December 2014 – Page 7

A Police Department On Edge

Sam Eifling remarks that the NYPD “has behaved like it’s at war since officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were murdered in their patrol car last week”:

A basic principle of good policing holds that officers in the field should seek to de-escalate, rather than intensify, tension and use of force. (Police escalation of force was instrumental in many if not all the recent deaths that have sparked nationwide protests.) Yet thousands of New York’s finest created a political spectacle at Ramos’ funeral Saturday by turning their backs on the mayor during his eulogy. And while it’s [police union head Patrick] Lynch’s job to antagonize the sitting mayor when his union is in protracted contract negotiations with the city, it’s also his job to represent police to the city. Cranking up the heat, especially at funerals, does police no favors. Even NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has started pointing fingers, saying on the “Today” show that the “targeting of these two police officers was a direct spinoff of this issue of these demonstrations.”

Tomasky wants cops to “understand that some criticism of them is legitimate; that not everyone who levels criticisms is a cop-hater; and that in a democratic society, no institution is above criticism and accountability”:

We don’t criticize the armed services much in America these days—this isn’t the early 1970s, with anti-Vietnam protesters cruelly calling legless veterans pigs and so on—but by God, when something goes haywire (Abu Ghraib), at least there are some prosecutions and forced retirements. The CIA spends years getting away with the stuff it gets away with, but eventually, something happens like this month’s Senate report, and with any luck a couple of heads will roll.

These people put their lives on the line for the rest of us, too. It’s not only possible but also right to find the deaths of CIA officers in the field to be tragic while also demanding that they follow the law and international treaties the United States has signed. And it’s possible and right to be sickened both by the murder of those two NYPD cops and by incidents of police violence that seem to have a clear racial element to them. But somehow, it feels like the Army and the CIA, rigid as those institutions can be, are more responsive to democratic accountability than police departments. That’s the reality that needs to change. And in New York, at least, Bratton has to lead the way.

Ilya Somin argues along the same lines:

As A. J. Delgado points out in a recent National Review article, police departments exhibit many of the same pathologies that conservatives rightly decry in other government bureaucracies – including a tendency to avoid accountability like the plague. Just as pointing out the flaws of public schools does not make conservative and libertarian critics “anti-teacher,” so condemning the comparable failings of police departments does not make you “anti-cop.” Both cops and public school teachers are members of valuable professions. But both also often get away with poor performance because of perverse incentives.

But Thomas Knowles, who has “spent the last 39 years working as a Military Investigator, a police officer and then 23 years as an FBI Agent and supervisor,” thinks the focus on cop quality is a mistake:

Yes, bad cops do exist—and they must be held accountable. They deserve the full weight of our criminal justice system brought down upon them.

But I don’t think that’s what this fall’s protests are really about. We’re not talking about bad cops. We’re debating bad policies and broken systems. And too many people are trying to indict the system itself by pretending that the cops are the enemy.

In almost every instance, by the time a cop pulls his or her service weapon and fires, the system has failed. A police officer’s use of lethal force, in almost every instance, isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom of broader challenges and bigger problems. Deadly force, most often, is the end result of a failure—and often many cascading failures—elsewhere in our society leading up to that fatal encounter.

Another Missing Airplane

AirAsia flight QZ8501 is presumed to be “at the bottom of the sea”:

The jet vanished from radar screens on Sunday morning with 162 people on board, as it approached violent weather over the Java Sea about 40 minutes into a two-hour flight between the Indonesian city of Surabaya and Singapore. The plane, an Airbus A320-200 operated by an Indonesian subsidiary of the Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, reportedly requested to deviate from its flight path to avoid a cloud. Moments later, it lost contact with Jakarta air traffic controllers. It did not send a distress signal.

Chris Brummitt contrasts this missing jet with MH370, the Malaysian plane lost earlier this year. Why we have a better chance of finding this one:

Based on data “pings” from Flight 370, authorities believe the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, a vast, deep, isolated stretch of water far from the last known position of the plane. The AirAsia flight was carrying enough fuel for about four hours of flying. Assuming it crashed soon after it dropped off the radar, finding it should be far easier. The Java Sea is a contained body of water, shallow, and crisscrossed by planes and ships. In normal circumstances, a plane leaves wreckage even if it enters the water largely intact. It can take several days for it to be spotted, however. On Jan. 1, 2007, an Indonesian jetliner carrying 102 people went missing on a domestic flight from Surabaya to Manado. A search effort across land and sea turned up nothing until 11 days later, when a fisherman found the plane’s right horizontal stabilizer.

