Obsessed

Or maybe just loyal.

I light of the many and disturbing revelations being made these days under the general rubric of "torture," I feel increasingly compelled to point where I can to clear-headed accounts of what has been the neo-American position and tradition on torture in recent years, and its high distinction as a mode of interaction between people.

Consider this digest of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody in last week's New York Review of Books (with thanks to John Wirenius for pointing it out). Also

One of the most obvious distinguishing characteristics of American-style torture is the ambivalence of its enablers. Seldom has so edifying and concrete a term been so cavalierly double-spoken by its practitioners. "Enhanced interrogation techniques", indeed. Nothing so sullies any act as shame, and nothing is quite so neo-American as absolving ourselves of our bad behavior by professing our self-loathing. In principle, however, this is less neo-American than a first-world updating of the old passive-aggressive Puritan two-step, known better to historically liberal sensibilities as moral cowardice.

What makes it moral is that it is an act of will; the will to purity. What makes it cowardice is that, while Puritans of all stripes love purity, Puritans generally dare not speak the name by which such love would be reified, namely the destruction of the impure ("Death to the infidel!" notwithstanding). Nietzsche ennobled the will to power ("Machtgelüst") in several of his works, and noted that it was as characteristic of enfeebled ascetic types as it was of robust, pro-creative types. Only one of the two could, however, be said to be an honest broker of their intentions.

In the present case our elected leaders have been too ashamed to call what they were directing what everyone already knew it was; as though it's not torture when we do it (and heaven forfend it should be looked upon as simple sadism). To give a moment's benefit of a teeny, tiny doubt, perhaps torture is such a definitionally gray area among those at the levers of power that other world leaders and international bodies were understandably cautious in their observations and condemnations of neo-American behavior. Is the nature of leadership power a contingent property of the threat of torture (the so-called "deterent effect" so beloved of penal-industrialists, gun nuts, drug warriors and sabbath gasbags)? Maybe, and maybe if you're a leader you have to deal with the possibility you'll have to use that threat someday. Maybe we've all been reminded lately that it's not just a threat, and that we should be careful about what we sign up for when pulling our own little levers, like on voting machines.

It's certainly no mistake nor should it be a surprise that clear reportage on torture is just now emerging - directly on the heels of the departed regime (the ICRC Report is dated early 2007, but was just released within the last month). Although it clearly advantages them to discredit the previous regime, I have been impressed by the new Obama administration's forthright use of the word "torture" to describe what has been going on, to permit open and transparent debate on the matter within its ranks, and to allow that it's going to take some time to clear it up. It's the antithesis of the earlier view, free of moral absolutism and capable of working the ground between the polarities of purity on both sides; the pro-"enhanced interrogationists" and the Human Rights Watch-ers. It's smart and utterly impure stuff, the first we've seen of its kind in a long while.

In the BDSM world view, what we do and our experience of it we call sadism, plainly. It's focused, directed energy between two people for an instant or an hour, it's intended to register as an unconventional sensation (conventionally called "pain") and to shift the recipient's frame of reference - psychic, emotional, corporeal. The rope bondage I love so much I consider to be especially capable in levering all of the above, through the surfeit of time required to do it, through the symbolic and actual connections, and through the symbolic and actual suffering of physical restraint. What happens in that space is unconditioned, and it's not always good, but the disposition toward its potentials has to be non-normative or what you've got is failure before the fact. In positive terms, one has to have a bit of a liberal world view to get what BDSM has to offer; to be honest of intent and to gladly suffer uncertainty of outcomes.

For all of a top's activity inside a scene, the benefits of the frame shift accrue equally (if not in greater measure) to the receiving party, and this, apropos my last post on the subject, is another characteristic marker of BDSM. It ain't BDSM if the lever you're using extracts power from the exchange.

That would be torture.

Is It Torture Yet?

Consider the ethical dilemma of meat-eating on page 310 of Michael Pollen's brilliant Omnivore's Dilemma :

"To (Benjamin Franklin's ) argument 'other animals eat meat', the animal rightist has a simple, devastating reply; Do you really want your moral code based on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, we can choose: Humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; carnivorous animals do."

To this I reply that a moral code based on the natural order is apt if for no other reason than our ability to conceive of rights is also natural. If we endorse the natural ability to choose as being in the order of things, but exclude choices based on selective observation of the natural order, then we have only deepened our dilemma.

