Marat

Where there is a high population density because people have good reasons to live there, such as in Hong Kong or Singapore, the high population density itself creates wealth, since it greatly inflates real estate prices. But where there is high population density for purely contingent reasons such as high birth-rate or political and religious factors which hem people into a crowded area, such as in Bangladesh, the high concentration of people can create poverty, at least where the population still depends on agriculture, which needs inexpensive and extensive tracts of land to be economically efficient.

Since few people have lived in both North America and Europe (though many have visited both areas), I think most people aren't aware of what a profound, constant, nagging inconvenience it can be to live in an area where energy is very expensive and has to be used sparingly, as opposed to one where it is cheap and used lavishly. In North America I just don't think about energy use because it is sufficiently inexpensive to ignore, and as a result I gain about 5% life expectancy, in a sense, since I don't have to devote 5% of my day to the dull and irritating business of husbanding energy resources. Unless as a prerequisite to taking a bath you want to lean out the second-storey window of your house on tip-toes to light a gas flame under the hot water pipe while holding a blanket over it with your other hand to keep the flame from being constantly blown out by the winds, and repeat this process four or five times per bath-filling on a windy day because the wind keeps extinguishing the wind, then don't pretend to be an environmentalist.

The whole problem with affirming 'freedom' is that you then have to decide what kinds of freedom are acceptable for each person to exercise, even if these irritate or harm other people, and which types of freedom are justly limited because of their injury to the legitimate security or autonomy interests of other people. As soon as you start calibrating this equilibrium, you start imposing highly questionable value judgements on other people, with the result that everyone can once again complain about a lack of freedom! So since you cannot separate the affirmation of freedom from the affirmation of some values which define its legitimate scope, and all these values are disputable, you cannot get around denying freedom by imposing your own values on others. Thus for example in Canada it is a crime to say anything that injures the feelings of certain groups which are designated as vulnerable, because this is deemed to be illegal hate speech. It is seen to be an illegitimate over-extension of your general liberty to say what you want if your statements encourage discrimination against other people, just as it is an illegitimate over-extension of your general liberty to swing your arms if you do so in a crowd and start knocking other people with your elbows. But in America the view is that you are still entitled to say racist things no matter how much they hurt the feelings of vulnerable races or encourage discrimination against them, since that is just the legitimate price they have to pay for living in a free society where they can also say offensive things. Depending on how you determine which is the more important freedom -- freedom from the threat of racial discrimination promoted by the racist free speech of others -- or freedom from the government censoring what you want to say -- either America or Canada is the more free country. To take a more extreme case, the Nazis may have felt their own society was more free because Aryans could live free of the threat of cultural contamination by Jewish influences. If you could really accept the foundational thesis of Nazism, that Jewish influences are genuinely toxic and unambiguously harmful, then you would have to see a society which segregated Jewish influence out of it as 'more free' than one which tolerated it, since the poison of Jewishness would limit everyone's ability to act creativity, enjoy good culture, and avoid morally perverting influences -- and thus limit the freedom of the majority of people.

I can get myself in the mood to do serious intellectual work by listening to music, but if I try to listen to music while working, I find I simply tune it out so there is no point in playing it. Since all thinking is ultimately structuring, it helps to prepare yourself for intellectual work by listening to music with a highly evident and complex structure, like Bach or Monteverdi. Liszt or Mendelssohn, in contrast, just fire up the emotions with their more amorphous harmonies.

Legally, each state is entitled to legislate as to its own common language of commerce and interaction with governmental authorities. Pennsylvania, for example, in the early years of the American Republic, actually seriously considered declaring its state official language to be German. Free speech rights in the Federal Bill of Rights and in various state constitutions would always secure some rights for people who wanted to express themselves in some language other than the official one, however. Since every nation on earth was once occupied by someone else, and all current settlement is the product of migration, conquest, and displacement, history cannot establish what has to be the 'just' language of any area. Otherwise, depending on the point of origin you select, the people in France today would be required to speak Latin, Gaulish, or some proto-Indo-European tongue rather than modern French. Thus the Natives have no more claim to say that theirs is the language of America than Lawrence Welk's community of German speakers in Wisconsin have the right to set up German as the national language. The present Native peoples themselves invaded each others' territories prior to European contact, so where Cree is now spoken perhaps there should 'really' be Navaho spoken instead, and until we have better archeologial evidence, we can never know who speaks the 'historically justified' language in any particular place. It is thus more sensible just to let the current majority of speakers determine the lingua franca.

