Marat

The latest report about bin Laden's arrest by CNN says that he was shot while moving about in the dark and within seconds of the arrival of the Navy Seals. A sensible prosecutor before an international tribunal would want to know how the U.S. can have discharged its duty to make a proper arrest by exercising no more force than necessary in the circumstances if its forces had only seconds to decide to make two lethal shots -- one to the head and one to the heart -- of a person moving in the dark? How could they have been certain under those circumstances that the person was resisting arrest, and that only lethal force would suffice for a group of young Navy Seals to subdue a 55 year old man? It all seems implausible. Cf. the Quintinalla Claim in the United States v. Mexico, General Claims Commission (1926), 4 R.I.A.A. 101 at 102-103: "The most notable parallel in international law relates to war prisoners, hostages, and interned members of a belligerent army and navy. ... A foreigner is taken into custody by a state official. It would go too far to hold that the government is responsible for everything that might happen to him. But it has to account for him. The government can be held liable if it is proven that it has treated him cruelly, harshly, unlawfully ... ." So the U.S. has to give an account to a neutral arbiter of exactly why bin Laden was killed -- execution-style -- rather than being taken into custody. The facts provided so far, that a team of burly Navy Seals armed with machine guns were simply overawed by a 55 year old unarmed man resisting arrest and so had absolutely no other way to subdue him except by firing two lethal shots, is simply unbelievable. Even granting that a group of Navy Seals armed to the teeth are no match for one late-middle-aged, unarmed man, surprised in the night and stumbling around his bedroom in his pajamas, there is still no explanation for why, if they absolutely had to shoot him, they didn't just shoot to wound bin Laden as an intermediate option.

To complete your analogy, we would have to imagine that we live in a world where there is in fact a nearly unlimited supply of food and water, but for various cultural reasons we decide to restrict the supply severely. This then creates an intense desire for food and water because of their artificial scarcity, so people do extreme things to satisfy their unnecessarily heightened cravings. In this atmosphere, there is an advantage to the normally pathological behavior of damaging your electrolyte balance by voluntarily training yourself to go without water or damaging your physiology by voluntary starvation, since you can endure the shortages better than other people and so avoid doing extreme things to slake your thirst or eat. A less warped response would be just to maximize enjoyment of the available food and water, as the bonobos do with respect to sex. As Wilhelm Reich once pointed out, given the essentially equal number of males and females, if it were not for social rituals which create an artificial shortage of sexual opportunities, we could all enjoy our wildest sexual fantasies at any time. Just as people can learn to avoid over-eating to keep from making themselves sick or gaining too much weight, so too we could learn rational rules to restrict sex for various utilitarian purposes, such as not having sex all the time so that society could function. But what is a pure loss is the restriction of sex for superstitious rather than practical reasons, as when opportunities are foregone for the sake of preserving various irrational social values, such as the status of being chaste, of being a virgin and thus having more market value as a marriage partner, or of maintaining the rituals of self-denial required to make oneself a good monogamist, etc.

But almost all government funding priorities are irrational, just like those of civil society. Thus 1000 times more per AIDS death is spent on finding a cure for AIDS than is spent per heart attack death to find a cure for heart disease. A wealthy family buys an antique clock which costs ten times more than a poor family needs to send all three of their children through university; but instead of redistributing that excess wealth in the rich family to give the three poor children a chance at a developed mind and a genuine career, the government pursues a low tax policy and lets three lives go to waste for the sake of a Louis XVI clock. Radical utilitarianism is ultimately the doctrine motivating communism, while respect for the arbitrary sequestering of resources by the recognition of private rights is the essential doctrine of the modern, liberal-democratic state.

