Home of the Unspeakâ„¢ Communityâ„¢
You are not logged in.
Offline
Took him long enough.
The article itself is a very peculiar piece, with a strange obsession about not lasting as long as KSM, and queer attempts at "writing":
Hitchens wrote:
As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.
Offline
Now we just need Bush, Cheney and Yoo to try the same test.
Offline
I think there is something deeply wrong with this "test" or stunt, which anyway several people already enacted before Hitchens. The idea that you can't really know whether forced partial drowning is torture or not until you've been drowned yourself is bizarre, isn't it?
Offline
I agree wholeheartedly. It demonstrates an astonishing failure of imagination, or a sociopathic lack of sympathetic feeling, or possibly willed ignorance on the part of the people who claim being drowned isn't torture. On the other hand, it always seems to work...
Offline
George Packer has an interesting post about the Hitchens piece, though I don't agree with the following:
Packer wrote:
he strikes a balance between self-presentation and self-effacement (always apologizing for mentioning his own feelings)
Surely apologizing for mentioning one's own feelings is not self-effacement? It's just as self-presentational as the kind of direct self-presentation with which Packer is contrasting it, just with a view to presenting a more sensitive self. The whole setup of the piece is inevitably self-presentational. The most pressing question of our day is whether Christopher Hitchens personally can bring himself to believe, long after the rest of the civilized world knew it to be true, that forced partial drowning is torture.
Offline
I read Hitchens' piece in VF and I agree it is entirely self-presentational. It's all about him. The world, he seems to think, needs his assessment in order to know what to think. The self-deprecation is pretense because it is always couched in a way that is miraculously self-aggrandising ( e.g. "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 [wheezy, paunchy] breath"). Approaching Hitchens' prose is like walking into a closet where he has been farting for a week.
Last edited by roger migently (2008-07-04 01:30:24)
Offline
Offline
The embarrassment is like torture to me. Even though, in the honorable tradition of my family, I have been trained to be impervious to shame, I shall never be able to visit, or even think of, this page without the hideous remembrance of such an egregious oversight. That I sloppily assumed the link was to the Guardian article is neither defense nor consolation to one of such inflation as I. Try as I might, as try I do, my gag reflex is, as the human body and mind are what they are, a reflex. Involuntary. Not subject to rational control. I look. I think. I gag, no matter the deep and arcane mental training I received from the Monks of Zenn during my years of intrepid travel in the Orient [My Years in the Intrepid Orient, 1994]. There are, I surmise, two possible actions, or, in the Zennish way, inactions, which a ruthlessly compassionate blogowner might take, or, as it were, again in the inscrutable way of the aforementioned Monks, not take. The first, which magically precedes the second, would be to remove the excrescence and mercifully hide my shame. But both of us would know the truth and the retchable reek of it would remain to taunt with its blank, accusating whiteness. There would be no consolation. The second, which equally miraculously succeeds the first, would be to leave the shameful, reeking stool extant as a new challenge to deepen my already considerable existential skills (to which I fancy I may have alluded in relation to the Zennist monks above). The choice is up to you, dear owner. I am at your mercy and sans, this time, any pre-arranged "Uncle!" with which I might mercifully terminate the prolongation of this awful nightmare.
--------
By the way, putting Hitchens' piece into wordle (to mash a couple of posts) and allowing common words shows that HItchens' second most used word, after "the", is "I". You could of knocked me down with a fevver!
Last edited by roger migently (2008-07-05 03:37:40)
Offline
"The idea that you can't really know whether forced partial drowning is torture or not until you've been drowned yourself is bizarre, isn't it?"
It gets better than that. In one of the comments at Harry's Place, a monkey actually wrote:
"It is an interesting and fair question, though, if waterboarding qualifies as torture, but you’d need to get the answer from tough people, people who have been trained to resist captors and pain."
That's right, folks - there are people out there who genuinely believe that you can't ever know whether forced partial drowning is torture or not without an "expert" telling you. The good news is, it saves you having to think for yourself.
Offline
richard wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly. It demonstrates an astonishing failure of imagination, or a sociopathic lack of sympathetic feeling, or possibly willed ignorance on the part of the people who claim being drowned isn't torture. On the other hand, it always seems to work...
They are Neocons. They train their minds for years to achieve those traits.
Offline
