A few years after I reclaimed my life, Scotty called. Said he was nearby, that he’d told his new, for-real, actual boyfriend all about me. Could he drop by?
At Sunset and LaBrea he pulled the car over. “Ian! Did I tell you or did I? Isn’t he gorgeous!”
He was a child. I’m guessing a younger shade of 11. No way a teen. The world turned blood red with rage as I imagined a parade of raped Scotty-victims past, present and future, children used up and cast away while their monsters got away with wrist-slaps because that’s how we do it in the U.S. of A.
Scotty saw what was in my eyes and actually flinched. Then he gathered the child in his monster arms, stared in my eyes, and gave him a sloppy French kiss.
Had I a gun, I’d have emptied the clip in that smile. But I didn’t have a gun. And something shut down in me as I let him ride off with his new tiny victim. Who in due time — his brain a neurological wreck, probably addicted to something, if only his continued ruination — would be ditched when age made him of no further amusement to his users.
I want readers to understand that this is what we are talking about when the media yatters about another big-deal director, another priest or everyday schmuck with a child use problem. That these are the stakes.
Do I still think about Scotty, aside from this article? Yes. In nightmares.Ebola suits. During the nation’s collective Ebola freakout this autumn, several companies smelled money and began to sell protective suits on Amazon.com, pandering to public fears. Popular suits included the Lakeland Interceptor Vapor Suit and Dupont Encapsulated Level A Suit. To be fair, these hazmat suits serve a legitimate purpose, protecting workers from chemical and environmental hazards, but retailers were selling them for more than twice the price they typically retail for and buyers were scooping them up because, hey Ebola!
In October, Conan O’Brien fancifully tweeted out that “I picked out my Halloween costume. I’m going as ‘Slutty Madeleine Albright.’” The former secretary of state quickly hit back, and her retort was perfectionNigel Warburton: The topic we’re focusing on is “Free Will Worth Wanting.” That seems a strange way in to free will. Usually, the free will debate is over whether we have free will, not whether we want it, or whether it’s worth wanting. How did you come at it from this point of view?
Daniel Dennett: I came to realize that many of the issues that philosophers love to talk about in the free will debates were irrelevant to anything important. There’s a bait-and-switch that goes on. I don’t think any topic is more anxiety provoking, or more genuinely interesting to everyday people, than free will But then philosophers replace the interesting issues with technical, metaphysical issues. Who cares? We can define lots of varieties of free will that you can’t have, or that are inconsistent with determinism. But so what? The question is, ‘Should you regret, or would you regret not having free will?’ Yes. Are there many senses of free will? Yes. Philosophers have tended to concentrate on varieties that are perhaps more tractable by their methods, but they’re not important.
NW: The classic description of the problem is this: ‘If we can explain every action through a series of causal precedents, there is no space for free will.’ What’s wrong with that description?
DD: It’s completely wrong. There’s plenty of space for free will: determinism and free will are not incompatible at all.
The problem is that philosophers have a very simplistic idea of causation. They think that if you give the lowest-level atomic explanation, then you have given a complete account of the causation: that’s all the causation there is. In fact, that isn’t even causation in an interesting sense.As the roads began to clear that morning, I piled in the car with Johnathan’s father and his best friend Devon, and we made the 300-mile drive to see him one last time. We stayed in a hotel near the prison death chamber where they had transported him. We checked in, bought alcohol and tried to drink ourselves away from reality, which was that a man we loved would be put to death the following night.
It was only days before that Devon and I seemed like strangers to each other. Now, she and I were eternally bonded. Too anxious to go to bed, we stayed up talking and laughing and crying. Death, life, darkness, light. We stared at the clock. We dreaded the end. We wondered: Was he scared? Was he cold? Could he sleep?
I told her the story of meeting Johnathan. How I wrote to him as part of a court-ordered community service, a program that sent reading materials to prisoners. That letter kicked off an almost year-long correspondence that brought me to Texas on a Greyhound bus. His family — even his fiercely protective sister Genia — had welcomed me with open arms. His father made me hot chocolate every morning, his brother lightened the mood with his whimsical sense of humor, and both his sisters were always there for me. It all happened so fast I didn’t think about what the end would mean, or how soon it would come. I was too immersed in the bond we shared.
Secrets were foreign in our world. Our connection was rare and intense. I told him everything: My adolescence in a series of foster group homes marked by neglect and abuse. How I became addicted to heroin at 16. Johnathan didn’t judge me; he encouraged me to stop wasting my life.Swastika Hanukkah wrapping paper. The pattern on a roll of blue and silver Hanukkah paper looked somewhat odd to a California Walgreens customer earlier in the month. Cheryl Shapiro noticed maze-like blue lines converged into a swastika, which was repeated along the foil wrap. Shapiro said she put her foot down and demanded the store’s management remove the paper from the shelves. They complied, though it appears the wrapping paper has turned up in at least one other Walgreens store. Walgreens told an NBC affiliate in California that it is looking into the matter. Hallmark Cards, which produced the wrapping paper, has pulled the item from distribution.