Since the world does not know anything about the nature of the blood and tissue characteristics of the real Osama bin Laden, there is no way that displaying those samples now, in isolation from the body, could in any way establish that he was killed. The only way to put his death beyond question is to display his body, which is exactly what the American action in burying the body immediately at sea ensured could never be settled. Another possibility is that the U.S. forces executed bin Laden at close range, perhaps with a bullet to the head, and a forensic examination would be able to establish that fact and further expose the illegality of the American use of force in subduing him. International law allows states to arrest international criminals characterized as hostis humani generis, but not to excute them if they can be subdued by less violent means. Since it is surrealistic to suppose that a team of armed Navy Seals could not subdue an unarmed 55 year old bin Laden without having to kill him first, this has to count as yet another crime against international law by the U.S. But what is so surprising is that for all the commentary about the event, no one seems to notice its illegality -- other than Professor Alan Dershowitz speaking to Pears Morgan last night. Leon Panetta today seemed to assume that because this illegal murder was committed 'as part of the mission authorization' everything is fine -- as though U.S. mission authorizations determine international law.

I agree that the problem of class distinction is rampant, but at least when it takes the form of one person driving a Rolls-Royce while another has to get by with a bicycle, the cruelty of the distinction is less acute than when a family is bankrupted to pay the overinflated fees of an already fabulously wealthy surgeon to save their dying daughter.

Since the very close relatives of humans, the bonobos, have sex almost all day long, I am not sure that frequent sex among primates should be characterized as a harmful addiction. It has none of the negative physiological characteristics of an addiction, since indulgence in it satisfies the drive rather than creating further dependency on it, and human physiology imposes natural limits on it. My post elsewhere suggesting a theoretical maximum of about 50,000 occasions of intercourse per lifetime for males, in contrast to an actual realization of this potential which amounts only to about 10% of that, suggests that we humans are anything but sex addicts. People are naturally constantly craving and indulging in drinking water, defecating, urinating, eating, breathing, and having sex, and if some artificial social rule restricts their fulfillment of these natural drives, they start to obsess over them and suffer greatly until they can satisfy them. So I wouldn't characterize these needs, many of which assume a lethal form if they are not fulfilled, as 'addictions.' The characterization of a strong interest in sex as an addiction was just a propagandistic move in the war on sex by prudery, taking a medical term for something which can be objectively shown to be harmful -- addiction to various kinds of drugs -- and transposing the term 'addiction' with its negative connotations to indulgence in natural, harmless, physical needs. A strong interest in sex, since it improves the fitness of the species, is actually a symptom of biological success and health in an individual.

It is worth noting that because of the boom in oil prices a short while ago, from which the provincial government skims off a large proportion in taxes, Alberta was awash in cash. Instead of investing this in healthcare, which any individual family would do if it had a sick child who needed more money for his medical treatment, Alberta gave the money away to its citizens as tax surplus checks. Quebec had earlier done exactly the same thing with additional money given to it by the Federal Government intended to help with healthcare expenses, but not given as a conditional grant with formal use limits. Obviously healthcare costs will spiral in the future, given three factors: The increase in the elderly as a percent of total population; the inability of preventive medicine to make much difference in actually heading off serious illness, which is largely unpreventable; the continuing improvements in devices for early diagnosis of illness in the absence of any improvements in the ability to treat disease, with the result that people's lives will be medicalized at great expense for a longer time before they are dead. But this by no means should be taken to imply that we have to cut healthcare spending or not reduce it to keep pace with increased demand. Since disease is the most serious problem people can face, it obviously has to have priority over anything else we could buy. What individual would skimp on his cancer treatment to be able to afford repainting his living room? Why should a nation or its government think any differently on the larger scale? Also, if we do not increase healthcare spending to keep up with the increasing burden of disease on society, then the cost of disease will just have to be paid in another, possibly 'more expensive' form, in terms of the unproductivity, the hideous suffering, or the early death of the people we cannot afford to treat. So there is no way to save on healthcare costs, other than reducing inflated physicians' salaries, hospital managers' compensation, drug and medical equipment costs which mostly go to profit or servicing some billionaire's patent rights, etc. These profit rights are created by patents which the state grants, so the state should feel free to limit them in service of the vastly superior interest of aiding the sick.

