more than 95 theses

Hitchens, waterboarded

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:46:20 -0500

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

[here]

The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:06:39 -0500

Online, many Chinese are worried — about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others — presumably the boys themselves — meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: “Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history.”

And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China’s new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men “are under too much pressure,” Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. “They need a way to release it.”

[from a New Republic story about the consequences of the gender imbalance of Chinese society]

"Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others."

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:47:51 -0500

“Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.”

- America’s Finest News Source

Photo

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:21:25 -0500

That’s the front cover. Cool. I want to buy the whole...

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:20:05 -0500

That’s the front cover. Cool. I want to buy the whole series, just for the covers. (Via Kottke.)

method as metaphysics

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:55:08 -0500

Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human problems into narrowly technical problems, framed in terms of some theoretically tractable model and a corresponding method. Such tractability offers a collateral benefit: the intellectual pleasure that comes with constructing and tinkering with the model. But there is then an almost irresistible temptation to, as E. A. Burtt said, turn one’s method into a metaphysics—that is, to suppose the world such that one’s method is appropriate to it. When this procedure is applied to human beings, the inevitable result is that the human is defined downward. Thus, for example, thinking becomes “information processing.” We are confronted with the striking reversal wherein cognitive science looks to the computer to understand what human thinking is.

[Matt Crawford]

Keats

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:46:09 -0500

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem lasts. The sublimity of the odes did not stop Keats from suffering in body and mind, or from cursing the fate that allowed him to taste the pleasures of life and art so intensely, only to snatch them away. “Keats, of all poets, cannot be divided between the artist and the man,” Plumly writes. But in a sense it is precisely the violent sundering of the artist and the man that is Keats’s tragedy. The poet saw autumn as fulfillment, the season that “set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease.” The man died in winter, in a foreign country, certain that his work had not kept the promises his imagination made. “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?” he asked in one of his last letters home. “There must be,” he decided. “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

[Adam Kirsch]

Tyson Homosexual, champion sprinter

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:02:05 -0500

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website… replaces the word “gay” in [Associated Press] articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

[here, via Daring Fireball]

Brian Appleyard's least favorite book

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:03:04 -0500

The Awkward Age by Henry James This late (1899) book marks the beginning of the end for James, and persuaded me that he was never that good. FR Leavis called it “one of James’s major achievements”. Leavis was mad. I tried to make myself read it, my mouth gaping in a silent scream, but I failed. I wanted all the characters to die, slowly and in terrible agony. It would be the first interesting thing that had happened to them.

[this and other selections here]

Turns out that the story Gene Weingarten wrote last year about a...

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:55:00 -0500

Turns out that the story Gene Weingarten wrote last year about a world-class violinist playing in the subway is not as original as he had thought.

European men and the baby bust

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:59:10 -0500

A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University of Turin, and three of her colleagues compared the situation of women in Italy and the Netherlands. They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, “It’s about how much the man participates in child care.”

[NYT]

"Pixar may have earned awards and laurels as the pioneers of digital animation, but the true secret..."

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:54:19 -0500

“Pixar may have earned awards and laurels as the pioneers of digital animation, but the true secret of their success is stories so smart and superbly-tuned that you could tell them with sock puppets and still move the audience.”

- James Rocchi

I am grateful to live in the Age of Pixar. I really am.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:45:00 -0500

I am grateful to live in the Age of Pixar. I really am.

Photo

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:25:44 -0500

Photo

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:22:36 -0500

Michael Kenna, via Monoscope

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:22:10 -0500

Michael Kenna, via Monoscope

Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of thick...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:18:00 -0500

Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of thick steel cables hung way up toward the top of the building. This secret, Piranesian moment of inner geometry effectively acts as a pendulum or counterweight – a damper – for the motions of earthquakes. As earthquake waves pass up through the structure, the ball remains all but stationary; its inertia helps to counteract the movements of the building around it, thus “dampening” the earthquake. [BLDGBlog; original photo here]

George Orwell explains how to make a nice cup of tea

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:46:09 -0500

George Orwell explains how to make a nice cup of tea

"No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then..."

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:57:11 -0500

“No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.”

- Hitchens on Tim Russert’s funeral and its rainbow

world unlikely to end immediately

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:55:52 -0500

Physicists around the world are waiting with excitement as the final preparations for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) take place in advance of the start of operations this summer. Others, however, are much less enthused, as they worry about the prospects for cataclysmic forces to be released through the exotic forms of matter that will appear in the debris of the collisions that take place within the LHC’s detectors. Those worries sparked a lawsuit intended to block the LHC’s operation. Physicists are aware of the concerns, however, and CERN sponsored a safety report back in 2003. Now, with final preparations for operation under way, they’ve issued a followup safety evaluation, updated in light of the progress physics has made in the intervening time. The report’s conclusion is that, if the LHC were capable of destroying the earth, nature would have beaten us to the punch.

[here]