Month: July 2013

A reader asks a “simple question”:

Is it more humane to let the detainees starve to death?

Obviously, in a perfect world, the situation would resolve itself, GTMO would close, and we would all live happily ever after. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. We live in a much more complicated world where there isn’t a simple or elegant solution to this issue. I’ve been to GTMO as a Judge Advocate working on the military commissions. I, too, would like it to close. I really would. But in the meantime, how many men do you let starve to death?

All who wish to do so. If they believe it is the only way to end their torment, what right do we have to prevent them? One reader’s answer:

Perhaps some fellow Dishheads can shed some light on what the pains are associated with long-term starvation, but I have to assume that’s not exactly a pretty picture. What all of this does for me is just crystallize the giant clusterfuck that is Gitmo. We have a number of humans who are being indefinitely detained with no end in sight, which in and of itself is horrible. And the choices appear to be for us to inflict further pain by forcing them to eat, or for us to let them inflict pain on themselves, possibly to the point of a slow horrible death.

When you frame it this way, I would lean slightly toward saying that in the current circumstances, force-feeding is the better choice of two bad options.

Another:

I have followed this thread with some interest and can’t help but point out: this treatment does not meet the dictionary definition of torture.

Torture, as it is commonly defined, is “the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.” That the procedure is deeply unpleasant I have no doubt in my mind, but let’s be clear: I doubt even the soldiers who perform it enjoy seeing the pain and discomfort in the eyes of these prisoners. Nor is it being done to extract information or as a way to “punish” them.

Plenty of acts done by the U.S. government in the past should be labeled torture, including waterboarding, but force-feeding simply does not meet the definition. It is being done for one simple purpose: to keep them alive – hardly a cruel intention.

And as your readers have pointed out, this is a common medical procedure for people with medical problems or people with mental illnesses. Had your thread been titled, “Is force-feeding just in these circumstances?”, I might refrain from speaking, but you’ve put it in such broad terms I can’t help but find your arguments ludicrous.

Supposing these were genuine al-Qaeda members, and they refused to eat until a fellow murdered was freed: would you still label force-feeding them torture? Would you still think it cruel that instead of quietly sitting on their hands as some men starved in front of them – to stand as martyrs for some horrible cause – they saved their lives by intervening?

They have a right to their own bodies. If they do not even have that right, they are slaves, not prisoners.

One of countless complaints from the in-tray:

I am surprised and disappointed by your dismissiveness of the apparently widespread concern among the Dish community about the scrotum-shot as it relates to workplace propriety.  The nannyism of corporate America is clearly not the issue and your mention of it effectively neutralized the “I’m sorry” that preceded it. The potential employment termination of your subscribers, of which I am one, is a very significant concern that I believe you should properly acknowledge.  Otherwise, your characterization of the Dish as a “community” would appear to be fraudulent.

But my point was that it was the nannyism that creates the risk of being fired. I was sympathizing with the victims of this new corporate Puritanism, not dismissing it. Not acquiescing to that kind of censorship is one reason the blogosphere came into existence. But clearly, since this blog is primarily read by people at work, and people’s jobs may be at stake, censorship wins. Another quotes me:

“If bloody corpses are kosher, why not a simple and abstracted view of the human anatomy?” That’s a terrific question that my boss and coworkers are completely uninterested in considering.

Another:

Yes, this is different than pictures of bloody corpses.

Pictures of bloody corpses are a conversation that needs to be elevated. It needs to be discussed, the pictures printed to bring the event to the public’s attention, whether it happens in a remote corner of a far off land or at the finish line of a Boston marathon. It’s uncomfortable, but it needs addressing. We need to know about it to be able to do something about it.

The evolution of the scrotum just doesn’t have the same heft. It’s interesting, but not at all critical. And it doesn’t need the attached photo.

I went into blogging because of the freedom to write and post anything I wanted. But I didn’t go into blogging to get my readers fired. I’m somewhat unsure about the limits of this censorship. Are we allowed to post any pictures of humans in a state of undress? Lots could be erotic or sexual to some. Could this still from a YouTube, for example, get someone fired? Or this photo? Or this one? A lot is in the eye of the beholder, and I’m not sure the office police will make distinctions between photos that “add heft” and those that merely illustrate or, God save us, amuse. But in deference to the readers, this blog will henceforth censor itself in one area: no more non-pornographic, non-sexual depictions of any faintly naughty bits of the actual human body.