It is true that some women's attitudes toward pornography are evolving (LEAF supported a lesbian pornography shop in the case of Little Sisters Books and Art, Ltd. v. Canada), but the majority still seem to think that it mystically poisons the social atmosphere and so must hurt women's interests, though detailed studies fail to support this. (See the Canadian Supreme Court case, R. v. Butler (1992), which decided that the evidence wasn't sufficient to prove that pornography is actually harmful, but they let the legislature get away with its unsubstantiated assumption that it was harmful nevertheless.) Women who are sexually active are criticized as 'sluts' while equally active men are respected as 'studs,' but what generates this distinction in the first place? Perhaps women, in order to enhance their social power, have exploited the longer periodicity of the fluctuations in their sexual desire compared to men to create an artificial shortage of sexual partners by withholding their consent to sex. This unnecessary shortage then creates a sex economy in which women have the power of capitalists against the male workers, since the woman possesses the goods she has caused to be in short supply, and so with the promise of these scarce goods she can gain power over men, making them flatter her, bribe her with expensive gifts and dinners, treat her with ritualized acts of submission and self-abasement, ranging from opening doors for her and pulling out chairs for her to giving her a pass on a murder charge under the many infanticide statutes in common law countries, which permit a woman to murder her child during the first-post-partum year without having to face a charge of murder or plead insanity to escape it, even though the reasoning assumes her insanity from post-partum depression! Obviously in such an economy the women who are too generous with the resource whose scarcity secures female power over men are class traitors to the capitalistic women who are sequestering sex, so they have to be denigrated as 'sluts' for their crime.

The preliminary investigation by a court to investigate whether there is sufficient evidence to require someone to answer the state's accusation that he has committed a crime is called a habeas corpus hearing in every common law jurisdiction I know, and that term comes from the Latin subjunction for 'you should have the body' or 'you must have the body,' which is a phrase projecting by metonomy from the case of murder to all criminal cases to indicate that some substantive evidence is required to support the state's accusation. In this case as well, to prove that bin Laden was indeed killed, the body should be produced. Nothing else, not even a photograph which could be photoshopped, will resolve the issue perfectly. The statement by bin Laden's close relatives, who were present at his killing, may be a good second for establishing the truth of the matter, but it is still not the best evidence possible. Statements by the U.S. about bin Laden's death are especially suspect, given their manifold lies at the press conference given yesterday. We hear a long, highly cinematic, rhetorically inflated diatribe about how the craven bin Laden hid behind a woman he was holding up as a human shield as he attempted to fire his weapon at the brave Amercian heroes, who of course fired on him in self-defense with perfect self-justification. A great story, only it now turns out that not only was bin Laden completely unarmed, but that he was not holding a human shield to protect himself. Instead, the U.S. 'accidentally' murdered an innocent by-stander, a female, in the room, after killing an unarmed bin Laden. The press conference spokesperson also sought to paint bin Laden as living in luxury in a mansion while he expected his followers to sacrifice their lives in the War on Terrorism, but now we discover that he was crowded into his residence with his own family plus two others, giving him the 'luxurious lifestyle' of a tenement dweller. A further lie was the misrepresentation of the downed helicopter in the mission as having had 'mechanical trouble,' even though films today show that its propellar blade clumsily collided with the wall of the compound. I guess 'mechanical trouble' sounds more heroic. International law allows the arrest of criminals who are accused of being hostis humani generis,' the enemies of all mankind,' by their wanton acts of destruction, so the arrest of bin Laden by the U.S. was legally sound. But since state immunity at international law does not extend to immunity from criminal acts, the U.S. in arresting bin Laden was obligated to arrest him by the usual standards of domestic criminal law, which I would guess, given the ultimate root of Pakistan's legal system in the common law. In a case where a group of Navy Seals, armed to the teeth, are attempting to arrest an unarmed man in his fifties with a few supportive women in the room, it is utterly beyond any conceivable legal use of force to shoot him in the face because he is 'resisting' arrest. Thus once again, just as in Libya where civilians are being killed by the West's intervention, which is itself only authorized to protect civilians, the U.S. makes itself a criminal state at international law.

