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A reader writes:

Such a gloomy post! I think there is still reason to be optimistic. The rhetoric of the new Pope suggests religious institutions are not yet completely closed to change. That young evangelicals tend to be less socially conservative is a hopeful situation. It is difficult to see how conflicted countries in the Mideast will build a bridge between fundamentalism and modernity while at the same time transitioning from dictatorships to self government, but the American ills could be corrected with some firm, consistent pushback from rational Republicans to a fundamentalist base. A GOP that sounded more like David Brooks and less like Rush Limbaugh could win. The party is not too far gone to recognize that fact and adjust. A political solution is not yet out of the question, but it can only come from the right.

It would help if the rest of us, not just urban liberals but moderates too, could avoid sounded bigoted when discussing Christianist fundamentalists, but where to begin? When someone is willfully ignorant or cherry-picking history to support their belief system almost any challenge, no matter how carefully worded, can be labeled and dismissed as arrogant or bigoted.

I didn’t mean for the post to be gloomy; just realistic. Any successful resolution will take a generation or two. But we should not underestimate the forces out there. In the US, after being trounced in the last election, the GOP is actually veering even further right in their nihilism and sabotage. There is no figure in that party able to control the forces daily goosed by Ailes et al. It looks as if the fever hasn’t broken but intensified: they are waging war now on every front – from new anti-abortion laws across the country to sabotaging the president’s universal healthcare law, to preventing any functioning executive branch, and to go down screaming on immigration reform. Their bet now is the same bet as 2010: total opposition by all nonviolent means on all fronts, using the midterm elections, where their base turns out more reliably, to ratchet up the effect. It is not getting better. Another reader:

Thinking about your post, I’m struck by how important of a Pope Fransisco Uno may be. Consider his words from a recent Mass:

If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

That’s such a humbly-but-radically different kind of confrontation than I (a blue atheist but also a student of religions) had ever expected from a Pope. Fransisco so far has spoken with a unique and important voice.  I hope it doesn’t fall on deaf ears of the blue or the red.

Another:

I really enjoyed your essay for the way it distilled the principal conflict of our time into a fight over the adaption to modernity. We are all Weberians now. I think Hitchens said it most succinctly in concluding Hitch-22 (I’m paraphrasing without the book handy):

It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.

What I think Hitch meant is that skepticism is the essence of democracy, and that though we must insist upon the abandonment of absolutist pretensions (religious or secular), we must ourselves be unwavering in our commitment to forever question our values and interests.

Between belief and unbelief there is doubt. How we get there, I don’t know.

(Photo: Donna George of Houston, TX, stands and prays during the non-denominational prayer and fasting event, entitled ‘The Response’ at Reliant Stadium August 6, 2011 in Houston, Texas. Thousands attended the event organized by Gov. Rick Perry in order to pray for God to help save ‘a nation in crisis’ referring to America. By Brandon Thibodeaux/Getty Images.)

That’s the lesson Will Wilkinson draws from sequestration:

Of course, the sequester was ill-timed, and has probably hampered America’s economic recovery. That shouldn’t stop us from drawing some general lessons from the experience, though. Meat cleavers work, and they aren’t in practice so indiscriminate as they may seem to be. They focus attention, clarify priorities, and lead to the swift discovery of previously unimagined economies. That the effect of the sequester has been relatively benign so far strikes me as a data-point in favour of relatively inflexible fiscal rules, such as debt-ceilings and balanced-budget amendments, capable of somewhat offsetting the diffuse-cost/concentrated-benefit dynamic that otherwise drives democracies toward imbalance and ruin.

Matt Steinglass counters:

Democracies are driven toward imbalance and ruin? Which democracies does he have in mind?

