“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.

Keying The Pentagon’s Car

Yesterday, a group of hackers calling themselves the “Cyber Caliphate” briefly took over CENTCOM’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and posted pro-ISIS propaganda and anti-US taunts. They also “leaked” some documents that were already available publicly and tried to make it seem as though the US was planning a war with North Korea. Though he acknowledges it’s a decent publicity stunt, P.W. Singer isn’t very impressed:

[S]eizing control of those accounts is the equivalent of controlling a social media megaphone, but not the actual networks that matter to military operations. The networks are civilian controlled and hosted, not Pentagon owned or run. No critical command and control networks were touched, nor, for that matter, were any of the military’s internal or external computer networks that are used to move classified or even run-of-the-mill information.

Fred Kaplan passes along the above XKCD cartoon and shrugs:

Hackers try to launch assaults on Defense Department computers and networks hundreds of times a day. Sometimes they succeed; once in a while, the breach is serious. This one is not.

He nonetheless cautions:

Having a Twitter feed hacked is no big deal, but it indicates that someone was careless with a password or fell for a phishing expedition (i.e., clicked on an email attachment that installed malware); and if doing that exposed Twitter and YouTube to a cyberattack, someone else higher up might get careless with the passwords for a more substantive site.

Classified servers have rarely been hacked by adversaries, at least as far as officials know. (Who knows whether, or how often, they’ve been hacked without detection? The answer is, by nature, unknowable.) But the military runs many “sensitive but unclassified” sites that, if hacked, could reveal vital information about military operations—a particular unit’s travel and logistics plans, the workings of a computer-controlled electrical power grid, the phone numbers and addresses of key officers, and so forth.

The federal government responded to the embarrassment by ordering a security audit for its more than 800 social media managers. By the way, it’s not clear ISIS actually had anything to do yesterday’s prank:

[tweet https://twitter.com/Ali_H_Soufan/status/554699999456423937]

However, as Alex Krasodomski points out, these days “it doesn’t take much to be an Isis member”:

Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four people in Paris and Mountrouge last week, pledged allegiance to the movement while sitting underneath an A4 flag he’d printed out. The hostage taker in Sydney had forgotten his flag, but offered to release a hostage if somebody brought him one. Travelling to Syria or Iraq is no longer a predicate for becoming a terrorist in the Islamic State’s name: all the contacts, material and propaganda that might be associated with planning and carrying out a terrorist attack can be found online.

The hack on @CENTCOM is likely to have fallen in this vein. A ‘lone wolf’, sympathetic to Isis but with no ‘formal’ links carrying the hack out from their bedroom. The internet has brought us all a bit closer. The distance between a wannabe terrorist and extremist content, the distance between a cyberterrorist and their targets, and the distance between their acts and their onlookers.  This is the real threat of #CyberJihad: that anybody can get involved.

Can Romney Pull A Nixon?

Bouie thinks “it’s not crazy for Romney to think that he’s still viable”:

Given 1.8 percent gross domestic product growth in the first seven months of 2012, President Obama was projected to win 51.2 percent of the two-party vote. He won 52 percent, to Romney’s 48 percent.

It’s possible that a stronger, more charismatic Republican could have moved the needle and beat the fundamentals. But I doubt it. A growing economy is like a Power Star for an incumbent president, and barring some other disaster—like a bungled war or serious terrorist attack—there’s little you can do to stop the momentum. And even then, it’s difficult. John Kerry outperformed the fundamentals and still lost the 2004 election. It’s not that he was a bad candidate, it’s that beating an incumbent president is hard.

But, should Romney’s gambit succeed, Aaron Blake points out that Mitt “would be only the second major-party nominee since the 1800s to lose a presidential race and then come back and win one.” Nixon and Grover Cleveland are the exceptions to the rule:

Nixon lost the 1960 popular vote by less than one point, and Cleveland actually won it in 1888, despite losing the Electoral College. In other words, they were near-miss candidates who probably earned another shot, in the eyes of party supporters. Romney’s 2012 loss — at nearly four points overall and the Electoral College 332-206 — while technically one of the closer popular votes in history, wasn’t really regarded as much of a near-miss (by everyone except perhaps the Romney campaign).