Lemur: From the way you phrased your OP I have the feeling you are deriving your idea from Habermas' now popular resort to 'discourse theory' as a way to solve social problems. The idea is that requiring an open, rational, courteous discussion with input from all stakeholders will ensure that all reasonable points of view will be equally respected, thus producing a just outcome. But I think discourse theory is essentially just an impractical idealism, since most conversations among people with strongly-held and sometimes unreasonable interests they cannot or will not abandon will simply end in deadlock. Habermas and his many fans today seem to think that just by spreading over any problem the soothing patina of 'discourse theory' the problems will somehow be dissolved, but in fact, that process will often just bring the irreconcilable disputes to light. Since both capitalists and unions are ultimately just self-interested, and each would gladly see the other extinguished, how can discourse between them settle disputes? Pure power has to come into the equation before anything will move.

Wages are the by-product of the interaction between the supply of workers and the demand for workers by industry, agriculture, and service jobs. Only if there is always a surplus of workers relative to the demand for workers can wages be kept low, which is what capitalism requires, since the whole point of capitalists investing is to buy productive forces which can employ workers for less wage than the value of the products they make. This is called 'making a profit' if you are a capitalist, or 'exploiting the workers' if you are a Marxist. Historical examples show how much more empowered ordinary people become against the wealthy when the supply of workers is reduced against the demand for workers. This occurred after the Black Death in the 14th century destroyed a third of Europe's population, resulting in a shortage of workers relative to the demand for workers, which not only raised incomes for laborers but also freed them from much of the bondage of medieval laws. Capitalism revolves around a central absurdity that while there is a huge demand for work to satisfy essential human needs being done which the amount of workers available could never meet -- such as home care workers for the sick and elderly, repair for substandard slum housing, tutoring for children at risk of falling behind in school, big brothers and big sisters for children without parents, high quality day-care workers, truly caring foster parents, psychological support staff for those dying alone in hospitals, etc. -- this demand never becomes 'real' in capitalist terms, since there is no profit to be made in employing workers to satisfy this demand. So capitalism simply denies these essential human needs any representation -- even though satisfying these needs could both generate real human happiness and employ countless workers -- because bringing workers to address the need would not generate a profit for capitalists to skim off, given that the demand comes from people without any money. So in this way capitalism creates a simultaneously cruel and artificial shortage of jobs and an unnecessary unemployment. This absurdity of capitalism is intensified by the fact that the potential workers who are made artificially unemployed in the presence of a huge human demand for their labor by the insistance of capitalism that no work ever be done, no matter how necessary -- unless capitalists can skim off a profit from the process -- are now punished with inadequate welfare payments, poverty, or even starvation for the unemployment which capitalists have imposed on them! Shame on you, you lazy, unemployed worker! We are going to impose on you a type of slavery known as 'workfare,' requiring you to travel large distances by bus in the early morning hours to do vulgar, demeaning work paying a minimum wage as punishment for the fact that capitalism doesn't provide enough reasonable labor for you. The essential problem is that the economy should be organized to ensure the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number of people, but if it is in fact organized so that nothing can be done unless it makes profits for capitalists, there will always be a severe tension between the natural utilitarian goal of social life and the artificial capitalist requirement of our economic system. Only if the latter goal were abandoned could society operate to maximize the satisfaction of genuine human needs.

