Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing, Ctd

A reader writes:

Thanks for the discussion thread. But as a daughter who endured her father’s suicide when I was 12, I get upset when people like your readers say the act is selfish. My dad suffered from mental illness and depression, and if hanging himself from a bridge brought him relief, I can understand.  One thing that helped me greatly was reading William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Styron was able to describe his depression succinctly and convincingly; I read the book in a few hours and immediately found the forgiveness I guess I needed.

Another:

Like many of your readers, I’ve had up close and personal experiences with suicide – family 499px-Octave_Tassaert-An_Unfortunate_Family_aka_Suicide_1852members, friends, acquaintances, sick, healthy, etc. I have thought repeatedly about doing so myself. I’m part of that 30% for whom SSRIs and other meds don’t seem to work, and talk therapy can only do so much. For me depression is as painful as I imagine a chronic debilitating disease and I have made peace with the fact that it has become the defining issue of my life.

I recently had a heart attack, and must admit that at a certain point I thought I could take advantage of the opportunity and not dial for help. Had the pain been less intense, I might not be writing this to you. I know exactly, without a moment’s hesitation, how much I am loved and how much pain it would cause if I were to follow through. The question for me: Would it cause more pain than me keeling over dead from a heart attack or refusing treatment for an incurable disease or any number of ways life presents us with returning our energy to the universe. Why is that? Why are those deaths socially acceptable?

Another:

I’ve been following your recent thread about suicide with a kind of bemused interest. Barring a bus or car accident or being shot randomly on the street, my death almost certainly will be suicide.

I agree with your commenter several posts ago who received such a violent negative reaction: A right to life is meaningless without the right to choose death. It is for me a matter of when, not if. I cannot imagine not wanting to be proactive about choosing when and how I will die.

My first thoughts about suicide surfaced in my 30s, while I was under therapy. It was the one thing I could not name in the voluminous journals I wrote to my therapist. I could write around it, but I knew that if I named it, he would be legally (as well as professionally and morally) obligated to take action to take away my right, to remove whatever mechanism I had in mind. But still, the power and finality scared me then – especially since I am an atheist, confident that death is an end – full stop. However, even though suicide frightened me then, I was more scared by the possibility of relinquishing the right.

I am now in my 50s, and the idea of my suicide has been a constant companion for more than a decade. I think about it daily and I have grown comfortable with it. Indeed: It is sometimes the only thing that keeps me living, keeps me moving forward.

The last few years have been a difficult struggle. The amount of work it takes to sustain life far exceeds any pleasure to be found in being alive. This is not depression talking; I went through depression in my 30s and came out the other side. This is simply the cold calculation of reality. It takes way too much work just to stay alive for way too little payoff. It is only knowing that staying around to fight another day is a positive choice rather than an obligation that makes staying around bearable.

Another:

Thanks for bringing up the topic of suicide. Discussing it in the public forum helps to alleviate the stigma for those of us who have lost loved ones to suicide. I lost my 21-year-old son three and a half years ago. Like some of your other readers, I’ve done a lot of reading and talking to people since then.

I don’t think of suicide as a selfish act. As one person has told me, “Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds the resources for coping with the pain.” I don’t believe that my son wanted to abandon his family and friends; he loved us deeply. I do believe that he wanted to end the terrible pain he endured.

I also don’t think of suicide as a sign of weakness. To the contrary, it takes a perverted sense of courage to complete the act of suicide. I raised my son to be strong and courageous, and to meet problems head on. I think it was those characteristics that he used … but again, in a perverted use of those usually admirable traits.

I agree with the reader who cited Dr. Thomas Joiner’s work, but with this refinement. Joiner says that the first two elements, perceived burdensomeness and perceived loneliness can come and go; but the third element – the fearlessness of death – is learned and then stays with you forever. And the way one “learns” not to fear death is through habituation to various forms of violence. This explains why combat veterans, police officers, prison guards, and doctors all have a higher rate of suicide than the general population. (And here’s a link to an article that describes interesting research going on at Harvard.)

(Painting: Octave Tassaert‘s An Unfortunate Family aka Suicide 1852, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, via Wikimedia)

Al Qaeda Strikes Back In Iraq – And Syria

Over the weekend, al Qaeda-linked insurgents staged well coordinated attacks on Taji and Abu Ghraib prisons, freeing at many as 500 inmates, including senior al Qaeda members:

Suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives to the gates of the [Abu Ghraib] prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night and blasted their way into the compound, while gunmen attacked guards with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Other militants took up positions near the main road, fighting off security reinforcements sent from Baghdad as several militants wearing suicide vests entered the prison on foot to help free the inmates.