Democracies are the wealthiest countries on the planet; as a rule, they have better credit ratings than other forms of government. Perhaps democracies do have a tendency to use taxpayer money to reward interested groups, but they seem to do so less than other forms of government, or else to have other built-in advantages that counterbalance this problem, such as stable property regimes, the rule of law, and confidence in the ability to levy taxes to pay back debt, due to the consent of the governed. In some particular democracies, excessive generosity with taxpayer money may be more of a problem than in others, and may retard economic growth; one thinks of high government debt levels in Italy. But Italy’s problems arguably have less to do with government debt than with rigid business patterns, corruption and cronyistic regulations, not to mention low birth rates; and democratic governance has in fact succeeded in getting Italy’s budget back to primary surplus (unwisely so, in the midst of Europe’s recession). In any case, this doesn’t seem to be a problem that afflicts America, which is among the world’s richest nations and has very good growth rates for a developed country.

Micah Cohen discovers that the Florida senator is losing support:

Mr. Rubio led in an average of the first few 2016 Republican primary polls released after the 2012 election, but support for him has faded in more recent 2016 primary surveys. In the four national surveys conducted in January, an average of 20 percent of Republicans said they would support Mr. Rubio for the party’s nomination in 2016. That number dropped to an average of 11 percent in the four primary polls conducted in June.

Rubio is considering sponsoring a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks. Nora Caplan-Bricker sees this as a ploy to win back the far right:

It’s painfully obvious why Rubio might want to spend a few months as the anti-abortion movement’s most visible cheerleader. After supporting a path to citizenship in the immigration bill, the Tea Party golden boy has become, in the words of Sarah Palin and the eyes of many former fans, the contemporary embodiment of Judas Iscariot. By attaching his name to the abortion issue, Rubio can endear himself to miffed conservatives and patch up any vulnerabilities on his right flank. And, he can do it at relatively low risk: Aides to Majority Leader Harry Reid have said he won’t allow the bill to reach the floor, and President Barack Obama has promised to veto the bill if it somehow passes, meaning the whole episode will be ancient history by 2016. As Democratic strategist Maria Cardona told MSNBC, “Any blowback will be early blowback. He will be able to look back in 2016 and say ‘look what I did in 2013’ and he won’t necessarily have to talk a lot about the issue.”

Allahpundit chimes in:

The risk of him stepping on a landmine a la Todd Akin is, or should be, small. If he wants to be the new Great Communicator, there’s no better way to ace the degree-of-difficulty portion of the competition than by taking on abortion.

Lydia Tomkiw reports on a change to Channel 4’s late-night broadcast schedule:

[T]he British broadcaster Channel 4 has announced that it will be airing the call to prayer, or adhan, live every morning throughout Ramadan (an autoplay version will also be available on its website five times daily). … Writing for Britain’s Radio Times magazine, Channel 4’s head of factual programming, Ralph Lee, called the decision “a deliberate ‘provocation’ to all our viewers in the very real sense of the word,” noting that the broadcaster expected to be “criticized for focusing attention on a ‘minority’ religion.” Lee went on to point out that nearly five percent of the country will be participating in Ramadan. “[C]an we say the same of other national events that have received blanket coverage on television such as the Queen’s coronation anniversary?” he asked.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed supports the move:

For Muslims, this is an opportunity to have showcased what is important to them in a nuanced manner. But perhaps more significant is that British Muslim culture and faith is being integrated into and reflected back from mainstream culture. For me, this makes it a turning point.

Jehangir Malik calls it “doubly positive”:

It’s positive for Muslims, of course, for our faith to be taken seriously by a mainstream broadcaster rather than demonized. But it’s also positive for a wider audience to have the opportunity to look beyond media stereotypes and gain a better understanding of mainstream Muslims and our way of life.

James Bloodworth is less enthusiastic:

[Channel Four] actually wants to “provoke” the wrong sorts of people for the purposes of publicity, much like when it made the atrocious decision to broadcast an ‘alternative message by the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–although in the case of the latter it would have been wrong not to be provoked. … Personally, I would like to see a lot less religion on television. But that doesn’t mean I’m the sort of person who is going to be “provoked” by four minutes of Muslim prayer each day for a single week. You should probably worry about anyone who is.

