Marat

Capitalism is like a jelly-fish, the more you squeeze it in one direction to get the result from it that you want, the more it expands into another direction to escape your efforts to control it. If you tax businesses more to generate more resources to answer the welfare needs of the population, then businesses just reduce wages, hire fewer workers, or increase the price of the commodities they produce to ensure that their own profits will never be diminished to supply basic human needs for the population. If you tax businesses even more, they just leave for some Third World destination and employ the local labor force for $0.10 an hour rather than $10 an hour, and wind up making even more money, now that the various Globalization Treaties have made the world safe for capitalism so trade tariffs are no longer in their way. If you give businesses various economic benefits to stimulate job creation, then the businesses might still decide not to create any new jobs but just invest the economic gains abroad, increase dividends to shareholders, or boost executive bonuses. Ultimately, the only way to limit the power of capitalism is to displace it, letting it control a smaller share of the economy by nationalizing various industries to ensure that they serve the public good rather than private greed. Imagine if, during the financial crisis of 2008, the government had used it powers to buy up the large banks at fair compensation (consistent with the 14th Amendment). The major banks could have been bought quite cheaply, since they were on the verge of insolvency, so their true value was very low. Then the government could have made the banks do exactly what it wanted them to do, which was to loan money to small businesses and to exercise forebearance on mortgage foreclosures to get the economy going again and avoid acts of inhumanity. But since they did not nationalize the banks, but instead just invested in them with government funds, the banks, in jelly-fish fashion, just did what they wanted, and refused to lend to small businesses, continued to foreclose on mortgages, and soon paid out huge bonuses to executives and large dividends to shareholders once again.

At international law, the issue is one of interpretation of the precise facts of what happened when bin Laden's compound was attacked, so I agree that the U.S. should release the details -- though the problem would be that this would not be objective evidence, since the U.S. could always have censored or manipulated the data. The international law position of the U.S. is that it was acting under a right to defend itself against an active enemy in a war under article 51 of the U.N. Charter, but unless it can be established that bin Laden was still an active enemy commander, actually waging war on the U.S., barging in his house and just executing him rather than arresting him for trial would be illegal. Arresting him and returning him for a fair trial, preferably before the International Criminal Court, would have been legally the safest option, since the entire factual setting ought to have been investigated by a neutral institution before any irreparable acts were undertaken. The U.S. almost always violates international law, and even exempts its own citizens from the jurisdiction of international courts, since it knows it will be likely to continue violating international law in the future. It is unfortunate that in a democracy that prides itself on free speech, problems such as this simply never come to public discussion, and instead all we see is CNN acting like the State Department's Propaganda Ministry when it comes to foreign affairs.

My guess is that all the complex entanglements you mention would probably be very much reduced in a world where sex was not artificially made into something sacred and thus necessarily scarce. No doubt the entanglement effect of interactions would be variable, just as it is now with chance conversations with strangers. For example, I found myself sitting on a London bus next to a World War II veteran who was there for the D-Day 50th Anniversary Memorial Services on June 6, 1994. He sat there wearing his blue blazer covered with medals and his military beret jauntily tilted to one side, garrulously going on about storming the beaches into a hail of machinegun bullets, and I had the distinct feeling that after the conversation our relationship was not going anywhere. On the other hand, I was on a trolley going to the Countway Medical Library one afternoon and fell into a fasinating conversation about life and death with a young chemotherapy nurse, and I became sufficiently interested in her to ask her out, until I noticed that everyone else on the trolley was avidly listening to the developing soap opera and so I shrank back in embarrassment.

Leibniz has an interesting angle on this. Since the world obviously has evil aspects, we can only find that God's creation is good if there is an adequate excuse for the evil in it. The excuse, Leibniz suggests, would have to be that to create the best possible net world, it would have to contain some evil, and the world God has created has the least amount of evil you could get away with an still maximize the net goodness of the universe. But if we were to understand this assertion rather than just accept it, we would have to be able to see why Jimmy falling and scraping his knee on the way to school at 8:19 A.M. on October 3, 1957, was a necessary element of this world being the best of all possible worlds. Since we can't understand that and any number of other apparently contingent evils, since we have no concept of 'universal compossibility unto the maximal realization of goodness,' the most we could say is that if there were any solution to the problem of evil marring God's creation, it would have to be along the lines of Leibniz's suggestion.