Hayes Brown thinks the consequences go beyond Iraq’s borders:

The sudden influx of a large number of trained fighters and convicted terrorists into Iraq would be a problem even if there wasn’t a civil war next door. Given the ongoing conflict in Syria, however, this could mark a radical shift in how the war proceeds.

While talks of a merger between the two have gone back and forth, AQI and Syrian rebel group Jahbat al-Nusra have been cooperating for months, to the point that the State Department has listed Nusra as a subsidiary of the terrorist group. Aaron Zelin, Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, told ThinkProgress that it will be interesting to see if those who escaped do go to Syria, whether they will bring with them some of their more radical tactics. At present, according to Zelin, there are jihadi groups who provide social services to civilians and perform other acts that could see themselves undermined by an influx of “hardened fighters” captured during the U.S. “surge” in Iraq.

Michael Crowley worries that Iraq is “living on borrowed time”:

“[Al Qaeda’s fighters have] got the wind at their backs from the Syrian rebellion,” where Sunni rebels are fighting an Alawite Shi‘ite regime, says Kenneth Katzman, a Congressional Research Service analyst who recently completed a detailed report on Iraq. “Their goal is to destabilize and bring down the Maliki government, and they think igniting sectarian conflict might accomplish that.”

Sectarian violence in the country has killed at least 2500 people since April. More evidence that nothing – not even the surge – produced anything of any long-term benefit to the US, Iraq or the Middle East. Just carnage and chaos.

900 Million Miles From Home

What the earth looks like from Saturn, courtesy of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft:

N00213962

Robert T. Gonzalez captions:

Earth is the bright, starburst-looking flash of light at the middle of the photo, our moon the speck just down and to the left. From Saturn, our planet is hardly distinguishable as the orb we know and love. That being said, I’d love to see you snap a photo this good from 898,410,414 miles away. And remember, this is a raw, unprocessed image–just one in a huge batch that Cassini beamed down to Earth on Saturday.

Cassini also captured Saturn and Earth in the same frame:

pia17038annotated

(Photos by NASA)

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #163

Screen Shot 2013-07-20 at 11.58.26 AM

A reader writes:

Looooongtime reader, but this is my first VFYW contest entry, so I’m probably wrong. But I’ve taken float planes from downtown Vancouver to beautiful Vancouver Island many times.  The 20 minute trip is a blast, and the picture looks just like the view a couple of minutes after water takeoff, passing over their gorgeous park (named after the same guy as the hockey CUP). So to use the old “Clue” game format, I’m calling it Stanley Park, in Vancouver, from a seaplane.

Another:

Ticonderoga, New York?  Fort Ticonderoga is slightly left of center.

Another:

I approached this VFYW with confidence, armed with the recent pointer from a previous winner: identify bridges. Unfortunately, this view didn’t have any. What it does have is a fort, with an American flag. Now we can narrow the view down to navigable rivers in the United States. The abundance of quaint little churches hints at the Northeast. Perhaps the Hudson or the Susquahanna. The fact that the river seems to be making a 90 degree angle leads me to guess this is where the West Branch and the North Branch of the Susquehanna Merge. If that is the case, this picture was taken from Shikellamy State Park. Wikipedia offers this promising view, which may or may not feature the vista in question. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a fort here. Which means I’m not looking hard enough, or all rivers look the same.

Thanks for a fun Sunday afternoon; this may take over the niche previously occupied by crossword puzzles.

Another:

Is it Vicksburg, Mississippi?  Glad to see the Stars and Stripes flying there again …

Another:

Thanks for giving us an easier one this week. I know it’s easy because I could get it.

The view screamed Northeastern US, especially with what appeared to be a 19th century fort in the foreground. After a little fruitless searching in the Hudson river Valley (Ticonderoga?), a search for New England forts quickly came up with an identical picture. The contest photo was taken from the Observatory built into the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, looking out over Fort Knox, the town of Bucksport, Maine and the Verso Paper Company’s Bucksport Mill. The observatory has three levels, so let’s guess it was taken from the highest level, center window, as the reflections of the windows behind the photographer are on both sides of the frame.

One of these days I’ll get a hard window, and get on the list of people who can win.

