I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to hold up under torture. If I got captured by some mob guys, and they tied me in a chair and got out some implements of torture and started asking me questions, I would answer them right away, even before they did anything. I would probably do this even if my answers led to death for other people that I cared about. Does that make me a bad person? It does? Well, who the hell are you to say so! You think you wouldn't crack? Oh, don't give me that shit. If some hulking mob guy got out a pair of pliers and threatened to apply them to your genitals, you'd talk -- don't think you wouldn't. You'd start talking before they even asked you any questions, you pussy.

But wouldn't that be the smart thing to do? I mean, it seems to me that nobody could resist torture indefinitely, not if the torturer had time to spare and knew enough not to kill you accidentally. So if you're going to talk anyway, why not just talk right away and spare yourself the agony? That's not very noble, I guess, but if all nobility gets you is several hours of excruciating pain at the hands of The Nutcracker, then I don't want any part of it.

The bad thing is that, even if you talk right away, the mob guys might torture you anyway, just to make sure you're telling the truth. Or maybe the mob guys would ask you a bunch a questions you didn't know, and you would say, "I don't know," and they wouldn't believe you and would torture you anyway. Or maybe they're not mob guys at all -- maybe you got kidnapped by a deranged serial killer. That would be bad, because he would torture you just for fun and there would be nothing you could do about it. The best you could hope for in that situation is that maybe you would be his first victim, and he wouldn't know what he was doing and would mess it up and kill you before the torture got really bad. Alternatively, you could hope for Jodie Foster to bust in and shoot the deranged serial killer, but I think she's working on some big film projects these days and wouldn't have the time to save you. I can't blame her, really. If I was on some cool Hollywood set, making lots of money and hanging out with handsome, funny people and eating off the free buffet, I wouldn't risk my neck to save you from some sicko torture dude either.

+posted by Lawrence @ 8/17/2003 11:56:00 PM