> These same detainees were subsequently placed in rooms with temperatures ranging from 59 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Oh the horror of room temperature.
Oh the horror of room temperature.
Just take two hours of your day. Strip naked, have someone throw a bucket of cold water over you, and then stand on a letter-size piece of paper for two hours in a room that is 15C
>Oh my god they were quite chilly
And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial).
What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that?
Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Mengele's cold exposure experiments being "a little chilly"?
Absolutely. Abduction, held without trial, dehumanizing conditions, torture, etc.
Does your outrage about the jewish civilians only begin at the point were they burned them too?
Second, there are three levels of evil here, even if you disagree about "how many were totally innocent".
1) Some of them being totally innocent without dispute (for example those that were even released as such - in one case I read about after 7 years (!), and others for which they admitted they knew it for the start but used them as leverage, etc).
2) Even for the guilty, there should be no inprisoment without due process and fair trial.
3) Even for proven guilty, there should be no torture.
I don't consider anyone who does not agree on (2) and (3), basic tennets of human rights in the civilized world, anything more progressed than a KKK member lynching blacks back in the day...
Well, yeah, its called (naturally enough) the straw man fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
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(FWIW: You are not the first one I ask about this.)
Not on Hacker News it isn't. We want people to apply the Principle of Charity and respond to the strongest reasonable interpretation of what each other is saying [1]. Alternatively,
A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. [2]
It increasingly seems to me that we should add these principles to the site guidelines, though they're arguably derivable from them.
It's true that when people seem (and/or are) hopelessly wrong and misguided, and no one else seems (and/or is) respecting these principles, there's a great temptation to say "fuck it" and let loose with snark. But that needs to be resisted. The community depends on you and other established users to set good examples. Otherwise how can we tell new users that they can't do the same—or rather, do worse, since these things always get worse?
There's a kind of caricaturing wit that could be called uncharitable, but only if it's meant to distort, in which case the humor is a means to something else and it's the something else that's the problem.