The obsession with issues of obedience and faith is characteristic of the relationship between humans and their governments, which are naturally always concerned with the effectiveness of their authority. This is especially true of any attempt to govern people by a made-up mythology whose doctrine empowers a priesthood to live at the expense of the general population even without providing any material service, but instead just because they create an unreal need (assuaging the sins of disobedience to a made-up omnipotence) which only they can mediate (confession, special prayer, interventions, rituals, etc.). Cf. the slogan of advertising: 'Create a need and then fill it.' People get so caught up in the standard god-myths they don't notice how arbitrary they are. Why would a real god care so much about faith, belief, and obedience, rather than just about goodness, kindness, and humanity? He has the former obsessions because they are the characteristic worries of an invented mythology which seeks to govern people, and can only succeed in this if it can secure belief and obedience. A real god, on the contrary, would have no particular reason to care whether we obeyed him or not, believed in him or not, or would not even necessarily want to promulgate rules of behavior. He would be completely confident of his own reality, of course, so what difference would it make to him if finite minds were convinced of that or not? He would have infinite power, so what difference would it make to him if finite minds obeyed him or not? With his infinite power, why would making moral rules for puny beings and punishing disobedience of those rules be such a preoccupation for him?

Although the social and economic design of the world requires people to specialize in some particular area of study and develop an expertise in it, this is highly unnatural, since everyone is inwardly aware that he could have been an actor, a soldier, a butler, a chemist, an engineer, or a war criminal, given the right circumstances and influences. Essentially you have to tell yourself a lie about yourself to pretend you 'are' just one thing or the other. Keeping this in mind, always try to broaden your academic foundation in preparation for future changes of direction.

No doubt there are confounding variables in trying to trace the relevant factors for the differential incidence of AIDS throughout the world: but this is almost always the case in epidemiology. But still it is quite striking that multiple sexual partners in the West does not seem to have anything like the same AIDS-incidence increasing effect as it does in Africa, nor does it have the same significance among men as it does among women. What the AIDS fear-mongers don't want you to know is that if you are a male in a developed country having sex with females from developed countries, your AIDS risk is insignificant. Biology is neither delicate nor politically correct, but causing micro-tears rather than receiving micro-tears seems to make a lot of difference to your risk. A good data sheet on the evidence for the complex interaction between the great differences in AIDS incidence in the developed and underdeveloped world and its relation to parasitology, pre-existing immune deficiency, nutrition, and unclean sorts of homosexual sex is by Dr. Richard Bowan Pearce, "Parasites as Cofactors in AIDS" (1997).

The essential problem is that all the market inducements for consumers to spend their money on one thing or another are disconnected from the most general needs of the economy. If the economy would produce most jobs if people bought cars, but public transportation is priced more attractively than car ownership, then people will put their spare cash into public transport. If the costs of buying gasoline to power motorized transport are lower than using electric power, then people will buy gas-powered cars even if there is a hidden cost in this choice to the environment which makes gas ultimately cost-ineffective compared to electric power. The way the economy is presently structured, the pricing mechanism for things doesn't reflect the real cost-benefit of purchases, to the environment, to employment, to community safety, to national security, etc. You might call it the 'reverse invisible hand phenomenon,' in which the sum total of individual inducements to buy, to sell, and to price things yields irrational choices for the net good of the society. But if you start setting prices according to some general, political notions of the common good, that is a step toward socialism which the Republicans wouldn't like. "Get the government off the people's backs," said Reagan in 1980, and that ideology has been predominant in America ever since.

This discussion reminds me of a point made in Peter Singer's interesting and brief text on Hegel. He says that humanity abstracts out all its good qualities and projects them into an imaginary being which contains all of these good features on a reified platform, which makes all these properties features of an infinitely good God-entity. Since humanity is now left behind with all of its good features missing, the constructed entity which contains all of human goodness, God, can now criticize humanity for lacking goodness, and humanity can feel guilty for no longer being good. This abstraction, projection, reification, and criticism process then creates a need for some reconciliation between a defective humanity and the infinite goodness of all the good abstracted out of it and made into a God-thing distinct from it, and this reconciliation is achieved through the mythology of the sacrificial lamb. Yawn! This is what Wittgenstein used to call 'an unnecessary shuffle.'

Behind this question lurks an interesting puzzle for idealists who want to insist that there should only be a higher, 'romantic' love as the essential basis for intimate relationships between men and women. The question is: If romantic love is ideal rather than driven by sexual desire, why don't 18-year-old males ever fall madly in love with 88-year-old women with powerfully attractive personalities and fascinating intellects? The fact that this never happens has to be explained by supposing that romantic attraction has an essentially sexual component.

