AWESOME TO INFINITY POWER

[trinityvixen]

Sadly, No! asks commenters to prove that the plot of The Dark Knight encourages/approves of torture 'to save lives'.

And this person wins at life forever for this answer:

Zifnab said,
August 5, 2008 at 22:44

Let Batman be George Bush - B
Let Joker be Everyone George Bush Doesn’t Like - J

J - responsible for the deaths and threats on the lives of untold numbers of people
B - fabulously wealthy vigilante who operates outside the rule of law

We assume that B has a widely varying approval rating, but that consistently criminals don’t like B. B has a rather sensitive ego, and it appears that if criminals don’t like B, then criminals are a subset of the group J.

Torture is illegal and it is something that the United States doesn’t do. Fortunately, that allows B - who as we have stated operates outside the rule of law as a vigilante - is allowed to do it. Thus B is allowed to torture.

J is constantly plotting things against B, and it is impossible for B to be aware of all of them - J was one step ahead of B until the very end of the movie. As was seen in the movie, B gets information from criminals by dropping them off of buildings. But criminals don’t give up that information if a superior threat - another J - is present. So B must present the most serious threat in order to get information from J. That means B must use torture or death to secure information from J. Since you can’t get information from a dead guy, you must resort to torture.

Finally, J was responsible for the death of dozens of individuals and the potential death of hundreds more. Only people in the set J would be ok with this. Since you are not with J, we can assume you are with B. Therefore, we can assume you are not ok with all this killing, and you support killing J.

But because J consists of more than one person, it is necessary to torture elements within J to uncover other elements of J until such a time that all elements within J can be killed by B.

Ergo, if you wanted to see Joker get killed by Batman - and only someone who sympathized with Joker would feel otherwise, thus making that person just as bad as Joker - we can conclude that you are ok with torturing terrorism suspects for valuable information. Also, since Batman didn’t kill Joker, they are the same person. Hence we were dealing with one giant verbal BJ the whole time.

QED.

Comments

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Nice.

T linked me to this John Scalzi post the other day:

http://scalzi.livejournal.com/6069.html

Most relevantly,

Going back to Aristotle and Nietzsche, Western philosophy's cute couple, a good and general rule of thumb is that, unless you are having a discussion about philosophy, if someone starts trying to link the topic under discussion to the superstars of Western thought, you should probably have your internal Mr. Sulu raise the Pretentious Twaddle Shield to maximum and then brace for impact. It's not that the fellow is wrong (Feeney's overall point that macho is not automatically homoerotic is largely correct), it's just that going there is probably unnecessary on the rhetorical level, and the only reason to do it is to impress an editor or to show off to your conversational partner that, indeed, you got one of them there edumacations (showing off your book learning? That's so gay). It might seem impressive at first blush but what it really suggests is a certain lack of rhetorical sophistication, and the lack of awareness of every cultural thing between the quotidian subject under discussion and the giants of philosophy. Something in between is likely to be more relevant and on point.

Somehow this seemed supremely relevant to the original article SN wanted debunked.