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

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.

Technology Lust: ASUS EEE

Okay, the name is unpronounceable: eee. It sounds like you're about to flee the monster. But it's a nicely compact subnotebook that only weighs two pounds. If it's light, cheap, easy to toss in a bag, and comes with wireless web browsing and a decent word processor, that's all I really want, anyway.

I've been wanting to fondle one in person -- because the real question is whether I can cope with touch typing on a keyboard that small -- but it looks like all the sources are online-only, even Best Buy and Costco. Still, it was tempting enough when I heard from Charlie Stross that the 4 gig flash disk Ultra is only $400 for a New! Wireless! Subnotebook! but those only come in black and white. Now ASUS has pushed up introduction of their entry-level model, and the Surf is only $300 (!) and it comes in candy-floss pink and spring green! Oh, oh, oh. Technolust. It's pink, dammit. That might just push me over the edge.