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Newsflash: Pakistani Taliban Kill Lots of Innocent Children (Sardonic Edition)

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Here are my three favorite commentaries on the Pakistani Taliban’s recent attack on a school in Peshawar:

KABUL: The Afghan Taliban have condemned a raid on a school in Peshawar that left 141 dead in the country’s bloodiest ever terror attack, saying killing innocent children was against Islam.

Survivors said militants gunned down children as young as 12 during the eight-hour onslaught in Peshawar, which the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said was revenge for the ongoing North Waziristan operation.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has always condemned the killing of children and innocent people at every juncture,” the Afghan Taliban, which often target civilians, said in a statement released late Tuesday.

“The intentional killing of innocent people, women and children goes against the principles of Islam and every Islamic government and movement must adhere to this fundamental essence.”

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the official name of the Taliban) expresses its condolences over the incident and mourns with the families of killed children.”

The Afghan Taliban are a jihadist group loosely affiliated to the Pakistan Taliban, with both pledging allegiance to Mullah Omar.

That’s from “Afghan Taliban Condemn Peshawar School Attack,” in Karachi’s Dawn.

Here’s another great one, for those who know a bit about Pakistani politics. It’s from Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf political party.

“I have never seen an atrocity like this in my entire life…I cannot even comprehend how someone could kill children like this,” he said.

“If someone killed my children like this, I would seek to avenge it as well,” Imran said.

Yes, terrorist attacks are really unprecedented for the Pakistani Taliban. I mean, who ever heard of the Pakistani Taliban killing innocent people? In Pakistan, no less? Has Imran sahib informed the Royal Society?

Then there’s this gem:

Obama terrorizes and murders innocent Pakistani citizens.

That’s supposed to be a commentary on drone warfare against the Pakistani Taliban. I’ve italicized the word of interest. Here is what I find interesting about it.

Suppose that the U.S. packed up its drones tomorrow and left South Asia for good. What does the author think should happen next? Broadly speaking, there are only two options. Either the Pakistani military fights the Taliban or not.

(1) Suppose they fight the Taliban. Suppose they choose to do so by means of the least destructive method available to them– drones. (Actually, drones are not quite ‘available’ to Pakistan right now, but imagine that they were.) Suppose that these drones kill “innocent Pakistani civilians” as a side-effect of the attempt to fight the Taliban. Would Nawaz Sharif then be as guilty of “murder” as Obama has been alleged to be? Or do you have to be an American drone operator to satisfy that description?

(2) Suppose that the Pakistani military chooses not to fight the Taliban, on the grounds that doing so would lead to the deaths of “innocent Pakistani civilians” (as it surely would). Suppose that the Taliban then murder Pakistanis civilians with impunity for the next seven or eight years, as they’ve done for the last eight. In fact, imagine that the Taliban ratchet up their killings on the grounds that it’s easier to kill people when the army that’s supposed to be protecting them refuses to do so. Would the author be willing to accept those consequences as an implication of his fastidious strictures on drone warfare?

While I’m on this subject, let me ask one last set of questions. The Taliban are non-state actors–a kind of terrorist NGO. They are, in other words, de facto anarchists. According to anarchist theory, “the state” lacks legitimacy. So imagine we decide to  get rid of it.

Now imagine, further, that “we” are Pakistanis. (Yes, I realize that my thought-experiment is starting to strain credulity at this point.) Let’s imagine, then, that “we” Pakistanis abolish the Pakistani state tomorrow. I assume that the Taliban would not be deterred from further depredations by this act.

So here is my question, intended for anarcho-capitalists: In what sense would Pakistanis be better off without a state than with one in facing the Taliban? And how should they do it? Whatever the method, it must meet two specifications: (1) it must not involve the assistance of a state, and (2) it must not lead to the deaths of any innocent third-parties. In this season of miracles, that surely can’t be too much to ask.

Postscript, December 18, 2014: More coverage of Peshawar. A poignant passage from a story from this morning’s New York Times, “Horror Paralyzes Pakistan After Methodical Slaughter“:

Some mourners expressed frustration at the apparent impotence of their own security forces. “What is this army for?” shouted one man at the city’s main Lady Reading hospital, where he had come to collect the body of his grandson.

“Where are their atom bombs and airplanes now?” he said. “They were of no use if they cannot protect us from death in our daily lives.”

Better questions could scarcely be asked, and truer words could scarcely be uttered. But we’re talking about armed forces that have begun every war they’ve fought, and lost every war they’ve begun: they’re guilty of genocide (East Pakistan, 1971) and willing to start nuclear war with India over uninhabitable chunks of ice (Siachen Glacier), but incapable of grasping the fact that their deals with the devil have surrendered the entire northwest of the country to totalitarian psychopaths bent on mass murder in the name of God. Pakistanis should never forget that the partition of the subcontinent was intended to give the Muslims of the subcontinent a safe haven from religious persecution by Hindus. Somehow, it never occurred to them that “they” might persecute “themselves.” Call it another grim chapter in the annals of that supposedly impossible phenomenon–“reverse discrimination.”

Meanwhile, from the same article:

Back at the deserted Army Public School, snipers perched on the rooftops, watching for a potential follow-up attack. In the nearby tribal belt, the Pakistani Army mounted fresh airstrikes.

Were they merely “fresh airstrikes” or were they mass murder? Would they have been mass murder if carried out by drones more precise than the airstrikes? I renew the question.

I find it interesting that in the English language press, at any rate, a lot of Pakistani commentary has taken the form of anguished questions. This column by Sameer Khosa in Lahore’s Nation consists of almost nothing but questions until this passage at the end:

Let us finally put an end to the criminally dishonest nature of our conversation on the Taliban, and on the national security challenge as a whole. Because now, we have seen its cost and it is unbearable.

Carry these children in your heart always. Let their innocence be the antidote to the lies that are peddled to us. Let their curiosity about the world remind us to ask anyone who has a one-sentence-long solution to this problem how they propose it will end. Let us fight in their name. Let their gravestones say: tell us now that this is not our war. Tell us now that this is not personal.