The fundamental basis for establishing the justification of the state to hold anyone in prison to face a criminal charge is known as the 'habeas corpus' principle. 'Habeas corpus' means 'you should have the body,' referring to the fact that being able to display the physical corpse of the person killed is the very essence of establishing that someone is guilty of murder. Indeed, it is extremely rare to be able to convict anyone of murder in a common law jurisdiction unless the state can actually physically produce the corpse to establish that a person really has been murdered, rather than is just not able to be found. The proof of death becomes especially difficult in the case of someone who has been in hiding for a long period of time and who is trying to keep his existence a secret. If I were to have claimed in 1972 that I had murdered the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, a higher standard of proof would have justifiably been required of me to establish that I had indeed killed someone who normally seemed non-existent even without being killed. This same reasoning applies to the case of Osama bin Laden, who hasn't even appeared on video since 2007. So what has the U.S. now done? Rather than presenting the body of bin Laden to a neutral official, such as a respected Swiss pathologist, for example, and performing a DNA analysis and facial recognition test before that witness before disposing of the body, they instead immediately disposed of the body in a place where it can never be recovered for inspection by a neutral observer. The only witnesses to the verification process establishing that the U.S. ever had the body of bin Laden were extremely prejudiced observers, the U.S. military and CIA, who of course would have lied to support some official story that bin Laden was dead even if he were not dead. And rather than burying the objective evidence to clarify the issue in some undisclosed location on dry land, which would also have avoided the burial place ever becoming a shrine, the U.S. has buried it at sea, so the objectivity of bin Laden's death can never be established. In this case the U.S. has at every step behaved exactly as it would have had the entire death of bin Laden been faked. Its excuse that it had to act this way to preserve the Islamic requirement that bin Laden be buried quickly has been undermined by Islamic clerics who have asserted that burial at sea is a worse offense than delayed burial. Its excuse that showing the body would inflame public passions in the Islamic world is undermined by the fact that it displayed the corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons after killing them. I'm not saying that I either think that bin Laden is still alive or not. It actually doesn't much matter, since the death of a single terrorist makes absolutely no difference to the war on the general terrorist movement, which consists of hundreds if not thousands of enemies of Western interests. Rather, I am saying that the whole mission has been handled with gross incompetence by the U.S., since burying bin Laden at sea will ensure that conspiracy theories relating to his (purported) death can never be settled, like Friedrich Barbarossa supposedly going to the mountains after his death to await the reunification of Germany.

The continuing resolve of schizophrenics to persist in their suicide attempts is well-documented in the psychiatric literature. Some sources to consider might be: F. Fujimori and M. Sakaguchi, "Suicide by Schizophrenic Patients in Psychiatric Hospitals," Fortschritte der Neurologie-Psychiatrie, 54 (1) 1 (1986); S. Shrivastava, et al, "Persistent Suicide Risk in Clinically Improved Schizophrenia Patients," Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 6, 633 (2010). The abstract of the article by J. Harkavy-Friedman and E. Nelson, "Management of the Suicidal Patient with Schizophrenia," Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 20 (3) 625 (1997), has a telling phrase that summarizes the situation: "Clinicians working with individuals with schizophrenia are often aware of the persistence of suicidal behavior ... ."

When you got old your senile hyperkeratosis would be worse.

Just start a campaign to get landowners who don't mind people camping on their land to put up signs saying something to the effect that: "By spending time on this land, you waive all rights against the owner of the land for any injuries suffered."

It is a chicken-and-egg problem deciding whether women dress provocatively because they are conditioned to do so by male behavior, or whether women themselves initiate that behavior so as to enhance their sexual power over men. Women hate pornography, which puts sexually provocative visual material under the control of men, but they appear to delight in fashion, fashion magazines, beauty salons, etc., which put sexually provocative visual material under the control of women. A good empirical test was perhaps the experiment of predominantly male fashion designers with the maxi-dress, which covered up women's provocative parts. It proved utterly unpopular among female consumers and quickly disappeared from shops, only to be replaced by an escalating race for ever-shorter skirts.

The current social paradox is that it is still expected that men will take the lead in initiating flirtation and the whole, ritualized process leading to sex, but at the same time, men who do so are shamed for 'objectifying women' and 'treating them just as sex objects.' Curiously, women at the same time are also objectifying themselves and doing everything possible to enhance their character as sex objects, by obsessing over fashion, wedding dresses, make-up, etc., and by beautifying themselves at hair salons, by applying make-up, and by wearing the most revealing outfits they can get away with. Of course, the absurdity of this is that all people are always both ideal, spiritual beings with subtle emotions, sophisticated ideas, complex psychologies, and interesting personalities, but at the same time they are also just plain physical objects, and in their sexual aspect they interact with each other to a large degree as pure objects. So the feminist complaint that women are viewed as objects and thus objectified is foolish, given that all people are always perceived as objects, but this does not entail that they are ever understood (other than by a psychotic) as being only objects.