Charlie Campbell passes along “speculation that flying through thunderstorms at high altitude could have caused ice to form on instruments, giving erroneous readings and effecting navigation”:

Similar problems are thought responsible for the ditching in the Atlantic of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009, that killed all 228 people aboard.

However, there are problems with this theory. Firstly, cockpit recordings indicate the Air France crew hadn’t been trained for such circumstances. But ever since, Airbus has put new training in place so that all pilots who fly their aircraft know how to deal with these occurrences. “It’s a new regime,” says [Captain Desmond Ross, an Australia-based aviation expert].

What’s more, the Air France flight was in the dead of night and so the crew only had instruments to rely on. “I don’t even think they had a horizon,” says Ross. It is unlikely such a tragedy would have occurred in daylight conditions such as QZ 8501 experienced.

Essentially, says Ross, “Weather doesn’t cause accidents. Accidents are caused by poor decision-making or other things like malfunctions.”

David Cenciotti also brings up Air France flight 447:

AF447 was an Airbus 330 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris that plummeted 38,000 feet in 3 minutes and 30 seconds and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. In that case, pilots responded to a stall, induced by inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements likely due to pitot tubes being obstructed by ice, by pulling the nose up instead of pushing it down to attempt a recover.

Even though a low Ground Speed can be caused by strong head winds, the fact that nearby Emirates was cruising at 36,000 feet at a speed of 503 knots, seems to suggest that the missing Airbus 320 was probably too slow and closer to the stall speed than it should have been

William Wan likewise focuses on the speed of the plane:

The speed of the airplane will likely be at the forefront of any investigation, said John Cox, a former accident investigator. Radar suggests the plane was flying at a low speed, Cox said. Too slow at certain altitudes will cause an airplane to physically stall with insufficient lift to sustain flight, he said.

Geoffrey Thomas, editor of airlineratings.com, said he reviewed radar data of the flight obtained by other A320 pilots showing the plane at an altitude of 36,300 feet and climbing and traveling at 353 knots or roughly 406 miles per hour — a relatively low speed for that altitude.

Adam Minter can’t believe Malaysia’s bad luck:

[M]any Malaysians are now trying to reckon with the fact that Malaysian-owned carriers will have been involved in the three worst air tragedies of the past year, including Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over the Ukraine. That’s an unlikely status for any country, much less Malaysia, population 30 million, and hardly a global aviation power.

It’s tempting to look for a common thread to explain this inexplicable string of bad aviation luck. But prior to March 2014, Malaysia’s two major carriers had exemplary safety records, and there was absolutely nothing about them to lead an outside observer to believe that they’d lose three jets in nine months.

And Amanda Macias looks back at this year’s aircraft crashes:

If the Indonesian-registered aircraft is confirmed to have crashed, killing all on board, the accident would make 2014 the worst year for loss of life in civil aviation since 2005, when 1,014 people were killed in passenger accidents, according to the Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network.

But the number of fatal accidents in 2014 would stand at only eight, if flight QZ8501 is included, compared with 24 in 2005. This would be the lowest in memory, reflecting the peculiar nature of this year’s disasters.

(Photo: An Indonesian military commander marks the map at the Crisis Center of AirAsia at Juanda Airport on December 29, 2014 in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. By Syaiful Arif/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Don’t Get Caught In The Middle

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton argue that a super-centralized infrastructure is a marker of instability:

The first marker of a fragile state is a concentrated decision-making system. On its face, centralization seems to make governments more efficient and thus more stable. But that stability is an illusion. Apart from in the military—the only sector that needs to be unified into a single structure—centralization contributes to fragility. Although centralization reduces deviations from the norm, making things appear to run more smoothly, it magnifies the consequences of those deviations that do occur. It concentrates turmoil in fewer but more severe episodes, which are disproportionately more harmful than cumulative small variations. In other words, centralization decreases local risks, such as provincial barons pocketing public funds, at the price of increasing systemic risks, such as disastrous national-level reforms. Accordingly, highly centralized states, such as the Soviet Union, are more fragile than decentralized ones, such as Switzerland, which is effectively composed of village-states.