Coming obliquely yet again to my point, I wish to observe that empathy is the determining ground of torture.

Think about it. Other animals kill outright, and if they don't kill outright they linger a bit over their prey's demise, perhaps to sustain the rush of the hunt, perhaps naively. As agonizing as that may make the death of the poor creature in a predator's clutches, ethically it does little more than make sport of the act, but not torture. I think it's safe to say that in as much as a motive may be imputed to any predator (other than humans) it has to do with getting the kill.

Humans do stalk, hunt and kill for sport, but we also do these things for utterly bureaucratic purposes as well, and then often with no intent to kill. Torture, the blandly procedural visiting of engineered suffering upon another person, serves an end but is seldom the end itself, various religious and political manias notwithstanding. Even in the case of an event such as the famous Inquisition during which the infliction of lethal suffering putatively served some ennobling end (say, salvation), it's fulfillment was contingent on the recipient's confession, renunciation, or what have you - the externalized criterion. I have to doubt that it's ever been recorded that any prelate who committed or suffered to be committed the laying of a lash on the hapless back of an innocent owned up to a simple will to be an agent of suffering; the mission of the priestly class (always a dangerous and uniquely religious confection) was, and still is, the legitimizing pretext.

When the visiting of pain is the end itself then what is happening is sadism, and the distinguishing mark of its humanity is empathy. Want of empathy mixed with externalized criteria (e.g., renouncing Satan / al Qaeda / le diable du jour) to which the engineered suffering is suborned is torture. While in the popular consciousness the space between sadist and torturer is ethically gray, and doubtless there is plenty of room for crossover, the unfriendly, oafish, often pathological, and as often statist, mode of hurting others favors the term "torture".

Sadism is an intimate act. To be sadistic is to stay close to the authentic feelings of one's partner in the act, and in an sado-masochistic context a sadist's partner would nominally be a masochist, but not always. Many are the partners with whom I've shared an intense experience who would never identify as masochistic. They have no fondness for the pain they experience as a product of my depredations, but they take it in and work out their ultimate triumph over it, often by absenting themselves from it, but, again, not always. Sometimes it ends up just being a long effort of endurance. It is often more difficult for me to be cruel to someone I know derives nothing of value from pain qua pain. Their psychic, emotional and physical machinations within our exchange are more complex, less scrutable to me, and thereby in a sense more demanding of my empathy, with which I often feel myself responding profligately, if not always evenly.

Throughout, the ends served are uniquely contained within the exchange between partners, whether pain is intended, or at all the object of the proceedings. As often as not, a partner will tell me that their objective was to witness how much I pack into my love, and how unconventional I can make its expression. To quote a recent email from a lover of many years past, speaking to her perceptions of my approach:

"One thing it's definitely not is ordinary - you're like an anti-Valentine. Your affection was always tailor-made to me, however fucked-up it looked to anyone else (and it did and still does), and it sucked sometimes, it hurt so much, but it was pure and I always thought it was my own. It's unforgettable because it's unimaginable."

That was long enough ago for me to blush at what she was referring to and my own ineptitude at that time. Then I was not clear that what I was doing was not torture in the most venal meaning of the word, and this lover would not turn out to be masochistic in the end, although she was working on figuring that out through our play, much as I was figuring my way through my conflicts about being mean with someone I love. What I like to believe she is pointing out above is less so the depravity of our erotic interest in each other and more the closeness and intimacy borne of the difficulty of what we were doing - me naively throwing (nylon!) rope, her asking for it, both of us aroused by our respective uncertainties. I hurt her not quite knowing what I was doing (incompetence plus nylon equals rope burns every time). She got off not on the pain, but on the intensity of my approach and that I would risk any of it on her.

What I understand with the passing of time and the patient teaching of my partners is that what I do with rope, my hands, my cock or any other part of me is far less important than what and how much I'm willing to offer to the space we would fill between us, which in the natural order of things may be the essential import of human eroticism. It's a choice as to how we do who we are, and the choices are pretty much unlimited in the erotic realm, but what they all have in common in order to preserve them as erotic is empathy, no matter the mode of their expression. My expression happens to induce an eruption in the range of human feeling usually given a wide path under most circumstances. Absent empathy what I chronicle in these pages would be torture. With empathy, the adhesive media of human expression that can transform a victim into a participant, there is the possibility of transcendence.

With thanks to Spain, for doing the right thing, and to A. for keeping her old emails.

