Author: Andrew Sullivan

Lee Siegel suggests that, in the wake of news scandals such as the Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow case, “you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art … has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem”:

There are those events in which something unequivocally bad is claimed to have been done, but we cannot know what actually happened: Farrow and Allen. Then there are those in which we know that something happened but can’t decide if it was bad: Edward Snowden. Finally (though there are countless sub-categories), there are situations in which we know that something unequivocally bad happened, and we know who did it, but, because the law in these situations seems so weak, even perverse, we—society—do not know whether to blame the perpetrator, the victim, or the legal system: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin; the recent shooting over texting in the Florida movie theatre.

The confusion created by these mounting, everyday enigmas is so impenetrable that it is difficult to say whether this trend of being incapable of moral closure is itself good or bad. On the one hand, we are now able to talk about injuries and abuses that were formerly swept under the rug. Twenty years ago, adults who, as children, had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, or were the young victims of Jerry Sandusky, would not have come forward, for fear of being accused of mendacity or mental illness. On the other hand, our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees. As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life. Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period.

Katie J.M. Baker investigates:

“Schools should encourage students to seek treatment. But a lot of policies I see involve excessive use of discipline and involuntary leaves of absence, and they discourage students from asking for the help they need,” says Karen Bower, a private attorney who specializes in disability discrimination cases in higher education. “Ultimately, that makes the campus less safe.”

Two large-scale studies found that around 10 percent of college student respondents had thought about suicide in the past year, but only 1.5 percent admitted to having made a suicide attempt. Combined with data from other studies, that suggests that the odds that a student with suicidal ideation – the medical term for suicidal thoughts – will actually commit suicide are 1,000 to 1. “Thus, policies that impose restrictions on students who manifest suicidal ideation will sweep in 999 students who would not commit suicide for every student who will end his or her life,” Paul S. Appelbaum writes in Law & Psychiatry: “Depressed? Get Out!”

“Colleges don’t want people who are suicidal around, so what’s supposed to happen to them?” says Ira Burnim, legal director of the D.C. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “We’re going to lock them in a bomb shelter?” Kicking students off campus for mental health issues typically does more harm than good by isolating them from their support systems when what they really need is stability and empathy, he says. Moreover, it’s often a completely unnecessary overreaction.

The Dish stumbles upon the Holy Grail:

The changes that THC produces in the gut a process formally known as “microbial translocation,” isn’t as complicated as it sounds. During HIV infection, one of the earliest effects is that the virus spreads rapidly throughout the body and kills a significant part of cells in the gut and intestine. This activity damages the gut in a way that allows the HIV to leak through the cell wall of the intestines and into the bloodstream.

When THC is introduced into this environment, it activates the CB2 receptors in the intestines to build new, healthy bacterial cells that block the virus from leaking through the cell walls. In other words, the body works hard to keep bad stuff in the intestines and the good stuff out.

Put another way: HIV kills the cells that protect the walls— THC brings them back. Reducing the amount of the virus in the lower intestines could then help keep uninfected people uninfected.

Illustrated.

Rhys Southan Bob Comis, who raises pigs for meat, confesses that “no matter how well it’s done, I can’t help but question the killing itself”:

In a well-managed, small-scale slaughterhouse, a pig is more or less casually standing there one second, and the next second it’s unconscious on the ground, and a few seconds after that it’s dead. As far as I can tell — and I’ve seen dozens of pigs killed properly — the pig has no experience of its own death. But I experience the full brunt of that death.

It’s not the sight of blood that troubles me, but the violence of the death throes. Livestock science would assure us that these convulsions are a sign of the pigs’ insensibility, but as a witness, it is almost impossible to believe that the pigs are not thrashing around because they are in pain. And then that sudden lifelessness of the body as it is mechanically hoisted into the air, shackled by a single hind leg. I don’t think anything could be done to make the deaths of the pigs weigh less heavily on me.

I think a lot of animal farmers have the same ethical struggles me, although I’m not sure how many struggle as intensely as I do. I believe this is likely the case with even non-corporate factory farmers. Feeling nothing strikes me as mildly sociopathic.

Update from a reader:

Bob Comis has just followed up with an article in The Dodo. He has taken the next step:

In the current discourse, happy pigs are the ideal alternative to the miserable and abused pigs raised in factory farms. Happy pigs become happy meat, and happy meat is good. We should feel good about eating happy meat.

Happy meat, really? I am haunted by the ghosts of nearly 2,000 happy pigs.

(About a month ago, I had my final crisis of conscience, in a decade of more or less intense crises of conscience. Having abandoned the last vestige of what seemed to be at the time legitimate justification, happiness and a quick, painless death, I became a vegetarian. I am now in the beginning stages of the complicated process of ending my life as a pig farmer.)

Speaking of happy pigs, another reader sends along a video:

Previous Dish on swimming pigs here. One more reader:

I’m a meat eater, I confess. I like meat. That said, I also worked in a slaughterhouse for three years. I don’t think it’s woo-woo to say that I think the people who do the actual killing and dismemberment of animals pay a deep spiritual price. Problem is, in this culture there is no way to process that effectively. Some cultures have a sense of gratitude for the animals and a humility in taking the life of another creature. We don’t. Nowhere is that more pointed than on the slaughterhouse (dis)assembly line. I gave a presentation at a conference a few years ago where I asserted that the line workers carry the psycho-spiritual burden for all of us and particularly for corporate leaders and investors who profit financially. A job shifting more and more to Hispanic immigrants, among those with the least privilege in our culture. I wondered how practices might evolve if executives were expected spend time working the line, both for the sacrificed animals and for the workers. We need a genuine gratitude for both.

Previous Dish on processing livestock here, here, and here.

“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies'” by Robert Hayden:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

(From The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher  1970 by Robert Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Painting of waterlilies by Claude Monet, circa 1915, via Wikimedia Commons)

Scott Bland draws a parallel:

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision to suspend the state’s death penalty Tuesday fits into a national trend. Eight states in the past decade have rolled back the death penalty, an accelerated pace mimicking the rapidly changing public opinion surrounding same-sex marriage that started at the same time. Public opinion over these two cultural wedge issues of the 1990s has changed dramatically since that time. And in blue states, both public opinion and public policy have moved significantly since Bill Clinton said Democrats “should no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent” with capital punishment. (To prove he was tough on crime, Clinton left the campaign trail in 1992 to preside over the execution of convicted murderer Rickey Ray Rector.) Clinton also later signed the Defense of Marriage Act barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages two decades ago. Now, more than 100 million people live in states without the death penalty. …

Support for the death penalty for murders, which peaked at 80 percent in 1994, according to Gallup, has declined markedly since. The last time the polling company measured public opinion, in October, support was down to 60 percent, the lowest mark since the 1970s. While support for capital punishment trends downward, support for same-sex marriage has swung up at about the same rate, from 27 percent in 1996 to 54 percent last year, again according to Gallup.