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I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.
As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.
I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.
To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.
Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).
The answer there is often to just bite the bullet: either they were just "stupid" or they were getting some sort of fringe benefit separate from actual divine signs (psychological comfort, political cover, social buy-in).
But I kind of agree: "torture doesn't work" can't really be defended in its most literal sense. I mean: it works some of the time, obviously. But the anti-side never say that in the West.
The most charitable way I can read it is "torture as a practice doesn't work - as in produce better results than alternatives on the whole. So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective, even if the torture of much more dubious cases (perhaps the bulk) of mere suspects may not be. After all: if torture were institutionalized it would involve a lot of such people.
Which I think is similar to the argument against corporal punishment: surely it works as deterrent to beat a child sometimes. The argument is that it's bad on the whole (I'm personally agnostic on both of these).
Augury was very useful.
Surprise is extremely effective in warfare, and if the hour you're going to attack is based on augury, then your enemy has no way of predicting it.
If you attack based on an objective judgement of when the conditions are most favourable to your side, aka babby's first campaign, you will quickly find your movements anticipated and hard-countered by your opponent, who was able to predict your movements based on exactly the same objective signs.
Conversely if you attack because the chicken bone pointed towards the Death card, then your opponent will never see that one coming.
This only applies to situations where there are multiple valid ways or timings to proceed and augury can help you to randomly pick one. In other cases, augury might commit you to pointless or even disastrous decisions. Consider this example from the Anabasis (this is quite late in the book where the Greek army had already reached the Hellenized parts of modern northwestern Turkey):
This scene also happened while at the exact midway point between two Greek cities in the territory of a hostile Anatolian tribe. A little while later a scouting party is attacked and almost wiped out by hostile cavalry that had time to arrive in the time the army sat around idle. It's only after the supply of sacrificial animals runs out and oxen pulling the wagons have to be used instead that finally the signs are favourable.
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