Perhaps there is an account of this taste in the book, 'Alive,' which was written about the people who survived the crash of a plane in the Andes Mountains by eating the corpses of their fellow-passengers preserved in the snow. I know that they complained of suffering from alternate bouts of diarrhea and constipation, and I wonder whether this had something to do with the unique physiology of each type of person they were eating. Some survivors of the crash could not stand the thought of carving flesh from their dead friends (they were all members of a soccer team), so they relied on the more hard-hearted passengers who went to the corpse supply and cut off bits of flesh in such a way that their origin from a human body, as well as the person they were taken from, was disguised.

Shipping exotic animals might be a problem! I wonder if anyone can draw a connection between the reputed capacity of gecko saliva to help in AIDS and the recent discovery that gila monster saliva is helpful for diabetes?

It is certainly possible to experience in imagination things you have never seen or experienced before. For example, certain brain injuries, such as severe hypoglycemia, can stimulate the areas of the brain which simply alert the subject to the fact that something is present in front of him, so the patient has a strong sensation of seeing something 'there' right before his face, but he can't say what it is or what it looks like, which causes great consternation. The first time this happens to someone (say, from the occurrence of a new insulinoma), it is the experience of 'seeing' something in imagination which was neither seen before and resynthesized from imagination, nor is it seen now.

If you consider what education was like in its Western origins -- people who generally loved learning coming together at Plato's academy or Aristotle's lyceum, seeking to enhance their understanding by discussing problems with each other -- and contrast this with the purely instrumental education of today, it is quite depressing. "I hate studying this but without a degree I can't get into the management trainee program at McDonald's Restaurant, so I have to put up with this for the next four years unless I want to start out making hamburgers," is hardly an attitude that would have made sense to the scholars participating in the foundation of modern science at Gresham College in the 17th century. The great step backward was the arbitrary assumption at the end of the 19th century that a unversity education is necessary or useful to doing most high-paying jobs, which it is not. Actually, I would have been more suited to enter the Met Life management trainee program straight out of high school, since I was then still uneducated enough to adjust to the stupid sort of interests required for such a trade. If for some reason you are strongly motivated to study science, have a genuine love of learning, but cannot leave your home area to attend university, then a good option might be a distance education from the University of Waterloo. Waterloo is well-respected in Canada as a technical, computer-oriented school with a distance learning program which is now about thirty years old. You can earn a general science B.A., with real courses at an advanced level in chemistry, physics, biology, etc., all taken by distance learning and examined by arrangement with schools near where you live.

Canada is one of the most environmentally committed cultures in the world, and it is no coincidence that Greenpeace was founded there. However, in the 2008 election, when the Liberal Party under Stephan Dion ran on a strong environmentalist program proposing a cap-and-trade/carbon tax system, the voters decisively rejected that party at the polls. It seems that even though the romance and the ideology of the green movement is extremely strong in Canada, the voters don't want to touch it with a barge pole if it turns out to cost any money at all. As a result, in the 2011 election the issue completely disappeared from the political agenda. Why is democracy celebrated as our highest political value if it empowers people who are so dumb that they assume that what they want shouldn't cost anything, yet they still continue to affirm that they really want it?