Larison is highly skeptical that Romney can follow in Nixon’s footsteps:

Romney fans like to cite Nixon’s example as proof that it is possible for a losing general election candidate to come back later and win, but they don’t try to explain why no one since Nixon has even made the effort. In the last century, it is not unheard of for a party to turn to a losing nominee a second time, but it is still fairly rare for a reason, and that reason is that it is almost always a guarantee of another loss. As it was, Nixon was (barely) able to win in ’68, and he had come much closer in 1960 than Romney did in 2012. He had been Vice President on two landslide-winning tickets, and already had far more relevant political experience before becoming president than Romney will ever have. Such comebacks for losing candidates are possible, but they are extremely difficult even for someone with Nixon’s background. Romney doesn’t have that background or anything like it.

Not From The Onion

Reuters reports:

A prominent Saudi Arabian cleric has whipped up controversy by issuing a religious ruling forbidding the building of snowmen, described them as anti-Islamic. Asked on a religious website if it was permissible for fathers to build snowmen for their children after a snowstorm in the country’s north, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Munajjid replied: “It is not permitted to make a statue out of snow, even by way of play and fun.” Quoting from Muslim scholars, Sheikh Munajjid argued that to build a snowman was to create an image of a human being, an action considered sinful under the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Sunni Islam. “God has given people space to make whatever they want which does not have a soul, including trees, ships, fruits, buildings and so on,” he wrote in his ruling.

Will Europe Repeat America’s Mistakes?

That’s Cassidy’s fear:

Clearly, France needs to beef up security around potential terrorist targets, as well as take a look at its internal security agencies, which failed to keep tabs on three attackers who were known to be supporters of violent jihad. But there’s also a possibility that the French government will overreact, plunging France and other European nations into conflict with the millions of Muslims living in their own countries—something that organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS would love to see, and whose consequences might be disastrous.

From the images of the past few days, it’s plain that last week’s attacks have riled up the French public in a way that is, in some ways, redolent of the aftermath of the U.S. reaction to 9/11. On Sunday, millions of people took to the streets of Paris and other French cities. In addition to holding up signs that read “Je Suis Charlie,” many of the marchers were carrying the French tricolor and singing “La Marseillaise.” This outburst of patriotism was entirely predictable, and, in some ways, it is to be commended. But patriotism blends easily into nationalism, which, in turn, can be used to justify illiberal actions. In a country that has already banned the burka from public places, whose treatment of its immigrant population has long been a blot on its reputation, and where an explicitly anti-immigrant party, the National Front, gained twenty-five per cent of the vote in recent elections to the European Parliament, the potential for a lurch toward oppressive and counterproductive policies cannot be entirely dismissed.

Victoria Turk is concerned by the initial EU response:

Following the terrorist attacks on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the EU has issued a joint st​atement to condemn the act and work to prevent extremism and safeguard freedom of expression. The leaders’ suggestion? More surveillance and internet censorship. …

To suggest that absolutely everything on the internet should be protected—no matter what—would be naive, but it’s not the first time that politicians have tested the limits. In the UK, there has been di​scussion around flagging “extremist” content on YouTube that is deemed “unsavoury” but, crucially, might not break the law.

In France, the crackdown on speech has already begun:

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, generally known by his stage name Dieudonné, posted “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” to his Facebook account in the days after the attack. His message seemed designed to offend: Playing on the #JeSuisCharlie meme, it merged the name “Charle Hebdo” with that of Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages in a kosher supermarket Friday. The post has since been deleted.

