January 2015 – Page 37

Not Going With The Flow

Reviewing Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Alan Jacobs underscores the way often otherwise helpful technologies can rob us of “flow,” the experience of “total absorption in the task at hand, in which body, mind, and environment seem to cohere into a single gestalt.” Examples include Inuits navigating the snow and ice in traditional ways, and pilots who flew without GPS. Jacobs concludes that Carr raises important points that shouldn’t be dismissed as nostalgia:

Carr wants us to ask what value we place on the loss of opportunities to experience flow—the loss even of opportunities to develop and exercise skills that challenge and reward us. Carr readily admits that these are extraordinarily difficult questions. “How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill? You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone, and even then we may have trouble expressing the losses in concrete terms. But the costs are real.” They are real for the Inuit, they are real for pilots, and they are real for us.

Nicholas Carr is asking us to count those costs, as a prelude to figuring out whether we can minimize them. Scanning through the early reviews of The Glass Cage, I can’t help noticing how deeply reluctant people are even to begin addressing the questions he raises. I have seen Carr called a Luddite (of course), a paranoiac, and even a “scaredy-cat.” And among the leading apostles of automation, Carr has discerned an Orwellian tendency to portray costs as benefits. He notes that “Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that ‘a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.’ But, he hastens to add, ‘it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.'” Ah, that’s better. As Carr wryly notes, “Being freed up sounds a lot more pleasant than being fired.”

Nous Sommes Charlie, But Do We Really Want To Be? Ctd

More reader feedback on this long and comprehensive thread:

Jonah’s Jordanian friend raised the tired and disingenuous claim of freedom of speech never being raised for people convicted of anti-Semitic speech in France, or elsewhere in Europe/the larger West, or hate speech convictions being reserved for Antisemitism. This is such a trope, and is extremely annoying to anyone (I’m a South Asian Muslim) who believes in the absolute right of free speech (or at best, the 1st Amendment/Brandenburg Test), because European nations have a long history of criminalizing anti-Islamic speech or anything deemed too hurtful to Muslims.

Denmark, for example, convicted an ex-Muslim Iranian of being racist against Muslims. The UK routinely convicts people of anti-Muslim tweets or Facebook posts and stupidity, such as a year-long jail sentence or having an anti-Islamic poster in your window. Burning of a book (The Koran/Quran) can land you in jail for 70 days. In the UK. Conviction for anti-Muslim posters or speech or burning of a book is routine across Germany or Belgium or anywhere else in sensitive Europe. A racist joke is criminal in Sweden and a Finnish MP can be convicted of hate speech. The French have convicted Brigitte Bardot more than once for anti-Muslim immigrant and anti-Islamic speech and convictions for anti-Muslim speech are common in France.

Jews and Muslims are very well protected by the speech police in Europe. Any attempts to show the supposed “hypocrisy” of free speech campaigners is disingenuous. European-style hate speech laws are misguided but have protected European Muslims.

Another reader:

RE: the Jordanian friend, isn’t the reason obvious? France was complicit and helped in rounding up and sending Jewish people to execution camps. The legacy of Nazism is why anti-semitism is particularly taboo in Europe. I don’t think Dieudonné should have been jailed, but there are obvious historic reasons why anti-antisemitism is treated differently in Europe than other forms of offensive speech.

Regarding the third Abrahamic religion, another notes that “France banned an ad depicting Jesus as a female because of its ‘intrusion on people’s innermost beliefs.'” Meanwhile, like many others, Kenan Malik rejects the notion that Charlie is racist:

What is really racist is the idea that only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.

What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities. There are hundreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West, and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions; writers, cartoonists, political activists, daily putting their lives on the line in facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms; people like Pakistani cartoonist Sabir Nazar, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, exiled to India after death threats, or the Iranian blogger Soheil Arabi, sentenced to death last year for ‘insulting the Prophet’. What happened in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris was viscerally shocking; but in the non-Western world, those who stand up for their rights face such threats every day.

What nurtures the reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it, is the pusillanimity of many so-called liberals, their unwillingness to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray the progressives within minority communities. On the one hand, this allows Muslim extremists the room to operate. The more that society gives licence for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. And the more deadly they will become in expressing their outrage.

Jörg Heiser also defends Charlie, citing another misconstrued example of their “racism”:

They ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. They took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza. … So how can it be that these editors actually campaigning for the sans papier would be so quickly identified as islamophobic racists? Some of the shocking imagery suggested such an allegation. Take one of the most outrageous examples [seen right]. ‘touchez pas nos allocs’ translates as ‘Don’t touch our welfare allocations!’. The case seems clear: an outrageously racist and sexist depiction of girls abducted by Boko Haram and made sex slaves presented, in racial stereotyping, as grotesquely screaming pregnant women of colour, with a future as ‘welfare queens’ in France. But then I did a few minutes of research and came across this online discussion.

What the contributing users – some French, some American – were saying can be roughly distilled into this: mixing two unrelated events that made the news in France last year – the Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram; the French government announcing welfare benefit cuts – is a double snipe, in classic Hebdo style, at both Boko Haram and those who hold grotesque fantasies and stereotypes about ‘welfare queens’, i.e. the French Far Right and its followers. Many of the covers of the magazine work in this strategy of mimetic parody mixing two seemingly unrelated things to create crude absurdity in order to respond to the crude absurdity of the Le Pen followers (think of the [Steven] Colbert Report done by Southpark, but ten times amplified by France’s tradition of mean, challenging joking, made to grin and bear it, going back to the 17th century ).

Max Fisher draws a good parallel to that controversial cover:

To get a sense of how Charlie Hebdo’s two-layer humor works, recall this 2008 cover from the New Yorker. It portrayed Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, as Muslim. And it portrayed his wife, Michelle Obama, as a rifle-toting militant in the style of the black nationalists of the 1960s. It caused some controversy.

If you saw this cover knowing nothing about the New Yorker or very little about American politics, you would read it as a racist and Islamophobic portrayal of the Obamas, an endorsement of the idea that they are secret black nationalist Muslims. In fact, though, most Americans immediately recognized that the New Yorker was in fact satirizing Republican portrayals of the Obamas, and that the cover was lampooning rather than endorsing that portrayal.

To understand Charlie Hebdo covers, you have to look at them the same way that you look at this New Yorker cover. And you also have to know something about the context of French politics and social issues.

(Photo: A Jewish man holding a placard reading “I’m Ahmed” in English attends the funeral ceremony for Ahmed Merabet, the French policeman killed by the Kouachi brothers in Wednesday’s attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, at Takva Mosque before he is buried at the Muslim Cemetery of Bobigny in Paris, France on January 13, 2015. By Mehmet Kaman/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Face Of The Day

A woman attends a vigil on January 13, 2015 organized by Muslim groups at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to commemorate the victims of the recent terror attacks in Paris. Germany is home to four million Muslims, and many mosques and Muslim associations have been outspoken in condemning the recent terror sprees by Islamic extremists that left 17 people dead, including 10 employees at the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine. By Carsten Koall/Getty Images.

The Dems Get Populist

Khimm has details on their new tax plan:

Under [Maryland Congressman Chris] Van Hollen’s new proposal, working Americans earning up to $100,000 would receive a $1,000 tax credit per individual; working couples earning up to $200,000 could receive up to a $2,000 tax credit. The plan also increases tax credits for child-care expenses, creates a new credit that rewards workers who save for retirement, and reduces the so-called “marriage penalty” for dual-income families.

The $1.2 trillion plan would be paid for through new limits on tax deductions for the top 1% of American households, as well as a 0.1% fee on a broad array of financial transactions. In 2015, the top 1% will have $518,000 or more in adjusted gross income, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Kilgore raises an eyebrow:

[W]e haven’t seen the whole package. But suffice it to say it’s one of the more frankly redistributive proposals coming from anywhere other than the Progressive Caucus in a good while, and the central prominence of the financial transaction tax makes it a direct shot at Wall Street.

Russell Berman admits that, with “the GOP firmly in control of Congress for the next two years, Van Hollen’s proposal has no chance of going anywhere immediately”:

But it lays down a marker for Republicans, who have talked increasingly about wanting to move away from their budget-slashing reputation and toward policies that can win over the prized middle class. And it can also be seen as an offering to Hillary Clinton, who will need a platform to run on in 2016 as well as a way of attracting the liberals who are disappointed that the more populist Warren won’t challenge her. So while it won’t become law, Van Hollen’s plan is likely to help shape the economic debate both in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Sean McElwee and Lenore Palladino focus on the proposed tax on financial transactions:

The small FTT in this bill—which also includes provisions to boost stagnant wages and close lucrative tax loopholes—wouldn’t burden longer-term investors. The tax is applied to every transaction—the sale and purchase of a stock, bond, or other financial instrument—so as long as the investor holds the investment for a decent period of time, the tax is a tiny percentage of their overall portfolio and won’t drastically alter their trading behavior. It’s the high-frequency traders who have fought this tax tooth and nail, and who will gear up to fight it now, because if you trade multiple times a millisecond then your tax burden will be higher.

Jared Bernstein stands up and applauds:

Whether you like [Van Hollen’s] approach here in attacking inequality through the tax code or favor ideas that target market outcomes, what’s so very notable here is that a senior member of the Democrat’s caucus is trying to do something about the relentless inequality that’s beset the middle class and poor for decades.

But Ponnuru brushes off the plan:

[T]he proposal sounds entirely redistributive. Much of it also seems likely to be ineffective. The tax incentive to boost wages does little to combat the powerful forces that have suppressed wage growth in recent years (such as rising health-care costs). The new higher-education policies mostly funnel more money to a system that does a poor job of meeting the needs of middle- and lower-income students.

The elements of the Democratic tax proposal would almost certainly poll well, but Republicans have an obvious counter to it. Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have been working on a plan that cuts taxes on business investment while increasing the tax credit for children. Unlike the Democratic proposal, it seeks to help the economy grow rather than just milk it. And increasing the tax credit for children would benefit a broader range of parents, and give them more freedom over how to spend their money, than increasing the tax credit for child care.

Waldman, on the other hand, thinks the GOP is at a disadvantage:

If we look back at the recent history of presidential campaigns, we see that Republicans win the argument on the economy under three conditions. The first is when there’s a Democrat in the White House and the economy is terrible, as it was in 1980. The second is when there’s a Republican in the White House and the economy is doing well, as it was in 1984 or 1988. And the third is when the economy is doing so-so, but the election turns on an entirely different set of issues, as in 2004 — in other words, when there really isn’t much of a discussion on the economy.

The 2016 election doesn’t look (at the moment anyway) like any of those three. Unless there’s a dramatic change, the economy will be doing well in broad terms like growth and job creation, but voters will want to hear what the parties are going to propose to improve wages, working conditions, and the fortunes of the middle class and those struggling to join it. Winning that argument will be an enormously difficult task for the GOP, and they aren’t off to a promising start.

Cool Ad Watch

There’s need to set loose all those old t-shirts into the wild:

Rewriting The Story Of Selma, Ctd

[D]irector Ava DuVernay may well have taken more license than artistically necessary in the confrontational scenes between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson. But inaccuracies in other significant parts of the film were forced upon DuVernay by copyright law. The film’s numerous scenes of King delivering powerful speeches regarding civil rights all had to be paraphrased, because the MLK estate has already licensed the film rights in those speeches to DreamWorks and Warner Bros., for an MLK biopic Steven Spielberg is slated to produce.

The litigious MLK estate, controlled now by King’s descendants, has a long history of employing copyright to restrict the use of King’s speeches. The estate appears to have two objectives: maximize revenue and control King’s image.

Let freedom ring? King, and now his estate, have the copyright because he was never a government official, in which case his speeches would have been part of the public domain. Also, as Band bemoans, “thanks to aggressive lobbying by publishers, the estates of authors and, more recently, the motion picture studios, Congress has repeatedly extended the copyright term”:

The extensions have always been retroactive, applying to works already in existence. Thus, King’s speeches and other writings will not enter the public domain until 70 years after his death: January 1, 2039. In Congress’ rush to please copyright owners, it has lost sight of the balance the founders intended. A term of protection of “life plus 70” grossly exceeds the economic incentive any author needs to create a work while constraining the ability of new artists to build on the original.

Meanwhile, a reader react to our big roundup on the film:

I believe Yglesias is absolutely right about too many Hollywood movies portraying the “hero” as the white person in the story. But then Hollywood has always been pretty awful when it comes to race (in more recent decades more out of incompetence or fear of alienating white audiences than actual racism). But I also feel Yglesias misses what LBJ defenders are upset about: the persistently inaccurate and sometimes downright malicious portrayal of LBJ himself. So many movies that portray this time period show JFK as a fully enlightened and enthusiastic supporter of Civil Rights and LBJ as a redneck rube. Of course, if one knows the actual history, they would know better, but how many people really know enough about the subject? Isn’t the point of the film to educate people?

This has always been driven, at least in my mind, by prejudice against white Southerners, the (sometimes absurd) deification of JFK, and bitterness over Vietnam. As a fan of LBJ’s domestic accomplishments, this has always driven me nuts. And to see LBJ once again unfairly depicted is aggravating from a movie that I think many of us expected better from. One does not have to make LBJ out to be unsupportive in order to make sure MLK is the real hero of the story. And while artistic license should be granted to movie versions of historical events, perpetuating widely held falsehoods should not be given such leniency.

Hathos Alert

It would probably be a Poseur Alert if not for the sweet beard:

The poseur part is mostly from his Kickstarter page:

Document ME is a 5 year long journey of a ‘selfie-feature-film.” This first ever style and new genre of film documents the character study of the ‘modern renaissance man.’ This film is very important to pop culture and the world at large because it exemplifies innovation in style, story and structure. The first of a new genre of film as both true story docu-reality and fiction that is created in our very characters. This film is a global revolution looking inward at the outward world. This is the first of many to follow in the DOC-U genre. …

The film exemplifies how the cell phone, more so the camera phone, has taken over modern civilization. This film is a social case study into the lens and iris that we all see in and out of. The deeper we look into the lens the more shallow our own ‘selfies’ become and everyone is prone to wanting to break-free of their own lives. This is a perverse and poetic journey through life’s looking glass at the many mask we wear and the many faces of ME.

Bonus demo reel here.

(Hat tip: Tom Hale)

Who Does Torrenting Hurt? Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m a former IP attorney and thought I’d respond to the reader who wrote:

I torrented a bunch of movies last year. 9/10 were terrible. Like really fucking terrible. (Planet of the Apes, I’m looking at you). I’m glad I didn’t pay for them. And I don’t feel bad. Because I wouldn’t have paid to see them otherwise … and certainly not in a movie theater, arguably the worst experience in the Western world apart from commercial air travel.

I’ve heard this argument before, and while I understand the reader’s point, he does miss the larger issue: he DID see the movies, and the people who created them deserve to be compensated as a result. His claim that he wouldn’t otherwise have paid to see them isn’t a particularly good one – like arguing that he would never have bought an SUV so it’s OK that he stole one. That you might regret paying to see the movie is part of the consumption of art.

The generally corollary to this argument is “I didn’t really steal anything since it’s digital and the artist/record company still has possession of it afterwards.” But that’s also true when you swipe a CD from Tower Records; the master recordings are still owned by the same people afterwards. The fact that no physical object has changed hands doesn’t change the fundamental nature of it. You’re still taking something that isn’t yours to take. The only thing that’s changed is the likelihood of being caught.

Ethics is what you do when nobody is watching. Make no mistake – this kind of thing substantially injures artists.

One artist is piiiissed:

As an independent filmmaker who has had most of his films illegally shared on torrent sites, I have heard every excuse you can imagine, including the usual “I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway” bullshit from your “Fuck Hollywood” reader. These people sound like 5-year-olds trying to justify behavior that they know is wrong. It’s stealing, period.

To the torrent apologists, try this:

Get busted for shoplifting, and then tell the police you weren’t going to pay for that stuff anyway. See how that goes over. Or steal cable TV for a while, and when you get caught, complain that you weren’t enjoying most of the shows. I’m sure they’ll let it slide. Or the next time you need plumbing work, tell the guy when he’s done that you won’t pay for it, but you’ll give him “promotion” for his company. See how much he appreciates that.

99% of the people your reader refers to in his “Fuck Hollywood” rant are independent, far-from-rich filmmakers like me, who are just scraping by from film to film. Directors like me, and a whole bunch of blue-collar and middle-class production crew members, ARE “Hollywood.” The less I make on my latest film, the less I can put into the next one, and the less I can pay the people who work on them. I spend YEARS making just one film, and when it comes out, self-entitled pricks are ripping it online for free within days, with a nice “Fuck you” for my efforts.

I’m sorry you had to wait a few months until it was released in exactly your preferred format; were the millions of other download options available then not enough to hold you over? And let’s not pretend the only films getting stolen are the ones that are currently in theaters. I have one film that has been out for years; you can buy it for just $5 in any format you want, any place you want, from Walmart to Amazon. And yet I see torrent users still begging to have it uploaded for them for free. Here’s a crazy notion: If you don’t want to pay for something, then you don’t get to see it. Please stop stealing my work.

As for the question of why the movie/music industry still exists if artists can just sell their stuff directly, a question: and market it how? Do you know how many films, albums, and books are released every single year? Self-distribution and marketing becomes another full-time job, with another huge investment for marketing costs. Most artists can’t do that, and they put time and money into their next film – especially when, you know, people are stealing it.

We asked that reader to plug some of his work:

Sure, you can link to my films:

The Six Degrees of Helter Skelter: America’s Most Horrific Serial Killer

(That’s the older one that I self-distributed at first and found uploaded to torrent sites within days of its release. You can get it for $4 now!)

Lost Airmen of Buchenwald

The Oyler House: Richard Neutra’s Desert Retreat

Thanks again.

Another reader quotes another:

And if you know of an “Industry” exec who would like to make an argument for his continued existence, please let him make his case. I’m listening.

I’m not an industry exec. But I am extremely fond of a British company called Big Finish Productions. They produce audio stories (think of olde time radio plays for modern audiences), based around various properties; most notably Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Dark Shadows and the like. They’re expensive to produce (about 25,000 pounds for a two-hour story, from what I’ve heard), and usually have six to eight actors, plus sound effects, plus original music, plus behind-the-scenes materials.

I’ve talked with several people who work for them. One revealed to me that due to torrenting of Big Finish audios, this person hadn’t received even a single royalty check in fifteen years. Another told me that for every thousand copies or so sold, at least three or four thousand are downloaded. This is a company that has razor-thin profit margins, and had to stop production of at least one series, Sapphire and Steel, because it was being torrented and not purchased.

So while it might not hurt larger companies (which still doesn’t excuse stealing from them), it certainly hurts smaller ones. Bottom line: if you want creative people to produce their products, pay for them.

On that note, subscribe to the Dish here! More of your emails to come; follow the thread here.

Mental Health Break

A dad brings back the ’90s:

“Take Your Medicine” Taken To An Extreme, Ctd

A reader writes an open letter to the Connecticut teen who was just denied her right to refuse cancer treatment:

Dear Cassandra,

I was also diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, when I was 13 years old. I went through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. It sucked. I mean, really, it sucked. At the time, chemo was the worst. I puked for days on end. The word “nausea” doesn’t do it justice. I would puke until there was nothing left in my stomach, and then puke up bitter, foamy, yellow bile, until that ran out. Then I would just dry heave.

One thing no one seems to talk about is that you can actually taste the chemo when it goes into your veins. Or at least I could. I would use cinnamon mints to try to cover the taste. Eventually, the taste of cinnamon candy itself made me nauseous. I couldn’t eat it for years (it still isn’t my favorite). Back then, they used mustargen (I think it is much rarer these days, as there are better, less harmful drugs available). It was nasty stuff. One time, it actually leaked out of my veins, and burned my left arm – literally. It felt like it was on fire for days, and left scars that I can still see (but only because I know they are there – no one else could notice them).

I am talking about this stuff because I don’t want to come off as a Polyanna, like I’m trying to sugar-coat anything. It sucked, and in many ways, still affects me. But, Cassandra, with all due respect, the issue isn’t whether you are “mature enough” to make a decision to end your life. The thing is, you have no idea how much living there is left for you. No teenager does. There is no way to understand it from your vantage point.

And here’s what I really want to tell you:

life is fucking awesome. And I don’t mean in some kind of cinematic, gauzy, sentimental way. It isn’t all peaches and cream – not for anyone. But you will experience pleasures beyond what you can currently comprehend. I promise. I understand that one of your major concerns is that chemo will leave you infertile. It did to me. And I am now the father of two amazing children. Neither of them share my DNA – and I can’t imagine it is possible for any human to love anyone or anything as much as I love these kids. And nothing, absolutely nothing, even comes close to the joy I have already gotten from being their father.

Hopefully, someone had the foresight to freeze some of your eggs, and who knows what technology will make available in the future to increase your likelihood of having biological children. But even if that can’t happen, I will bet everything that you will find that once you are raising children – once you hold your babies in your arms, once you see them smile and laugh for the first time, once you know that nothing can comfort them like your own words and touch, not sharing your genes with them won’t diminish the experience of being a parent even a tiny bit.

But that’s just me. I have always wanted to be a father. Maybe that isn’t the most important thing to you. Here are some other things that you will do:

Laugh with friends

Fall in love.

Make art of some kind.

Dance.

Swim, or run, or jump, or play soccer, or whatever it is you like to do with your body (yes, while Hodgkin’s sucks, it leaves you far more physically capable than a myriad of other ailments).

See new places.

Help someone.

I am more than 30 years older than you. The things I have done, the people I have met, the experiences I have had since I was your age dwarf everything that came before. And I have no idea what is still in store for me. Sure, getting old will suck – even worse than cancer did. But I won’t trade a day of it if it means one less day with my wife, one less picture of my grandchildren, one less day to brag to a nurse about what my daughter is doing in her career, one less laugh at a good joke, one less listen to a great song.

I don’t know if it is right for the government to force you to get treatment that you say you don’t want. That’s a tricky, complicated issue. But, Cassandra, that you are flat-out wrong, that you should do everything you can to fight for the life that you have a fantastic chance to have, is as clear and simple as it gets.

Sincerely,
An Old Fart

Another reader also had the disease:

Back in the ’90s, I had Hodgkins twice, first at 28 and then at 30 (it never really went away, so I had an autologous stem cell transplant). When I was first diagnosed, my doctor literally said, “The good news is you have Hodgkins.” This disease is no longer the death sentence it was decades ago, so it’s sad to see Cassandra’s brain be poisoned by her parents.

I am not a big fan of how cancer patients are presented as “battling” the disease, as it romanticizes it too much and can sometimes make it more frightening than it needs to be. But this girl’s parents need to be properly educated and asked why they would not want their daughter to live a healthy life. That has to be some sort of child abuse, no?

I like to tell friends who ask whether I beat cancer by saying that I only beat it if I die of something else first … which of course means I will never know if I beat it. That is a bummer, but Cassandra will one day be glad she has the same opportunity.

A much different view:

Cassandra is just “misinformed“? My wife had a similar experience to the parent who wrote in about their kid undergoing chemo at five. She was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia when she was four and underwent full-body radiation, several courses of chemo and a bone marrow transplant.

She’s now 34, and her whole life has been an ongoing medical drama – changes to her hair (“Chemo Curls”) and fingernails, tons of minor skin cancers, severe metabolic issues, irregular periods and a pretty horrific miscarriage the one time we managed to get pregnant, followed by early menopause at 29, followed by breast cancer and all the attendant surgeries and follow-ups that involves. She’s had over two dozen surgeries at this point in her life. She is, in my opinion, a minor medical miracle at this point, but nobody would deny that her whole life has been punctuated by intense pain and unimaginable suffering, almost certainly thanks to the cancer treatments she underwent as a child.

This is not to say that she would have been better off without the treatment she received then. She’d be dead if not for modern medicine. But each time it does get harder, her quality of life gets a little worse (not to mention the bills that pile ever higher and deeper), and a little more of her morale is sapped. I dread the day when we have to face it again even more than I did the first time. It doesn’t get easier.

So I guess I can’t really blame Cassandra. I don’t think she’s misinformed by scare stories. Chemo is poison and is a terrible, terrible thing to have to undergo. I feel for her and hope she finds some peace, and hopefully also the ability to forgive the state of Connecticut for trying to save her life.

As poignant as that sentiment is, another reader doubts it:

This is a teenager who’s already employed every evasion tactic she can – including running away – to make her wishes clear. The only thing that can possibly be the outcome of holding her captive and forcing very unpleasant medical treatments on her is that when she turns 18 this year and is able to legally walk away, she will never in her life go near a doctor or mainstream medicine again. I know I wouldn’t.