Another sends a view from above:

VFYW Maine Bird's Eye Marked2 - Copy

Another reader:

So after a few tough weeks (Ethiopia? Really?), you ratcheted down the difficulty level. This wasn’t a difficult view at all, but I’m pretty sure you chose this one just to blow my mind. I insidementioned a few weeks back in the Portugal contest how bridges are an important part ofviewfinding and that lately I’ve become obsessed with bridges. Well, well, didn’t bridges go notably absent for a few weeks?

And no bridge here, either. But that’s because – wait for it – the view was taken from INSIDE A BRIDGE! This M. Night Shyamalan twist is from the Penobscot Narrows Observatory, a cable-stayed bridge (like Portugal) that boasts the fastest elevator in Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. How fast? Fast enough to get you to the top of the world’s tallest public bridge-observatory in the world in one minute.

What you see once the adrenaline wears off is a rather pretty view of bucolic Bucksport, Maine across the Penobscot River, with the slight eyesore of the Verso paper mill to the left. No doubt your submitter is a VFYW junkie on his way to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park who couldn’t resist the urge to send in a view from an unconventional window.

Another:

Apparently this is the first, tallest and only bridge observatory in the US, and one of only four in VFYW_7-20_Observatorythe world.  The form of the bridge towers were designed to mimic the Washington Monument, as some of the stone used to construct the more famous obelisk was sourced from nearby quarries.  Fort Knox below was constructed following the Aroostook War, which was never really a war, but rather a state of tension between the US and Britain over the boundary with New Brunswick.  Interestingly, one consequence of the diplomatic intervention which forestalled actual warfare in the Aroostook “War” was the establishment of a railroad right-of-way which would eventually become part of the Montreal Maine and Atlantic railway, most recently in the news for the tragic disaster which struck Lac-Megantic, Quebec and spurring on a renewed debate as to the safety of transport of tar sands oil by rail versus long-distance pipelines.

Another sends a video from the observation deck:

Another reader:

Usually I spend about an hour on this contest every week. But today, I am very, very lucky that I opened this week’s VFYW with my girlfriend sitting next to me. She recognized it instantly as the Penobscot Narrows Observatory, overlooking Fort Knox and Bucksport, Maine. (The tower is technically in Prospect, Maine). She drives past the observatory every time she visits her grandparents, who live just a few miles away. She and I are moving in to an apartment together this month, and now I can’t stop imagining The View From Your Window Book as our first coffee table book! Crossing my fingers that we’re the winners!

There are 18 windows total on the north face of the observatory, so I hope the tiebreaker isn’t whoever guesses the exact window. But if I have to guess, I’ll say that the picture was taken from the top floor of the three observatory decks, the easternmost window on the north face of the tower. I found a 360 degree view of the top floor, and the three western windows on the north face are in the stairway area (it looks like an awkward place to take a picture), so I suppose it’s a guessing game between the three eastern windows.

Details from the submitter:

Should be a pretty easy contest. It’s from the highest bridge observatory in the world on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine. I think it’s from the third window from the left on the north side of the observatory, top floor. (The elevator only goes to the floor below so you get a 360˚ view).

Driving back from my first trip to Acadia in way too long, we stopped at the observatory. When it was rebuilt as a cable-stayed bridge in 2007 (after the previous 1930s-era bridge was found to be structurally unsound due to corrosion) it was built with what is now the highest bridge deck observatory in the world. It was totally worth the price of admission to zoom up in an elevator and wander around the observatory watching the river below. Usually, such observatories are found in cities, this is in a rural area with a view of the paper mill and the rolling hills in all directions – all the way back to Cadillac Mountain in Acadia.

When you step out of the elevator you’re only two or three feet from the windows, and you’re told to look first at the horizon to dispel issues of vertigo from looking straight down 420 feet. This reminded my girlfriend of the a story about the rickety old bridge. In high school, her cross country team was going on a trip to Acadia for a training camp. The bus driver got to the bridge and refused to drive across. Not because it had been condemned at that point, but because the driver was afraid to drive across high bridges. He would only cross if someone else drove and he could lie on the floor and not see out. Apparently this was deemed too much of a liability, and the bus took the 30-mile detour to Bangor, where the bridges aren’t quite so high above the river.