The problem is, this is what Pakistanis always say after a Taliban atrocity, only to forget it until next year’s atrocity. I’m not criticizing Khosa; I’m criticizing his audience. What he’s saying is undeniably true. So is what these people are saying. And these two.  The problem is that it’s been true for years. Remember what happened in Peshawar last year? It was Malala before that, and the massacre of the Shias of Derra Adam Khel before that, and the Geo TV station before that, and the Bajaur market before that, and the attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh before that, and the one on the Ahmadi mosques in Lahore before that, and the assassination of Benazir before that. How many “before thats” does a rational person need before he figures out “we have a problem, and we have to solve it”? (Here’s a list of TTP attacks.) Unfortunately, what Khurram Hussain is saying is true, too.

Anyway, I can’t help continuing the semi-sardonic theme of the original post. So, a few quotations in that vein:

Khursheed Shah says terrorism is national issue

Speaking to media representatives after attending the MPC, Opposition Leader in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah said there is a complete consensus among political parties of the country on the terrorism issue.

He expressed his resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the armed forces in their ongoing fight against terror. Shah also urged the media to play a proactive role in eradicating terrorists from the country.

The PPP leader said that even Israeli state does not carry out such atrocities on Palestinians like the terrorist did to young kids yesterday at the school in Peshawar.

That’s from Dawn, “No distinction now between good and bad Taliban: Nawaz.” I mean, if they’re worse than Israelis, then we really have to fight them. Incidentally, the U.S. just normalized relations with Cuba. Any chance of Pakistan doing the same with Israel sometime soon?

I certainly wouldn’t go quite as far as Sherry Rahman does here, but I see her point, and it’s a nice counter-narrative to those handwaving claims one hears about the virginal innocence of the Taliban’s clean-handed apologists and sympathizers:

PESHAWAR: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Sherry Rehman said Wednesday that if anyone engaged in the apologist narrative when it comes to terrorism and terrorist attacks, they would be considered as terrorists and allies of the terrorists.

Time has come for a decision and anyone who presents justification for acts of terrorism will be regarded as a traitor.

“Whoever is a friend of the terrorists is a traitor,” Rehman said addressing media representatives in Peshawar.

Rehman urged that the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will not remain the victims and instead become those who will lead the war against terrorists.

Of course, taken literally, Rahman’s policy would require locking up large chunks of Pakistan’s judiciary. But I don’t think Rahman quite means what she’s saying–at least not as stated. It’s still the heat of the moment.

I leave you, finally, with a Word Press Editor’s Pick for 2014, written in October by Mehreen Kasana, a Pakistani graduate student at a school in Brooklyn.

On my way to class, I take the Q train to Manhattan and sit down next to an old white man who recoils a noticeable bit. I assume it’s because I smell odd to him, which doesn’t make sense because I took a shower in the morning. Maybe I’m sitting too liberally the way men do on public transit with their legs a mile apart, I think to myself. That also doesn’t apply since I have my legs crossed. After a few seconds of inspecting any potential offence caused, I realize that it has nothing to do with an imaginary odor or physical space but with the keffiyeh around my neck that my friend gifted me (the Palestinian scarf – an apparently controversial piece of cloth). It is an increasingly cold October in NYC. Sam Harris may not have told you but we Muslims need our homeostasis at a healthy level. While our bodies regulate our internal fanatic temperatures to remain stable, sometimes it gets a little too chilly so we pull out those diabolical scarves and wrap them around our diabolical necks and diabolically say, “Holy shit. It is cold today, Abdullah.” To which Abdullah replies, “Wallah. My ass is freezing.”

Reading her, you’d think that the act of wearing a keffiyeh in Brooklyn or Manhattan was a wildly rare and transgressive occurrence. It isn’t. But let me add one more “maybe” to the list: maybe this is the kind of thing that happens occasionally, that the author could very well be imagining, that doesn’t matter much even if it happened, and that is best ignored rather than inflated into the occasion of a self-pitying drama of grievance stretching back to Hiroshima, the Raj, and the Atlantic slave trade.

See if you have the discipline to make it through the whole thing. Kasana doesn’t want to apologize for Muslim atrocities. That’s fine. I don’t think she should, and have said as much in the past. But try as hard as you can to make coherent sense of her claim that there is no distinction to be made between good and bad Muslims. And feel free to enlist the help of the Mahmood Mamdani article she links to in her post to do so. Yes, I realize that she’s rejecting the “binary opposition” of Good and Bad Muslim within a specific narrative. But at the end of the day, what does she think is left of the ordinary distinction between good and bad Muslims? Should we throw it out? I don’t know a single Muslim who thinks so. Try to make sense of what just happened in Peshawar while ignoring the distinction, and reflect on the results. Hard to do. So why should any non-Muslim apologize for making use of it? No apology, so to speak.

CFP: Ninth Annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy

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CALL FOR PAPERS

 The ninth annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy will be held at the Rutherford Campus of Felician College
223 Montross Ave
Rutherford, NJ 07070
on Saturday, April 25, 2015, 9 am – 6 pm

 Plenary Speaker:

James Stacey Taylor (The College of New Jersey)

“Markets in Political Votes: A Moral Defense”

 Submissions on any topic in moral and political philosophy are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2015 to: felicianethicsconference at gmail.com

Submissions are invited for a special session on topics at the intersection of ethics, counseling psychology, and psychiatry.

If you have any questions, please contact Irfan Khawaja, khawajai at felician dot edu. For more information, go to the website of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.

Boycott the Ayn Rand Society

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This may turn out to be the least-publicized call for a boycott ever, but I’m going to call for one anyway: Philosophers attending the APA Eastern Division Meetings this year should boycott the meeting of the Ayn Rand Society. Frankly, in my view, they should boycott the Society itself.

For twenty-five years now, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has vilified libertarians as “nihilists,” and declared them too evil to “sanction,” i.e., too evil to endorse or deal with.