In primitive Christian and Islamic culture all lending at interest was forbidden as usery. Islamic culture still recognizes it as such, but uses various devices to allow lending despite this by various legal subterfuges. However, without a credit system, the necessary fluidity for capitalism to function smoothly would be lacking, and neither business ventures nor consumer purchases would be very easy. Essentially the only people who could either make large expenditures or start new businesses would be people who already had a large amount of liquid capital. Even those with huge agricultural holdings, which pre-existed modern capitalism, would be unable to generate a capitalist economy, since they could not translate the value of their land into liquidity by taking out a loan against it. The inability to pledge land holdings as collateral (by feudal land title obligations) was part of the reason why the European nobility fell into the decline with the rise of capitalism, since they could not mobilize their land assets by taking out loans against them to invest in the new opportunities. A good illustration of the importance of credit is the great expansion of the European economy when the first banking houses got underway in Renaissance Italy, and then afterward in Amsterdam and with the Fuggers in Germany.

I quite agree that people would still decline to have sex with people they found unattractive, but no doubt they would be significantly less picky since sex would no longer have its currently inflated, metaphysical status as somethng you are not supposed to have with anyone unless the circumstances are nearly magical so that it can be 'excused' or 'washed clean' by the romance. Sex could become more like conversation, hand-shaking, spontaneous side-walk sports games among teenagers, group singing, answering questions for a survey, accepting a new brand of food from someone offering it to you in a supermarket, etc. You might not have been especially interested in doing any of these things on that particular day with the people who presented themselves seeking your participation in their little group activity, but just out of human sociability you went along with it, since it was no big deal. I don't think that women would want to surrender their currently privileged status a governors of the sex economy, deciding who is favored for how many gifts, how much flattery, how much social status, and how much attention, and who isn't. But if they understood that the scarcity of sexual partners was the cause of the commodification of women, which could be cleared away once they were no longer scarce partners but instead just normal people, they might be willing to opt for people equal people with men rather than a cartel of capitalists in control of a scarce resource.

This is a very interesting puzzle that concerned epidemiologists when the AIDS virus first appeared, since other similar STDs like syphilis and gonorrhea had shown no preference for targets in the developed vs. the undeveloped world. But the epidemiological data are quite clear: AIDS is widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa and other underdeveloped areas but not in Europe or North America. Several reasons have been suggested. One is that the immune systems of people in the Third World are weaker, given their frequent exposure to parasites and bacterial infections, so they are less resistant to AIDS. This would also account for AIDS' more efficient spread through the Gay population everywhere, given certain Gay sexual practices which weaken the immune system. Another theory is that parasitic infections common in the Third World create patterns of micro-tunnels throughout the body, thus promoting the spread of the AIDS virus, especially out of the vaginal canal.

Republicans make an odd assumption -- but one necessary for their political clients, the wealthy -- that the only way to stimulate the economy and increase the available jobs is by handing over more money to the rich by tax cuts and other benefits. But of course, the economy could equally well be stimulated from below, by directly increasing the demand among the poor and the lower middle class by increased welfare and entitlement programs, which would also induce the wealthy to invest more money in production of consumer goods, thus employing more people. But whichever end of the social spectrum you stimulate -- the poor at the bottom or the rich at the top -- some of the stimulus money will always stick to the hands of those who first receive it, and the Republicans want it to stick in the hands of the rich, not the poor. Also, no one wants to notice that depressions, like those in 1929 and 2008, coincide with extremely lopsided wealth distributions. The rich can only preserve their excess wealth by investing it productively, but the capacity of investments to generate a good return is contingent on the poor and the middle class having sufficient disposable income to buy the goods being produced, which they don't have in times of extreme maldistribution of wealth. The warning signs were already evident in the U.S. economy prior to the 2008 crash, since return on capital investment was steadily declining due to consumer wealth falling, which in turn was the result of the triumph of capitalism from the previous 30 years of right-wing policies, which caused real wages to stagnate and union membership to collapse. The maldistribution of wealth generated a further problem when the rich started packing their excess wealth into exotic and extremely risky paper investments, such as insurance schemes on market performance, which weren't adequately supported by real assets. When these flimsy structures, called into existence to absorb the massive overinlfation of spare capital in the hands of the wealthy, collapsed as they had to, since they were entirely artificial investments, the crash of 2008 was inevitable. When anyone tells you that we have to increase the rewards for the rich or they won't invest to create any new jobs, ask him why the stock market always falls on news of higher employment and rises on news of lower employment. The whole goal of capital is to reduce wages as much as possible in order to increase profits, and once the minimum wage was introduced, the only way to accomplish this was to reduce the number of people employed.