Just about every country in the world claims to be promoting freedom, even though the extent to which they actually provide structures which enhance freedom varies enormously. This suggests that using freedom as the reason for being patriotic is formulaic and misleading. The U.S. thinks it is free because it keeps taxes low and thus plunges everyone into a perpetual state of enslavement to their fear of not being able to pay medical bills, not being able to afford university fees for their children, or sinking into utter penury when some capitalist decides to close the only industry where they can find a job. With an equal but distinct absurdity, in the 1984 election in Canada, candidate John Turner described Canada as the freest country on earth, even though Canada is the paradigmatic nanny-state and censors all speech it doesn't like by government 'human rights tribunals' which forbid anything they can manage to characterize as 'hate speech.' There is also a criminal code provision that can send you to prison for saying anything not politically correct, as long as it is not said as part of a religious opinion, which is for some reason privileged above normal secular speech. Finally, I was at an historical display of World War II posters once and saw a group of Nazi banners urging foreign citizens in occupied Europe to join the foreign branch of the SS to preserve the 'freedom of Europe' against the crassness of American capitalism and the oppression of Russian Bolshevism. If freedom can be claimed by every political movement then it is an empty concept.

The truly expensive, chronic diseases are those that simply cannot be prevented, since their cause is either not well understood or there is no known method to prevent them. Cystic fibrosis, type 1 diabetes, muscular dystrophy, lupus, multiple sclerosis, a whole range of autoimmune conditions, polycystic and other genetically caused renal diseases, teratomas, about half of all heart disease, about half of all cancers, all cost a fortune to treat and cannot be prevented by any change in lifestyle or medical intervention. Even type 2 diabetes is now emerging in new research as a largely genetically-conditioned, autoimmune condition like type 1 diabetes, and so it is also probably much less preventable than was previously believed. Although there is now a constant drumbeat that prevention is the key to reducing healthcare costs, in fact this is largely a myth promoted by those who don't want a public healthcare system and argue against it on the grounds that since disease is always just the patient's own fault, there is no obligation of society to help the patient. This ideology is reinforced by the fact that healthy people want to feel superior to sick people, whom all societies tend to shun, hate, and fear, and the best way to do this is to pretend that health or sickness is your own fault. Healthy people also like to think that they have some control over their medical fate, so imagining that they have to adopt an unhealthy lifestyle in order for serious illness to have any chance at all to affect them is one way they conjure up a false sense of control. But then suddenly a tall, thin, hyperathletic individual like the tennis star Arthur Ashe suffers a massive heart attack at an early age and everyone tries to ignore the implications.

Wasn't there a famous experiment in which psychiatrists couldn't differentiate computer-generated texts from confessions written by real people rather than by a computer confession writing program? Suppose 'Marat' is just the pseudonym of a committee of 12 people who just have one 'front man' who is in charge of actually writing up the ideas each of the other 11 members has. Then the writing style wouldn't give away the identity. Also, writing on a number of different topics seems to suggest that 'Marat' really is just a composite name for a few people rather than just one person. The whole point of trying to generate this scepticism is just to suggest, of course, that personalizing things such as so many posts do here when they ridicule reputations and insult the poster's character, or assign negative or positive reputations, etc., doesn't make much sense when you don't know the whole person behind the posts. People might blush if they knew the real academic credentials, the list of publications, and the university position held by the posters they label as fools. The discussion would be much more civil if it were treated just as authorless ideas in interaction rather than personal contests.

At international law only a country can declare war, not a band of hooligans. International law does recognize the existence of bands of criminals who can be seized and brought to trial wherever they are, called 'hostis humani generis,' the enemies of all mankind (originally intended as a legal designation for pirates), but these people have to be continuing to engage in what makes them enemies of all mankind to be killed, although they can be arrested at any time. A retired pirate has to be arrested, not killed on sight. He may be an enemy of mankind, but he cannot declare war on mankind, so his hostile status depends on what is now continuing to do, not on an implicit declaration of war effected by his initial misbehavior. Criminal mens rea is determined at the moment of the act, not after later facts emerge to justify it. The criminal intention and the criminal act have to overlap temporally for the person to be guilty of a crime. Thus if I intend to murder a person who, unknown to me, is about to kill me, even though in fact I have a defense of necessity (self-defense) which allows me to kill him if necessary, I am nonetheless guilty of murder, since I acted with the intent to commit unlawful killing and did so, even though more knowledge could have given me an innocent intent. An interesting complication of this is the case of transferred intention, where I intend to shoot person A but my aim is bad and I kill person B instead. Then transferred intent allows my criminal mental intention against A coupled with my intent to act to kill A to count as both the criminal intent and the criminal action of murder against B.