IS LIBERTARIANISM AN EVIL DOCTRINE? Yes, if evil is the irrational and the destructive. Libertarianism belligerently rejects the very need for any justification for its belief in something called “liberty.” It repudiates the need for any intellectual foundation to explain why “liberty” is desirable and what “liberty” means. Anyone from a gay-rights activist to a criminal counterfeiter to an overt anarchist can declare that he is merely asserting his “liberty” — and no Libertarian (even those who happen to disagree) can objectively refute his definition. Subjectivism, amoralism and anarchism are not merely present in certain “wings” of the Libertarian movement; they are integral to it. In the absence of any intellectual framework, the zealous advocacy of “liberty” can represent only the mindless quest to eliminate all restraints on human behavior — political, moral, metaphysical. And since reality is the fundamental “restraint” upon men’s actions, it is nihilism — the desire to obliterate reality — that is the very essence of Libertarianism. If the Libertarian movement were ever to come to power, widespread death would be the consequence. (For elaboration, see my essay “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty.”)

Justice demands moral judgment. It demands that one objectively evaluate Libertarianism, and act in accordance with that evaluation. It demands that one identify Libertarianism as the antithesis of — and therefore as a clear threat to — not merely genuine liberty, but all rational values. And it demands that Libertarianism, like all such threats, be boycotted and condemned.

“Boycotted and condemned.” I like that.

Despite some tricky-looking verbal gymnastics, ARI has not disavowed that view (and explicitly says that it has not). So vilification of libertarianism and libertarians remains the official view of the Ayn Rand Institute despite its paradoxical (that is, hypocritical) decision to make common cause with a few libertarian organizations.

The Ayn Rand Society (ARS) is a nominally distinct entity, but every single member of its Steering Committee is in some way affiliated with ARI. In any case, this year, they’ve decided to invite Yaron Brook as the main speaker at their APA Eastern Meeting (see the very first link in this post). Yaron Brook is the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is therefore the man responsible for ARI’s continuing policy of defamation. ARS has invited him to address their meeting despite that fact, and absurdly enough, has invited two libertarians to respond to him. The Steering Committee’s knowledge of Brook’s institutional role–and of ARI’s ideological position–are, in my view, sufficient to justify a boycott of the meeting. (Read this exchange if you’d like a sense of Yaron Brook’s moral stature and his method of cognitive functioning. It’s best read in conjunction with this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

It makes things worse that intellectually, Brook is a shallow propagandist entirely lacking in bona fide qualifications as a political philosopher. (Nonetheless, like all Objectivist pseudo-intellectuals of his type, he insists on describing himself as an “expert.”) It’s therefore a mystery why ARS’s leadership would have invited him to speak at the APA. In 2012, I asked both the late Allan Gotthelf (ARS’s founder*) and James Lennox (the current co-chair of ARS’s Steering Committee) why Brook had been invited. Neither of them had an answer. If you’d like an answer, feel free to ask Lennox or his co-chair Gregory Salmieri for one, and share what you hear from them. But my own inference is that they have no defensible answer to give. I also find it a mystery why James Otteson and Peter Boettke would have accepted an invitation to discuss libertarian politics with someone responsible for a mass-movement campaign of anti-libertarian defamation, but I suppose one mystery begets another.

I’m happy to say that I’ve convinced at least one major philosopher to back out of an invitation to speak at an ARS event, and have convinced a few prominent libertarians to let their membership in ARS lapse (or in the case of those who had already let it lapse, not to renew their membership). I’d like to add indefinitely to that list.

Whatever you do, don’t seek refuge in the excuse that philosophers are obliged to have conversations with those with whom they disagree on moral issues. (Scroll down in the link to my exchange with Matt Zwolinski.) The response to that is: “no kidding.” The question is whether philosophers ought to help burnish the reputation of organizations that suborn and facilitate decades-long campaigns of character-assassination. If you want to be a part of that of effort, feel free. But then take responsibility for being a part of it. And don’t complain when you’re treated accordingly. You’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

*Correction (added after posting): To be precise, Gotthelf was ARS’s co-founder, along with David Kelley and George Walsh. ARS was co-founded by the three of them in 1990. But Walsh died in 2001, and Kelley has not been active at the leadership level in ARS for decades. Gotthelf was the central figure at the heart of ARS, and was responsible for the decision to invite Brook.

Postscript, December 18, 2014: I just happened to read an interesting article, “Meeting Ayn Rand on the Las Vegas Strip,” by John Paul Rollert (of the University of Chicago’s business school), that sheds interesting light on my call for a boycott of the Ayn Rand Society. The article is a report on this past summer’s ARI conference in Las Vegas, featuring Yaron Brook, among others. This passage, on a session on inequality, is particularly revealing of Brook’s approach to intellectual discourse:

“The Left dominates our intellectual world,” Brook declared. And yet, despite its success, the stated aims of the Left are merely a pretext for an agenda far more sinister than anything contained in the Democratic Party’s platform or, for that matter, a Michael Moore movie. Take the professed concern for the growing disparity between the very rich and the rest of America: The liberal impulse to address this gap may seem rooted in a sense of fairness or even a desire to promote social cohesion, but viewing it as such is extremely naïve. Indeed, it takes at face value the rhetoric of the Left, which keeps one from seeing it for what it really is: the language of a decades-long con game. “What they’re really after is not the well-being of anybody,” Brook explained. “They want power. They want to rule us.”

It gets worse. For if “the intellectuals” use fear-mongering around the so-called problem of inequality to seize power, they wield it in favor of a nihilistic vision of the human condition. They aim to systematically undermine and annul the great achievements of heroic men and women, an effort that will not only corrupt the “American sense of life” but one that stabs at the very heart of Ayn Rand’s vision. “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” Brook said. “We need to reveal them for what they really are. We need to expose them to the American people for what their agenda really is. They’re haters. Their focus is on hatred. Their focus is on tearing down. Their focus is on destroying.”

ARI’s pretense at intellectual respectability is a laboriously-constructed affair. Those affiliated with it realize that if ARI’s intellectuals are to be taken seriously, they must convince their non-Objectivist interlocutors that they take those interlocutors seriously, and want to engage constructively with them. Taking them seriously means treating them with respect, and treating them with respect means not poisoning the well in disagreements about their views. The preceding passage shows those interlocutors what the rest of us have long known: it’s an act.

Anyone who attends Brook’s presentation at the APA will be treated to Brook-in-genteel-mode, Brook-as-he-presents-himself-in-a-prestigious-academic-setting, where his reasonability and ARI’s are under scrutiny and on the line. If you decide to attend his session (against my advice) ask him what he means by “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” and “Their focus is on destroying.” What truth? What bastards? Who is focused on destroying what? Why not be explicit for a change? Does he mean the ones in the room next door? The ones who run the APA? The ones running the job interviews for the jobs his Objectivist Academic Center-groomed job candidates so desperately want? If so, tell him to say so. If not, ask him to explain.