Angelic Bitchslap

I write a lot here about the spiritual and practical effects of embracing uncertainty, doubt, displacement and, ultimately, change. I like to think that often enough I remember to link my ruminations through the ungentle art of bondage and its related practices. This one is going to be a stretch.

I look out my living room window as I write this entry and see a decrepit oil tanker loudly blurting diesel fumes into the air as it delivers another 40,000 gallons of soon-to-be greenhouse gases into the bunker beneath my building in Brooklyn. It will lumber around the corner onto the main commercial drag in my neighborhood and crumble a few more centimeters of salt-crusted tarmac from the hundreds of potholes it hits as it coughs its way back to the oil terminal along Gowanus Canal.

However it arrives, the day is coming when this little transaction will cease. Even so, with the snow on the ground and the wind chill approaching zero, I'm glad for a warm apartment and that the toddler running around over my head can at least do so in stocking feet. As I watch the delivery conclude, the hose is coiled back to its ready position and a few obsidian drops mark the snow and the event... and the need. The truck lurches away in crescendo of ground gears and a cloud of blue smoke.

Made of fungible stuff, these carbon traces - the oil on the snow, the blue fumes - may come from Saudi Arabia, from the North Sea, from Texas, from Venezuela or from any several of the thousands of corners of earth being ruined by the habit of consumption, war and resistance to change.

Today, around noon, we will watch as our last, desperate, generations-long bitchiness about progress sings its nunc dimittis, having delivered fully on the pestilential promise of its creed. The revelation of our folly was so sudden and catastrophic, in our freshly home-made straits we have already begun to sigh with relief at the mere promise of remedy, of a shift. The long captivity to which we consented began in a spasm of self-loathing following the banishing of institutional prejudice with the triumph of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and was tempered by the schism of Vietnam. We have been having something like Robert Frost's "lover's quarrel" ever since.

No one ever tells you that the "better angels" of which Lincoln and now Barack Obama have spoken so eloquently can reveal to a culture and a people just how hateful and venal they have been. In the venal acts of 9/11/01 we had an opportunity to heed the angels' call - the manner of our better angels is not necessarily kind, but it encourages us to be more so, and their point is that we not make war upon ourselves. That devastatingly obvious opportunity was squandered and the acid bath of the last eight years was, in a way, just the last swing of the pendulum before it finally lost its moorings. We totally ran the clock down, broke it, maybe because it needed breaking, but also maybe because our collective soul needed just this much uncoiling, just this much and nothing less.

The utter loss of institutional and personal certainty, of anything like "homeland security," and the certainty of the change that will ensue is the same opportunity, only more obvious, less dispensable. It still boggles my mind that we dispensed the call of 9/11 with comic bromides like shopping is patriotic, but if, in the the end, we were engineering a shovel-ready shit-storm such as we're now experiencing, all for the sake of a fresh appreciation of the excellence of our Constitutional principles, then leveraging pliant national moods during national tragedies is just one abuse among a multitude we consented to.

Today we close the old book, the book of reaction and victimization, right to left and left to right, and we step up upon its terrible lessons to our prosperity and our posterity, to look homeward to where we grew up before, and to where we are to grow up yet again. It's the way we do it here.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and to our United States.

Energy Independence

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Tsk, tsk...

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may trust me on this: when it comes to remembering scenes accurately and completely, bottoms have it all over tops.

My dear byrdafyre reminded me (however inadvertently, or perhaps very, very subtly) of a scene we did several years ago during which she orchestrated some serious overcoming in a Barca Lounger thus enabling her 2+ hour endurance of the various depredations upon her person. Once summoned again from memory I recalled that I was challenged too, and not unpleasantly: rigging to a soft, somewhat amorphous block of yield-y upholstery takes a little extra doing.

So, I bow to and thank the formidable woman reclining to your left for keeping the record straight. Clearly higher selves are somewhat more ecumenical in their choice of landing place than I would credit them, even in my own (somewhat faulty) memories.

Risk Everything All the Time, Part 2

Partners very reasonably expect that I have at least a modicum of skill in the dance I would lead, and while I have never dropped anyone in the (literally) hundreds of suspensions I’ve rigged (nor in dancing, come to think of it), I have crushed nerves, left unintentional marks, had to cut rope and generally made acquaintance with the many crises common to bondage play. Still, I’ve no interest in mitigating any of the risks to which I expose myself or my partner.

