conversations that never happened

I was, as I often do, having a conversation that never actually happened. During this, I posed an interesting question while mentally acting as my false interrogator. Well, more like a statement that begs a question.

"You've changed".

First off, I'm pretty sure this is a false statement. But I had to at least offer up an explanation to myself as why this might be. The best analogy I could come up with, because it's always an analogy that's needed to give answers to myself, was this:

"Remember when you were a kid and how things looked then. What happens when you go back to that same place as a adult?"

Have things actually gotten smaller? Not usually, and certainly not substantially so. Our sense of space and time has changed. Usually the whole getting taller or bigger tends to skew the perspective a different way. The same sort of experience happens when a person goes from walking or biking everywhere to driving. Distances suddenly become as though they are much, much shorter, because our experience of time is dramatically lessened.

So what does that have to do with a person? I suspect the problem is that most people don't actually change all that much, if at all (at least, not without heavy medication or a drinking problem). The difference is largely the perspective that we see them in. In my case, this is probably more pronounced than most. I tend to graft things onto my behavior because I have a distinct lack of personality. But I'm basically the same around the same people as I was 10-15 years ago. I'm just better at burying the edges than most people. And I have some years of absence from many people in which to hide them. This unfortunately didn't do much for resolving the conundrum over which I was vociferously arguing conversationally with myself. But it seemed rather important at the time.

Better news. I read over more torture op-eds and I came to a certain realization. Cheney et al are actually right in one sense. The methods they used "worked". The problem is now that they're lying about what they "worked" for. We're being told in one breath that they worked and then told that they saved American lives in a ticking time bomb situation. Except what it looks like the torture methods were employed for was to manufacture evidence to justify a particular course of action by providing this crucial non-existent evidence. Being told what you want to hear is a hallmark of torture's "utility". This is often completely different than what you need to know. It makes no sense to say that we were torturing as a last resort in a ticking time bomb situation and then say we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times within a couple weeks of catching the guy and this mostly to develop intelligence linking his organization to Iraq rather than to collect actionable intelligence on future terror ops that he may have had knowledge of. That he "decided" after that to tell us what we wanted to hear is only natural. The "ticking time bomb" wasn't to the higher ups another 9-11 event but rather the political ability to mobilize the country into a war for some reason while it was still in a state of fear and hostility. Good times.

Thanks though. At least we know torture still "works".