Kid-Friendly Chemo, Ctd

A reader writes:

The Batman logo on the chemo container seems cute and well-intentioned, but the fact is that chemo is such a horrible experience that can linger for years. Many people report feeling nauseous just from driving by the hospital where they got their treatment. So is the Brazilian hospital dooming these kids to feel queasy every time they see Batman’s logo for years to come? Can’t help but wonder.

Another:

Your post on a Brazilian hospital’s attempt to disguise chemotherapy as “superformula” awoke a strong resistance in me that I’m having difficulty fully understanding. I had Leukemia when I was 9-11 years old, so I know a thing or two about chemotherapy, and would say I hate it as much as anyone else. Suffering from cancer as a small child is unlike anything you could ever experience, and I understand the urge from adults to turn these children’s weakness into strength, their internal pain into power. But to do so underestimates the resiliency and stoicism I’ve seen in every childhood cancer sufferer I’ve ever met.

Those who survive deserve to know that they are fighting the greatest enemy they’ll ever face, and that their only ally will hurt them before it helps. They, like me, will leave understanding what true strength feels like and can wake every morning knowing they’ve already faced the worst day of their lives. Those who die – and sadly there are far too many – already know deep down that they are not like the other kids; there is a reason they don’t go home after a treatment cycle.

There is no need to be blunt about their future, but lying to them adds nothing to their quality of life. The three strongest people I’ve ever known never made it to 12 years old; every evening we would say goodbye for the last time, but then every morning we would play like … well, like kids.

I don’t mean to belittle kind-hearted efforts to improve the lives of kids who are facing such a tragedy. It is important to cheer up “cancer kids” (those Pittsburgh window washers you linked to would make anyone’s day). It is important to make them feel like they’re not alone. But pretending that chemotherapy isn’t the worst thing they’ll ever experience? Not only is that a lie that could make it harder for kids to understand what’s happening to them, but it’s a lie that assumes that they can’t handle the truth. They can.

What Makes SVU Special?

Emily Nussbaum ponders the popular appeal of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:

You can pause an episode, you can laugh at a bad guy. The cheesiness (cha-chung!) is itself a reassurance. For young women, who are endlessly bombarded with warnings of how to avoid assault, watching can feel like a perverse training manual. What is it like to be cross-examined about your sex life? Is there any way to foil a home invasion?

For survivors, there may be something validating about seeing one’s worst experiences taken seriously, treated not as the B story but as the main event. But the show also has a strange therapeutic quality for any woman, a ritualistic confrontation with fear: it might upset you to watch one rape story, but it thickens your skin to watch a million. (As Bart Simpson once put it, “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.”) And, of course, the show is also a fantasy about something else, something largely out of reach: an incorruptible legal system, in which the police are eternally in the rape victim’s corner.

Quote For The Day

“I felt I was isolated from what’s happening in the country, and if I was going to advance in life I had to know the society. My parents are not proud of me. The silence is thundering,” – Yehoshua Salant, a 25-year-old father who is in a program to integrate Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox into the working economy.

Will Power Have Power?

Alex Rogers wonders how Samantha Power’s “skepticism of the UN’s effectiveness” will affect her as ambassador:

Despite picking Power, [Obama] may be no more likely to intervene in future cases of genocide, or in current war-torn areas like Syria [than past presidents]. And even if Power got her way, history suggests that a major U.S. humanitarian effort would not start with the UN, as Power has accepted a role in which she believes she has little power. As Laura Secor wrote in the New York Times after the release of “A Problem from Hell,“ “Power appears to have given up on international institutions. She does not argue for empowering them, for liberating them from the narrow interests of the powerful or for altering their terms of engagement in genocidal conflicts. Instead, she presses for the United States to act like something other than the self-interested superpower it is.”

Marc Tracy, pondering why so many UN ambassadors are “people whom even the French would consider intellectuals”, casts Power as the US’ global spokeswoman-in-chief:

The U.N. ambassador has served as an eloquent mouthpiece for American values at the clearest symbol of “the world community” that exists. … Particularly at the U.N.’s lowest moments, where the place seems little more than a collection of schoolchildren squabbling and wasting time, the ambassador’s job is less to get things done and more to forcefully advocate for what the adminstration believes America should stand for. Given how justifiably harsh [Power’s book] “A Problem From Hell” was toward U.S. administrations that looked on as genocides took place, [she] seems like a great choice: she is fierce, she is articulate, and she is decidedly un-diplomatic—and that’s exactly what the job calls for.

