Owl convo re: notes on torture from the last couple of years

It’ll just be collecting scattered thoughts on my end, no structure in mind.
Most everything I’ve learned about it comes from Tom Kratman (years ago), Nick Land, Douglas Valentine, and Banned Hipster.

not a bad line-up, in fairness
pity hipster stopped blogging

True. However! https://threatenedhipster.wordpress.com/

he was always incredibly insightful

It was often hard for me to extract the insights, he does a different flavor of shitposting than I do.
Similar to Bice.
Or excuse me, similar in the sense that I have trouble telling what he’s saying sometimes.
You have to slow down and play with the words for a while to sort out the jokes and the ideas, and I don’t usually spend that time.

jokes are an excellent vehicle for inarticulable truths, and thus an excellent foundation for a more nuanced intellectual examination of ideas
anyone that tells you otherwise has a deficient sense of humor

“It’s just a joke.”

nothing ever truly is

No such thing.
Great minds.

thought police are correct on that front

It must first be admitted that torture is lindy. Primitive people like the Native Americans are often famous for their creative cruelty.
So it’s clear that part of the motivation behind torture is the fun of doing it.

The conventional wisdom is that torture is not useful for obtaining useful information. Kratman’s thesis is that it can be, but you have to follow a proper method.
It’s basically a moot point because almost no one ever does anything right. But if you’re interested, the idea is detailed in the Carerra series (and in some of Kratman’s comments around the internet which would be more difficult to track down)

In broad strokes, it’s Pavlovian training. You ask questions you know the answers to (“What is your name?”) and make it very clear correct answers will be rewarded and incorrect answers will be punished. You escalate slowly, exercise enormous patience, and as the interviewee begins to believe you’re omniscient you gradually move into areas where you don’t actually know the answers, but always interspersed with questions you do know the answers to (like a Skinner box).
The problem is that the interviewer tends to a sense of his own omnipotence and omniscience after holding God-like power over another human being for a prolonged period. Megalomania is a very common career hazard, but the one trait you need in abundance is self-control.
Hearkening back to the lindyness of torture, it’s worth mentioning explicitly that there must be an evopsych reason for torture being at least partially fun.
Probably in this case it’s the adaptiveness of being feared for your reputation.
Like Machiavelli said, fear is a reliable source of influence, and influence is a type of power that scales up.
The idea of getting information from torture isn’t new, e.g. the Greeks, but it may always have been a rationalization for civilized people wanting to do it. I’ll leave that question open.

or just the thrill of power
re: why some people enjoy it

Yeah, that’s the fun of it.
But why is it fun? Because apparently it was adaptive.

perhaps it’s a confluence of playfulness with hunting instincts
kind of like how cats will sometimes play with their food

Good point.

there’s an eloquent way of putting it but i’m having toruble translating the visual into words

“Why doesn’t she just kill the poor mouse?
Cats have a reputation for cruelty for one reason in particular: they have a tendency to play with mice and other prey until the victims are totally overcome with fear.
“Cats are opportunistic hunters and must be ready to stalk and catch any prey they discover by chance — even if they’re not hungry,” Turner explains. By playing with the live prey, the cat is acting out this inner conflict. “It seems cruel, but it is a necessary process developed by evolutionary selection.”
As early as the 1970s, researchers studied why cats play with their prey instead of killing them immediately. The bigger and more dangerous the prey, the longer the cat plays with it, reported Maxeen Biben from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA, in the journal Animal Behaviour. Rats stayed alive longer than mice. 
Biben assumed then that cats were just careful — the bigger the prey, the more dangerous it could be for the cat. Therefore, cats approached slowly and played it safe before they came close enough to the animal that they could kill it with a bite. Biben also found that the hungrier the cat actually is, the faster it kills.”
https://www.dw.com/en/cats-are-neither-mean-nor-cruel/a-45002369
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0003347279901295
Don’t know if I trust that study, it doesn’t have a solid feeling to it.

but there’s an interesting idea in there about a tension between factors leading to playing
which, since we’re equating playing with torture, could be a hypothesis
we torture when we can’t decide to kill or whatever
though that wouldn’t equte with the long history of torturing prisoners before killing them
or killin ghtem intentionally through torture

Well, that’s a different factor.

