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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

A similar issue came up when 24 was popular:

http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/06/scalia...

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"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

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Jack Bauer has the luxury of being right or mostly right when he tortures people.

In the movies, the good guys know with near-perfect certainty that the bad guy knows where the bomb is, and there is only just enough time to get the information - thus, torture. If real-world torture worked under similar certainty, few people would be against it.

If one person tortures one other person and as a result found the bomb, he probably wouldn't get a very hard sentence. But in reality (as I understand it, I'm not exactly a subject matter expert), you'd be trying a guy who tortured 50 guys, 49 of which didn't know anything (or didn't break) or fed you disinformation, and then one guy who told you something actionable, that you plausibly could (but perhaps not) have learnt through other channels.

24 is a much better example than Fringe. If Fringe depicts torture as a tool, it also depicts time travel as a tool and wacky science as a tool, but I don't see the author taking umbrage.

Fringe, like 24, is a work of fiction. The problem is not the series' content. The real problem is letting politicians and media use a work of fiction as an actual situation. Using "Jack Bauer" in the debate about torture is like using Planet of the Apes in the debate about space exploration.

Sure but it happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

But unlike time travel and alternate dimensions, torture is a thing we have in our world of real things.

But the rest of your comment is completely correct.

I'm the author... I pretty much figured that 24 was generally acknowledged to be torture full. I wrote that piece after spending the holidays binge watching X-Files and Fringe. Such similar subject matter but such hugely different treatments.

The problem with your hand-waving away of the issue is that torture is something that we as humans have a long, close history of, and time-travel is just a fantasy. To represent these as being essentially the same level of concept is utterly disingenuous.

Interestingly, the creator of 24 (Joel Surnow) gave a much more nuanced treatment of torture in his earlier "La Femme Nikita". The protagonist agency regularly used torture to hunt down terrorists, but the people practicing it are portrayed as far less sympathetic than Jack Bauer.

In 24 at first they tried to attach consequences in the form of the physical and emotional degradation of Jack Bauer, but after a few seasons of successes and redemption, it made no impact anymore. I can't recall instances of the good guys in Fringe using torture directly. I'm sure they are there, and I've just become numb to them.

By season 6 of 24 they nuked a city in USA just to get Bauer to go back to work.

That's not even the most unbelievable thing in the show. I mean, an entire season is supposed to take place over a 24 hour period, making each episode a running hour of time. You expect us to believe that Jack Bauer can drive across LA 3 times an hour!? BULLSHIT!

I was mostly disappointed he never got hungry. You'd think he'd at least be eating a clif bar or a sandwich every few episodes.

I think he ate once when he was getting debriefed

yeah, you gotta figure superAgentJackBauer has a caloric burn rate of at least 5000 calories.

Yeah, but by then, 24 had become a cartoon. I watched it as though it was a slapstick comedy. As a big dumb cartoon, 24 made sense to me. If I took it seriously, it just made me angry. I came to absolutely love it as an outrageous joke.

Didn't pressure make Keifer do little PSA's during the commercials of the last season or two of 24, saying that 'this is just a TV show torture shouldn't really ever be used'?

In the 5th season, Peter tortures an observer. But this is displayed in a dark light, and the torture fails. It's not glorified. It's in fact the dark side, a counter-balance to Olivia's mourning.

Basically, it's portrayed as a horrific, shocking action, made all the more horrible because of who's doing it. It's the first steps down a darker road for Peter.

So, yeah, not at all propaganda supporting torture.

You could say the same about "The Blacklist" right now; the FBI in that show uses violence at the drop of a hat. (And they're portrayed as the heroes even though it doesn't work for them at all --- the whole premise of the show is that it's brought them so little that they don't even know the identities of the Kingpins of Evil on the titular list.)

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