lesser crimes and cops get out a lot of false claiks they use against whoever they dislike.In real world, it happens as a power trip with no saving factor.

In real world, it happens to cover up crimes cop did themselves or to facilitate them.

That is where the lie is.

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