It hasn’t occurred to Brook that someone might regard inequality as a proxy variable for structural injustices in an economy, including injustices caused by rights-violations. It hasn’t occurred to the apologists for the supposedly new and improved ARI that Brook’s well-poisoning is a direct implication of his avowed allegiance to Peikoff’s “Fact and Value.”  Nor has it occurred to academic philosophers that their coy and “sophisticated” defenses of dishonesty and phoniness find perfect expression in the likes of Brook–someone they’d likely regard as a mortal enemy, but whose practices they’ve unwittingly come to rationalize. If there were any justice in the world, Thomas Nagel and David Nyberg would be forced to attend the ARS session and have an awkward conversation with Yaron Brook: Brook would have to call them “bastards” intent on destroying the world, and Nagel and Nyberg would have to face in Brook the perfect exemplification of both Nagelian concealment and Nybergian dishonesty.  Frankly, if that meeting happened, I’d go to the session.

Incidentally, Rollert gets a lot of things right in his essay, but gets some things wrong. For one thing, he buys into the myth that “when it comes to ‘real’ philosophers–a designation that, for better or worse, indicates a perch in a Philosophy Department–Objectivism mostly goes unmentioned.” Not quite.  Again, not quite.

He also seems to equate radicalism with “escapism.” But Socrates, Aristotle, and Locke were all in their own way radicals. Arguably, so was J.S. Mill. None was an escapist. Contrary to Rollert, there’s no intrinsic connection between escapism and radicalism.

Finally, this seems to me wrongheaded:

By and large, when it comes to questions about the structural shortcomings of capitalism, the most persuasive answers will be of a dry and technical nature. They won’t savor of the sulfurous clash between the forces of good and evil….

There’s no reason to think that questions about the structural shortcomings of any political system should be reducible to issues “of a dry and technical nature.” The structure of a political system is something set by people. People have free will, and can be held responsible, not just for what they choose to do, but what (and how) they believe. If people culpably embed injustice into the very structure of a system, claims about structural shortcomings will not merely be “dry and technical.” They’ll be about justice and injustice, and that will “savor” of the clash between good and evil. No one thinks that structural racism is a merely “dry and technical” issue. There’s no good reason to think that other structural matters are “dry and technical,” either.

That is something that Rand got right, and it’s something that non-Randians might (ironically enough) learn from her. “Nothing made by man had to be; it was made by choice” (Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 37). What was made by choice can be judged in moral terms, and that goes for the structural shortcomings of political systems as well.

As I was saying, not all choices are dry and technical. Just look at ARS’s choice to invite Yaron Brook to speak at the APA.

Six months a slave: my bout with Ambien addiction (Part 2 of “Psychiatric Medications: Promise or Peril?”)

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I’d like to get back to summarizing the presentations at last week’s Felician symposium on psychiatric medications, but two things before I do:

First, I’m happy to report that all four presenters have agreed to write their presentations up for a symposium to appear in Reason Papers. The written version of the symposium will probably be published in the journal sometime in early 2016.

Second, an anecdote.

I’ve mentioned Robert Whitaker’s work here several times before. He’s the author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic; he’s also a contributor to the website Mad in America. I happened to notice Marcia Angell’s review of Anatomy back in 2011 when it (the review) came out, but had no direct interest in the topic at the time, and more or less filed it away for future reference. I eventually managed to develop a direct and personal interest in the topic, and in the interests of disclosure—and the amusement of telling the story—I may as well explain how it came about.

The long and short of it is that in 2013, I became a psychotropic drug addict myself. The addiction came about through the good intentions but serious errors of my medical practitioners, and, as far as I’m concerned, it counts as a significant (though ultimately not medically serious) case of iatrogenic injury. The experience soured me for a while on the medical profession (including pharmacists), and especially on psychiatry and Big Pharma. I have a less bitter and less intense attitude now, but still have to confess to a residual resentment at all involved for what I went through. The benign residue of that resentment, however, is curiosity. I wonder what happened to me, and why. Hence the interest in the topic itself.

Anyway, here’s my story. After several straight months of insomnia and depression following a divorce, I asked my primary care physician for something to help me sleep. The something turned out to be Ambien. My doctor put me on a dose of 90 x 12.5 mg controlled release pills, which—in compliance with the directions on the bottle—I took “daily as needed” until I ran out (and then got some more).

Around day 25, the medication started to lose its original effect of knocking me out within about ten minutes of taking it.

Around day 40, I had regularly begun to lose my sense of how many pills I was taking on a given night, and started to double and even triple up on the 12.5 mg/day dosage. Having done that a few times, and having realized how insane it was, I then abruptly decided to stop taking the pills altogether, thereby inducing a relatively severe and totally unexpected withdrawal reaction (which I misinterpreted as the effects of extreme sleep deprivation). In the process, I almost crashed my car a few times, suffered two physical collapses on campus, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, including friends, family, students, colleagues, several nuns, a security guard, and an administrator or two. Colleagues had to call 911 for both of my collapses after finding me semi-conscious and on the ground. I found it scary, and judging from the looks on the faces of the first responders, and the way the cops encircled me and kept their hands on their weapons, they seemed pretty frightened, as well. (There’s no telling what harm a semi-conscious philosophy professor might do to a group of armed law enforcement officers. “I don’t really know where my hands are, but don’t shoot!”)

On the one occasion when I was taken to the ER (I refused treatment “against medical advice” on the other occasion–correctly, I still believe), no one seemed interested in hearing about my Ambien issues. They duly noted it in their chart, then promptly ignored the issue and moved on. The ER doctor diagnosed me as having “vertigo,” prescribed an anti-vertigo medication, gave me an IV with saline solution, and left it at that. In retaliation for his refusal to listen to what I had to say about Ambien, I lied to him and told him after a few hours in the ER that I was fit to drive home. I guess he believed me, and then cheerfully discharged me; I less cheerfully drove home (or at least in the direction of my home) and then nearly crashed my car into a diner. (Having missed the diner, I decided to stop and have a meal there: I mean, if you don’t wreck the diner while driving past it, you might as well stop and have the hot open-faced turkey sandwich to celebrate your good fortune. Insanity never tasted so good.)