Any commander of a U.S. military base of any description -- hospital, rehabilition, military college, or armory -- who heard helicopters, gunfire, and explosions the area and did not send scouts to investigate would be cashiered. Every sort of military installation is protected, and protection requires a pro-active response in the defensive zone around it. (When I was a student at the Free University of Berlin, we used to laugh at the jumpy, trigger-happy U.S. soldier who stood guard in front of Harnack House, a mere reception hall which happened to be under U.S. military control thanks to World War II.) I assume the Pakistani Army's military manuals state the same principles. How fast can a military jeep cover the distance of a kilometer and a half in the dark? Two minutes? Even if you allow ten minutes for reaction time plus five minutes for travel to the site of the noise, the Pakistanis would still be there with 25 minutes to spare before the Navy Seals completed their mission. The video from the civilians' amateur films of the fires around bin Laden's compound was shown today on BBC World News. Another thing that doesn't seem right to me is that Obama said that they were not sure it was bin Laden's compound until they got inside. But this seems to conflict with the U.S. story promulgated earlier that bin Laden's courier was shot and killed outside the compound before the U.S. forces entered it. This would imply that the U.S. was already willing to murder people standing around the compound in the dark even without knowing who they were, which hardly comports with international law, which binds foreign sovereigns to compliance with the domestic criminal law of the host state when they are in its jurisdiction.

It has now been revealed that people living next door to the bin Laden compound took amateur videos of the bin Laden compound as it was burning, and the films show that there was quite a large conflagration there. Too bad the soldiers in the military college, also next door to bin Laden, didn't respond to that fire. Or react to the explosion of the downed U.S. helicopter, or the gunfire. Of course these are exactly the sorts of things that cause people militarily trained to jump to their feet when they hear, so why did civilian neighbors come out with cameras while the military college soldiers apparently just slumbered on? Also, no defense installation ever neglects to have perimeter partols on duty all the time to guard the installation, so why didn't they react to helicopters landing in the middle of the night next door, gunfire, fires, and explosions? Given that one U.S. helicopter struck the side of bin Laden's compound and smashed its propeller as the Navy Seals were being deployed, why didn't everyone in the compoud just flee as soon as they heard what must have been an enormous crashing sound as a warning that something was coming? The fact that they didn't flee seems to argue that there was already some blocking force in place to prevent their escape, and who provided that if not the Pakistanis?

It is important not to assess the pluses and minuses of monogamy from a perspective within current society, with all its ritualized assumptions that the price males should pay for intercourse is that they have to 'take responsibility' for the women they have sex with and support them. These notions take from an era when birth control was unavailable or difficult to secure, and they have no practical value now. There also seems to be an odd assumption that sexual freedom would somehow negate the possibility of significant mental and emotional relationships between men and women. But on the contrary, sexual freedom might well encourage significant male-female interactions on a 'higher' level (the term already presupposes the prude's view of sex), since women would no longer be commodified as the scarce resource needed for heterosexual satisfaction, but would instead resume their true character as people, since the whole unnecessary 'sex economy' would be gone with no artificial partner shortages to sustain it. The vital first step is to de-sacralize sex and regard it just as a normal biological need which should be fulfilled so that people are not frustrated unnecessarily by artificial scarcities of opportunities for satisfaction. If you could only eat after you had satisfied some woman that you were in love with her and that she should love you as well, we would live in a world of misery and starvation for nothing. So why make that a precondition of being able to enjoy sexual satisfaction, with all the attendant suffering that that unnecessarily causes? Of course, this system makes women extremely socially powerful, but the problem is that it allows them to be socially powerful without their having to be kind, courteous, intelligent, or sophisticated. They are important just as a scarce heterosexual cooperation commodity, which encourages them not to develop more truly human ways to appeal to people, especially if their appearance makes them naturally powerful in the artificial sex economy. This economy is thus a tragedy for both men and women, since it involves them both in a subhuman commodification game where they could have interacted in a more sophisticated and human way. And monogamy is a lynchpin of this economy, since all economic systems have to rely on exclusivity of 'property.'