We are all Barbie and Ken now.

(Photo: Models dressed the same way as different Ken dolls pose during the press preview day of the International Toy Fair Nuernberg on February 2, 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany. Mattel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Ken doll. 2,683 exhibitors will present their new toy products until February 8, 2011. By Miguel Villagran/Getty Images.)

Sean Dunne’s painkiller-addiction documentary Oxyana, which the Dish spotlighted in April and which won a documentary award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, has left some residents of Oceana, West Virgina, decidedly unimpressed. Local critics have called the film sensational and raised concerns about its accuracy. Alec MacGillis, who agrees that the town has a serious drug problem, says the filmmaker lays it on a bit thick:

[Oxyana] is, as the promotional materials promised, a hellscape, one that little resembles the bedraggled but not blasted town I passed through on my April visit, a typical deep-Appalachian strip with a Bible bookstore and a medical supply shop and a WIC office and car repair shops and a foot and ankle clinic and a sign advertising for foster parents and another identifying the Afghanistan veteran for whom a small bridge has been named and an AT&T outlet store with the Kindle Fire on sale and, yes, a couple of pharmacies.

Conceding that “an AT&T store isn’t exactly material for a documentary film,” MacGillis considers the film’s objective:

Portraying people and places at the outer edge of despair is a fraught enterprise—finding the line between exposing wrong and suffering without wallowing in it. “Oxyana” is, in a sense, the Appalachian version of the ruin porn we’ve become used to from cities like Detroit. To just toss the images out there, one after another, without sufficient context and perspective, as Dunne has done with the broken people he found in Wyoming County, can start to look awfully gratuitous.

More Dish on Oxyana here and here; more on painkillers here and here; and more on ruin porn here, here, and here.

A. Barton Hinkle notes that “both state laws and departmental policies seem to let police officers use deadly force as a first resort against family pets that often present little or no threat.” He wants this to stop:

The Justice Department says not only that “dogs are seldom dangerous” but that even when they are, “the overwhelming majority of dog bites are minor, causing either no injury at all or injuries so minor that no medical care is required.” As Balko writes, “If dangerous dogs are so common, one would expect to find frequent reports of vicious attacks on meter readers, postal workers, firemen, and delivery workers. But according to a spokesman from the United States Postal Service, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are vanishingly rare.”

Yet serious – deadly – attacks against dogs are all too common. They shouldn’t be. And the solutions are obvious: Departmental policies, backed by state law, should require police officers to use lethal force against companion animals only as a last resort. Officers should receive training in safe and non-lethal methods of animal control – and in dog behavior: “An approaching dog is almost always friendly,” according to the Justice Department; “a dog who feels threatened will usually try to keep his distance.”

Recent Dish on cops shooting dogs here and here.

Michael White explains why a cure for cancer has been so elusive:

Cancer genome projects are the latest front in the War on Cancer. The U.S. National Institutes of Health created The Cancer Genome Atlas (whose acronym, TCGA, consists of the abbreviations for each of the four chemical letters in DNA), and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust is assembling the Catalog of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC). The goal of projects like these is to exhaustively map out the genetic terrain of cancer by identifying every mutation in the genomes of tumors from tens of thousands of cancer patients. The hope motivating these projects was that scientists would discover a core set of cancer driver mutations for each type of cancer, mutations that could be targeted with smart drugs.

What researchers have discovered instead is that cancer is a much more fiendishly complicated genetic mess than we ever imagined. Instead of a handful of cancer-causing driver mutations for each cancer type, scientists have found that there are many different genetic paths to the same cancer. Many driver mutations for a particular cancer type occur in less than 20 percent of cancers of that type, which means that drugs targeted at that mutation will only help a minority of patients. A recent review of the subject noted that the COSMIC project has cataloged more than 800,000 mutations, covering nearly every gene in the human genome. The authors of the review suggested that “the cast of genes involved in any single cancer type will be in the neighborhood of 50–100.”