The internet forum I am most actively a participant on is called BigSoccer.  I’m a huge soccer fan and contribute to the discussions on my favorite team, specifically, and Italian soccer (though we don’t call it that), generally.

I am also active on that site’s Politics & Current Events sub-forum.  None of the participants on that very active sub-forum have anything remotely in common with my philosophy.  In fact, its leading “libertarian” poster considers himself a Keynesian.

Anyway, one of the threads that has gotten a lot of play over the last few days is called Mancow Waterboarded.  The republicans generally do not consider waterboarding to be torture, while the democrats (the clear majority on the site) do seem to believe it is torture.

Whether, or not one believes the practice to be torture, it is interesting to me that the democrats (sorry, I just cannot bring myself to refer to those that do not believe in liberty as “liberals”) are not against waterboarding on the basis that it is torture.  Nor do the democrats seem to be against torture on any sort of principled basis at all.  They are against torture based on their hypothesis that it does not produce reliable results.

This seems like a very treacherous slope to me.  If people stand against torture on the grounds that it is not reliable enough, then all a government has to do is show the people, even fraudulently, that information obtained via torture is reliable.  Doesn’t it also create a market for more reliable torture techniques?

Not that either republicans or democrats have much faith in markets…