Your question was, assuming GDP won't increase, how do we make people happier with interventions that won't cost more money? Well, 'The Spirit Level' addresses itself precisely to that issue by pointing out that people become happier with a constant GDP as long as the distribution of wealth is improved.

I was amused at the euphemism of the U.S. spokesman who said that bin Laden's body was 'eased' into the ocean from the deck of the aircraft carrier after the funeral service. How many meters can a corpse free-fall through the air before splashing into the water for the process still to be described as 'easing' into the ocean? CNN reported in detail this evening on the topic of speculation in this message thread. It turns out that even though there was a police station only a 5-minute drive away from bin Laden's compound, Pakistani police and army units (from the three battalions stationed at the Military College about the same distance away?) arrived there only an hour after the 40-minute commando operation had begun, and thus very shortly after the Navy Seals had left. (They were surprisingly accurate in how well they timed their lateness, if the point was not to create a confrontation with the U.S. Was someone telling them when it would be all right to appear, or were the Seals just miraculously lucky that no one from five minutes away bothered to come until just after they left?) Locals describe encountering perimeter guards around the compound when they arrived to see what was going on, and they stated that these guards had laser-sighted weapons and spoke Pashto, the local language. (Does the U.S. have Pashto speakers with commando training on call just in case such a mission to that area of the world were ever necessary, or does the presence of these perimeter guards point to Pakistani Army cooperation providing a blocking force against bin Laden's potential escape in case he heard and responded to the helicopter noise and the possible crash of a helicopter against his compound prior to the storming of his residence? Was there time for the U.S. to unload and deploy these perimeter guards from the helicopters after the noise of the helicopters landing and the helicopter crash alerted the local population and brought them running to see what was happening? What guarantee could there have been that perimeter guards disembarking from helicopters could deploy around the compound before the compound's residents took off after hearing the helicopters approach, or after certainly hearing the crash? Wouldn't a military planner want them on the ground already prior to the warning from the helicopter noise, and if so, wouldn't that have to mean they were there with Pakistani Army cooperation?) A local retired military officer interviewed said he heard the U.S. helicopters flying, so even though they were stealth helicopters their flight was audible to those on the ground.

'Marat' is actually just the pseudonym for a committee of 12 different people. Or not? My point is simply that we cannot know.

Two epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have published a detailed statistical study in 'The Spirit Level' (London: Penguin, 2010), which shows that when nations reach a certain level of prosperity, which corresponds to that typically found in a developed economy, the quality of life in those countries improves with increasing equality in the distribution of resources, but not with increasing wealth. By comparing the lopsidedness of wealth distribution in various countries and states of the U.S. with data on crime, mental health, physical health, life expectancy, education, violence, etc., Wilkinson and Pickett were able to demonstrate that the best way to improve quality of life on all these measures was by making the distribution of wealth more equal, not by increasing the total wealth in society. So this defeats the essential argument of the Republicans, which is that we must adopt social policies which lower economy equality in order to increase the total amount of economic wealth in order to improve the quality of life in society for everyone. In fact, the opposite is true: By increasing economic inequality we generate so many internal tensions within society that we lose more quality of life than we could ever gain from any economic gains -- that is, as long as we have a developed economy and we are not talking about whether additional economic resources would be beneficial to quality of life in Rwanda, Chad, or Mali.