The 48-year-old Dieudonné is probably France’s most controversial comedian. His career began in the late 1990s when he worked in a comedy duo with his Jewish friend Élie Semoun. The pair poked fun at racial stereotypes and intolerance, but they fell out as Dieudonné began focusing more and more on France’s Jewish minority after 2002. Since then, Dieudonné’s act has frequently been accused of being anti-Semitic. It has also, however, made him popular.

Adam Chandler also covers the investigation of Dieudonné:

In identifying with both some of the victims and one of the shooters in last week’s attacks, Dieudonné’s statement, according to the prosecutor’s office, was being investigated on the grounds that it was “defending terrorism” rather than committing hate speech. Responding to the development, Dieudonné accused the government of persecuting him by banning his performances and treating him as “public enemy number one.”

Cory Doctorow is more worried about David Cameron’s goal of spying on all forms of communication:

What David Cameron thinks he’s saying is, “We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us.” There are enormous problems with this: There’s no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal—and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They—and not just the security services — will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. He doesn’t understand technology very well, so he doesn’t actually know what he’s asking for.

Friedersdorf questions the security benefits of such a plan:

[I]f Britain improbably succeeded in creating a society where its security services could read anything communicated online, if its citizens bore all the costs in the forms of decreased privacy, inferior technology, and vulnerability to abuses, would the country then be safe from terrorist attacks like the one in Paris? Of course not. Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators didn’t need the Internet to nearly succeed in blowing up parliament (nor were they stopped by signals intelligence). Terrorists will always find methods of communication that are relatively hard to intercept, whether communicating in code online or sending documents via bike messenger or notes via pigeon or through unwitting children.

There is, if all else fails, meeting face-to-face to plan a future murder.

Mitt Doesn’t Know When To Quit

538 candidates

Another Romney run is looking more and more likely. Chait doesn’t buy it. His “reasoning here is that another Romney candidacy would be insane, and Romney is not insane”:

Eight years ago, John Kerry briefly considered another run for president, after also having failed to oust an incumbent despised by his own party’s base and mistaking the outpouring of commitment on his behalf as an expression of personal loyalty, rather than the partisan loyalty it actually was. Soon enough, Kerry came to his senses. Romney will, too.

Allahpundit, on the other hand, takes Mitt seriously:

Romney would surely prefer to see Bush win the nomination than someone more conservative. If he knows in his heart of hearts that he’s not running, he should grit his teeth and encourage Jeb to pile up the dough. The better armed Bush is financially, the better his chances to run the table and snuff the tea-party threat early. Why force him to slow his roll if Ted Cruz will benefit?

Meanwhile, I keep seeing quotes in stories about Romney’s deliberations noting that he’s not impressed with Bush’s political skills, doesn’t believe Bush will have an easier time on his private equity dealings than Romney himself had, and, frankly, may not like Bush all that much personally. … If all of that is true, that Romney legitimately thinks Bush can’t beat Hillary if he’s the nominee, then yeah — suddenly it seems entirely plausible that he’s “likely” to run. Against all odds and logic, he may have convinced himself that he, Mitt Romney, is the very best the GOP can do against the Democrats for two consecutive presidential cycles. That seems to me the strongest explanation for why he’d dare risk splitting the establishment by waging a war of the RINOs against Jeb while Cruz, Paul, and the other righties sit back and laugh.

Philip Klein is befuddled:

Romney may have believed some of the stories that surfaced last year about nostalgia for Romney. But this sentiment on the Right (such as “see, Romney warned about the threat of Russia”) was more about pointing out the failures of Obama’s second term than representative of any newfound love of Romney. Conservatives have not warmed up to Romney. They’ve gone easier on him, because they assumed he was retired from politics and they don’t see the need to continue kicking him. That will change should he run for president again, a prospect that perplexingly is looking more likely.