It is objected that settling the Jewish population in a state of its own anywhere but in modern Israel would do irreparable harm to their sense of identity and would be something they should not be required to accept, but this argument is bound to ring hollow to American ears, since in the U.S. almost everyone is a either a displaced person from another country or the descendant of such a person. And, as anyone can see, people have brought all their cultures to the U.S., where they often continue to celebrate them long after their displacement. The largest Jewish city in the world is not in Israel, but in New York, and if visit Hassidic communites in New York you would hardly say that they are suffering from the loss of their identity by their geographical displacement from where they originated. Massive resettlements happen all the time in world history, whether it is those resulting from the cujus regio, ejus religio formula, the displacement of the Germans of eastern Europe at the end of World War II, or the potential shift of the Jewish people to a safe state of their own carved out of Paraguay or realized in New York, and the success of these resettlements undermines any argument that the Jews have to be permitted to resettle exactly where they want -- even if it perpetually involves the rest of the world in terrorist threats, inflated oil prices because of the resulting political instability of the region, or the displacement of the Palestinian people. The fact that the term, 'Palestinian people,' only came into general use after the collapse of the protective umbrella of the Ottoman Empire thematized the issue of national identity for the people who had previously just been Ottoman citizens, and after the Arabs of Palestine were dialectically defined into a distinct unit by the opposition of the new Israeli state, hardly delegitimizes it. In the initial situation in the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean, to give it as neutral a designation as possible, both Arabs and Jews lived side-by-side in relative harmony, given that their common sovereign, the Ottoman Empire, deprived either of any possible claim of sovereignty or national identity. This neutrality was gradually undermined by several factors, such as Jewish immigration in the 1880s, Britain seizing that area from the defeated Ottomans after World War I and thus putting the national identity of the region into question, various contradictory declarations by the British government about the future of its mandate, political maneurers at the UN, Britain's withdrawal, etc. Since there were then two ethnically and religously distinct peoples living in that area, a clear majority of Arabs plus a distinct minority of Jews, the proper, tolerant, neutral solution would have been to form an ethnically and religiously undefined state in the former British mandate, consisting of Arabs and Jews living together. If this state was democratically governed, it would also have adopted a majority Arab-Moslem character, but since it was essentially created by British-UN action, minority protections could have been written into its founding charter, such as have been made more recently the preconditions for the recognition of the states of the former Yugoslavia as sovereign nations. But this benign solution was not adopted. Instead, the Israelis insisted on having a total victory rather than a tolerant compromise, and proclaimed a Jewish state, and made matters even worse by refusing to recognize Ottoman land title so that Palestinians could be bulldozed off their traditional land holdings (legal by prescription if not title) and transformed into refugees. But of course this was necessary, since if the new state was to be democratic, it could not also be a Jewish state if it allowed the native Arab population to remain. So, out of this initial injustice, we now have more than 60 years of international disruption which destabilizes the politics and economy of the world. This seems an unjust price to have to pay just so that Israel can undemocratically establish prior to any fair vote among the native population of the territory it claims as its state that that area must forevere have the character of a Jewish state.

The first thing I would do about North American secondary education would be to add another year to it, making it like the European Abitur/Matura system with people graduating at 19 rather than at 18. That would provide more room in the curriculum for secondary school courses which would, ideally, either provide students with a more solid grounding in critical thinking, or give them a taste of college majors they might want to try, so that they don't have to waste a year of university trying them 'for real' to discover that they are really not interested in that line of study. Critical thinking courses I would add would include: Introductory Logic Introductory Philosophy Philosophy of Science/Scientific Method Introduction to understanding statistics Enrichment courses I would add might include: Psychology Astronomy Statistics Anthropology History of World Religions Another thing that would be useful would be to reform the way English is taught. I occasionally grade student papers at the university level and I would guess that about 60% of students cannot write in a fully literate way, so I always wonder what people actually do during the one hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for the twelve years that they study their native language? If I read one more time a phrase like "For patients that are non-compliant with their medication regimen," using 'that' as the referent for animate objects like people, I think I'll explode!