I found her acceptance speech rather moving, as a fellow immigrant from Irish stock. Check it out.

Who Is Afraid Of Big Brother?

When you hear lots of rhetoric about Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, it’s worth reminding oneself that its themes are infinitely more dire than our current situation. The danger of the abuse of power is omni-present, but as Matthew Steinglass explains, the Orwellian metaphor is too drastic to explain our present unease:

It’s not the totalitarian fear that an agency that knows exactly where we are and who we’re talking to at all times would find it easier to round us up; we’re not a totalitarian state, and in any case, in modern America, if the police want to arrest you, they’ll be able to find you. The legitimate fear boils down to two things. The first is the possibility of illegitimate pressure based on information we didn’t intend to be made public. Everyone has secrets; everyone has things they’d prefer not be publicly known. … This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when we say “the government”, we are actually referring to huge numbers of different agencies and individuals, each of which have their own interests and will use whatever information resources they get their hands on to pursue those interests.

The second is the fear that a pattern of circumstantial activity will lead us to be falsely incriminated, or to suffer administrative penalties that don’t even require any actual indictment.

In the era of the no-fly list, it’s not clear what set of activities are enough to get you to pop up on somebody’s computer screen at DHS and turn your life into a Kafkaesque hassle-dome. Did you visit Qatar, then Pakistan, then Qatar again? Did you spray-paint artistic graffiti on a sidewalk that turned out to be too close to Dick Cheney’s daughter’s house? We don’t know; our security agencies will never tell us. Giving the NSA a vast database of phone calls, and inviting them to search for correlations that might be predictive of terrorist activity, is likely to generate a massive number of false positives.

John Sides notes that “most Americans do not express much anxiety about domestic surveillance”:

 In a recent article (gated), political scientists Samuel J. Best, Brian S. Krueger, and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz reported the results of a 2007 survey in which they explicitly asked whether Americans were anxious, worried, or scared about “the government monitoring the activities of people like you.”  Only about 30% of Americans said that they were “somewhat” or “very” anxious, worried, or scared.  Best and colleagues note that this is more than some commentators and scholars have suggested.  The question, though, is whether it is “enough” to engender a backlash.  I have not seen comparable questions asked in more recent surveys, but my guess is that there is not a great deal more anxiety.

Many people I admire – from Conor to the Pet Shop Boys – find all this horrifying. I still don’t. Maybe it’s because what’s left of my own privacy was destroyed long ago; maybe it’s because I lived under government surveillance as a non-permanent resident for almost two decades. I had to constantly report where I lived, make sure my visa was always in good standing, and go before all-powerful immigration officials at least every three years. I’m now routinely taken aside for extra interviews whenever I enter the US (I’m told my name is on an Irish terrorist-suspect list, but who knows?) and I had to give the government a sample of my own blood in order to stay here. So apart from my blood, my address, my salary, and almost every detail of my professional and private life, I’ve been a free man. After that, maybe meta-data is never going to terrify me.

Barack and Xi

Anticipating the summit between the two presidents, Osnos predicts “the chances of success this week are high”:

The comparison to Kennedy and Khrushchev can sound melodramatic; the stakes this time are lower in the short term. But they are just as high in the long term. I am optimistic about the chances for success. Both sides know they cannot afford to insult or bully—and neither man is known for it. More importantly, they know that history has been unkind to great powers who fail to come to an accommodation. Neither side wants conflict, but, as of today, neither can exclude the possibility. That is a powerful motivator. “The ultimate question,” Reynolds wrote, “is whether a leader feels that in the last resort he can afford to walk away empty-handed.” The summit in the desert will be the rare case in which neither side can afford to leave empty-handed—or to run the table.