Bernstein wonders if there’s really any enthusiasm for Bush or Romney:

Republican party actors might be so desperate for a recognizable order to the campaign and familiar names that they will simply flock to Bush or Romney. But it’s at least as likely that real enthusiasm for Romney in particular, and perhaps for Bush as well, doesn’t extend far beyond their relatively small circle of loyalists, and that most party actors — politicians, campaign and governing professionals, donors and activists, party officials and staff, party-aligned interest groups and media — are more than ready to move on. …

What we need now is some reporting about what Republican party actors, especially the ones outside the Bush and Romney orbits, are thinking. While we’ve had indications that some big-money donors want a recognizable candidate right now, it isn’t at all clear how deep that sentiment goes.

Silver, who posts the above chart, sizes up the Republican field:

While Romney could perhaps beat out Bush, whose candidacy hasn’t been received all that well by conservative elites so far, a fresher face like Walker or Rubio could be more problematic. Or if the establishment field became too crowded, it could open up room for a candidate like Paul to win by plurality. Romney’s path is not impossible — after all, Republicans nominated him in 2012. But he faces a tougher sell and a tougher field than he did four years ago.

Waldman doesn’t count out Romney:

[I]f there’s one other thing you can say about Mitt Romney, it’s that he’s persistent. He lost in his first run for office, a Senate race against Ted Kennedy in 1994, then came back eight years later and won a race to become Massachusetts governor. He lost to John McCain in his first run for president in 2008, then came back four years later and got the Republican nomination. So why couldn’t he lose the general election in 2012, then win it all in 2016? To him, it probably makes perfect sense.

Nate Cohn suspects a Romney candidacy could help Rand Paul win an early state:

The odds that Mr. Paul spoils the fortunes of a more traditional candidate increase as more such credible candidates, like Mr. Romney, enter the field. Mr. Romney remains a long shot to win the nomination; it is unclear whether he will even run again. But if he does, and attracts any substantial support among party leaders this year, the odds of a more unusual outcome might increase.

Larison argues along the same lines:

Romney’s most likely supporters are “somewhat conservative” and moderate voters that couldn’t care less about Bush’s immigration and education views, so attacking Bush from the right on these issues will leave them cold and offer them no incentive to prefer Romney to Bush. The good news of a Romney run for the other candidates is that it will siphon away some support from Bush in early states and prevent Bush from gaining much early momentum. That makes a long, drawn-out nomination contest more likely than it would have been if Romney had wisely stayed out of the race. Romney’s ego trip makes it slightly more likely that an insurgent Republican candidate will come away with the nomination for the first time in decades.

And Beutler thinks Romney might have been competitive if things hadn’t started turning around for Obama:

Romney has never been a crusader, and was thus ill suited to the ideological battles of 2012. His best political attribute has always been a reputation for managerial competence. But he cashed in on that virtue at the wrong time, and as such, has legions of supporters, who support him not because he was a successful governor and business man, but because he promised to wrest the country from the clutches of socialism. It’d be untenable for him to pander to that element in a climate of full employment, but it’d be just as untenable for him to step out of sync with his supporters by promising to be a responsible steward of a full-employment economy.

Recent Dish on Mitt’s fledgling campaign here.

Turkey Blames The Victims

Steven Cook is dispirited by the country’s reaction to the terrorist attacks last week:

I find the Turkish leadership’s response to the events in France striking. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu took part in the solidarity rally in Paris on Sunday, but among the near universal denunciation of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and subsequent killings at the Hyper Cache market, the Turkish reaction was disturbingly equivocal. In a public statement after the assault on the magazine, the foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu declared, “Terrorism and all types of Islamophobia perpetuate each other and we stand against this.”

It is hard to disagree. Islamophobia, of which there is much in Europe and the United States, is bad, and terrorism is bad. Both are scourges that need to be fought, albeit in different ways. And while Davutoglu was more direct in his condemnation, cloaked in Cavusoglu’s outrage against anti-Muslim bias and terrorism, the foreign minister was saying something else entirely: The people targeted specifically in the Charlie Hebdo attack were Islamophobes who brought Cherif and Said Kouachi on themselves, producing a cycle of more Islamophobia and thus more violence. More broadly, Cavusoglu was signaling that the West is to blame for terror because it is irredeemably anti-Islam.