But the problem is that while the U.S. is NOW claiming that the evidence found in bin Laden's compound supports the theory that he was still actively making war on the U.S. and was thus legitimately killed as an enemy combatent who was not surrendering when encountered, the U.S. did not have that evidence when it ordered what is now admitted to have been a 'kill or capture' mission. It was then often suggested that bin Laden may at one time have been actively directing al-Quaida but was no longer doing so; that he was now just a figure-head but no longer a combatent, etc. So when the U.S. framed its intent to kill or capture bin Laden on the assumption that he was still actively making war on the U.S., the general consensus is that it was not clear that he was a legal target for killing under article 51 of the U.N. Charter. He could have been arrested under international law for a trial to determine -- by a neutral investigation of the facts by a disinterested adjudicator -- whether he still was an active combatent, and whether he was really guilty of crimes against humanity in the past, but he could not legally have been killed on the information available. Since the U.S. had the mens rea to kill bin Laden knowing that it did not yet have sufficient information to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he was still an enemy combatent, yet it still committed the actus reus of killing bin Laden despite the absence of exculpatory knowledge, then the action was just murder and illegal at international law when committed -- even if after the fact it might be found to have been justifiable. But now that bin Laden will never be available to present his defense, the justification of the U.S. action can never be proven. All the U.S. does by saying that it had article 51 justification for its action is to assert that according to America's theory of the situation, that was its justification. Whether the facts support that justification or not can only be established by the International Criminal Court, but now that investigation can never occur.

In Canada all essential healthcare services are provided by the government without user fees, and that system costs only about 10% of GDP to cover 100% of the population, as opposed to the mixed public-private system in the U.S., which costs about 17% of GDP to cover 86% of the population. Similarly generous healthcare systems in Europe cost about 7% to 9% of GDP, and are cheaper because European physicians cannot automatically practise in the U.S. as Canadian physicians can, which forces up the cost of healthcare in Canada, since physician salaries have to be inflated to keep them from migrating southward. Generous healthcare systems must be affordable, since a devastated United Kingdom at the end of World War II was not only able to introduce a healthcare system for all without user fees, but was also able to provide free dental care and free pharmacare. It is clearly illogical to believe that government-provided healthcare must be too expensive, while private payment of healthcare is not, since government provision of healthcare can control the prices that doctors and drug companies want to charge by the force of law, while private purchasers of healthcare, who have no option but to buy what is offered at the price that it demanded or die (or suffer from untreated disease), are not in a negotiating position to drive prices down by ordinary supply and demand bargaining. Finally, if it is supposed that private healthcare will be cheaper because fewer people will seek medical care for their illnesses, then this does not really save money, since illnesses will only become worse because of delayed or foregone treatment, and a sick person without treatment represents the cost of disease in his inability to work and his suffering, even if he does not represent it in the money his treatment costs, so there is no ultimate saving. But despite the good sense of a public healthcare system, it will never be provided in the U.S., since as Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, once remarked, the U.S. is not a democracy but a plutocracy. As long as the rich rule American via the campaign financing system, there will be no public healthcare system, not because it doens't make sense, but because it blocks investment and profit-making opportunities for private capital.

If you go back to the foundational works of modern political theory, such as those by Hobbes and Locke, the basic understanding is that there can be less freedom resulting from more disorder, rather than the other way around, as your comment seems to presuppose. Thus if all citizens were compelled to pool their resources together to fund out of income tax payments a public healthcare system in which all medical expenses were covered without user fees by the government, there would be some loss of freedom since everyone would have to pay slightly higher taxes. But there would be an enormous gain in freedom as well, since people would not have to fear their entire family having to go bankrupt because of the catastrophic illness of one family member; unfortunate inidividuals struck down by a catastrophic illness would not have to confront economic stresses at the same time; healthcare costs would fall because the monopoly power of government could drive the prices of healthcare suppliers lower by negotiating as a unified force against them, and this in turn would increase the freedom of all from the burden of health expenses. So for a small net loss of freedom in having to pay higher taxes, there would be a huge net gain in freedom from the terror of catastrophic medical expenses, which now haunts everyone except the super-wealthy. The same principle follows from forcing people to pay higher taxes for crime control, since for this small initial loss of freedom in higher taxes there is a larger net benefit in the freedom from fear of crime; increased taxes for public highways represent a loss of freedom to produce a much larger gain in freedom to travel efficiently, etc. The interesting thing is that if you talk to Danes, who pay a huge tax rate compared to Americans, the first thing they praise about their country is its greater freedom, since government subsidies mean that it costs next to nothing to go to university, healthcare costs are low, maternity leave is long and generous, disability leave is also easy to get, social housing is readily available to answer personal crises, unemployment payments are generous, etc., so everyone is free of the threats and financial limitations which make life a perpetual terror in the U.S. for everyone who is not wealthy.