By risk I don’t mean of incompetence or negligence (I, after all, derive a significant measure of my satisfaction in tying by successfully getting and keeping my partner in the form or pose I fancy), but rather of surprise interludes or endings within the scene. Those sometimes include quick arrests of erotic energy and emotion (which, once they’re flowing, understandably want to remain so), but that they too are at risk of unforeseeable detours adds immeasurably to the charm and intimacy of BDSM.

I would risk saying that in BDSM the only risk worthy of the common conception of the word is that of incompetence, and even then two people may consent to venture into experiences with which neither is familiar - both are incompetent, ipso facto, until they’re not. Yes, we should be aware of the risks of tying and being tied, of wine enemas, of an involuntary twitch with a knife in hand, of the local laws, of hot, of cold, full, empty, up, down, open, closed, in, out, right, wrong, rough, soft, loud, silent, on, off, loaded, slack, tight, loose, happy, sad… we should be aware of all of it… and therefore none of it.

Stepping full into possibility is what, in the end, will have given life its sweetness. In this sense being a pervert is a gift par excellence. What gets me off is not binary possibility, but quantum possibility – vagueness, indeterminacy, gray areas, the interdigitation of one and zero. I’m more a student of Buddhism than a practitioner (because I believe the teaching has gotten the matter of suffering wrong), but I am totally on board with the idea of unknowing. Knowledge is static (a common starting point in any epistemology) – it does not flow. It’s on or off. Not knowing is flowing… and risky.

Embracing risk takes a certain amount of being out of one’s head, and by that I mean absenting oneself to thought and calculation and analysis (and knowing), and admitting full feeling and presence. I am continually delighted by what ensues from the simple fact of my having been fully present and aware. Were I feeling really bombastic I’d suggest that nothing ever goes wrong when I’m present, but what does go wrong turns quickly right when I’m aware and full in feeling. Going wrong is in the flow to right. When I’m in my head I miss things, mostly the flow.

I’ve taken thousands of trips on New York’s subways and never felt in danger of loosing my life, but obviously that does not mean that risk is not present. Doubtless many of you reading this will have driven somewhere today, which is a far riskier venture than gliding under rivers in giant aluminum sarcophagi. Still, risk is what gives living in New York its complex flavors and frisson, and we all share in it, on subways and elsewhere. It’s why the world tilts constantly in our direction. Shared risk is more prosperous and more fun. It’s why money and art are here in such profusion. It’s one of the more obvious yields of kink.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it, but my bread-and-butter is risk analysis and mitigation. People hire me to ride herd on their investments and they pay me only when I do better than the markets. Their risk is my risk. That said, I trade very aggressively and take only those clients who can stomach volatility (for which I am the poster child). My competence is in limiting the downside, a discipline for which I have to show up daily. I control what I can, which is a very small percentage of the whole. The making of the money, the main event, is something I just get out of the way of and let happen. I get out of my head. In effect, everything is at risk because it’s in play and working – if it’s not in the ring it’s safe, but no good comes of it.

With rope what I control is ultimately a very small part of a whole scene. My best gambit is to get out of the way and let the main event happen, what ever that might end up being. I’m a firm believer in non-zero sum outcomes - win-wins are possible and even probable if everyone is willing to put something on the table. There can be no winners when everyone is safe.

Risk Everything All the Time, Part 1

So, it's late on Monday evening and I’m shuffling through Jersey City to the Grove Street PATH station. Following a bit of work I’ve stopped for dinner and vigorous dialogue with a long-absent and dear friend with whom I can unself-consciously bring up kink and Kafka in the same breath. By this hour my constitution is propped up with a surfeit of bizarre boutique-y Malbec and rangy thoughts. It’s a clear night, a good one for surprise visits, which, despite my slight impairment, I still have in mind once I’m back across the river.

Descending into the station I note that the cops minding the station that night are all of the body type good for short bursts of activity on flat ground. One pauses coming up the stair to catch her breath, the other feigns impatience and shifts a plastic bag she has slung over her shoulder from one side to the other. I wonder if the perps they’d likely encounter in the subway are the kind who thoughtfully use elevators while fleeing. The crackle of the panting cop’s radio reminds me that they’re more like smart-cams with a reporting function – they don’t generally chase anyone down, they dial up an insertion team for that.