I eventually got home, but still had to fill out the anti-vertigo prescription. I didn’t trust myself to drive to the pharmacy, but didn’t trust myself to walk there, either: vertigo is no respecter of modes of locomotion. I ended up staggering there somehow, only to discover that I had lost the anti-vertigo prescription somewhere between my apartment and the pharmacy. Out of options, I staggered back home, reframing the loss of the anti-vert prescription as a defiant refusal to comply with medical orders, and settling on the ground to have my vertigo in a safe place. That’ll show that ER doc.

I lay there awhile, let the vertigo wash over me a bit, then popped another 12.5 mg CR Ambien, settling soon enough into another four refreshing hours of non-REM sleep. By 2 am, I was wide awake, reading Jorge Luis Borges (on insomnia), and waiting for the sun to come back up so that I could start yet another vertiginous and sleep deprived day teaching ethics, critical thinking, and aesthetics to students who seemed not to notice that anything was amiss. (Conveniently, I had managed to collapse after class had ended. None of my students saw the collapse happen; I lay on the ground an hour before I was discovered by the instructor who needed to use the classroom after me.) At that hour, being “wide awake” for the forty-fifth night in a row didn’t feel anything like being in a Katy Perry video. It felt like being in a madhouse of my own making.

Somewhere around day 85, it began to dawn on me that I was addicted to Ambien and had to find a way to get off. (What, you ask, did I do between day 45 and day 85? I followed the directions on the bottle, that’s what. I popped those pills “as necessary,” supplying my own personal criterion of “necessity.”)

No one—not my physician, not my pharmacist—had ever informed me that any of this was likely or possible. In fact, my pharmacist insisted that Ambien was harmless, that no one ever got addicted from it, that one could safely be on it for years, and that when the time came to get off years hence, I could safely make that decision at will.

Not really. Getting off the medication was a bit of a drag. I started the taper around my hundredth day on the medication. The taper protocol, which involved a 12.5 mg reduction of the medication per week–one abrupt drop per week from 12.5 mg a night to 0–gave me intense nightmares, paranoia, and hallucinations, among them a particularly wild psychotic episode in which I believed that my brain was being devoured by pink, L-shaped worms.* I also had unbelievably vivid, detailed, apparently true-to-life dreams of home invasions, of unknown intruders coming into my house and maliciously leaving all the lights on (while, in the dream, I was alone in my apartment tapering from Ambien), and (my favorite) of being asked by an ex-girlfriend to lead an eager and willing army of small children to overthrow the U.S. government. (I woke up before we did any harm.)**

A physician I eventually consulted to help supervise the taper described my taper protocol as “an act of self-punishment,” and put me on a more gradual one. Unfortunately, before it was all over, I had yet another episode that put me in the ER. This time, I had to call 911 myself, only to discover that the paramedics sent to rescue me had gotten lost on the way to my apartment. (In other words, my local EMS had failed to pull off what Papa John’s routinely accomplishes. Is it the tips?) As I saw them circling my apartment complex without ever quite finding their way to my building, I was forced to leave my apartment in the middle of what was supposed to be a medical emergency to guide them to their intended destination. When I did, one of them blamed their inability to find me on the complexity of my apartment complex. The other one blamed it on her addiction to Xanax. Et tu, Paramedic? Anyway, there’s nothing like honesty.

When I told her that I myself was suffering side-effects from Ambien withdrawal, Xanax Girl blurted out, “Ambien? Shit, I was going to switch to that tomorrow. They gave me the prescription for it, and I’m pretty sick of this Xanax–but you know, maybe I won’t now. You’re fucked up, honey. I don’t want end up like that.” I told her she had a point. She thanked me for the advice, then got me into the ambulance, and nearly managed to crash it into a barbershop before we got to the ER. (No, we didn’t stop for a haircut.) I’ll never forget the crazed, anxiety-ridden look on her face. I felt protective of her. She seemed worse off than me.

This time the ER doctor listened to my anti-Ambien rant, then nodded sagely and said, “Yeah, but Ambien is nothing. You should see Klonopin withdrawal. Now that’s some shit! I’ve seen people vomiting for hours from that. I mean, not to make light of what you’re going through right now.” Not at all.

Another saline drip. A few questions about my fitness to leave the ER. Some informative sheets of paper on the perils of Ambien dependency. Then, discharge. My friend Mike picked me up, and we decided to get pizza (pizza cures everything). Unfortunately, despite the pizza, the symptoms came back that night, but I couldn’t bear to call 911 again. I got through it somehow, mostly by forcing myself to stay awake.

All in all, the withdrawal lasted 71 miserable days. Once I got off Ambien, however, my sleep patterns returned to normal. The irony was that the Ambien had done almost nothing to help me sleep, which is what it had been prescribed to do. I suffered eight consecutive months of insomnia, six of them on Ambien–less than four hours of sleep a night for about 250 nights. Bad as the insomnia was, however, the experience as a whole convinced me that Ambien was a lot worse than the condition it had been prescribed to correct. It also gave renewed meaning to a line from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flyin’ High Again”: I really should have kept my feet on the ground, and waited for the sun to appear. Better insomnia than addiction. And the experience primed me for Robert Whitaker’s anti-medication message.

Though it’s obviously not Whitaker’s fault, it was probably a mistake on my part to have read his book during withdrawal from a psychiatric medication: I learned a lot from the book, but the experience of reading it at the time almost certainly ramped up my sense of paranoia, and probably fed my nightmares and hallucinations. (On the other hand, I have to admit that the nightmares and hallucinations gave me new and distinctive insight into Descartes’ Meditations, so I guess I made epistemological lemonade of the psychotropic lemons I’d been served. Call it a contribution to positive psychology.) Even under the best of circumstances, it’s difficult to read and contemplate Whitaker’s thesis without suffering mental disturbance of some sort.

A year or so after my Ambien ordeal, I’d like to think that I’ve achieved some measure of objectivity.