The close human relative, the bonobo, has sex almost all the time it is awake, but only in the form of brief encounters which occur throughout the day between males and females in the group, often not leading to orgasm, perhaps so they can have intercourse more often. (I was surprised when I first noticed that guinea pigs also have intercourse to the point of orgasm and then stop so that they can prolong the experience. How could creatures that simple be so calculating? And wouldn't that be a survival disadvantage?) So if humans with the cultural patina stripped off are really 'naturally' like bonobos, then perhaps we should normally be having sex all the time. The numbers I offered are just speculative maxima for the possible frequency of sexual intercourse. They actually apply only to Moontanman.

Your problem of the money from the socialist industries (subsidized production of solar panels) winding up servicing the profits and fueling the further productive efforts and power of the non-socialist industries (people use the solar power energy savings to invest in buying gas-guzzling cars) could be avoided just by having more socialism. If all major industry was owned by the government, all prices, wages, advertising, energy economies, goods produced, and industrial methods could be designed to be as rational for the good of the people, the planet, and the society as possible, without the clumsiness of having to achieve these desired results approximately by nudging prices, taxes, environmental fines, etc., this way or that. Looking again at the inital premise of this thread, i.e., how would a coercion-free economic system be possible, you might say that if people can agree to be bound by the majority will by their acceptance of democracy (which is usually taken for granted by our system of democratic government), then as long as the democratic will of the majority of people freely determines the way the economy is run, it can be regarded as coercion-free. Granted, some elements of the system will always have a coercive effect on some consumer interests, but since people in a democracy theoretically regard themselves as free by being the authors, in the general sense, of their government, they don't mind accepting the occasional speed limit or zoning law that they find unreasonably coercive. By extension, if the economy were also under general democratic control, no one could complain that any elements of it were coercive, since he would suppose that the system overall was designed for the good of the public, of which he was a voting member.

Here is one way more objectively to approach the question of the persistence of suicidal intention in schizophrenics in opposition to the comparative lack of persistence in non-schizophrenics. A very large percentage of suicide attempts are actually 'cry for help' suicides, especially among females. That is why female suicide attempts are very much less successful than male attempts: they are not really designed to succeed, but are just pathological attempts at communicating with the community, telling people that the person playing at committing suicide is very serious about needing intervention. Of this large subset of people attempting suicide, most of them will not try to kill themselves again, or not try it again seriously enough to succeed, because their initial communication via the 'cry for help' suicide attempt has alerted the community sufficiently and they have received the intervention desired. However, a key feature of schizophrenics is that they are detached from the surrounding human community and do not communicate with it in any effective way. As a result, their suicide attempts are not 'cry for help' attempts, which will cease once they have communicated the need for intervention, but are genuine efforts to die. Thus, since these schizophrenic suicide attempts are not cries for help but genuine endeavors to die, they will be repeated, as the cry for help pseudo-suicide attempts will not be.

If the Palestinians were allowed to resettle within the present borders of Israel, I highly doubt that they would any longer have a motivation to be terrorists. What would the topic of their terrorism be? Hijacking airplanes for the fun of it? Everyone seems to forget that Paraguay offered to sell an area of land to the Jews much larger than present-day Israel which they could use as their own autonomous country starting in 1948. Since no one would have objected to the Jews settling there, they could have had a truly Jewish state, since a state like Israel which has to be aggressive and militaristic because of its geographical position is profoundly inconsistent with the true nature of Judaism, which is a religion promoting peace. So the whole argument that the Jews needed a homeland to rescue them from a future (and thus non-existent) Holocaust, which would never have happened given the way World War II worked through and ultimately destroyed that version of anti-Semitism), doesn't offer any justification for the present state of Israel, which could have inoffensively been located in Paraguay. It was positioned in the Middle East because the Jews wanted not only a safe homeland but also one that coincided with the physical geography of their beliefs, but this itself has proven to be mistaken, since they could today have had safer access to their sacred areas as South American tourists in a friendly Palestinian than they now have as Israeli enemies of the local Arab population. The final argument against the 'safe homeland' thesis is the fact that even if one was needed, since the Palestinian people were in no way responsible for the misfortune of the Jews in World War II, there is no reason they should pay for security against the possibility of its repetition through having to be displaced from their own homeland.

