More Stuff on TSA Insanity

here and here:

Meanwhile, as the State is, right now, strip-searching and groping little boys and telling you that it is keeping you safe, people who still live somewhere in the cloud cuckoo land of the Ridiculous Hypothetical Scenario are *still* writing me stuff like this:

Mark I usually love your posts but I find your moral compass to be a little shaky here.

Here’s an extreme hypothetical to get the ball rolling.

Your options:

1) The Holocaust

2) Torture Hitler

Your choice?

Odd that my reader should use that last word. This is what is known as “Sinning by Hypotheticals“. It is a particular species of intellectual sin in which the mind and imagination are used to overlook evil that is right in front of your nose in order to justify committing evil in some fantasy land.

One of the things that is worth noticing about the habit of torture defenders training their intellects to defend evil is this: they indulge the same fallacies that abortion defenders do. Let’s rewind my reader’s sin fantasy and restate it:

Here’s an extreme hypothetical to get the ball rolling.

Your options:

1) The Holocaust

2) Abort Hitler

Your choice?

If you think that somehow absurd or unfair, you haven’t been paying attention to the consequentialist arguments put forward for abortion. As Charles Krauthammer says, if it can save just *one* innocent life…

Embrace consequentialism to defend torture and you embrace it to defend abortion. That’s the deal.

And all the while Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM] are defending handing Caesar this sort of power in the cowardly conviction that it will keep them safe, Caesar is busy grabbing the power to treat our kids like the victims of a pedophile. Talk about faith-based government.

More on that kid here.