Sam Harris, the avowed atheist, recently wrote, “Despite my antipathy for the doctrine of Islam, I think the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth.” Listen to it above.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder affects 2.2 million American adults. Matt B. reflects on a childhood experience of debilitating indecision over a souvenir T-shirt:

[M]y fixations had grown to the point where Mom offered to drive me back to the restaurant so I could exchange my shirt for the pink one. I had turned her down once or twice before, but things had gotten pretty tumultuous in my head, and I relented. Fine, I thought. Let’s just get this over with. Maybe then I’ll be able to go down to the beach and enjoy things.

When we got to the restaurant, though, my doubts multiplied. I could feel a tension building, a fizzy pressure in my head. I weighed the pros and cons of each shirt: the gray one was more traditionally cool, but the pink was bolder, full of a weird, preppy swagger. Gray wouldn’t turn any heads, but maybe I didn’t want heads turning – maybe I just wanted to get in under the radar. Pink was edgier, but it ran some real risks.

Mom tried to talk me through the decision, telling me to ask myself which one I liked better. She angled her head forward in determination, smacking her hands as if wiping them clean: “Just go with it.”

I knew, at some level, that she was right, that thinking about things this way was tormenting me to no good end. But I couldn’t decide. I didn’t know which one was better. As soon as I leaned in one direction, I felt terrified that I might be missing out on everything the other shirt had to offer. After ten minutes of indecision, I burst into tears.

Mom stayed with me, but I suspect she was more unsettled than she let on. I’m not sure there had ever been an instance like this one, in which my indecision and ambivalence rose to such acutely painful heights. I felt silly sitting there, aware of how privileged and prissy my concerns would look to most people. Here I was, a young boy on a nice beach vacation with his family, with a totally unnecessary T-shirt already in his possession, thrashing about because he thought there might be a slightly nicer one out there.

I was also aware of what I was missing. Everyone else was at the beach, playing or reading or crashing around in the surf. The beach itself was only a small road and a short sand dune away. I didn’t want to be here, but I didn’t know how not to be.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Brian Kellett, a paramedic who in “most cases [is] completely against force-feeding,” nevertheless deems the Mos Def video “propaganda”:

I have placed more NG tubes than I can remember and I have never seen a reaction as strong as that shown in the first video. It certainly isn’t very pleasant to have a NG tube inserted as it tickles the back of the throat that makes you want to gag (or swallow), but it is not this apparent torture that is being shown. An NG tube is inserted in hospitals for a number of reasons, sometimes for surgery, sometimes because a patient cannot swallow. In the first video Yasiin Bey [aka Mos Def] isn’t given water to drink during the procedure, but in many of my patient’s I also couldn’t give them anything to drink to ease the passing of the tube as these patients would have no gag reflex and so giving them water could result in them inhaling rather than swallowing the water. Inhaling water can have side effects that include death.

Yasiin Bey is also shown to be resisting, while the person in the [above] video is complying with instructions. Many of the patients that I passed an NG tube into had some form of confusion, either due to a stroke, due to dementia or due to a multitude of other causes . In some cases I would be passing a tube into the stomach of someone against their will because they had tried to commit suicide and were under a Mental Health Section.

Even in these cases I never saw a reaction as strong as that of Yasiin Bey.

A reader has a very different take:

I have a rare condition called Multiple System Atrophy, which involves a number of progressive diseases/conditions. But of all of the painful things I’ve endured, feeding tubes take the prize.

I first encountered NG tubes in 2002, when after a bout of pancreatitis I found my stomach completely without function. After about a week, the decision was made to insert a nasal tube. I can never forget that experience. Two nurses came to insert the tube. They explained what the process would be, telling me it would be mildly uncomfortable. Undersale of the century. They tried inserting it in the right nostril first. Whether I already had a deviated septum or they caused it with poor technique, they couldn’t get the tube to pass. It turns out they also forgot to apply the numbing agent, meaning I felt every bit of the pressure and pain of the first attempt.

