Just saw this story:

Is this the natural outcome of a society that approves of torture as an interrogation technique?

The V.A. is saying that about 30% of the soldiers coming back from Afghanistan are having some mental difficulties, so I'm reluctant just to blame the soldier's reaction just on torture. However, let me just mention that the use of water-boarding and some other techniques I do believe are torture and is inexcusable, imo.

People, not in the armed forces, have done worse. How you can make the correlation between child abuse, torture, and military service is beyond me.

If you went with the odds, he's probably a Christian. Perhaps his behavior is the result of believing in Jesus.

This thread is a strawman. There are better ways to approach the subject of torture by the US military.

I see this as a direct corollary. If you think it's a strawman, so be it. I do not. I think we will be seeing more events like this in the years to come.

The man was a serviceman. How is that not a correlation?

I don't know, everything and nothing can be corollary depending on youre perspective.

Florida has the death penalty, does that mean that someone who works in the Florida penal system is more likely to strap down their child and inject them with Pancuronium bromide, than say someone from New York?

One can reach fairly spurious reasonings rather easily when it comes to finding correlations, especially when such correlations can be observed to be tenuous...

True.

Perhaps, but exposure to and the condoning of such behavior does have a tendency to desensitize people. Desensitization tends to lead to a blurring of the lines of what once was not acceptable.

Is anyone else disturbed by this man's behavior?

It is deeply disturbing, doubly so since he seems to have thought this was an acceptable form of discipline for anyone, let alone a child, let alone his own child.

Having said that, I'm not particularly convinced that ex and current soldiers are going to replace spanking with near drowning any time soon.

Neither am I, but I don't think we'd have seen this particular "punishment" a decade ago. He got the idea from somewhere.

Personally I blame 24 and Grand Theft Auto and the removing the the 10 Commandments from our public schools

And possibly the man was tall. Do tall men torture their children? Or perhaps he was blond. Do blonds torture their children.

Every argument of the form post hoc, ergo propter hoc, must be scupulously examined, and will almost always subsequently be thrown out!
Why? My stepfather tortured me, and that was 5 and a half decades ago -- and by the way, he was never a serviceman. Where did he learn it?