*Postscript, December 14, 2014: I forgot to mention the episode where I hallucinated that demons had entered my brain via my eyes, roosting in my eyelids. I blame the lapse of memory on my Ambien use, but hey, according to the experts, Ambien improves memory, so don’t listen to me.

**Postscript, February 9, 2015: I just happened to discover a music video that’s a picture-perfect depiction of an Ambien withdrawal nightmare–“Big Bad Wolf” by In This Moment. Just fall asleep after hours (or days or weeks) of insomnia, draw out the wolf-piggie dialogue depicted here for a few hours, and repeat every night for a few months–and you’ll get the idea.

Psychiatric Medications: Promise or Peril? (Part 1)

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About twenty years ago, Robert Nozick published a brilliant paper, “Socratic Puzzles,” intended to address the apparent paradox of Socrates’s avowal of ignorance:

Socrates claims he does not know the answers to the questions he puts, and that if he is superior in wisdom this lies only in the fact that, unlike others, he is aware that he does not know. Yet he does have doctrines he recurs to…and he shows great confidence in these judgments. …Is this supremely confident Socrates merely being ironic when he elsewhere denies that he knows? How are we to understand what Gregory Vlastos terms ‘Socrates’ central paradox’, his profession of ignorance? (“Socratic Puzzles,” in Socratic Puzzles, p. 145).

I won’t try to summarize Nozick’s (to my mind successful) resolution of the Socratic paradox. I’ll just cut to the chase regarding its payoff:

Inquiry arises because of puzzlement, John Dewey said. People who are quite confident of the truth of their very extensive views are unlikely to engage in probing inquiry about these matters. The first step for Socrates, then, must be to show these others that they need to think about these matters, that is, to show them that what they already are thinking (or unthinkingly assuming) is quite definitely wrong. (“Socratic Puzzles,” p. 153).

And more:

Socrates has doctrines but what he teaches is not a doctrine but a method of inquiry….He teaches the method of inquiry by involving others in it, by exhibiting it. Their job is to catch on, and to go on. (“Socratic Puzzles,” p. 154)

And yet more:

Socrates shows something more: the kind of person that such sustained inquiry produces. It is not his method alone that teaches us but rather that method (and those doctrines it has led him to) as embodied in Socrates. (“Socratic Puzzles,” p. 154).

That’s a long preface to a discussion about psychiatry, but it seems to me the best entree into a discussion of the Felician Institute event that I organized this past Saturday, “Psychiatric Medications: Promise or Peril?” The upshot, ironically enough, was a collective but highly instructive profession of ignorance by the four presenters invited to address the symposium. Whatever their “doctrinal” disagreements, all four presenters agreed–in some way, at some level—with this proposition (my words, not theirs):

Despite the ubiquity of the use of psychiatric medications in the United States (and perhaps the First World generally), we really have no clear idea what we are doing when we use them, with what consequences, or with what rationale. What’s clear is that we’re widely overusing them with highly problematic consequences.

They may not have put it that way (though I think one or two did), but I think all four were committed to the claim. When you consider what’s at stake—the mental health not just of the present but of future generations, of children,  the elderly, and everyone in between—that’s a fairly sobering thought.

The “profession of ignorance” involved here was not the helpless or hapless “I don’t know” of the unprepared student or the ignorant layperson coming to the issue for the first time. It was a profession of ignorance by people in one way or another professionally involved in the field of mental health—as a science reporter and activist (Robert Whitaker), as a psychiatrist in private practice (Ray Raad), as a counseling psychologist and professor of counseling (Peter Economou), and as a philosopher of psychiatry and patient (Christian Perring). And the audience they were addressing was also, to large degree, professionally involved in mental health, consisting in large part of students from Felician’s Master’s Program in Counseling Psychology. It was a Socratic profession of ignorance—a profession of ignorance of the sort possible to people with deep knowledge of a subject, and something important to say about it.

I’m very pressed for time, given the end of the semester, but what I’d like to do over the next few days is to summarize what the presenters did say, and perhaps invite some further discussion both from the panelists and audience to add to or correct what I’ve missed. Obviously, any reader of the blog is invited to comment as well.

A summary of the event is perhaps in order:  The event began with a remarkably personal and candid introduction by Dr. Anne Prisco, our College president, on the dilemmas she’s faced as a mother, confronting the issue of whether or not to medicate one of her sons for what might have been (but might not have been) a case of ADHD. She decided not to: better that he should underperform, her reasoning went, than that he should become dependent on stimulants. That deep skepticism about the use of psychiatric medications set the agenda and tone of the rest of the conversation (with some significant provisos and caveats offered by Ray Raad, the only psychiatrist on the panel, and probably the only psychiatrist in the room).

The first of the two panels featured a 45-minute talk by Robert Whitaker, and centered on the thesis of Whitaker’s controversial (and prize-winning) 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which is highly critical of the use of psychiatric medications. Whitaker’s talk was followed by a 25 minute commentary by Ray Raad, a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City. Raad agreed in a very general way with Whitaker’s argument, but disputed many of the specifics, with interesting (and still debatable) implications for Whitaker’s thesis. What followed was a relatively brief but very interesting discussion. I can’t quite remember the details anymore, so perhaps other participants can fill them in when I manage to write up a summary of the panel itself.

The second of the two panels featured two thirty minute presentations. The first, by Peter Economou, sketched a “middle of the road” approach to psychiatric or psychological treatment, combining cognitive-behavioral therapy with the judicious use of medications. Peter’s was perhaps the most skeptical, theoretically eclectic, and overtly Socratic of the four presentations: he actually just came out and said, “The truth is, we know what works in this or that context, but ultimately, we have no idea why it works or what we’re doing.” Christian Perring came at the issue by considering the “epistemic difficulties” presented by consumers of mental health services in confronting the conflicting claims of “psychiatric expertise.” The talk was tellingly and instructively inconclusive: considering the nature of the epistemic difficulties, it’s not entirely clear what potential patients should do, or what “informed consent” means under such conditions of uncertainty. We had a nice (meaning: contentious) hour-long discussion after that, which I’ll try to reconstruct at some point if I can.

After that, of course, we had a reception in which participants self-medicated with the widely-used psychotropic substance known as “alcohol.” (The event was fueled by self-medication via that other widely-used psychotropic substance, “caffeine.”)