They moved to the left nostril. This time, they remembered the xylocaine or lidocaine, but it really made no difference. It was mildly uncomfortable in the way that the New York Yankees are a recreational baseball team. I have never felt such pain – not even in proctological or urological procedures. Well, maybe it is similar to the urological ones. I felt as if I was drowning as the burning hot sensation passed from my nasal cavity to my throat. I began dry heaving, with the most intense gagging sensation I’d ever felt. The hose didn’t move easily, and the nurses were literally pushing against the resistance with jabbing movements.

Once it was in, it felt like there was a knife in my throat. For days, I was gargling liquid lidocaine to dull the stabbing sensation. The pain was constant and would keep me awake. As my tube was more permanent than the ones being used at Gitmo, I had more issues than are relevant to the discussion. But suffice it to say, there were more issues caused by the tube than I care to remember, and they ultimately had to move me to a surgical feeding tube because of the issues with the NG.

I am in a place right now where I am wasting away. My stomach has no peristaltic function. Two years ago, I weighed 215 pounds. Today, I tip the scales at 125. A 5’10” man in his late thirties, I have the build of a prepubescent boy. My biceps are now smaller than my wrists used to be. But I cannot bring myself to being fed by a tube again, either temporary or permanent. I love my family, and want to spend as much time with them as I’m given, but my wife and I agree that when I was living with a tube, I was not really living; I just wasn’t dead.

I have extremely mixed feelings when it comes to Guantanamo Bay and the hunger strikes. On one hand, Congress has made it almost impossible for the Administration to return those prisoners who are cleared, as the requirement of absolute certainty that those released won’t engage in terrorist acts is not something that can ever be 100% fulfilled. And letting prisoners die would be an absolute disaster, both politically and on a human level. But I also know that forcing a plastic tube up the noses and down the throats of human beings is torturous, if not outright torture. Every politician and military leader who has caused or supports this situation should be forced to endure just one session of restraint and insertion. Until then, it will be seen as just another process issue by the game players in Washington, who are more interested in scoring political points than ending the very real humanitarian crisis that we have created in Cuba.

Update from a reader:

I’ve had a naso-gastric tube inserted twice, each time as part of the treatment for a bowel obstruction. I can confirm what others have said: it ranks up there with the worst things I’ve ever experienced. That said, my reaction was nothing like Yasiin Bey, in no small part because the thing I was being treated for was a bowel obstruction (and its subsequent complication, pancreatitis), which is also on the list of the worst things I’ve ever experienced, and which I was willing to endure almost anything to alleviate, up until the tube went in and the gag reflexes and pain from the plastic tube chafing against my nasal passage and throat started. Yasiin Bey seemed to exhibit none of the gag reflexes and dry heaving that I experienced every time, which really made me wonder if the tube was really being fully inserted. The only time I’ve ever seen an NG tube inserted was when it was going into my own nose, so I really can’t say if my experience was typical or not. I can say two things for sure: first, I think Yasiin got off easy. Second, the “paramedic” who claims the tube “tickles the back of the throat” is correct in the same way, to quote one of your earlier correspondents, that the Yankees are a recreational baseball team.

Fortunately, one of my NG tube insertions was in California, where we don’t have strong strictures against pain killers. Dilauded, a wonderfully potent opiate, made me unable to concentrate on anything for even sixty seconds, but also numbed the pain in my nasal passage, throat, and stomach, where the end of the tube was constantly poking into my stomach wall, enough that I could manage to sleep at night. The other time I had an NG tube inserted was in Arizona, where they felt that miniscule amounts of morphine were more than adequate to kill pain. They weren’t. The pain was constant, twenty-four hours a day, and was only tolerable if I didn’t move. Sleep was nearly impossible: moving my head in any way pulled on that tube, increasing the pain and scratching more tissue off my already raw throat.

Yasiin also missed out on the best part of the entire experience. His tube was in for only a few minutes before being removed. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – like having a tube in for days before it’s pulled out. Even though every nurse that extracted my tubes pulled them out slowly and carefully, extraction is also painful, as the tube rubs for its entire length against the now raw surface of your throat and nasal passages. When the tube finally rounds the last turn and pulls free, the sudden feeling of relief is indescribable.