I worry about the Thucydides trap. Stephen Walt is, in contrast, a refreshing glass of iced water:

Neither Obama nor Xi can alter the core interests of the two countries, or wish away the various issues where those interests already conflict or are likely to do so in the future. The best they can achieve is a better understanding of each other’s red lines and resolve and some agreement on those issues where national interests overlap. In this way, each can hope to keep things from getting worse and at the margin make relations a bit warmer. In this sense, personal summitry of the sort being practiced this weekend is the only card either can play.

But even if Obama is successful this weekend, this effort is unlikely to prevent Sino-American rivalry from intensifying in the future. The basic problem is that the two states’ core grand strategies are at odds, and good rapport between these two particular leaders won’t prevent those tensions from re-emerging down the road.

John Cassidy’s perspective:

In the long run … accommodation is the only practical option. China is too big and it’s growing too fast to be contained. By 2016, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development, it will be the world’s biggest economy, and that is only the beginning. Despite a slight slowdown in recent months, China continues to invest heavily in the future. During the next couple of years alone, it is planning to build more than a hundred thousand miles of highways, fifty new airports, and more than five thousand miles of high-speed rail track.

What, then, should Obama do? Despite all the uproar about corporate espionage and hacking, the first thing on his to-do list should be reassuring the Chinese government, and the Chinese people, that the United States seeks coöperation rather than confrontation. As Ross wrote: “The right China policy would assuage, not exploit, Beijing’s anxieties, while protecting U.S. interests in the region.” That doesn’t mean ignoring examples of egregious behavior by Chinese, but it means dealing with them in the right setting. For example, complaints about intellectual property theft can be pursued through the World Trade Organization, which China joined more than a decade ago.

The Inferior Medium? Ctd

Samuel L channels his inner Walter White:

A reader writes:

Here’s a modified version of that Leibovitz rant to show how absurd it is:

In stage narrative, any stage narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to return to the theatre; and whatever’s happening must happen on stage, for this is a visual medium, and a scene of Oedipus brooding in the agora isn’t quite as gratifying as a scene of Oedipus returning with his eyes pecked out. Athenian new technologies, and the gluttonous theatre going habits they’ve created, have given the medium some more room to play, to build, as it were, character. But the primary principles still apply: To keep us amused, a play, any play, has to parade a quick succession of spectacles, far exceeding the scope of thrills and woes that befall any ordinary or extraordinary person in real life. That’s the nature of entertainment.

Yep, that hack Sophocles never amounted to nothin’.

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes me:

But like Ambers, I’m neither shocked nor that outraged. Meta-data is not the content of our phone records.

You’re grossly underestimating the contents and richness of modern metadata. The line between PRISM slide crop“contents” and “metadata” has blurred in the age of mobile, and the government is taking advantage of that. In 1970s and 1980s, when we passed most of our current government privacy laws, phones were dumb, stationary, shared devices that we used several times a day and otherwise left alone. Today’s phones are “smart” personal devices that are turned on and on us all day. They generate a record of a specific individual’s calls. They also create a constant, moment-by-moment record of our movements. And once I have that, I know where you work, I know where you sleep, I know the church you attend and the doctors you visit. I can also make a pretty good guess of whether you’re gay or straight (are you always at 17th and Q on weekends?).  As a few of the articles point out, it appears highly possible that the data authorized by the 215 order includes this kind of location data.

I guess I assumed that was already taking place, and don’t have the visceral reaction many have. I understand the gravity of the worry – and think this should have been an open, discussable program, rather than a super-secret one. With any luck, this new leak – how’s that aggressive plugging of holes going, Mr Holder? – will prompt a review and an update to guard against easy oversight of new modes of communication.

But, sorry, I don’t find such data-mining for national security purposes to be that horrifying. If that’s the price we have to pay for deterring Jihadist attacks, then we should recognize there’s a trade-off. The problem is that we, the public, cannot judge the gravity of those threats and so cannot even weigh the necessity of giving up our privacy. The threat may be far less than we fear. Another reader pushes back even harder:

Metadata is important.

Your phone metadata tells the NSA who your friends are,and which political groups you associate with.  It tells them where you are, within a quarter of a mile, nearly every minute of the day, as it it no doubt includes every time your phone switches from connecting to one cell tower to another, whether or not you make a call.  It tells them who you bank with, and probably where and when you travel.  It tells them where you shop.  And they never delete it.