States that centralize power often do so to suppress sectarian tension. That inability to handle diversity, whether political or ethnoreligious, further adds to their fragility.

Although countries that allow their sectarian splits to remain out in the open may seem to experience political turmoil, they are considerably more stable than those that artificially repress those splits, which creates a discontented minority group that brews silently. Iraq, for example, had a Sunni-minority-led regime under Saddam Hussein that repressed the Shiites and the Kurds; the country overshot in the opposite direction after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, took office in 2006 and began excluding the Sunnis. Indeed, research by the scholar Yaneer Bar-Yam has shown that states that have well-defined boundaries separating various ethnic groups experience less violence than those that attempt to integrate them. In other words, people are better next-door neighbors than roommates. Thus, in countries riven by sectarian divides, it makes more sense to give various groups their own fiefdoms than to force them to live under one roof, since the latter arrangement only serves to radicalize the repressed minority.

MFAs Aren’t Worth It, Ctd

In a follow-up to Jerry Saltz’s dismissal of advanced art degrees, Bourree Lam points out the above chart that shows a continued rise in both BFA and MFA degrees:

It’s clear that the cost is not (yet) driving young artists away from getting educated at M.F.A. programs. It might be that no one studies art for the financial returns: Even as auction houses break records—Peter Lik’s photograph “Phantom” just went for $6.5 million—resale royalties for artists in America have yet to be legislated. Then there’s another common saying: that artists don’t need to get rich because they already are rich. Looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Planet Money reported that artists do tend to have wealthier parents.

One piece of the puzzle might be that for those who choose this career path, the act of becoming an artist is an achievement itself that’s worth a lot. A group of sociologists took a look at what it means to be an artist, and wrote this in the conclusion of their study: “Seeing oneself as a professional artist is an achievement that compares to entering other elite status groups.” With artists being only 1.35 percent of the U.S. workforce, it’s a small group indeed.

(Chart via BFAMFAPhD, which captions: “Y-axis shows the number of graduates each year. Height of bar indicates increase or decrease in graduates each year.”)

Seated For Sociability

Christian Jarrett mulls over a finding that students who are assigned to sit in the center of the classroom are more popular than those assigned to sit on the margins:

Why should seating position have these associations with children’s perceptions of their peers? The researchers think two psychological mechanisms are pertinent. Social psychology research on race relations and prejudice finds that the more we interact with other people, the more positive our views of them tend to be. School pupils naturally interact and socialise more with the children located near to them, and so this interaction could encourage more positive perceptions. There is also a psychological phenomenon known as the “mere exposure effect”, which describes how familiarity with something or someone breeds more positive feelings towards them.sdgsdg

[Researchers Yvonne] Van den Berg and [Antonius] Cillessen also conducted a second study with 158 more school children, in which they asked them to rate each others’ popularity, and also to say where they would position themselves and their classmates if they could choose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children said they’d like to sit nearer to their peers who were more liked and more popular. The researchers said this provided an insight into what’s known as the “cycle of popularity” – well-liked and popular children typically attract more social interactions with others, this then reinforces the popular perception that others have of them via the mechanisms mentioned earlier.

The Best Threads Of 2014: “When Does Spanking Become Child Abuse?”

Over the next several days, we’re going to highlight a handful of the best discussion threads that were sparked or driven by your emails this year. Reader threads provide some of the most riveting and valuable content we post on the Dish, and they remind us every day how our readership is unmatched on the web for its wisdom, eloquence, and candor – qualities that are rare to find in any comments section.

Our first thread in the retrospective series – “When Does Spanking Become Child Abuse?” – stemmed from the story of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, who was indicted for beating his four-year-old son with a tree branch (seen here and to the right). The first reader email to emerge was by far the most powerful – “Psychological Suspense That No Child Is Equipped To Manage” – and it opened the floodgates of the in-tray to dozens of other stories of spanking and outright abuse, falling all along the continuum of corporal punishment. Read the whole thread here. Below are many more emails on the topic, aired for the first time:

I wonder how many of your readers who oppose spanking are parents – and what proportion of them have dealt with strong-willed children determined to do what they want, time-outs and rescinded deserts notwithstanding. Beyond this, the number of readers who think a quick jolt to the butt is the equivalent of child abuse astonishes me.

