Some number of my friends know that I’ve suffered from depression for a good long part of my life; I think my first real acute episode was when I was 13 or so, and certainly I had an acute episode when I was 16 that lasted for, I would guess, most of a year. I remember that there was a time during high school when I suddenly thought “maybe other people aren’t unhappy all the time”, which oddly was the beginning of the end for that acute episode.

Well, I’m depressed now. There are a bunch of stresses that go with it, that precipitate it, and I don’t doubt that some of them will come out in these pages in the next few weeks — and I don’t doubt that some of them are completely fantasies. I also, through long practice, know that the depression will ease on its own before too long; I’ve got the Good Drug, Prozac, and I haven’t had a long acute episode since I started taking it. But it makes life a little hard while it’s happening.

Depression, a real depression, is a funny thing: it’s not the same feeling as “being sad.” It’s not like grief or disappointment. It feels more like some combination of having a mild flu — you often have odd aches and discomfort — while being buried in sand up to your collar bone and having a black chiffon bag over your head. It’s hard to move, it’s hard to think, you want to just lie down because you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep very well. You often — especially with the kind of depression I often suffer, “atypical depression“, which paradoxically is the most common kind — have a craving for carbohydrates. (That Wikipedia article just pointed out that chromium picolinate supplementation is known to help that. I should try that, I think I even have some.)

Update, 3 July: First, “chiffon” is spelled with a “c”. Second, I’ve been taking 800 mcg of chromium picolinate a day for a couple days now, and damned if it doesn’t seem to be helping. Certainly the carbo cravings, and I think the depression as well. I hit MedLine, and there’s extensive literature that seems pretty uniformly positive on both chromium picolinate as a treatment for atypical depression, and as a treatment for insulin-resistant “type II” diabetes, as well as a good bit of stuff pointing out that depression, and especially atypical depression, is correlated with diabetes. This is very interesting; expect more details after I have a chance to read some papers.

Maybe the thing that most frustrates me is that since depression is a “mood disorder”, it’s not usually understood to be a “real disease.” There are still plenty of people who will tell you to pull up your socks and get over it. But there is a good bit of research to the contrary: besides having very consistent symptoms and increasingly well understood physiology, it turns out people with depression have associated co-morbidities — other diseases or pathologies that show up with it. Depressed people have suppressed immune systems. Depressed people are more prone to blood clots, so they’re more prone to both strokes and heart attacks. There’s a strong association between depression and type II diabetes — and one of the little stresses I mentioned is that I was diagnosed as being borderline type II diabetic a few months ago. (Dealing with type II diabetes while feeling hopeless and craving sweets is a particularly exquisite, if somewhat ludicrous, annoyance.) Peter Kramer’s book Against Depression goes into it in some detail.

What I don’t have is an ending for this note. I’m sure the depression will be better; if not tonight, then tomorrow or the next day, or a couple days after that. There are things I can do to help it, like force myself to get lots of sleep. (There’s some reason to believe disordered sleep is a precipitating event for an acute episode; in any case, I know that extra sleep helps me get past it.) So this is really just a whine, with perhaps just a hint of a suggestion that if you know someone with depression you think, just for a second, what you’d say to them if they, say, had a long-lasting case of bronchitis.

Here’s a hint: it wouldn’t start with “Pull yourself together and stop being a baby.”

A commenter at Volokh says:

However, many of us moderates or slightly-left-of-moderates find it curious that on every issue pertaining to race, conservatives side with the preferred viewpoint of the racial majority over the preferred viewpoint of the racial minority. Of course it could be a coincidence–and for most conservatives I believe it is–but it is nonetheless remarkable.

and later…

I want to clarify my point a little bit. The majority of conservatives are honest, kind individuals. However, it is curious that on almost every political issue related to race their view can be used to keep the racial majority in power. Is that really very controversial to suggest?

Controversial? No. Mistaken, and suggesting a really pernicious and deep-seated bias? Yes. Absurd if considered closely? Absolutely.

Consider the contrapositive: if there is something questionable about this notion that “every political position relating to race can be used to keep the racial majority in power” then it suggests that a more appropriate position would be one in which, on every question relating to race, one’s position ought to lead to the assumption of power by a racial minority.

Now contrast that with taking the position that everyone ought to be equally entitled to power irrespective of race. Such a post-racial nirvana would, in all probability, result in a majority of the positions of political power being held by members of the majority race — or rather, if you can imagine it, of the number of people who happen to have very dark complexions who have political success being about the same as the general population of their particular constituency, while also having occasional particular individuals who don’t match the makeup of their particular constituency. (This could be stated more precisely in statistical terms, but I’ll resist the siren song of mathematics for now.)

Imagine if, in some parallel universe, we made our “racial” construct based on RhD antigen blood type instead of melanocyte distribution and activity. A person from that universe, given sudden visibility into ours, might find it wonderful and strange that we have as many members of the Rh negative “race” in political power as we do, but observe that most of our political processes still result in most political power being held by the Rh positive “race”, and find that suggestive of continuing deep-seated racism. What’s more, no political system other than one that especially privileged people of the Rh negative “race” could possibly have any other appearance — to a person from that parallel universe.

I don’t deny that racism has had, and probably still has, an influence on political power — although I’m not at all sure that I believe the influence is always to the advantage of the majority “race”. But I think it’s worth asking, every so often, if we would recognize what a really “post-racial” society would look like. I suggest the really liberating, and liberal, position would be to strive to see no more political significance in melanocyte activity than we see in RhD antigens.