Another interesting point that Arne Hoffmann documents in his book is that the life expectancy difference between men and women in developed societies, around seven years to the advantage of women, stems in large part from the more dangerous work that men do. The injury and death rates in farming, mining, police and fire protection services, military service in wartime, and construction are all much higher than in comparably paid work dominated by women. Now if this same higher death and accident rate were noted for women instead of for men, there would of course be shouts from the rooftop about systemtic discrimination and gender bias. But since the difference is to the disadvantage of men, it is not even noticed in the current deathgrip of feminism on objective analysis. One poster commenting on affirmative action programs for women wondered whether they might still be necessary in this interim period, despite enormous advances for women over the past 60 years. But since affirmative action projects its effects into the future, since women are now essentially in parity with wen in educational institutions and in pay-per-hour in comparable jobs, continuing them now is likely to overshoot the mark, if that hasn't already occurred. It is also worth noting that affirmative action programs began in the U.S. in the mid-1960s, so the male grandchildren of men who suffered discrimination in favor of women are now still being discriminated against. So is this really still an 'interim period'? But there is a more general problem with the entire feminist approach, since it simultaneously seeks to criticize the way men act and yet insists that women are being discriminated against unless they can successfully adopt male roles. Why does it never occur to feminists that becoming male-like figures by leaving the home to work in paid jobs outside the home may amount to a type of servile flattery of traditional male ways of life, rejecting a superior way of life women may have carved out for themselves? Viewed from the perspective of philosophical fundamentals, isn't it possible to say that being the person who stays at home, gives young children their first introduction to the meaning of life, and who establishes a loving and supportive environment for those who must go out to participate in the objective world outside the home, is a far superior, more truly human role in life than going to the used car showroom every day to trick potential customers into believing that the odometer hasn't been fiddled so you can earn your $1425 sales fee for duping them into buying a lemon? Why are women so gullible as to accept uncritically the role which men have set up as the superior way to live, that is, the role of being a cog in the giant machinery of capitalistic exploitation? Weren't women showing a moral superiority, and perhaps acting more honestly in fulfilling their own true nature, when they were nurturing homemakers rather than competitive, mean, bitter, cruel young assistant district attorneys, elbowing the competition out of the way to get a promotion at the cost of cutting everyone else's throat? Is this really the higher calling for a human? In 1890, society had two distinct voices, the male voice of cruel competition in the objective world, and the female voice of nurturing, loving support within the refuge of the home. Now in 2011, society has just one voice: the male voice of cruel competition in the objective world and a female voice struggling to 'liberate' itself by the ultimate flatttery of imitating the male voice.

Even apart from questions over whether the birth certificate could have been faked, there is the fact that living witnesses have now come forward to claim that they knew Obama when he was a very young baby in Hawaii, or knew his mother when she went to the hospital to give birth to him. There is also the fact that notice of his birth was entered shortly after the time of his birth in the local Hawaiian newspaper. So if it is all a fraud, it is a fraud which has been planned and plotted in great deal over the past half century, but for what reason? Was someone plotting a half century ago to make a little black baby President of the U.S. by bribing newspaper editors and witnesses to support the story in 2011? It all seems implausbile beyond belief. The fact is that there is no 'evidence' in the world which is beyond dispute if held up to the standards of skepticism which are being applied to the evidence that Obama is an American. You can even convict someone of murder on a certainly 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' which is definitely not a certainty above the possibility of any metaphysical doubt. There was, incidentally, doubt about Michigan Governor George Romney's legitimacy to be a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1964, since he was from a family of Mormons hiding from U.S. law in Mexico. The doubt never had a chance to flower into a full-blown campaign against Romney, however, since his presidential efforts collapsed after he said he had been 'brainwashed' on an inspection tour of Vietnam, and everyone seized on that as proof that he was too easily manipulated to be President. U.S. politics was then just as foolish as it is today.