Anyone who has been paying careful attention to Turkey understands that the foreign minister’s statement was calibrated and consistent with a message the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been hammering away at for some time. It is hard to tell whether the Turkish leadership believes what they are saying or whether it is invoked as a political strategy to keep the party’s core constituency mobilized. Either way it is dangerous.

Marc Champion points out that “Turkey’s government doesn’t respect freedom of expression for cartoonists, or journalists more broadly, at home”:

Indeed when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, Davutoglu’s boss, then-Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, loudly condemned them for it. He insisted that free speech must have limitations — and cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo clearly breached the lines he would like Europe to draw.

Erdogan prosecutes Turkish cartoonists for much less. As the New York Times recently wrote, Turkey’s president is appealing the acquittal of cartoonist Musa Kart, whom Turkey’s leader sued last year for mocking his suppression of corruption allegations against the government. This is nothing new.

Michael Koplow feels that we are losing the battle of ideas, in Turkey and elsewhere:

A NATO-member country, with massive commercial and defense links to the U.S. and Europe, whose leaders speak English and many of whom have been educated in the U.S. and Europe, should know better. It should know that terrorism against civilians must be condemned full-stop, that drawing offensive cartoons does not mean that you deserve to be killed, that the Mossad did not just engage in a deadly false flag operation, and that no government is killing its own people in order to gin up anti-Muslim sentiment and create a pretext for persecuting its own Muslim population. When it doesn’t seem to know these things, it means we have lost the battle of ideas, and the extremists are winning.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

tumblr_mtceumowjf1qep9dso1_1280

A reader sends the above image: “The art teachers at this school had an enjoyable retort to bathroom graffiti.” Another adds two examples of latrinalia to the long thread:

My personal favorite, from a stall in the University of York in the UK (my alma mater):

There is nothing in life so overrated as a bad shag.
And nothing so underrated as a good shit.

Close runner-up was the handwritten addendum to a sign saying “Please do not throw cigarette butts in the urinals”:

… it makes them soggy and hard to light.

Another:

baconI haven’t seen this one posted yet: In the bathroom I once saw that someone had written notes under the instructions on the hand drier saying “press button … receive bacon.” Looks like it’s a real meme nowadays (see attached image), but I cracked up the first time I saw it.

A dozen more below:

Finally! A thread to which I can possibly add!

My favorite stall in college had two remarks that were stacked on top of one another. The stall scrawls were written in different handwriting:

There’s corn in the my poop
Better than the other way around

Another:

UCSB, circa 1975, inside a stall at the bottom of the door, about 8 inches from the floor: “Beware of limbo dancers.”

Another:

When I was a student, anti-nuclear demonstrations were big. Some sanctimonious person wrote in a stall, “You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms.” Someone thoughtfully replied, “No, but you can prevent them from wetting the bed.”

Another:

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I saw in a bathroom stall in the Math Department’s Eckhart Library the following text written just above the toilet paper dispenser: “U of C diplomas. Take one.”  I laughed then complied.

Another:

Above the urinal in a men’s restroom at a golf course outside a small ranch town: “This is the only place on this course where somebody won’t try to correct your stance or adjust your grip.”

Another sends a brilliant NSFW ad we posted several years ago when it first came out:

I saw this today, and I thought it fit well with the theme. Wait for it!

Another:

Spotted above a urinal in Michigan decades ago and never forgotten (probably because it’s all too true):

No matter how much you shake and dance
The last few drops go down your pants

Another:

I remember this graffiti from back home: “More than three shakes is masturbation.”

Another:

In the men’s room in the library of the University of Amsterdam: “Here I sit and contemplate, do I shit or masturbate?”

Another:

Not graffiti, but a note from the management posted behind the urinals in a restaurant men’s room in Cottage Grove, OR: “We aim to please. Will you aim too, please?”

