I hate being right all the time

Read about it from me months ago:

The curious result of our culture’s growing abandonment of the notion of sin is (as Faustian bargains tend to be) a loss of our humanity. As our culture becomes coarser and our belief in humans as moral creatures made in the image of God fades in favor of a vision of humans as creatures shaped by heredity and environment, our faith in the power of moral suasion goes with it. So, for instance, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary, self-styled combox experts in interrogation endlessly inform us that our first, rather than last, assumption is that prisoners in the War on Terror must be tortured like animals to get even minimal “results” from them. These self-appointed experts base this claim not on reality but on watching lots of episodes of 24. Meanwhile, real interrogators who dealt with pantywaists like Nazis and Commies insist that real intelligence is much more fruitfully gained by treating prisoners as what they are: rational human beings and not beasts.

As a culture embraces the view that men are essentially brutes, it is not possible to keep that in the bottle of a prison or CIA black site. Caesar starts to treat his subjects that way, too, while congratulating himself on his gritty “realism.” So, for instance, where there used to be public service announcements that said, “Every litter bit hurts,” we now get, “Litter and it will hurt” — something you could just as easily say to a beast via a whip. “Buckle up for safety!” has been replace with “Click-it or ticket” or “Drive hammered. Get nailed.” Threats, not admonition, are the order of the day.

Or watch it unfold in the headlines today: