Author: Andrew Sullivan

Leelah Alcorn’s Last Words, Ctd

Readers react to the suicide note:

The death of Leelah Alcorn is a tragedy.  However, what about the poor driver of the vehicle that killed her? That person is now stuck with the guilt associated with killing someone.  Alcorn may well have been mistreated by family, but committing suicide by foisting it onto an innocent party is not something that should be overlooked. This callous action should be condemned by everyone.

Another:

This has been making the rounds and I check every day for news about the parents’ reactions. I’m not very proud of my own feelings about this.

I want to be angry at parents, to see that they’ve changed their minds and that they have regrets. I want to see that Leelah’s death has shocked them into seeing reality and repentance. What I really want is a morality play.

What an ungenerous and small-minded attitude on my part. Losing a child is an unimaginable horror. Add to this loss the fact that the child has blamed you, perhaps correctly. Add even more that the issue is something you can’t get your mind around; that you’ve spent a lifetime striving toward something you sincerely believe is right and good and that tells you that what your child was telling you couldn’t be true and was even evil. Obviously, too, there was sadly a tremendous amount of fear and shame at work inside these parents.

I guess I’m just left with the sense of what a tragedy this was and is for Leelah and her family, and what an incredibly human story.

Activists are going to get on their soapboxes, and the blogosphere and Twitter are going to light up with condemnation – more grievance politics and demonization of the other and dehumanization of the commentators in this ultimately redeemed human fuckuppery we live in. And maybe that should happen if things are going to change. I do hope Leelah’s death makes a difference, but not at the cost of more suffering for the Alcorns.

Another reader:

The Leelah Alcorn story is so incredibly sad. There have been many great responses to it, especially the #reallivetransadult hashtag and accompanying stories. But what I worry about a bit is that a lot of what I’ve seen kind of misses Leelah’s point, about transitioning early.  It also lets her parents off the hook with the idea that if she had just persevered, then things would have gotten better later on, even if they were being jerks to her.

But being transgender is different from being gay in important ways, especially re: what a tumblr_nh42atfkcv1tddhzxo1_500body does post-puberty.  A gay kid can grow into a gay adult and be very happy with the body that develops naturally. For a transgender kid, often once certain things have happened, there is no going back. While most pictures of Leelah show her posing in that black and white dress (or a similar feminine pose), there are other pictures that show that she had become strong-jawed and broad-shouldered (included); those are physical characteristics that can be kept from developing, but once they’re there, they’re there.

So “it gets better” encourages a wait-and-see approach when for many of these kids; they are going to be stuck with a body they profoundly don’t want unless some active intervention begins fairly early. I do get that this is an incredibly difficult decision for parents, and I wouldn’t wish that decision on anyone.  It’s not something I personally have experienced, but I’ve watched a friend of mine deal with this with her young daughter, who knew she was a girl from very very early on.  My friend has handled it stupendously well, and it’s been a real education for me to observe the process.

The View From Your Obamacare

Some final remaining emails for one of 2014’s best reader threads:

Before Obamacare, I had individual health insurance (I’m a freelance writer) that cost $375 per month and had a $6000 deductible. I also have a bum shoulder, and my physical President Obama Visits Boston To Talk About Health Caretherapist stopped accepting my insurance, so I had to pay him out of pocket. In other words, my expensive insurance was pretty worthless.

When I looked into changing insurance a few years ago, the rates quoted were more than double due to my “pre-existing” condition of a bum shoulder coupled with a recent prescription or two. While I had health insurance, it really provided me with no advantages other than occasionally reducing the amount a doctor was paid. In effect, I had really expensive catastrophic insurance to protect my aging parents’ assets should I suffer some horrible disease that wiped me out financially (and overwhelmed them with guilt).

Now I pay $475 per month with no deductible. I’ve used my health insurance 3-4 times (plus physical therapy) this year, and my physical therapist now accepts my insurance. In fact he makes about $3 more per visit than I was paying out of pocket. The point is that now my savings occur when I use my healthcare. Before, my savings occurred only when I didn’t go to doctors (because I never exceeded my deductible).

This isn’t the sexiest healthcare story out there, but another example of the incremental benefits of Obamacare.

Another:

Thank you so much for giving me a platform to share my Obamacare success story! Well, actually, it’s my brother’s story and it starts about a year ago.

He was 25 and working for a small radio group in Ithaca, NY. He got into a PhD program at IUP and, since he was barely making any money, he decided to quit his job and spend the summer relaxing and traveling and visiting friends before starting school.

Those plans got thwarted when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in June. Three surgeries later, I am happy to say that he is in recovery and doing great, but damn my family would’ve been fucked without Obamacare.

Obamacare let my brother stay on my parents’ insurance, so he was covered when he got his diagnosis. I’m not sure what the costs of his treatment have been exactly, but the bill for just administering the iodine pill he had to take was almost $200,000.00.  When you add all the tests and the three surgeries to that, the costs have got to be close to a million, if not far more.

My family would likely be considered well off, but those costs would’ve bankrupted us. It’s possible that he would’ve been on Cobra without Obamacare, but I think it’s at least equally likely that he would’ve decided to just wait until he could join the school plan because Cobra is so expensive.

At the very least, Obamacare has saved my family from significants costs. And, because he now has a pre-existing condition, it’s the only reason he can buy health insurance and will be able to for the rest of his life.

By the way, my brother purchased his plan on the exchange, before the deadline, and it covers all the doctors he’s been seeing for his treatment. Unfortunately, he doesn’t make enough to get subsidies and PA hasn’t expanded Medicare, so he’s stuck paying the full price. But at less than $150 a month, it’s affordable. And again, at least it’s available.

Another reader:

Count me as another grateful and completely uncounted beneficiary of Obamacare. I work in state government, so my employer health care is about as stable and comprehensive as it gets.

That said, it’s not me I’m worried about; my now-four-year-old son was diagnosed with a tumor growing out of his brain stem in January 2013. The initial MRIs still make me sick to my stomach when I see them – the tumor took up well over 1/3 of the space in the lower portions of his brain, forcing the right side of the brain all the way over to the left. He had three brain surgeries over the span of 10 days and was in the hospital for three weeks. By March 2013, his symptoms were recurring, and a MRI confirmed continued growth. He started chemotherapy immediately, which is still ongoing.

Needless to say, our health insurance has paid for itself many times over. Every day of chemo (which happens once a week) comes with a sticker price of over $6,000. We pay $20. Last year we hit our out-of-pocket maximum for the year by January 7. Our bills would easily be in the 7-figures were it not for insurance.

So why do I thank Obamacare? Three reasons: elimination of lifetime caps (we’d have long since blown past those), under-26 coverage (he can stay on my insurance for two more decades!) and elimination of pre-existing conditions (he can get his own coverage!).Beard

On a somewhat related note, he’ll be done with chemo in 11 days (and 4 hours, but who’s counting?), and it has gone extremely well. His last MRI showed the tumor at the smallest it’s ever been, and strong likelihood that all that is left is scar tissue. He still has his feeding tube, but he’s mostly off oxygen overnight.

When we started this ordeal I shaved my head (he was very excited that we could “match”). I haven’t cut it since, and I also grew out my beard for the first time. I have had to trim that for professional reasons, but it’s all going away soon, so I’ll go ahead and send a picture to unite Obamacare and Beard of the Week (I’ll even throw in a VFYW for good measure!) Thanks for listening.

Thanks for sharing, and great beardage. One more reader:

I’m a farmer, so self-employed, and have been paying for my own Blue Cross-Blue Shield of MN policy since I started farming in 1979. I’ve had a $3K deductible or so all those years, am quite healthy except for wearing out my joints like many farmers, and since my (now former) wife didn’t have benefits, there was never an opportunity to be on a spouse’s plan. This has been a major driver in farm couples’ lives – the spouse who drives many miles for the job with benefits.

I was in a 15-year relationship after my divorce, but we never married or even lived together. My partner worked at Mayo Clinic until recently and had a very good benefits package. I remember one night  7 or 8 years ago she called late and was working on her choices for the plan and said we had until midnight to set me up on her health insurance. Then she called a little later and said since we weren’t married, I wasn’t eligible – unless we were in a same-sex relationship with each other. So I continued to buy my BC/BS plan, and anyway I’m no longer in that relationship.

[Two falls ago] we were busy with harvest until late, due to the weather. I was following the rollout of MinnesotaCare and the problems with the website, plus the national website. I waited for the website to get some of the kinks worked out, knowing I wasn’t eligible for a voucher. I had to turn in crop yield data for the subsidized crop insurance that you and all the other hard-working Americans provide for me, and while at the office my agent asked if I was signed up for health care yet. I said no and he said Blue Cross had a number of plans that were compliant but not on the website. We went over a few in maybe 10 minutes time and came up with three choices, and I left saying I’d call back with my decision. I didn’t get around to it so he called me and I took the middle choice. Same deductible, a few dollars more than I was paying, a little more coverage than I had before. I’m used to a few changes every year anyway and don’t much care about that.

I’ve been getting physical therapy for my right hip since mid-December, and a few weeks ago I learned I need a new one. It’s scheduled for June, after planting season, and with enough time to heal before harvest. Everyone wants to tell me their hip-replacement story now. The one I often think about is Jay Bennett, former member of Wilco, who died of a painkiller overdose. He needed a new hip but didn’t have insurance. He wrecked his hip doing kicks while performing onstage. I wrecked mine carrying pails of pig feed and jumping over gates. But I have insurance, and he didn’t, and I know what that hip pain feels like.

That’s my view from Obamacare.

Maternal Age And IQ

A reader reveals a fascinating angle to the latest round of the Bell Curve debate:

As a black man, I wish the Race vs. IQ debate were not so taboo; I feel that there are many angles to the debate that don’t get addressed due to the highly charged nature of this topic. For instance, how come there are no studies that look at IQ adjusted for the age of the mother?  In my spare time, I scan through census bureau economic data, and some of the analysis I’ve done has me convinced that if any of these IQ researchers actually took the time to adjust test scores for the birth age of the mother, this debate would look entirely different.

There is a strong correlation, across all races, between IQ and birth-age of mother. The birth age of the mother is directly correlated with IQ ranking (Asian>White>Hispanic>Black). Census data also strongly suggests that blacks, who have kids around the same age as white or Asians, do just as well economically. I don’t get why this important information is not even mentioned in the debate.  Instead of debating whether certain races are deficient, we might actually start focusing on the real issues – such as policies to reduce the racial motherhood discrepancy – that we can all agree on.

No, Not All Sex Workers Want To Be Saved, Ctd

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A reader can relate to the title of our post:

When I undertook a photo project on Dominican sex workers, I became friends and a regular client of one of the women I met, and we have kept in touch through WhatsApp.  She went to work in a brothel in St. Maarten on a six-month contract and had a hard time adjusting to being away from home.  Her unhappiness was exacerbated by the limitations on movement imposed by the brothel during the first couple weeks she was there, where she also lived in an upstairs apartment with the other workers.  I was alarmed by the depression she seemed to be sinking into and asked how much it would take to buy out her contract.

She found out and I got the money together, but when it came time to carry out the plan, she asked, “Then what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live and pay for my daughter’s school?”

She decided to stick it out, and things got better.  She’s back in the Dominican Republic with her daughter and parents, able to make enough money to care for herself, her parents, and daughter with fewer but better clients.  (She’s the one mentioned in the interview having a house built for her family.)

Though the women I met in the DR did not elicit the rescue mentality in me, this one woman did for a moment when she was stuck and unhappy in St. Maarten.  But the question that has to be asked before going down that paternalistic path is, then what?  The rescue industry in Cambodia, made famous by Nicholas Kristof and Somaly Mam, appears to be a tool of the low-wage garment industry in that sewing cheap clothes for export to the US and Europe is the alternative offered, but because the garment industry does not provide a living wage, in reality, it is no alternative.

I hope that police officer in the reality show you posted on has something to offer that can match the sex work earnings of the women he tries to rescue.  Otherwise, he’s just offering cheap morality, and that doesn’t pay the bills.

(Photo by Peter Brian Schafer. Learn more about his work here.)

The Business Of Infecting The Web

Andrew Marantz has a fascinating profile of Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old who runs Dose.com (formerly Brainwreck.com). For those of us who care about real journalism, it makes for depressing reading:

Spartz thinks that pathbreaking ideas are overvalued. “If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch—or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people.” Brainwreck’s early posts “leaned more toward originality,” Spartz said—they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”

Marantz sees Spartz as something akin to “a day trader, investing in pieces of content that seem poised to go viral”:

He and his engineers have developed algorithms that scan the Internet for memes with momentum. The content team then acts as arbitrageurs, cosmetically altering the source material and reposting it under what they hope will be a catchier headline. A meme’s success on Imgur, Topsy, or “certain niche subreddits” might indicate a potential viral hit. He added, “The sources and the rules sound simple, but it takes a lot of experimentation to make it actually useful. It’s a lot of indicators weighed against each other, and they’re always changing.” If an image is popular on Reddit but relatively stagnant on Pinterest, for example, Spartz’s algorithm might pass it up in favor of something more likely to appeal to Dose’s audience.

Apparently, Spartz “does not distinguish between quality and virality”:

He uses “effective,” “successful,” and “good” interchangeably. At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

Diet Another Day

Carrie Arnold suggests that weight-based New Year’s resolutions are a lost cause:

With fears about obesity ever present, as well as the West’s intense societal stigma against fat, it makes sense to want to lose weight. What people need to stop and ask, however, is whether it’s realistic to diet and lose weight long term, and whether that will improve health. The answer to both questions, [Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession With Weight—and What We Can Do About It author Harriet] Brown says, is no.

“If you look at the studies, most of them stop after six months, one year, two years,” Brown says. She wanted to know what happened over five years, or even 10, but the scientific literature had little to offer.

The longest study Brown dug up was the Look Ahead Study, which randomized 5,145 adults with diabetes to either an “intensive lifestyle intervention focusing on weight loss” or a control group and then followed them for 13.5 years. After 9.5 years, however, the study was halted. Although the intervention group did lose more weight than the control group (6.0 percent versus 3.5 percent of starting body weight), the researchers found no significant difference in cardiovascular events like heart attack and angina, or in premature death.

Sarah Kliff adds:

[T]here’s actually a tangible risk to failure:

research has shown that people who don’t meet their goals in dieting, for example, become less likely to succeed in future attempts. They seem to build up a narrative in their head that the thing they want to do is impossible. They have, after all, screwed it up before. “Every time we fail, we damage our own self-esteem,” says Janet Polivy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “We make ourselves less able to bounce back the next time. One thing we see is that, when people fail, they don’t blame the diet. They blame themselves. And that makes it hard to start again.”

Meanwhile, Lindsey Averill reflects on the success of her 2012 resolution to find clothes that fit rather than lose weight:

I was a clothes-that-fit badass. And while resolving to buy clothes might seem superficial and ridiculous, it wasn’t. It was amazing. As soon as I tossed my too-tight favorites, I started to forget to be self-conscious in private spaces. In other words, when my jeans were too tight, I could sit alone in my car at a red light – feel the tightness – and be reminded that I thought my body was wrong. Once my clothes fit, the “wrongness” I felt with regards to my body was rarely present unless other people or media made me feel that way.

I’m not trying to oversell this idea – all my problems with my body weren’t magically solved by clothes that fit, but I was loving myself more and I was treating my body like it deserved nice clothes, like it was okay to live and be happy and enjoy fashion at my size. So yeah – a resolution that was about accepting my body was way healthier for me than starting another new diet.

Reality Check

YouGov has a few charts that could qualify:

Assessments of both the economy and of the President continue to have a partisan basis.  Republican approval of the way the President is handling his job barely reaches double digits (12% this week), although in many recent Economist/YouGov Polls, is was below 10%.  And only 35% of independents approve.  But 80% of Democrats do, one of the President’s highest ratings in recent months from his own party’s identifiers.

A similar pattern holds when assessing the state of the economy.  Although 44% of Republicans believe the economy is getting worse, that is much lower than most previous numbers.  A majority of Democrats are optimistic.  Independents are divided.

Palestine Ups The Pressure

Noah Gordon sums up the big news this week:

The Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas signed the papers to join the International Criminal Court a day after it was denied statehood by the UN’s Security Council. The provocative move could draw sanctions from Israel and the United States, as well as expose the Palestinian territories and Israel to an international investigation of war crimes.

Jessica Schulberg’s take on the implications:

Precedent suggests that Palestine’s ascension to the ICC will amount to little more than a symbolic display of sovereignty.

As The Washington Post editorial board noted, the ICC accused Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in 2009. Yet, he continues to rule the country and travel freely. Since its inception in 2002, the ICC has brought a total of 21 cases in eight countries, resulting in only two convictions. Even if the ICC does decide to indict specific Israelis for war crimes, Israel is not party to the Rome Statute and could refuse to surrender its citizens or evidence for trials.

At this point, Palestine had little to lose by joining the court. It comes at a time when international support for Palestinian sovereignty is expanding, as is disillusionment with Israel’s continued occupation. While this decision is in direct defiance of the U.S. (the biggest donor to the United Nations Palestinian Relief Agency), the Americans are unlikely to pull funding.

Keating notes how close the vote was for Palestinian statehood:

This latest Security Council vote was hardly an unambiguous victory for Israel. The U.S. and Australia were the only countries to vote against the resolution. (Australia abstained on the 2012 Assembly vote, but has been more vocally pro-Israel since the election of Prime Minister Tony Abbott last year.) Three of the five permanent members—Russia, China, and France—voted for it. Britain, whose parliament passed a non-binding resolution in support of Palestinian statehood in October, abstained. None of the four EU countries on the council supported Israel’s position (Luxembourg voted for the resolution, and Lithuania abstained), reflecting growing impatience in Europe with Netanyahu’s government. …

Going forward, if the composition of the council is slightly different or the U.S. is slightly less enthusiastic about lobbying on Israel’s behalf, things could easily go very differently and Israel and its primary backer could find themselves even more isolated.

Bernard Avishai thinks Secretary Kerry is misreading the situation over there:

It turned out that Kerry did not have to veto the first resolution, though Abbas may try to reintroduce it in January, when the composition of the Security Council will change to his advantage. Kerry is trying to avoid “doing stupid stuff,” as Obama has often put it. If the nuclear negotiations with Iran finally produce an agreement this winter—even one that opens the country to permanent inspections and greater economic integration—Netanyahu and the Republican Congress can be expected to attack it. Why provide them with more reasons to accuse the Obama Administration of being unfriendly to Israel?

At the same time, Kerry knows that doing nothing to quell the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians may not be shrewd. Jerusalem witnessed escalating acts of violence this year, some with religious overtones, and Kerry saw how the collapse of his mediation effort last spring contributed to the eruption of war in Gaza. So Kerry is asking for a three-month grace period on the second, more significant resolution, in which all sides sweat out the Israeli election results with him.

Gershon Baskin supports the PA’s resolution, for the most part:

My sense is that the Palestinians put down a draft to place a benchmark of their baseline positions – look at what we are demanding. We (the Palestinians) want the world to know that our demands are such and such and that they are reasonable. That is a kind of starting point for the Palestinians, and if their international diplomatic strategy continues, members of the Security Council sympathetic to the Palestinian side may now push for some amendments to that resolution.

For the most part, the resolution is quite good and I see it as a call to the international community to preserve the viability of the two-state solution. I see this as a call to save the State of Israel from the occupation and to enable Israel to break free from its hold over millions of Palestinians. It is most unfortunate that the Palestinians did not wait to bring the draft to a vote, at least until after Israeli elections.