More to come, as I manage to get to it.

(Thanks to George Abaunza for the NPR link on medicating the elderly.)

Postscript, December 10, 2014: An interesting article in today’s New York Times, about the use of ketamine (“Special K”), a hallucinogen, for depression.

“Clueless” Meets “Lost in Space”: Will Thomas on “Interstellar” (SPOILERS)

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Will Thomas of The Atlas Society has just written a review of “Interstellar” that is clueless enough to make David Brooks’s commentary on the film seem like sublime wisdom by comparison. Thomas seems to belong to the Ideological Checklist School of Film Criticism, according to which a film’s aesthetic merits are reducible to its satisfaction of or deviation from a fixed and unimaginative set of doctrinal criteria. “Interstellar” seems to score something of a B+ on Thomas’s grading rubric, but the grade itself is perhaps of less interest here than the rubric.

“Interstellar,” we’re told, “shouts to the world that Americans should be achievers, but then it steals from them the ability to succeed.” There we have it, in one slovenly sentence: a film must have an ideological purpose; it must shout that purpose; if it features Americans, it must be shouting to the world about America; and its supposed aesthetic failings must be described as an offense against the Holy Grail of political economy, property. From a start this reductive and philistine, Thomas leaves himself only one direction to travel in aesthetic space—down. And down the aesthetic wormhole he goes. What follows are a few unexceptional (and unenlightening) paragraphs of commentary and plot summary. And then we get to “Interstellar film values.” Get out your checklist.

“Interstellar cheers for values an Objectivist can love,” we’re told. Is the purpose of art to function as cheerleader for moral or political values? Thomas’s avatar Ayn Rand didn’t think so: “Art is not the ‘handmaiden’ of morality,” she wrote, “its basic purpose is not to educate, to reform or to advocate anything” (The Romantic Manifesto, p. 22). I’d infer that its basic purpose is not to “cheer,” either, but I don’t expect that lesson to have been internalized by the people responsible for “Atlas Shrugged Part 3.”

So what does the film “cheer” for? I have to quote directly here:

Interstellar cheers for values an Objectivist can love. The film several times explicitly and approving quotes Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” with its refrain “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” In this and other ways, the film thus directly says that we should strive to survive, know, achieve, and live.

This is a tragic-comic interpretation of Dylan Thomas’s poem. The lines in question do not “directly say that we should strive, know, achieve, and live.” They don’t implicitly say that, either. They’re an irrational rebellion against death, and contrary to Will Thomas, that is how they’re depicted in the film. The character who repeatedly utters the Dylan Thomas lines lives an outwardly successful but actually aimless life in rebellion against the reality of death: he deceives people, drives them to insanity, and sacrifices them to a lunatic quest that masquerades as an act of striving, knowledge, achievement, and life, but isn’t one. It’s instructive that Will Thomas hasn’t grasped that it is a masquerade. I’d like to think that movement-Objectivists can still cheer for or at least discern the difference between achievement and its counterfeit, but optimism sometimes gets the best of us.

Death is what Ayn Rand calls a “metaphysical given,” and her view of such givens is that wholehearted acceptance of their reality is required for the serenity proper to human life: “To rebel against the metaphysically given is to engage in a futile attempt to negate existence” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 37). That’s exactly what the character in question does. “[W]hen no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely” (PWNI, p. 43, my emphasis). “Raging into the night” is anything but serene, and is the exact opposite of what Rand was prescribing. To get this wrong is to get both Rand and the universe wrong. But leave that to the self-appointed Objectivist “experts” at The Atlas Society.

So what does the film get wrong, according to our inquisitor?

But here’s the thing: for all their striving, the heroes are incapable of succeeding on their own. Instead, a deus-ex-machina rescue saves them at the crucial junctures. Cooper has no plan to fly again before a strange message delivered by gravitational fluctuations in some dust directs him to NASA’s secret project. And there would be no NASA project without the wormhole that someone (a being from the 5th—physical—dimension?) has plonked there out by Saturn. And this feature carries over into the climax of the film. The heroes cope and deal as best they can with what opportunity gives them, but we see that they could not solve their problems themselves.

That is a spiritually enervating betrayal of the film’s key themes. It says, in effect, “Pray, pray, for someone else to set things right.”

Suppose that I denied that I could solve all of my problems all by myself all the time—in the ridiculous sense of never relying on anyone besides me for help, and never conceding that the solution of a problem extended beyond my self-enclosed resources at a given time. Would that prove that I was advocating a resort to prayer, or would it simply suggest recognition of an obvious fact about the nature of human life—that we sometimes cannot solve our own problems in the envisioned way? Not a difficult question to answer, unless you’re in the grips of an ideologically-inspired fantasy that commands you to forswear the assistance of others, and then commands you to think ill of those who ask for it. Never mind that given the actual structure of the actual world we live in, the first group will actually solve the problems they confront, and the latter group will not. People in the grips of fantasies don’t notice things like that.

Perhaps that is why Thomas fails to notice that his summary of the film contradicts what actually happens in it. In fact, the heroes do “solve their problems themselves” in the relevant sense of that phrase. The small group of astronauts who blast off for the wormhole do not, it’s true, leap into space like Team America, fly to the wormhole, and fashion some facile derring-do technological “solution” to “the problem,” as you’d expect, say, in a very long re-run of Macgyver. But they do solve the problems they face in a way that entitles them to full credit for having done so, regardless of the help they seek: they get credit for seeking it, and for figuring out how to use it to their advantage, no mean feat under the circumstances.

Incidentally, I don’t mean to be denying that there are facile derring-do solutions in the film. There are some of those, too. But that only proves my point: a depiction of two sets of achievements can hardly be construed as an attack on achievement.  See the film for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

Far from being a celebration of achievement or reason, Thomas’s claims here are a slap in the face to the characters’ exemplification of precisely those values. What is spiritually enervating is not the film, frankly, but his one-eyed commentary on it.

According to Thomas, “[t]here are other, smaller betrayals of the reason-achievement theme as well.”

The Earth’s crisis, though never fully explained, is put down at least in part to human arrogance and industrial farming. No one seems able to engineer a response to the plagues, nor does anyone appear to be trying. Environmentalists will feel vindicated.