The hair of the very few Manhattan-bound passengers waiting on the platform begins to rustle as the inbound train pushes air out of the opposite tunnel. The train rumbles into the station shrouded in a thin fog which lifts and dissipates as the train slows, a phenomenon I happen to be facing and find strangely beautiful. The last several cars are dark, which is not that uncommon for NYC transit rolling stock, but this is a milky darkness. In the time it takes for the word “odd” to register in my thoughts, the doors open and people spill out onto the platform gasping and spitting, and gray smoke unfurls toward the vaulted ceiling.

New Yorkers (and their Jersey counterparts) don’t pay any attention to things that happen all the time; obvious attention-giving is how we tell tourists from locals. No one else on the platform was watching the inbound train arrive, and the station was well-filled with smoke and disgorged passengers stampeding toward the stairs by the time heads were turning. In either my Malbec-conditioned momentum or local-centric obliviousness I kept walking toward the evolving mayhem, which I thought later of myself exceptionally dull-witted. It wasn’t until the acrid smoke obscured my feet that it even occurred to me to change my direction and use my handkerchief to cover my mouth. There were a couple of passengers on their knees on the platform whom I gave a moment’s pause to consider helping before they were scooped up by one of their standing number to be merged into the panic that was heading my way. I stepped aside and made for the further (and less choked) exits. Coming my way were several New Jersey Transit workers carrying fire extinguishers, one yelling somewhat needlessly “Please evacuate the station!” I looked back to see their progress halted by dozens of bodies crowded at the bottom of the stairs. As I was not looking where I was going I bounced off a very soft chest; it was the stopped cop I’d seen on the stairs. As I turned I was met by kind eyes and a big bluesy voice asking me if I was all right - did I need help getting up the stairs? I nodded, and then shook my head and she somehow got my meaning, switching promptly to a more brusque “Then keep moving upstairs.” As I climbed the stairs now coughing a bit I thought I’d certainly caviled her.

On the concourse level the air was only slightly tainted by the fire. Passengers milled about looking progressively less traumatized, rallying to the point of laughing in many cases, beginning to shrug it all off. In the midst there were obvious signs of chaos – a couple of discarded coats on the floor, some vomit, a makeup compact, a pair of high heels left neatly on a utility box on the wall, everyone trying to get a cell signal. The transit workers who had made for the distressed end of the platform had wisely abandoned their mission and were bringing up the rear of the passenger herd coming up the staircase, calling out for everyone to evacuate the station, and largely ignored.

I waited at the exit stairs to see if anyone needed assistance or to await the inevitable stroller mom, but when a younger man asked me if I’d like help getting out I realized my presence was not only superfluous but maybe even a little fatuous.

When I came above ground the first bits of a glittering flotilla of fire equipment was assembling loudly on the square while others screamed in from every direction. Manhole covers were opened and plumes of smoke wafted up, fouling the air with the stink I’d just escaped. Hoses were extruded from trucks like fresh pasta. As colorful as it all was, I started back whence I’d come to see if my dear friend might not be completely exhausted of friendliness. There would be no going to Manhattan tonight.

One of the shibboleths of kinkdom is the idea that risk can be controlled. This is soft-peddled in the two maxims “Safe, sane and consensual,” and “Risk Aware Consensual Kink.” No thoughtful person who has practiced BDSM for anymore than a few minutes defends the notion that it’s safe – that one would even care to be safe en scene is itself counterintuitive, for it’s precisely where the certainty of outcomes departs that things get interesting. Safe is the precisely the opposite of exciting.

Outrageous.

About an hour ago a judge in Queens County, City of New York, issued findings of not guilty of all charges against the three NYPD officers indicted in the shooting of Sean Bell in November 2006, during which the officers emptied nearly 50 rounds into the unarmed man and two of his unarmed friends. Bell died, the two friends survived and testified at the bench trial. Neither Bell nor his friends were suspected of any crime other than, incorrectly as it turns out, to be in possession of a weapon. Sean Bell was not the target of any investigation, nor was he of any prior interest to the police. He merely was in the right place at the right time for the incompetence that periodically manifests among New York’s “Finest” to end up played out on his person.