Since we don't know who is behind any of these purely symbolic name tags, which could very well represent entire committees of people writing under a single nom de plume, I don't find it sensible to be voting for these names as though they were people. I actually never check to see who is saying what, and I make no attempt to discern a reputation or character for any name on this forum, but I just react instead to the contents of each individual message on its own. The true vice of this forum is the astonishing degree of rudeness, viciousness, and cruelty directed at the individuals who are merely imagined to exist behind the messages posted. I am not sure why this ugliness is so much worse on this forum than on any other message group I have ever encountered, but I suspect it has something to do with the title, 'Science Forum,' and the implications this has for personal self-worth being at stake in abusing other people or being abused by them. This enormous downside of the forum might be reduced if everything that tends to focus people's attention on identities underlying the posts is minimized. Included under this category would be things like 'reputation' ratings. Perhaps it is not even necessary to label messages by an identity, or to change the label for each message thread so that responses to previous comments in the same thread can be more clearly oriented.

There is already a U.S. patent (# 4,666,425) for a disembodied 'brain in a vat,' kept alive by being hooked up to a variety of life support machines, so it might be easier to subject this poor subject to a variety of illusions by chemical and electrical stimuli. It is described in detail in a book by Chet Fleming, 'If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive' (St. Louis: Polinym Press, 1987). The schematic diagram of the arrangement has the decency to show the disembodied head only from the back, fortunately.

DL: What you say is certainly ontologically correct, since if this were the best of all possible worlds, then everything in it would have had to have been conditioned by some necessary steps to achieve the best possible outcome. The only possibility of alternative causal sequences would be if there were more than one world of maximally good character, which seems unlikely, given the amount of varied detail in the world. But my worry concerns how we would be able to know that this is the best possible world? Jimmy falling and scraping his knee simply looks bad. I can imagine it being connected to some sort of complex causal sequence, which like a Rube Goldberg device intersects with other events so that Jimmy's fall in 1957 winds up preventing thermonuclear war resulting from the Cuban missile crisis, but really don't have any insight into this. I simply have to assume it. But since I have to assume it without being able to understand it, it seems that the premise of the OP, that we have to comprehend the perfection of God's works, is impossible for us to achieve.

Play: "The Death of bin Laden" Act I, Scene i Bin Laden sits in a dingy room watching television, huddled in a blanket, holding a monitor in his hand. There is a deafening crashing sound, stage left, from a helicopter blade striking the side of his compound. Bin Laden: (turning up the volume, leaning back, shouting over his shoulder) Mounir! Fatima! Seyedi! For God's sake, keep it down back there! I'm trying to watch the final episode of 'Dancing With the Stars'! -- Somehow, the scene doesn't ring true. In other news, today the former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. and U.K., Dr. Lohdi, said that the first that the Pakistani government knew of the U.S. incursion into its territory was when the noise of the U.S. helicopter crashing into bin Laden's compound was heard. She then added that at that point, Pakistan scrambled aircraft to send to the site of the noise, but they arrived too late. This raises two interesting questions: 1) Where was the helicopter crash heard? I would suppose it must have been at the military college. 2) If it was heard at the military college, why didn't they intervene, rather than waiting implausibly for jets to be scrambled to respond to an event occurring on the ground a short walking distance away?