Being of Italian extraction, I've heard some interesting ideas on what should be done with miscreants of various sorts. I could tell you of punishments meted out by my great grandmother to various members of her community back in Brooklyn. Not talked about. Actually committed. Maybe it's a cultural thing.
In that we have a greater bandwidth when speaking face to face with people, descriptions of these sorts, in my own family, required fewer words, but more gestures. Also, there are things, when said, that serve as a shorthand. Less was spoken, but more was said.
But this sort of hyperbole (and sometime, real deeds and actions) is not limited to us more expressive southern Europeans. I remember reading an interview with Mrs. Billy Graham about the difficulties of being Mr. Billy Graham's wife. The interviewer asked, “Did you ever think about divorcing him?”
She answered waving her hand, “Divorce? No. Murder? Well...”
I used to bowl with the Knights of Columbus. Get a group of beer-drinking guys together doing some beer-drinking-guy-like activity, and you'll get this sort of talk. But remember, the artifice of the “Internet thread” that focuses on a single subject at a time, where there may be tens, or scores, for even a hundred or more posters has a tendency to accentuate the phenomenon.
I also take a bit of issue with the use of the word “torture.” It's a slippery word, and I don't usually use it because its current use has often emptied it of meaning. Singapore canes people. Is that torture? The US military waterboarded folks. Torture? I know what being imprisoned in a maximum security prison does to previously not-insane people. It usually causes psychosis. Thus, is life in prison in a supermax prison, without the possibility of parole, torture?
Where does earned punishment end and torture begin?
I never hit or spanked either of my two sons. Never felt it was necessary. But they will tell you that they'd have preferred to be spanked rather than listen to my lectures and having to write the essays assigned to them as punishment. They have even asserted that my lectures and essays were a form of torture.
I don't see the answers as being so clear cut, and I'm afraid that in this thread, folks have permitted you to steal this premise.
Torture is easier to grasp when we're talking about trying to coerce specific behaviors: “Give me the code word to stop the bomb from going off, or I'll gouge out your other eye.” But what if the loss of the eye is the mandated punishment for having caused another the loss of his eye?
I'll give you that sometimes, Internet fora act like echo chambers, and encourage and magnify behaviors that are best left unencouraged. But that doesn't make the thirst for justice represented by these exaggerated punishments either demonic or bestial.
sitetest
I get impatient with people who say, "Oh, oooh, this is so hard, because, actually, how do you kno-o-o-ow what torture is? It's so complex! You can never know!"
You, in particular, sitetest, are intelligent enough to sit down and in 20 minutes write a short but adequate list of objective criteria to determine what is torture and what is not. The U.S. Army Field Manual could do it, and so could you.
How do we know what is r-a-a-a-pe? How do we know what is po-o-o-o-rn? Hustler? An ad for Dove soap? It's so confusing!"
It's like saying, "How can you know if anything is really wrong?" So much of this alleged ambiguity is self-deceiving, and shows a tendency to use spurious casuistry to avoid primary moral judgment. Not saying that about you in particular. I'm just distressed about what was smeared on our mind's eyes in this particular FR thread, and others like it. That's why I can't unreservedly invite conservative friends to get involved in Free Republic. Too much that would make me ashamed.