The particulars of the case are available elsewhere. Judge Arthur Cooperman’s verdict acquits Detectives Oliver and Isnora of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment. Detective Cooper was acquitted of reckless endangerment. The judge tellingly wrote that “incompetence is not the same thing as criminality”. The take-away here is manifold, but most saliently I understand the verdict to mean that NYPD officers are no more competent to deal with life-and-death situations than any citizen - life-and-death situations which often they, by dint of carrying death-dealing weapons, engender. As a point of law, at least in New York State, police officers are held to no higher standard than any other citizen in matters of lethal force.

Here’s an NYPD-approved competency test. Take your preferred index finger and rest it on the edge of a table. Flex your finger, say, 16 times and rest, taking a moment to use either hand to reach into any pocket quickly and remove it. Now put your finger on the table edge again and flex another 15 times. Take note of how long that took. That’s about how long it took Detective Oliver to determine he was firing on an unarmed man, despite his sufficiency of competence in reloading his semi-automatic weapon in the middle of the fray and finally loosening 31 of the 46 fatal shots, despite his sufficiency of instinct to preserve his own life and step aside from the car piloted by mortally injured Bell which Oliver testified went from a parked position to somehow bearing down on him and his colleagues at speed in the same span of time, such that, according to their testimony, the detectives were in fear for their lives.

Detective Oliver and his codefendants are able to offer as an affirmative defense to the charges that they were not heard when they identified themselves, that they were in fear for their lives, that they misjudged the presence of a weapon (although they testified that they could not see very well into the car). Their defense, in other words, amounts to a proclamation of gross lethal incompetence, endorsed by police department procedure (which permits the use of lethal force in indeterminate situations). Judge Cooperman affirmed this as a legitimate defense and acquitted, doing damage in my estimation to both the ideas of justice and the social contract.

Let’s not overlook in all of this that the prosecution, agents of the state just like police officers, presented their case ineptly, perhaps even incompetently. In no part of this fracas has any officer or agent of the state delegated with the responsibility and paid by the citizenry to do so protected from, or taken responsibility for, the danger they themselves present to lives of the citizenry.

And justice? While it’s clear who effected Sean Bell’s slaughter and the suffering of his compatriots, in Bush’s America persons sworn to uphold the law consider themselves neither responsible to it, nor subject to its adjudication. Makes sense, doesn’t it, in a trickle-down kind of way…

At this point you’ve doubtless wondered what all my high dudgeon has to do with BDSM, rope, etc. As horrified as I am by the facts and the entailments of this verdict, I’m reflecting on the matter of competence as it pertains to non-state actors such as myself, and I’m recalling a case in Seattle where an appellate court ruled that a defendant is not allowed to plead the competence of a partner to consent to a “forcible” rape scenario, the evidence for force having been rope and duct tape found at the scene. The State of Washington, in other words, says that you are not competent to consent to whatever you’re forced to do, and being tied up is enough to constitute force.

I’m obviously not all that familiar with case law on these issues, and I frankly don’t know how case rulings in New York State generally go (I suspect the constitutional scholar John Wirenius will have something to say about the Bell verdict, and it will be worth reading when he blogs it). I am familiar with a friend who suffered for years in court over what was essentially his incompetence at recognizing the forged ID of a 17-year-and-9-month-old model with whom he made nude pictures; the state in this case was tacitly requiring my friend to act as its agent in the interpretation and processing of state papers, the disposition of which being solely of interest to the state itself. My friend had made a good faith effort to indemnify himself, as he always does. The charges were reduced repeatedly from felonies to misdemeanors to a single misdemeanor, on which he accepted the bench ruling of guilty in order to have it removed from his record once the verdict had been entered (purely so the prosecution could get the conviction). In this instance there was competence demanded of someone who professed none and of whom no reasonable competence could be expected.

So, consider the fact that citizens who are ipso facto incompetent to take responsibility in loco parentis for big brother can, should it suit the state, be forced to have done so after the fact. Meanwhile, competence for determining one's own consent to certain behaviors can be conveniently excluded from admission in a court of law. In either instance no actual harm or coercion need be demonstrated by the state.

On the other hand, in an instance of actual and irreversible harm, namely a completely blameless man was wrongly killed by agents of the state, incompetence is conveniently claimed as an affirmative defense, goes unassailed by the prosecution, and is affirmed by the presiding magistrate as legitimate. Police officers can irresponsibly gun down citizens, and this is not a crime because legally the police are as free as you or me to be incompetent, i.e., at the pleasure of the state.

What, apparently, we are not free to be is competent in any intelligible sense of that idea. A competent citizenry would not consent to legitimized police incompetence.