Transplant medicine does give some indication of the relative biological similarity in various populations. When organs are matched for transplant, six or sometimes eight immunologically significant HLA groups are matched between donor and recipient, with special value being given to a match at the DR group. Getting a match by these criteria in much more likely in some countries' populations than in others. Iceland, for example, yields very high matches for random donors, while America, Britain, or Canada yield low matches. Since the function of a graft is improved if it comes from a family member as compared to a non-family member, even with exactly the same number of HLA matches, other factors are obviously involved, and again, Iceland scores better because of these subtle, unquantified factors, suggesting that Icelanders are to some extent like one giant family.

All of these concerns have to be seen in the context of the fact that the transmission of AIDS in the developed world is extremely low. The transmission of AIDS to males in normal heterosexual intercourse in the West is close to zero.

But against that you have to consider the theory that Pakistan was in collusion with bin Laden in hiding him. Some have pointed to the fact that Pakistani authorities must have known about his presence in the country and at least turned a blind eye to it, given that he lived next door to their war college. But another point little explored is that there must have been some reason why bin Laden decided to move next to the war college in the first place, of all the various places in Pakistan he could have picked to live. I have to think that the only reasonable motivation for his moving there must have been to improve his safety by putting himself next door to where his protectors could always have military force ready to protect him, yet without calling attention to his presence by that force being stationed there.

I agree that polygamy would ultimately prove as frustrating as monogamy, since everyone would then start going around grumbling over being stuck with the "same old four" rather than with the "same old one" all the time. I have heard of Islamic men regarding with amusement the envy of Western men for four wives, since they feel that the ultimate significance of four mates is just more responsibility for taking care of a larger family. As a thought-experiment, imagine having married your last four girlfriends and now having them all as wives. When you think of it that way, there seems nothing especially titillating about having four wives. So the point has to be the ultimate abandoment of any restrictions to the expression of any instinct, whether it be drinking water, sleeping, sunbathing, sex, or dancing to music, unless some clearly objective, positivistic measure can justify its restriction -- i.e., the musice is too loud for this time of night, too much sunbathing causes skin cancer, there's a shortage of water and so we all have to go without, etc. The Kalahari Bushmen somehow manage to get by with complete promiscuity, so it doesn't seem that sexual restrictions are necessary for social organization.

It is interesting to try to clarify Lemur's issue by putting it starkly: Suppose we would be fairly certain that by continuing to propagade new life, generation after generation, this would cause an overall progress in the human condition to greater moral value, enlightenment, and happiness. However, the price for this would be that each individual life devoted to this process would inevitably suffer from the human condition, which necessarily involves the certainty of what we most fear, which is death. Since the persistence of the human ego depends on a supporting biological state of organization, but the general trend of physical nature is entropy, humans desire and depend on an order which is constantly being threatened, undermined, and eventually destroyed by the disorder of death. So human existence is primed to be bad. It takes years of training to make a good surgeon who can successfully treat a serious knife wound, but a minute of rage by an idiot with a knife can make an incision in someone which no surgeon can treat. This imbalance of the world towards things humans don't life, toward misfortune, and many other things like this, are the result of entropy, which governs the universe. But on the other hand, we pay this price with no assurance that it will be worth it, since we have no guarantee of the opening premise of this speculation, which is that the world-historical evolution of humanity will be towards the light rather than further into darkness, will be true. So the terrible investment, with all its human misery, may be ultimately for nothing. Perhaps the best thing we can do, the one most assured of achieving at least something positive in sparing people misery, is to have no children. As I commented before, it's apparent I'm not a parent. (How could anyone miss that pun?)

Although science and morality are logically distinct, they do interact with and influence each other as historical processes. Thus the discovery of Darwinian evolution made many believers question whether humans were sufficiently special to be at the center of the universe, or ask at what stage of the evolution of humanity from its primate ancestors does the soul enter, or does it enter on a continuum, and these questions had a real effect in changing or undermining religious belief. Conversely, sometimes religion and morality can alter the real world course of science, such as when Bush refused federal funding to embryonic research. Rarely, religion can even alter scientific belief, such as when the Church suppressed Galileo's findings.

Manicheanism may be a fairly general idea, but different religions give it different prominence. Thus in Zoroastrianism it is a major theme; in Christianity and Islam it is important but less central than in Zoroastrianism; and in Buddhism it is relatively unimportant. Things are always classifiable as generally good or evil, so it must seem natural to most religious thinkers to incorporate this into some mythological superstructure.

Even if some vast computer program could store all the genetic information about everyone who now has a particular citizenship, as soon as children were born they would be entitled to citizenship legally, although genetically they would have new genetic combinations and spontaneous mutations, so they would appear to the passport-control computer program to be non-citizens.