But I suppose it shouldn’t. In a society where sex with an uneasy partner who never actually says no is “rape” – that is, is the very same thing as violent assault and physically coerced sex – we have also broadened the definition of “child abuse” to mean both what Adrian Peterson did, and what the dad who whacked his kid on the butt to keep the boy from running into traffic did. Is grabbing a child’s arm and telling him to stop making a scene in public also child abuse? And who gets to decide these things – a dispassionate system of law, or parents who consider themselves oh-so-enlightened who deign to tell tell the great unwashed that a quick whack on a misbehaving child’s behind is essentially the same thing as burning him with a cigarette or scarring him with a switch?

Another reader puts it well:

I have been following this thread with fascination. A few years ago my wife broke off all contact with her parents, because she had been spanked perhaps 5-10 times by her father until the age of 12. Her mother and father are extremely kind and loving parents otherwise. But my wife feels that those 5-10 spankings constitute abuse, and she will not speak to her parents, or let them see their only grandchild, until they accept that what they did was abuse. They steadfastly refuse.

Now many of your readers may consider this an over-reaction, and that is precisely how her parents feel. But I have been with my wife many years now, and I no longer doubt how deeply wounded she was by what she experienced as an abject humiliation and betrayal of trust. And I see this more clearly as a result of reading the letters you have received on this topic. So I would submit that the answer to the question “When does spanking become abuse” is easily answered: when the child being spanked experiences it that way. And to those who would scoff at that definition, you should consider whether you are willing to bet any future relationship with your child or your child’s family on whether you are right.

Another reader’s story:

I grew up in the South and spanking was “normal” in our household; but my mother and father were never brutish or brutal with us; and never hit us in anger. However, my dad taught me the best lesson on one “spanking” occasion.

I had been told not to drain any oil from our oil tank (I used it to clean paint brushes). Well, I did. My dad noticed the paint brushes in a jar of oil beside the tank. It was clear I had done it. He asked me if I did, and I lied, saying “no.” He knelt down beside me and held my shoulders so he could look into my face; and he asked me several times if I had used the oil, and I always denied doing it. The proof was right there! I was about 10 years old, and even I knew my lie was bald faced and stupid. He finally said to me, “If you tell me the truth, I will not spank you. If you lie to me, I will. Now, did you use the oil from the tank.” Again, I denied that I had. I saw his face go very blank and his stare lengthened. He was thinking. Then he said, “I know you would not lie to me, so I believe you.” I was crushed and shamed beyond belief.

I have never forgotten this. A spanking would have been forgotten immediately. And I never lied to him again.

Treating a child like an adult, once they are able to reason, is a good bet. It’s also good when parents know when this point is. Spanking should never become the fall back mode of communication.

Another:

I was glad to see a reader bring up school-based corporal punishment, as my memories of Bein’ Whooped are almost entirely paddle-based and at the hands of an overly-aggressive junior high P.E. coach.

In my Tampa junior high, the Troubled Teen had two disciplinary choices affectionately known as “Three or Three”: You could take three days of suspension, which went on your permanent record and (worse) alerted your parents, or you could take three licks with the paddle, which did neither of those things. Writing this now, I find a queasy sort of sadism in the nod-and-wink transaction between school and student in this hush-hushed ass-whopping option: “We won’t tell if you won’t, son. So bend over and let me spank that ass,” seems tawdry and a bit sick from a 30-year remove. At the time, facing three days of parental scorn and no TV for a month, it seemed a bargain at twice the price.

That is, unless you get busted for selling black market Jolly Ranchers the week your principal is out of town and his replacement is the world’s most stereotypical gym teacher, with oak tree arms and a Maker’s Mark cask of a chest who had no sense of his own colossal strength.

I should have known something was amiss when my paddling that day required a fucking witness. No joke, the outer lobby secretary had to stand in the coach’s office and watch as I received my paddling, I guess to make sure I wasn’t accidentally beaten to death or crippled from the ass down when Gigantor tucked in. I found this odd and unsettling until the first lick, which did two things simultaneously: Made me forget about everything and everyone in the world save the searing pain across my upper thighs, and dropped me to my knees in a bleating heap of penitence I have never forgotten. I would have done anything, anything, at that moment to save myself the final two-thirds of that beating. And though the coach helped me back to my feet kindly and without bravado, he took his last two licks, each worse than the one before, each a healthy splash of gasoline on a blazing ass-fire.

