Yes, torture is BOTH unacceptably cruel and completely pointless, why do you ask?

Supposing that, through the blogosphere, the following argument regularly surfaced:

Since invisibility would be a godsend to US forces, and since it’s known that if you put a living black cat in boiling water until the flesh is boiled off its bones, one of those bones will, if held in a person’s mouth, render that person invisible, it’s only sensible to keep boiling black cats alive until there are enough of those bones to make it possible for any US battalion to become invisible.

Clearly, boiling a cat to death is a horrifyingly cruel thing to do.

Equally clearly it is completely pointless, since there is no such thing as a magic bone of invisibility.

Yet, we read news reports all the time of US military confiscating cats, keeping the pure black cats, and no one ever sees them again. There exists video and photographic evidence that US soldiers have thrown living black cats into huge pots of boiling water. And here is this person, persistently arguing that it’s only sensible to keep doing this because invisibility would be so useful, don’t you care about US soldiers more than you do a bunch of cats?

Now, if I argue – as I would – that I oppose taking cats and boiling them alive: that this is unacceptable under any circumstances (even supposing a person were starving hungry enough to eat a cat, they could kill the cat before boiling the meat…): that I see this as objectionable and disgraceful behavior –

– I would also point out that it’s completely pointless, since no matter how many black cats they boil to death, they’ll never find even one magic bone of invisibility, and therefore arguing how useful invisibility would be is futile.

Exactly so with torturing prisoners for information.

(Posted originally on Slacktivist – LB: Buck’s New Friends.)