Try It, You'll Like It. Or Perhaps Not So Much

[akirlu]

It has been observed elsewhere that a common conservative trope is the inability to understand what difference consent makes in human interaction. Clinton versus Schwarzenegger; daliance versus assault? Whatever. More recently, one of the Republican presidential candidates poo-pooed sleep deprivation as a torture technique, since after all, he was sleep deprived himself on the campaign trail. (What fuckwit was that? Romney? Huckabee?)

And me, I have tended to believe consent makes all the difference. So especially as we see this parade of Justice Department nominees refusing to opine on waterboarding, I've thought that anyone who wants to claim that waterboarding isn't torture should be willing to submit to it themselves before making the claim. Submit to it full-on, mind you: submit to being strapped down and imobilized on an inclined plane and have a trained hostile handling the administration of water, and aids. If your claimant will do that, and be brought to the point of feeling that he is drowning, and then get up and tell me it wasn't torture, then the claim has some moral weight. Without it, it's just macho posturing. More chickenhawk puffery.

Well, somebody tried it. Not a Justice Department nominee, alas. This fellow is just a self-confessed conservative on The Straight Dope message board. And not full-on, involuntary waterboarding. This guy had his hands free at all times, and administered the water himself. And after some initial trials, he decided waterboarding is, in fact, torture. So I guess I'm wrong. Sometimes, even consent doesn't help.

But read the whole piece. It's a hell of a thing, as Tech Sgt. Chen would say.

Link thanks to Jay Lake.

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ashcroft said he thought he could handle it, if he had to:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112902223_2.html

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Modern day conservatives make a big deal about consent over taxation, and also over not being allowed to realize the full speculative value of their property. But yes, basically you're right. Funny how they are consistently unable to understand anything that might place a moral limit on their use of power.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer. I still feel no need to try it myself, but then I'm not working for any level to which it might be germane.

Too bad I can't introduce the first fuckwit you named to my friend B's dad, who was tortured by both sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation during WWII. (He never did understand why some people were willing to pay good money to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank.)