I had to stand in the outer office for half an hour, clutching the secretary’s desk and blubbering quietly to myself as my knees quivered and my thighs burned, before I could master the art of walking back to class. I wish I could say that was the Spanking That Turned Me Around, the last of my checkered high school career, but alas, I was a recidivist to the end.

My 12-year-old daughter, whose Perfect Precious Snowflakeness I defended to loud shouts of derision in a previous post, has been spanked exactly twice in her life: Once for playing with matches and again for nearly sticking a knife in an electrical outlet. Both were the mistakes you get with a curious mind attached to nimble fingers, so the spanking was meant to shock more than hurt. The house remains standing and she hasn’t yet electrocuted herself, so Bravo, Parent says I!

Another notes regarding the school angle:

Nineteen states still have some form of corporal punishment in schools on the books:

About 200,000 students are disciplined in this way in schools every year, and these students are disproportionately male, black, and often disabled. It seems obvious to me that if we don’t want parents using corporal punishment, we should at minimum be banning it in our public schools.

Another offers some advice:

To the reader who resorted to spanking to prevent his/her son from running in front of cars: while I understand the frustration and worry that must have occurred, I wonder why you never thought of putting your son in reins? It can be effective for little ones. I think there are creative ways to keep your children safe or modify behavior without resorting to spanking.

Another relays some wisdom from Montaigne:

Thought you might be interested in including this passage from Montaigne’s essay, “Of the affection of fathers for their children”:

I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul which is being trained for honor and liberty. There is a sort of servility about rigor and constraint; and I hold that what cannot be done by reason, and by wisdom and tact, is never done by force[…]. Leonor […] is over six years old now, and has never been guided or punished for her childish faults […] by anything but words, and very gentle ones. […] I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.”

And a final reader story touches on the theme of sexual humiliation addressed here:

Thank you for the thread on spanking. The ongoing discussion comes at a critical time for me, as my wife and I are wrangling over how to discipline our daughter, who recently turned three.

I was raised by a single mother after my parents divorced when I was five. Mom went from being the stay-at-home mother of two boys (less than a year apart) to a single parent with an M.D. ex-husband who chafed against the divorce settlement and made our lives very difficult financially.

I know, now, that my mother was depressed when I was a child. She had married my dad right out of college, less out of love than out of the desire not to return to her parents’ dysfunctional home. And now she found herself alone, raising two boys, with little money and no help. It’s a recipe for disaster, but to her credit, my mother managed to get us through it. But did she spank us? Yes, she did.

I’m not writing this to either condemn or excuse my mother’s use of corporal punishment (she had a wooden ruler, or maybe it was a piece of wooden moulding, which came to be known as “the slat”). She didn’t hit us often; “the slat” was more than anything else an omnipresent threat, there to keep us in line. My brother and I would find and hide it whenever mom left it, and us, unattended.

Perhaps ironically, Mom’s wooden enforcer was not involved when things reached critical mass, when I was probably 7-8 years old. I had done something wrong – serious, I’m sure – because Mom announced that she was going to pull down my pants and spank my bare ass. I went into panic-overdrive mode, not at the idea of being spanked, but at the humiliation of Mom attempting to pull down my pants to do it. I struggled, and I lost it, and I hauled off and punched my mother right in the mouth. It was one of those moments you can never forget or take back. We both burst into tears. I didn’t get spanked, ultimately, and I think at that moment we both realized that hitting doesn’t solve anything – it makes everyone feel worse.

I’m 50 now, and my first/only child is a beautiful, intelligent, feisty toddler of three years. It’s difficult to hold back from reacting physically when a toddler is kicking, slapping, and elbowing, typically over mundane issues like bedtime, wanting to watch more TV, or not wanting to go pee pee. I don’t believe that hitting a child is sending the right message, that a three year-old has sufficient self-control to be fully accountable for her actions, or that violence is an acceptable solution or response. My wife disagrees, but has never hit our daughter in front of me.

Last week I picked up my daughter from her preschool, and as I strapped her into her car seat she said to me “Mommy hit me, like this” and slapped herself, hard across the face. My heart broke.

It’s 2014. My wife and I are equal partners in life and in parenting. I can’t tell her how to discipline our daughter. She knows how I feel about it, and I know she feels like I’m too easy on our daughter. She’s only three, for christ’s sake. Wish us luck.