Another:

I can’t believe I’m adding to this thread, since I’m a 66-year-old grandma now, but here it is: Many years ago I was at a little bar in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, and on the back of the door in the women’s restroom was a glorious big poster of a gorgeous man, bare to the waist, with Levis low on his hips that were unbuttoned down a couple of buttons (and this was in the late ‘60s when such eye candy was very unusual and very provocative).  On the bottom of the poster was written in pencil, “What’s waiting out on the barstool for you?” I’m sure there were a lot of unhappy guys in that bar who couldn’t understand why they just couldn’t score there.

And last but not least:

This bathroom graffiti from a pizza joint in Tallahassee is wonderful:

“Anything will work as a dildo, if you’re brave enough.” – A. Lincoln

What Sets Off Fundamentalists?

Ron E. Hassner ponders the triggers of religious violence:

[W]hat is truly puzzling about fundamentalist wrath is not merely why some fundamentalist Muslims but not others choose to resort to terrorism against cartoonists but why there is no such Islamist terrorism against abortion clinics, for example, a prime concern for Protestant fundamentalists.  For reasons anchored in theology, history and politics, these Christians would never consider reacting with force to a cartoon mocking Jesus just as a cartoon mocking Moses would barely elicit a shrug from a fundamentalist Jew. But fundamentalist Jews riot, and violently so, in response to desecrations of the Sabbath and the unearthing of Jewish remains by archaeologists, two themes that neither their Muslim nor their Christian counterparts have much interest in. …

Why don’t Protestant extremists bomb abortion clinics in Europe?  Why have there been no Muslim riots in response to blasphemous cartoons in the U.S.? We cannot explain why fundamentalists attack without studying religion and we cannot explain when and where they attack without studying politics.  This point is lost both on anti-Muslim voices, who wish to forge an essentialist link between Islam and violence, and on postcolonial activists who strive to place the blame for violence anywhere but on the shoulders of its Islamists perpetrators.

Update from a reader:

I had an enlightening conversation with a Kuwaiti medical student who is on placement at my practice today.

He is studying medicine at Queen’s University in Belfast and would describe himself as a “secular” Muslim, horrified by the events in Paris. Nevertheless he recognises why some followers of Islam, are enraged by the care-free willingness of some non-Muslims to mock things that are fundamental to their beliefs, albeit that he does not support their deeds in any way.

However, our conversation got round to the reasons why some Muslims take up this jihad activity. He knows some who have left his own country but others from Iraq and further afield as well, who have been captivated by Islamic State and motivated almost entirely by revenge. Many of these people have been directly affected by the Iraq wars but other conflicts including Afghanistan have had a significant impact on their apparent conversion from relatively secular, peaceful individuals to radical jihads.
Most have been directly affected with the loss of several family members. The messages and propaganda promoted by I.S. have captured their imagination in a much more effective way than previously occurred with organisations such as Al Qaeda. Most of these men are of similar age (early 20s) to him. He does agree though, that there are many other reasons why young men are joining this organisation too. Whether we agree with these views or not, he is certain that the most recent invasion of Iraq was entirely unjustifiable and today’s events are a direct legacy of this.

Like me though, he also believes that organisations such as I.S. will never be defeated militarily. I come from a part of the world where a 30-year conflict eventually ended after the realisation that dialogue and negotiation were the only way to bring about a (mainly) peaceful situation. The IRA could never defeat the British forces or the determination of the Unionist people, just as the British Forces could never defeat the IRA or the aspirations of Irish Nationalist people. That it took 30 years for all involved to find this out is regrettable but should give us an indication of how long it might be before there is an end to fundamentalist jihad activity and the assumption that Western society can, in some way, dictate to people in Middle Eastern countries how they conduct themselves.

It would seem that the lessons of history are lost on too many who believe that (para)military aggression/intervention and war of whatever nature, represent any hope of solution to the horrors that affect our world today.