This is just a blatant misdescription of the film. What’s true is that the Earth’s crisis is never fully explained—full stop. It is not “put down to human arrogance and industrial farming.” It is just left unexplained. One character in the film attributes it to human arrogance, but his claims are never confirmed, and the film never suggests that his claims are right (or wrong). (And the film’s protagonist, Cooper, can hardly be called humble.)

It’s true that no one seems able to engineer a response to the plagues, but there is no way to infer from the film that no one has tried to; Thomas’s claim to that effect is sheer confabulation. Anyway, here’s a thought: what if a plague struck and no one was able to engineer a response to it? Thomas seems to imply that the suggestion itself requires some sort of indulgence in irrationality. Really? Why?

Elsewhere in the review, Thomas cheerily concedes the possibility that a spaceship could travel through a gravitational wormhole. Why then reject the possibility that we might lack a feasible engineering response to a plague that struck the planet? We currently have no response to the possibility of an asteroid strike. Does that mean an asteroid couldn’t strike the planet? We currently have no response to the possibility of disasters caused by sudden global warming. Does that mean that no such warming and no such disasters can take place? Can we assume, a priori, that we will have an engineering solution in place when the sun implodes? Bastardized Julian Simon dogmas aside, how could anyone know such a thing? Thomas seems to think that human technology (and by implication reason) can dictate terms to nature, and that a film that refuses this conceit has somehow betrayed reason. I’m afraid that isn’t the way the world actually works. For once the question can be posed without resort to metaphor: what planet is Will Thomas on? (On the topic of catastrophic events and possible responses to them, I highly recommend Richard Posner’s Castastrophe: Risk and Response.)

Thomas continues:

Another theme in the film, repeated at key moments, is that emotions, or at least love, allow us to form connections across space and time: they are lauded as a form of intuitive awareness transcending our three dimensions. In fact, the full arc of the story trades on this insight. When the most scientific people in the universe recur to this idea, the film paints reason as a hollow and insufficient exercise.

What the film is saying about love’s relation to reason is not entirely clear, but precisely because it isn’t clear, it’s susceptible of a more charitable interpretation than Thomas’s. We don’t need to infer that the film “paints reason as a hollow and insufficient exercise,” or that it claims that love displaces reason at all; perhaps the film suggests that reason cannot properly be exercised unless it does so alongside love.

If Thomas had read Ayn Rand with a little more care, he’d realize that in fact, she agrees with what I take to be the film’s account of love, not with his. What is the weapon one needs to fight the enemies of human flourishing? she asks in her 1971 essay, “The Age of Envy.” “For once, it is I who will say that love is the answer—love in the actual meaning of the word….love as a response to values, love of the good for being the good….What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential” (The New Left, 1975 edition, pp. 185-86). An exercise of reason devoid of love is not an exercise of reason at all.

Keep that passage in mind as you watch the very last scene of “Interstellar.” Then ask yourself who’s gotten the film right. But whatever you do, don’t be dissuaded by Thomas’s ridiculous review from seeing it for yourself.

Postscript, December 9, 2014: This article, “A One-Way Trip to Mars? Many Would Sign Up” in today’s Science Times, is a perfect example of the psychological superficiality of discussions of space exploration and space travel (as alluded to in my discussion with Jurgis Brakas in the comments). Being “scientific” in the narrow, reductive, geeky sense, the article devotes about three columns to discussion of the logistical difficulties of getting a person to Mars, then spends a few incredibly facile paragraphs on what it would be like to live there–i.e., what it would be like to be a Martian.

Yet Mars remains a forbidding, frigid place, with an average temperature of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit and an unbreathable atmosphere just 1 percent the density of Earth’s and consisting largely of carbon dioxide. Colonists would live in artificial podlike habitats, grow vegetables in greenhouses and get their protein from insects. No pets, sorry. And if you plan on going outside — as you will, often, to repair infrastructure battered by the chronic Martian wind, or to wipe off solar panels encrusted with the ubiquitous Martian dust — you must wear your spacesuit at all times.

In short, a lifetime on Mars would be like a life sentence in an unimaginably lonely, cruel, and dangerous prison. It doesn’t take an expert in mental health to see that an environment like that would be a breeding ground for mental illness or insanity. But apparently such trifling considerations aren’t the fodder for serious discussion in science journalism today: psychology isn’t scientific, so it takes a back seat to discussions of other things. One enthusiast, an engineer, dismisses the psychological issues with a facile cliche: “We’re a species that explores and pushes our boundaries. By exploring our own planet, we’ve developed technology to make our life more comfortable.” He might want to read up a bit on the historiography of exploration on Earth to discover what else happened en route to that destination.  One supposed enthusiast, “planning to get married in September,” is “willing to leave her husband behind should a Mars passport bear her name”–for the rest of her life! Talk about devotion. It’s supposed to be amusing, but is it?

Unsurprisingly, the most profound comment on the whole thing is a side-bar excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:

…and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt the great illness in them even before the first rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Loneliness.

Postscript, September 21, 2015: I was gratified to see this Op-Ed in the Times, adding some useful details to the anti-Mars arguments I made in the last postscript.

Stop coughing, stop texting, and shut up: toward a new ethic of concert-going

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I’ve got aesthetics on the brain, which is usually what happens when I’ve got a lot of grading to do. Also known as self-distraction. 

Anyway, here’s an article at the website of WQXR-FM on the violinist Kyung Wha Chung’s recent performance in London, with some ill-tempered comments by yours truly, weighing in on the much-discussed “coughing child controversy.” It’s really just an anti-concert-audiences-today rant, one of my favorite subjects, whether I’m discussing rock or classical audiences. My comment is posted at 4:25 pm, under “Irfan Khawaja from Lodi, New Jersey.”

Happily, the Decorum Martinets seem to be out-commenting the Narcissistic Entitlement Defenders in this conversation. Some of my favorite comments include those of LAP from New Jersey, Glenn, Peter from Rosedale (on Andres Segovia), ilyatrakht, Reindeer Games, CastaDiva from New York, Dariv, Prevum Cor from Mexico City, and Ramona Perez Finkelman from Nyack. But it’s heartening to see lots of others.

We shall overcome.