By the way, If you need me to vet windows, just email me and I can give thumbs up or downs. I seem to have a knack for submitting VFYW contest photos from observation locations – I submitted Enger Tower in Duluth a few years back. And maybe some day I’ll win a book : )

More than 250 readers entered the contest this week and nearly all of them correctly answered the bridge observatory, making it one of our easiest contests ever.  Since more than a dozen correct guessers of previous contests also guessed the correct window this week, the tiebreaker goes to a long-time correct guesser who has entered at least 20 contests without yet winning:

To use a standard VFYW contest cliche, the church spires in the background “screamed New England.” For once, the screaming was correct. A search for “New England coastal forts” produced Fort Knox (the original Fort Knox, I guess). The nearby bridge observatory is the only place that could produce that view.

One more reader sends “a postcard from 1905 showing the reverse view (of the fort from the town, without the bridge)”:

Fort Knox 1905

(Archive)

Fisking Ray Kelly

Pareene is relentless:

Kelly: From the beginning, we’ve combined this strategy with a proactive policy of engagement. We stop and question individuals about whom we have reasonable suspicion. This is a widely utilized and lawful police tactic, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1968 decision, Terry v. Ohio, and authorized by New York State Criminal Procedure Law and the New York state constitution. Every state in the country has a variant of this statute, as does federal law; it is fundamental to policing.

The “worksheet” officers must fill out after carrying out a stop-and-frisk contains boxes in which police officers can explain what led to the frisking — what the “reasonable suspicion” was, in other words. The single most common reason for a stop in the year 2008 was “furtive movements.” The third-most common was “other.” “Furtive movements” is cited in more than half of the forms reviewed by criminologist Jeffrey Fagan, a plaintiff’s witness in the class-action suit against the NYPD. Fagan, who believes a stop based solely on “furtive movements” is an unconstitutional stop, has calculated that the NYPD has carried out more than 200,000 illegal stop-and-frisks.

Read the whole thing. 400,000 young black men have had their futures ruined by patent racial profiling for petty marijuana possession. End racial profiling (only 11 percent of “stop and frisks” were initiated by a description of an alleged criminal and 88 percent of stops were of innocent people, overwhelmingly men of color, doing something “furtive”). And end Prohibition. Then fight crime.

The Old Media Knives In Nate’s Back

The Signal & The Noise - 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival

I’m not sure the role of public editor at the NYT includes the gossipy reporting of staff envy, resentment and resistance to the emergence of an Internet star in their midst. But Margaret Sullivan sure delivered – and she, at least by her account, was a defender of the 538 blog on the NYT site.

Still, if you wondered how the old-guard of journalism really regards the upstarts of the web, it’s a revealing piece:

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” …

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility…

The Times tried very hard to give him a lot of editorial help and a great platform. It bent over backward to do so, and this, too, disturbed some staff members. It was about to devote a significant number of staff positions to beefing up his presence into its own mini-department.

I’m thrilled Nate got his new gig at ESPN. But it isn’t good news for journalism that the NYT could not really digest his work. In the first place, Nate (who’s become a friend since the Dish first featured his work in the 2008 campaign) is about as real, sweet and modest as anyone can be without turning into mush. His ego is as well concealed as mine sometimes swivels like a Drudge police siren. So personality clashes were almost certainly not an issue – or not Nate-generated.

But fear was: fear that his analysis could render moot some of the horse-race journalism that the NYT still does and does well. It’s a misplaced fear. Campaigns are narratives driven by human beings – no statistical analysis could begin to describe them adequately. There’s no reason the two approaches cannot work together and inform each other. But the pretensions and defensiveness of the old media guard seem to have made that a tough compromise to settle on – to the detriment of NYT readers. And when the top brass actually started spending resources on the upstart, then jealousy took over. What usually happens, ahem, is that the lone blogger attached to a media company gets brought in for traffic, buzz, innovation, etc. and is then promptly ignored, or taken for granted, while the old guard tolerates him or her, and all the actual resources and investment go to the established institutional structure. Institutions tend not to like individuals who can dominate attention in a way others do not. It weakens their sense of control – something that remains in their minds even as it has largely evaporated from the media world.

