Talk:Boot (torture)

More boots
In one now-removed section, references was made to The Big Book of Pain, by Donnelly and Diehl. This is not, as far as I am concerned, a reliable source for an encyclopedia. I don't really believe that The History Press is such a great publishing company (I have seen no evidence to suggest it is), and the authors are known for writing TV shows of the highly popular kind--you know, cannibalism, ghosts, etc. Moreover, I can find no reviews of the book or citations, so I have no choice but to conclude that it is not a reliable source per WP:RS. Besides, the language used was not very encyclopedic. Drmies (talk) 18:41, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Not a reliable source
Donnelly and Diehl drew from many sources. Further, as rather an expert in the history of torture--I would say I own about 75 books on the subject--I can assert that they have drawn from some rock-solid sources. Even the putatively rock-solid sources can be questionable at times: for example, even though Sair (often incorrectly cited as Hirsch) draws directly from Shrewsbury and even says so, he manages to come up with one or two technologies that mysteriously make no appearance in Shrewsbury, such as his "instep borer": blades were certainly plunged through insteps, but there was never a discrete, screw-operated device that specifically immobilized and so tortured the naked foot.

Game of Thrones
I believe a foot screw was used in the most recent episode of the Game of Thrones season 3. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.197.137.25 (talk) 17:44, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Foot screw
That was not a foot screw per se. Rather, it was a fictitious, ahistorical, and rather hastily concocted prop of uncertain functionality. (In actuality, I don't imagine it had any functionality: its only design requirement was to look convincing!)

Removing unsourced or vastly undersourced material
I've removed unsourced or undersourced material from an editor who seems to have a history of hopping from IP address to IP address to evade blocks, while depositing speculative material that's unsourced, badly sourced, unverifiably sourced, or misleadingly sourced.

Porcsten (talk) 14:52, 4 April 2023 (UTC)