The point of medieval torture, for example, was:

1. False confessions: this is the most reliable use case for torture
2. Terror: to express the power of the sovereign (similar to public executions)
3. Justice: to punish criminals for moral outrages
4. Spectacle: to strengthen the state by broadcasting mind-bending entertainment products
5. Deterrence of future criminal behavior
6. Fun
   There’s probably a simple element of bureaucracy as well, the longer it goes on as an institution.
   You aren’t paying these torturers not to torture people.
   Gene Wolf’s “Shadow of the Torturer” was a good treatment of that aspect.

Most of these also apply to modern torture regimes like the Phoenix Program.
The modern West’s contribution to torture is its use for brainwashing.
This is apparently useful for creating zombie-like MK Ultra psychopaths like many of the ISIS fighters. However, my impression is it’s a lot less expensive to just find natural psychopaths in the wild and pay them.
I should give credit to Hank Oslo for the observation that it’s cheaper and more reliable to pay a psychopath to assassinate someone than to kidnap someone, regress their personality to childhood, raise them like they were your own child, and then get them to assassinate someone.
Sounds like a lot of trouble. More likely it’s just an excuse for sadists to put on the government form for research grants to continue their studies.
The brainwashing aspect, as it still exists, is probably a vestigial institutional growth from the last century’s focus on psychological experimentation for the refinement of propaganda and crowd control theories.

well i can see it being an attempt to have absolute control over your tools in a way you can’t with a hired gun

In that case I suspect it’s best to start with children and raise them as child soldiers, in which case you don’t need to regress their personalities.

fair point

On the other hand, maybe you aren’t thinking that clearly about it if you’re a psychopath who wasn’t smart enough to go into investment banking.
Psychopaths aren’t terribly clear-headed people and they don’t do lengthy trains of thought. That’s a common misunderstanding about them.
It’s more like “See banana behind window, smash window.”
That only seems clear-headed if you’re a normie who thinks social pretensions are the only reality.
Maybe that’s part of the attraction to noble savage theology.
For starters, it probably makes more sense to go inside the store and steal the banana without breaking the window, if you’re intent on stealing the banana.
Even more sense to pretend you aren’t stealing it and try to get away with it, to have less trouble afterward.
More direct isn’t always more direct, if you take my meaning.
The trouble being that normies don’t see social conventions as tools, but rather as a part of their identity, religion, etc.

and normies wouldn’t behave if they didn’t take those things seriously
i too have read liddell hart hehe

Is it good?
Which book?

Strategy – B.H. Liddell Hart
i wouldn’t say it’s ground-breaking but it’s good to be familiar with the idea that the indirect approach is foten a lot more initial work but gets you a better retrun on inestment for your effort in the long run
this is applicable in most aspects of life

“and normies wouldn’t behave if they didn’t take those things seriously”

You need only see their response to The Joker, Deadpool, etc.

Oh well, the poor you will always have with you.

There are apparently two factors that are overwhelmingly important for making torture-as-brainwashing work:

1. Coercing the prisoners to inflict the punishment on themselves
2. Combination with sensory deprivation

Final note on the Banned Hipster contribution:
His last post was about his personal experience with MKUltra. He says he was drugged and somebody dressed up like Jesus and did a sermon, presumably to invoke his Christian priors and get him attached to the handler, but it was so hamhanded that even a drugged 15-year-old just thought “this is stupid”. He then pulled the blog, presumably because he got a call from someone informing him that edgelords aren’t allowed to post secret brainwashing techniques, even if (especially if) they’re embarrassingly hamfisted.
It’s worth noting that drugs are (apparently) not helpful for this process, and probably the opposite of helpful (similar to Freud’s use of hypnosis).
I believe the fact that they’re still used gives credence to my theory that this branch of research is vestigial rather than pragmatic.
The people who do this, institutionally, have probably learned all they can from experimental torture. I expect their scientific journals and trade magazines make for pretty repetitive reading.

there’s a joke in here somewhere about the entire pharmaceutical industry just being a cover so that some people can work up new drugs with which to torture people
and as we mentioned earlier, jokes are very particular things