Jill Abramson rightly, in my view, took a different tack, trying to build 538 into something bigger and worth investing in. But the knives in Nate’s back were too plentiful to remove – and ESPN clearly outbid them and had no bitter dead-enders carping about the newbie. Besides, ESPN had already proven its willingness to invest in one key blogger/writer, Bill Simmons, and create a whole site within a site around him. Marc Tracy listened to an ESPN conference call on the news and talked to Silver directly about the Simmons model:

The calls were most useful for drawing out the shape and ambitions of Silver’s future site, whose model, as he and Skipper said many times, is Bill Simmons’ Grantland. “That Grantland precedent was as close as anything in media,” Silver said. It, too, will be editorially independent, and it will be similarly staffed, at least once FiveThirtyEight is fully staffed up post-relaunch ([ESPN president President John] Skipper pegged Grantland’s staff in “the low dozens”). It was clearly very important to Silver that he did not have to guess whether ESPN could build a Grantland-like site around him—that, instead, ESPN (and ESPN acting under the influence of Skipper) is what built Grantland.

Travis Waldron also considers the Grantland model:

Grantland is an important aspect to the story, since it provides the model for the new FiveThirtyEight. The site has been an unabashed success in the two years since it launched, so it’s no surprise ESPN wanted to duplicate it, and Silver’s site sounds like it will end up as Grantland with more numbers. Silver and Simmons are a lot alike, big names with devoted online followings who will bring traffic and readers and influence, and Silver repeatedly stressed the editorial independence ESPN has given Simmons as important to why he took the job. And while he guaranteed the new FiveThirtyEight would cover sports, politics, and economics, the rest is up in the air and dependent on who he hires, much like Grantland’s beats developed more through the voices that came aboard — think Wesley Morris’ movie reviews and cultural critiques or Jonah Keri’s baseball coverage — than through a specific plan to cover certain aspects of sports.

I thought Nate’s role at the NYT was one real bright spot in the evolution of journalism at the Times. So, it now seems, did plenty of others. And that was the problem. The good news is that the NYT needed Nate much more than he needed them, and what matters is getting an audience to write what you love to write about. At ESPN, he has all the resources he needs and none of the extraordinary resentment and envy so many old-school editors and journalists feel toward the blogstars.

Did I mention how great it is to answer to no-one?

(Photo: Nate Silver, Founder & President of fivethirtyeight.com speaks onstage at The Signal & The Noise during the 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Austin Convention Center on March 10, 2013 in Austin, Texas. By Amy E. Price/Getty Images for SXSW.)

What Went Wrong With The Motor City?

Detroit Abandoned Buildings

Chait, who grew up outside of Detroit, calls the city “the residual wound of the rise and fall of postwar America, the place where the egalitarian economy was born, and it where also died”:

It’s hard to imagine any plausible way to pull the city out of its death spiral. New jobs would help, but there’s nothing compelling the workers who got those jobs to reside in the city. The conventional urban policy solutions never intersected with the reality of Detroit’s crisis. As Ed Glaeser points out, urban renewal centered on furnishing housing and transportation, both of Detroit had in excessive quantities. The city needed better governance and education.

The major renewal project of my youth was the “People Mover.” It was initially conceived as a light rail project to connect the suburbs to the city, a massively expensive undertaking in a huge area with abundant freeways. It shrunk to a small downtown monorail loop. It became a stop on the downtown field trip, for suburban schoolkids — you’d visit the art museum, eat lunch in Greektown, ride a loop on the monorail, and pile back into the schoolbus. The People Mover operates at about 2 percent of its planned capacity. The People Mover is a relic to a time when it was possible to imagine a simple construction project could save the city. The sorts of solutions imaginative reformers contemplate today are vastly more radical.

Ilya Somin, who highlights another misguided Detroit development project, partially blames Detroit’s decline on “the city’s extensive use of eminent domain to transfer property to politically influential private interests”:

For many years, Detroit aggressively used eminent domain to promote “economic development” and “urban renewal.” The most notorious example was the 1981 Poletown case, in which some 4000 people lost their homes, and numerous businesses were forced to move in order to make way for a General Motors factory. As I explained in this article, the Poletown takings – like many other similar condemnations – ended up destroying far more development than they ever created. In his prescient dissent in Poletown, Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Ryan warned that there was no real reason to expect that the project would produce the growth promised by GM and noted that Detroit and the court had “subordinated a constitutional right to private corporate interests.”

Eminent domain abuse certainly wasn’t the only cause of Detroit’s troubles. But the city’s record is a strong argument against oft-heard claims that the use of eminent domain to transfer property to private economic interests is the key to revitalizing economically troubled cities.

(Photo: A tree stump sits among the ruins of the Packard Automotive Plant, a 35 acre site where luxury cars were manufactured until the 1950’s on May 2, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. Sitting on the East side of Detroit, the former automotive plant is now a site for scavengers, urban explorers and graffiti artists. By Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images.)