BTW, you have no real evidence that it doesn’t tell them the contents of your texts or email.  The disclosed document talks about voice calls, but it is likely there are comparable orders in place for text, email and for other carriers, probably including landline providers.  And the “business records” section of the Patriot Act makes no distinction between the contents of communication and the associated meta data.

It sounds to me like the NSA’s request was simply trying to be pragmatic and limit the information vacuumed up to information that could be stored and forwarded easily by the phone company.  The contents of voice communication is probably a bit too large there; even a one minute call at 64Kbits/sec is 480,000 bytes.  But texts are tiny; 140 bytes for a long one. Pragmatically, they could easily be stored and sent to the NSA.

We could ask Verizon if they send the contents of texts to the NSA.  If they don’t/can’t answer, there’s your answer; the law doesn’t seem to require that they lie, simply that they not answer at all if asked.

Another:

I’m pretty shocked by your blasé attitude about the revelation that the government in all likelihood maintains a database of when (and in many cases where) every single US phone call in the last seven years was made, and all the phone numbers involved.

It’s possible that there’s a good case to be made for all of this – but shouldn’t that case have been made first? I’m all for secrecy when it’s necessary for an investigation. But in this case, what could possibly be gained, operationally, from keeping this program a secret?  If the case for wholesale surveillance is so strong as everyone is now belatedly claiming, why were they so afraid to make the case publicly?

I think the answer is fairly obvious: Americans would never stand for it. And that’s a fundamentally illegitimate reason to keep something classified.

If you were wondering where the true scandal of the Obama administration is – the one that really belongs at the president’s feet and nowhere else – it’s here. Even if no laws were broken, and even if this is truly an “indispensable” tool in the fight against terrorism, hiding the existence of something like this for no reason other than to avoid public outrage has no place in a democracy.

On that last point I agree. The only justification for it is the prevention of Jihadist terrorism. Personally, I’m not that troubled by this kind of oversight. But why not debate it openly? It might even gain some support.

On Being “Conservative”

FRANCE-FISHING-ENVIRONMENT-TOURISM-FEATURE

Barro, despite my arguing otherwise, insists that he isn’t a conservative:

I’ve never quite understood Sullivan’s attachment to the term “conservative.” It seems to me that conservatism is whatever ideology is shared by most of the people who call themselves conservatives — roughly, that taxes should be low and non-progressive; that the safety net should be strictly limited and particularly should not include a universal health care guarantee; that more financial risk should be shifted away from the government and toward individuals; that the government should promote some concept of “traditional morality.”

I don’t believe those things and neither does Sullivan, so I’m not a conservative and neither is he. What members of the Whig party favored in England in the 1700s doesn’t enter into the question. I’ve had a lot of similar conversations over the years with libertarians who are upset that the left somehow got control of the term “liberal.” They need to let it go, too.

Here’s why I cling to that word as still meaningful:

I’m a utilitarian, so my first principle is “make people better off.” You could have some alternative set of first principles, perhaps based around protecting a concept of natural rights or a set of religious beliefs. But the justifications we most often hear for conservative economic policies are utilitarian ones — that they foster economic growth, create jobs, and make people wealthier.

Those are empirical claims, and Republicans ought to change their policy prescriptions if they turn out to be false. And my finding is that they have.

But I’m not a neo-liberal utilitarian like Josh (and I use ‘liberal’ there in the classical sense). I totally take his point about the quixotic nature of using that word in America today for anything other than what conservatives call themselves – and his matter-of-factness about that is refreshing. But the tradition I have long studied and thought about is not a conservatism finding solutions to problems. It is about finding solutions to problems you suspect may not be solutions at all, and may be moot once you’ve done your best; it’s about the elusive nature of prudential judgment; the creation of character through culture; the love of what is and what is one’s own; and a non-rational grasp of the times any statesman lives through. It is about a view of the whole that keeps politics in its place. It is, in the end, a way of being contingently in the world.

I could go on – or you can read my best attempt at explaining; (the longer, original version is here). Or you can try this classic [PDF] from the master.

(Photo: A fisherman practices fly fishing in the river Loue near Chenecey-Buillon, eastern France on July 16, 2012.  By Sebastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images.)