Research suggests we that we trust the contents of secret documents more than the unclassified stuff:

Specifically, “(a) people weigh secret information more heavily than public information when making decisions, (b) people perceive the same information as being of higher quality when it is portrayed as secret rather than public, and (c) people evaluate others’ decisions more favorable when those decisions are based on secret information rather than on public information.”

The authors [of the study] suggest this effect was very much in evidence following the original Wikileaks disclosures, when people who are normally skeptical about the judgments of U.S. officials were suddenly taking as gospel documents written privately by those very same officials. As Dan Drezner wrote at the time, there was a “natural inclination to think that any Wikileaks document will endow it with the totemic value of Absolute Truth. “If it was secret, then it must be true,” goes this logic.” In fact, it’s quite possible for diplomats or military commanders to be as wrong in private as they are in public.

It’s also not hard to imagine the kind of incentive structure that this bias creates. If classified information and secret recommendations are judged to be more credible, there’s going to be a natural tendency for the officials crafting and passing along this information to keep as much of it secret as possible.

Lisa Rosenbaum considers how doctors and patients approach medical decisions, examining the influence of the “affect heuristic,” which is defined as “the role that emotions play in our perceptions of benefit and risk”:

When affect guides our decisions, we are far more sensitive to possibility than to probability. In one experiment, some subjects were asked how much they were willing to pay to avoid a potential loss of twenty dollars; others were asked how much they would pay to avoid a potential electric shock. The people asked about the shock paid about the same amount of money, regardless of whether the probability of receiving it was one per cent or ninety-nine per cent. The responses of people asked about the monetary loss, however, tracked more closely to the associated probabilities. The mere possibility of risk, no matter how small, drives our behavior.

How might this tendency play out in medicine? Take, for instance, the increasing rate of women with breast cancer pursuing prophylactic double mastectomy—most famously, Angelina Jolie. For most women with breast cancer, the risk of later developing breast cancer in the other breast is low, meaning the risks of mastectomy outweigh the benefits. Indeed, a recent survey of women who had undergone prophylactic mastectomy found that some seventy per cent would derive little survival benefit. Nevertheless, ninety per cent of those women reported that they were “very worried” about breast-cancer recurrence. In other words, in the setting of fear, the possibility of recurrence, rather than its actual probability, fuels decisions that, over all, likely cause more harm than good.

A Financial Times article spotlights Amazon’s shipping warehouse in the former coal-mining town of Rugeley, England. John Brownlee follows up:

The issue at Rugeley is not that workers are ungrateful for the jobs Amazon has given them, or even that they find these jobs unpleasant. Most of Rugeley’s workers come from mining families, a stock not exactly known for its weak-livered dandyism. It doesn’t matter that these jobs are hard. It’s that they have no future. … The jobs in the Rugeley fulfillment center are almost always temporary positions handed out by agencies on zero-hour contracts. Nothing is guaranteed, and a fulfillment associate’s job can completely disappear between one day and the next. As such, the local economy is not recovering as locals hoped. Amazon is not investing in the town’s people; instead, it’s mechanizing them.

Brownlee talks to Ben Roberts, whose photo series Amazon Unpacked documents Rugeley’s “vast” and “shockingly quiet” shipping center:

“The workers at Rugeley are effectively human robots,” Roberts says. “And the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages.” … “When you buy something from an independent retailer, you might pay more than Amazon, but that extra bit is an investment,” Roberts explains. “When you pay it, you’re investing in the quality of not only your own life but the life of the community around you.”

Dustin Kurtz reacts:

The same panicked grasping by local governments at jobs, no matter how temporary or poorly paid, that led to the placement of the warehouse in Rugeley is how Amazon managed to place packing plants in other locations as well. Amazon (a company that receives more money from the UK government than it pays in taxes, remember) currently has other UK “fulfillment centers” in Hemel Hempsted, Hertfordshire; Swansea, Wales; Doncaster, South Yorkshire and Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, former mining towns all. At what point will those communities be forced to ask what, in fact, Amazon is giving back to them, if anything?