I want to return to the maxim: as I suggested, I think that anyone who understands something can explain it to an interested third party or reasonable intelligence and some interest. A lot of my posts on Buddhism are part of that; as I think about them, and try to make them clear, sometimes I find I don’t understand them as well as I might. Then I’m forced to go back to things like the Sanskrit or Chinese, as I did to think about the Eightfold Path. When I feel like I can explain it, I feel confident that I understand it.

So now we’re in the middle of a political campaign, and there’s a lot of speech around, all intended to persuade us. I’ll grant that sometimes people can’t explain something because they don’t understand it, and I’ll grant that some people may simply not have the skill to explain something they do understand; i’d be hard pressed to explain a lot of things in German, and I’m actually pretty fluent. In that context, perhaps I’m just not sufficiently competent in German to manage to make myself clear.

In the case of our politicians, however, we can pretty well expect that they’re more than merely competently fluent in English. [1] If they’re explaining their own positions, I think we have some reason to expect that they understand them; if not, that’s an issue in itself.

It’s not uncommon, though, to here a political candidate explain something; reverse it; explain why they aren’t really reversing themselves; complain of the distraction from real issues; and so on.

That, it seems to me, is the point where we ought to start looking more closely; that’s the point where we ought to ask ourselves “is this necessarily obscure?”

If not, it’s time to ask “why would it be to someone’s advantage for this to remain obscure?”

1. Don’t throw Bush up as a counter-example; he, like most everyone else, stumbles in some situations. But both when he was a written text from which to work, and when he’s talking one on one with other people, he is fluent, and in a plain-spoken way eloquent.

Of course, even saying that presupposes there was another time.

The truth is, my political opinions are sufficiently non-Euclidian that I’ve never had a friend or acquaintance of the sort who will excommunicate people of other opinions who hasn’t eventually excommunicated me, right, left, center, or from the Eighth Dimension with Lord John Worfin.

Today, though, I want to say something about politics, politicians, political bloggers, and political blog commenters in general; I read more blogs on one side than the other, but I read on all sides, and the phenomenon I describe appears uniformly. It’s a phenomenon composed of two parts self-righteousness and three parts naiveté, and it’s characterized by the unstated axiom “it would all turn out better if I were in charge,” usually compounded with a little soupçon of “… and had been in charge for the last fifty or one hundred years.”

I saw an example today, and no I’m not going to link it, on purpose, because I don’t want to talk about some individual. A few days ago, Aden Hashi Ayro was killed in in Somalia by a Tomahawk missile; it’s been variously reported (as Sky News does in the linked piece) that from five fighters and a house maid were killed, up to “collateral damage” as many as twenty civilians.

The blog post that had me thinking made the argument that an attack like this, done “over the horizon”, might have gotten a Bad Guy, but would invariably anger all the families of all the civilians who were killed, and so wasn’t productive. The writer was obviously correct that it would anger all the families of all the civilians — but then, wouldn’t we expect it to anger the families of the Bad Guys too? And what about the families of people the Bad Guy might kill if he weren’t stopped? Don’t people get angry at the US now because we don’t send troops to Darfur and the Sudan?

Of course, one might adopt a Gandhian pacifism, but Gandhiji’s ahimsa, to me, always seemed best suited to the Raj: the British had limits. When he suggested the Jews could have dealt with the Holocaust by suicide, there was at the bottom of it an unworldly assumption that the Nazionalsozialisten would have been somehow embarrassed or deterred by mass suicide. Since the goal was Vernichtung and an Endlösung, “obliteration” and a “Final Solution”, this seems to me improbable. In any case, it was a tactic: historically ahimsa wasn’t pacifism, and in the Gita Krishna teaches Arjuna why it is sometimes necessary to fight and kill.

If you use an “over the horizon” attack, you are responsible for the deaths of people — some combatants, some not. This is unsatisfactory. On the other hand, if you don’t use an “over the horizon” attack and instead, say, send troops, aren’t you then responsible for any deaths or other casualties among those troops that would otherwise not have happened? If you use “moral suasion” and diplomacy, when military action could have shortened a conflict, don’t you bear some responsibility for the suffering of people hurt by the conflict? If you do nothing, aren’t you then responsible in part for what comes to pass?

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?

The arguments about torture seem to me to have the same flavor. Is torture a desirable or satisfactory thing? No, I don’t think so. On the other hand, the use of waterboarding on a few people, we are given to understand, saved many lives. Are we to understand then, that waterboarding — an extraordinarily unpleasant experience, I’m quite certain — is so unpleasant as to overwhelm the harm to the people who would have died, and their families who would have suffered and grieved?

If you use torture, you’re certainly responsible for the harm that causes. If you refuse to use torture, no matter how many people might be harmed or killed, don’t you then necessarily have some responsibility for that harm as well?

What I see in these arguments is not a high moral tone, but a very low one: they assert moral authority without accepting the necessary and consequential moral responsibility. By asserting a high-minded and plausible sounding abstraction, they avoid responsibility, at least in their own minds.

It seems to me that moral choices, true moral choices, can’t avoid both making the choice and taking responsibility for that choice. If you believe an “over the horizon” weapon is appropriate, then you have part of the responsibility for collateral damage; if you believe it’s inappropriate, you bear part of the responsibility for the harm done in a more intimate action; if you believe nothing should be done, you bear part responsibility for what happens. More than anything else, it seems to me that if you choose to criticize, you assume a moral responsibility to recognize that the person you criticize has the same dilemma you do: no matter what action they take, even of inaction, they also have to bear the consequences.