God And The Great Chain Of Being

Toward the beginning of her essay about her complicated religious faith, Ayana Mathis announces that all of her attempts to describe it “begin with theological assertions and devolve into some syrupy business about the cosmos and the presence of God in all things.” She doesn’t give herself enough credit – it’s an elegant attempt well worth reading. A sample of her prose:

A few years before I left the church as a teenager, my mother and I became estranged from my grandparents and aunts and uncles. She and I were a little battalion of two, fighting our way through the world without family or neighborhood or most of the things that bond people to places and to each other. I suppose it could be said that we were impoverished by this circumstance. It is truer to say that ours was simply one in the infinite variety of human experience, with its accompanying difficulties and mercies. For a long time I held onto my unbelonging like a jewel, as though it were the most precious thing I had. And I liked tumbling around the world and sending dispatches to my mother who was, for a very long time, most of what I knew about love.

But it is time, as the saying goes, to put away childish things.

I am not, as I would like to think, hatched from an egg. It has taken me all my life to understand that I am a link in a long chain of fearless and flawed people: my grandparents, now dead; my aunts and uncles; my great-grandparents who came to Philadelphia from the South under harrowing circumstances at the beginning of the twentieth century. Also mine are Bettie Mae Fikes, and the millions who fled the Jim Crow South with nothing but a crumpled address and a few dollars in their pockets, the little children in those old colored schools with handed-down textbooks and more pride and hope than I can conceive of, and the children in the present iterations of those schools in Philadelphia and New York and all across this country. Also mine: Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder and Lauryn Hill. To think that for so many years I refused to turn my head to see these luminous chains of souls, stretching across time and geography, to which I belong. I still turn away frequently. It is difficult for me to cede any bit of my growling individuality. But I have a few family photos, and I have the music I love, to chastise me when I am arrogant and to brace me when I falter.

God is in all of this. I don’t mean the God I encountered at church when I was a girl, the bearded tyrant up in the firmament jerking us around like marionettes. Rather, I believe in the God of the links in the chain of being. This includes ancestry and culture and history, but it extends beyond those particularities into a vast constellation of belonging, which seems to me to be a form of grace, and a bulwark against despair and disconnection. Certainly, it is what I mean by love.

(Photo by Diganta Talukdar)

A Poem From The Year

“To Be Seen” by Jericho Brown:

Forgive me for taking the tone of a preacher.
You understand, a dying man

Must have a point—not that I am
Dying exactly. My doctor tells me I’ll live

Longer than most since I see him
More than most. Of course, he cannot be trusted

Nor can any man
Who promises you life for looking his way. Promises

Come from the chosen: a lunatic,
The whitest dove—those who hear

The voice of God and other old music. I’m not
Chosen. I only have a point like anyone

Paid to bring bad news: a preacher, a soldier,
The doctor. We talk about God

Because we want to speak
In metaphors. My doctor clings to the metaphor

Of war. It’s always the virus
That attacks and the cells that fight or die

Fighting. Hell, I remember him saying the word
Siege when a rash returned. Here

I am dying while
He makes a battle of my body—anything to be seen

When all he really means is to grab me by the chin
And, like God the Father, say through clenched teeth,

Look at me when I’m talking to you.
Your healing is not in my hands, though

I touch as if to make you whole.

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Dish Awards: The Ones You Love To Hate

Hathos is the attraction to something you really can’t stand; it’s the compulsion of revulsion. And according to the voting thus far, this creepy fusion of fat-shaming and evangelism is the second most hathetic moment of 2014:

But still in the lead is Maureen Dowd’s description of what it was like to overdose on edibles:

Then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. And then I wrote a column on Hillary.

Cast your vote for these or any of the other five Hathos Alert finalists here. Once you’ve done that, please consider also voting for the 2014 Malkin Award, Poseur Alert, Yglesias Award, Cool Ad, Face Of The Year, and the year’s best Chart, Mental Health Break and View From Your Window. We’ve now introduced voting for the Map Of The Year and Beard Of The Year as well! Polls will close on New Year’s Eve, so be sure to make your picks before then:

Please note: due to there not being enough nominees this year, we will not be issuing a 2014 Hewitt Award, Moore Award, or Dick Morris Award. You can learn more about those and all our awards here.

Mental Health Break

From pilgrimage to party: