Marat

The real question has to be, what do all these military interventions actually bring the United States in terms of concrete benefits? The 'war by accident' in Iraq, which I guess doesn't have WMDs after all, cost over a trillion dollars, and now the U.S. is fretting over cutting ten billion here and there to get the deficit under control. But the trillion spent in Iraq got us absolutely nothing in terms of making the corn in Iowa grow faster, the buses arrive quicker in Jersey City, or the VA hospital any more efficient in Boston. All it bought was some sort of satisfaction for a minute or two on the evening news that there was no longer a regional bully in charge of Iraq who, if he summoned all his strength, might be able to annex Kuwait or fight Iran to a standstill, but who could never have done anything more to harm the U.S. than ferry a few dozen troops to New York with his miniscule navy and land them in the harbor, where they would have been immediately arrested by the police for visa violations. In terms of practial value to U.S. security or interests, these military campaigns are simply inexplicable. Their real purpose is to conjure up plausible excuses to pump public tax money into the military-industrial complex where it generates huge profits for military contractors. On a more ideal level, it helps sustain a kind of romantic, religious nostalgia for the days when America could actually do more useful things with its military than just cause more loss than gain through the unanticipated blowback effects of making people in the regions attacked hate us forever, sparking simmering ethnic tensions into full-scale wars, and creating openings for terrorist organizations.

Insurance usually protects against risks which the insured person cannot avoid, like accidents or illness. But in the case of abortion, the problem is that the procedure is elective, so people with insurance might have a motivation just to have as many abortions as they liked an pump money out of their insurers. In the Soviet Union abortion used to be the preferred method of birth control, so the insurers could be overwhelmed. It would be difficult for insurers to determine the right price to charge for their policies, since the provision of insurance might itself increase abortions.

Since the typical Senator is already a millionaire (America is actually a plutocracy, not a democracy), a pay cut might not have enough bite. To avoid government paralysis we need simple majority rule in both houses of Congress, so a majority vote should be able to force the end of debate.

The usual explanation given for the eagerness of people to take even flimsy evidence as suggesting that aliens exist is that with the decline of religious belief, humans no longer feel contexted in the universe, and so we look to an empirical substitute for the metaphysical framing condition of a god, and find it in aliens. At least if there are aliens, we can define and understand ourselves relative to some other sentient being, so we can escape the existential challenge of defining ourselves without any external support or meaning context.

Perhaps sexual repression can to some degree intensify sexual pleasure when it is allowed to appear, but I suspect that repression still generates a net loss of happiness for humanity. Just consider the satisfaction of another physical desire like food or thirst. We all know that eating food or drinking water will be more pleasurable if we deliberately go without satisfying these urges for a long time first, but no one makes a practice of doing that, no doubt because we recognize that the net pleasure from the restriction-intense satisfaction game is lower than from the constant satiation practise. What is the average human realization of potential sexual happiness compared to what its maximal realization could have been in a world with no deliberate wasting of potential sexual pleasure by arbitrary cultural rules? Perhaps 10% of what it could have been with the stimulus of a wide range of new sexual partners all the time and no unnecessary rules? Consider this tentative suggestion: Ages 14 to 34: Intercourse six times a day: Total: 43,800 Ages 35 to 55: Intercourse twice a day: Total: 7300 Ages 56 to 66: Intercourse once a day: Total: 3650 Ages 66 to 86 (death): Intercourse once a week: Total: 1040 Grand total: 55,790 (a lot of children to support) Actual total under the restrictive rules of Western society, which require young people to live in sexual starvation, which require old people to be regarded as sexually unavailable, which force people to try to keep their sexual desire artificially alive under the oppressive constraint of monogamy (how many days in a row do you want to eat nothing but vanilla ice cream all day?), etc.: Perhaps 4000? In any case, pitiful compared to what could be possible in a rational society concerned to maximize happiness.

The notion of God having to communicate with humans by sending another humanoid/supernatural creature like an angel to act as message bearer just shows the poverty of the ancient imagination. Obviously a real god would come up with some more imaginative process of communicating messages, such as implanting ideas directly in the minds of the people addressed, thus ensuring that there would be absolute identity between the message and the interpretation of the message. An angelic intermediary, bearing a translation of God's will or thought into a message suitable for human minds, which would then be received and in turn reinterpreted by the human minds picking up the message, would simply no longer be the same message. Incidentally, there is an interesting display at the British Museum of an ancient Babylonian model of a temple with winged angels littering the floor, and out of each angel extends a wire, indicating that these were once hung from the temple's ceiling to make them look as though they were flying. It's remarkable how constant the imagery of angels has been through various cultures, right down to the bird wings and human heads. In this they are like the illustrations on the side of the famous Harpy Tomb of the ancient Greeks, which show human-headed birds carrying the souls of the dead on their nightly journeys out of the tomb. At one time the common imagery would have been explained as a 'Jungian archetype,' but now perhaps we would have to say it represents traces of a distant source in a common mythological image.

In part some of my answer to your comments on this thread could be derived from my reply to your similar topic in the thread below. Capitalism doesn't just exist in a vacuum, but rather, it conditions the society in which it thrives to promote its own interests by exercising an ideological hold on that society. Part of that ideological grip is sustained through advertising, which creates a strong consumer-culture to convince people that the meaning of their lives is measured not in terms of their ideas, their friendships, their morality, or their personal creativity, but in terms of the amount of trinkets they own. This induces people to live to consume and work longer and harder to generate more income to consume more, and capitalism needs to reduce people to these sorts of human-guinea-pigs who just turn the exercise wheel of capitalism in their meaningless "getting and spending, late and soon" (Wordsworth) State control of the economy could get people to buy the right things by setting the prices for goods not according to market forces and the profit motive, which have no necessary link to what is truly good for human society, but according to what is most beneficial for people according to an objective measure. Thus solar panels could be sold below cost, since they could include a discount for their positive externalities in reducing demand for materials in short supply, such as oil, while cars with poor mileage could be made nearly prohibitively expensive.

When you get some clinical experience you'll see what I mean. In the hospitals where I have worked, there is always a standard instruction for special precautions when post-suicide attempt schizophrenics are brought in, based on decades of experience with the way they persist in their intention. I saw one patient once who had an array of positive schizophrenic symptoms and who was admitted to the ICU after a suicide attempt and then started to cut himself with a butter knife from a meal tray. Then, after that was taken away, he took a chair and crashed it through a supposedly shatter-proof window and threw himself out to his death. Schizophrenics can act with apparently superhuman strength to kill themselves, and they often resort to methods which are among the most horrific and painful imaginable, such as one patient I saw who drove two knives through his eyes. Just talk to any mental institution attendant and they will all confirm what I'm saying about the persistence in suicidal motivation in schizophrenia. Or try thinking logically about it. Someone who attempts suicide out of a neurosis still has intact thinking and so can respond to the shock of having closely approached death in an inital, failed suicide attempt. He can reflect on the significance of his act, think further about the pros and cons, and revise his original intention given all the new anti-suicide influences which will come streaming in from the clinical environment he finds himself in after his attempt. But with a schizophrenic acting on the basis of irresistable instructions from external voices, what could make him ALTER his original intention to commit suicide? The voices are not going to stop on their own because they have been corrected by emotional shock, maturation, more mature reflection, acute clinical intervention, deeper analysis of the problems motivating the first suicide attempt, etc. No, in the case of a schizophrenic, there is no reason why the failed attempt could change the intention, so repetition is logically likely.

In my experience, genetic counsellors are by training perfect idiots, since they have a foolish predisposition in favor of getting the couples who seek their advice to have children no matter what the risks, because they adopt the parents' rather than the potential child's perspective. One couple I knew who had a very strong familial risk for type 1 diabetes consulted a genetic counsellor who urged them to have children anyway because "even if you adopted a child, the odds in absolute if not relative terms that it would have type 1 diabetes are not that much smaller than the chance that your own child would have it." But of course, the entire ethical issue is not to add to the stock of human misery by concentrating the genetic predisposition to type 1 diabetes in any one individual, not avoiding the problem for the parents that the child might have this disease. I can't tell you have many patients with polycystic kidney disease, one of the most hideous and lethal medical conditions known, which carries a 50% risk of transmission to the next generation, decide to have children because, as they say, they "like to see the glass half full rather than half empty." What's half empty is their moral sense.

All those negative stereotypes about Men-in-General! If you said that about women, you would be attacked as a sexist! Does this point to the fact that the gender inequality in our society today is to the disadvantage of men? Women have affirmative action privileges, which men do not. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars are affirmative action privileges worth in society today, especially when they determine who gets into professional schools and who does not? In Canada today, the majority of all university students, law students, and medical students are female. There are women's studies programs at almost all universities but no men's studies programs. Men can be drafted into combat but women cannot. The historical rule -- which amounts to genocide against men -- of preserving women and children (i.e., everyone but men) in an emergency still persists as acceptable behavior in society. In 75% of child custody cases, the woman wins possession of the child. Men pay spousal support much more often and at a higher level than women. In 70% of divorce cases, the woman alleges that the husband sexually abused the children. Under Canadian law, a man cannot present the defense to a charge of rape that he mistook the woman's consent, since only the woman's subjective intent matters; the man may present his story of what happened only if it substantially corresponds to the story the woman gives, since otherwise it is deemed not plausible as evidence (R. v. Ewanchuk). The ability of the man to present a full defense to a rape charge is limited by society's interest that the woman not be stressed or embarrassed by the evidence (Criminal Code, ss. 276-277). Males in prison can be subjected to intimate bodily searches by females but females may not be subjected to the same searches by males in prison because the court ruled that men are just too crude to be bothered by cross-gender searches (Conway v. Canada). Under the 'battered spouse defense,' women can be found not guilty of murdering their spouse even if they could have escaped his attacks quite easily without using any force; they have even been found not guilty under this defense for killing a sleeping husband or for pursuing their husband into another city and murdering him there. Historically, men have been responsible for their wives' debts but wives were not responsible for their husbands' debts; wives could pledge their husbands' assets to buy something on credit, but a husband could not do with a wife's assets; on divorce, a husband could still be found responsible for paying his wife's debts unless he published a newspaper notice that he was no longer responsible, called a 'notchel.' Today in academic journals, material presented for publication is characterized as having failed to meet 'gender neutral standards' unless it violates traditional grammatical rules which specified the 'male' referent for gender-unknown groups by going out of its way to exclude men and use 'she' or 'her' for all referents. 'Thus the soldier thanked for fireman for rescuing her when she climbed up the ladder' is now correct English. The evidence that women earn less than men may be an indication of discrimination (though if this can be proved, it is illegal), but it can also indicate many other things, such as women not being as interested in the world of work when many still choose to adopt a traditional role in the home. It can also reflect seniority lost through maternity leaves, or voluntary gender segregation by job type (how many men feel fulfilled working as a kindergarten teacher, as many women do?) My general point is that the situation is not as simple as some imagine. A useful, fact-packed book to consult on the issue is the in-depth study by the German sociologist, Dr. Erne Hoffman, 'Sind Frauen Bessere Menschen?' (Are Women Better People?)

Such a forum would be a real pleasure to pessimists like me, since so much of what bioengineering does is so unsuccessful.

The Ancient Greek myth of Pelops involves someone serving a dinner of human flesh to someone else who eats it unknowingly ... until he is surprised by the news of what he has just enjoyed. I guess this theme of the unknowing violation of an essential taboo was important to the Greeks, since they repeat it in the Oedipus story.

The ultimate goal of medicine is to produce as much human happiness as possible given the limitations of the human body through aging, disease, and accident. This is a battle that medicine always ultimately loses, and even en route to its inevitable defeat through death, it performs pretty poorly -- much worse than most people who have never been seriously ill can imagine. Most serious illnesses can at best only be managed, and the management often yields such an unpleasant existence that it simply falsely tempts and ultimately traps the patients into continuing to live when they should have chosen death -- as they would have had to do had medicine not been so 'advanced.' But once the tragedy of medicine's feeble efforts is admitted, it seems absurd that one of the strongest weapons we have in this struggle to achieve the greatest possible human happiness in the face of the limitations of disease and death is voluntarily wasted to such a large extent. This weapon, which official social policy artificially and unnecessarily restricts and hems in at every point, is sexuality, which is a natural happiness produced by the human body and which is available as a counterweight against all the miseries that the human body naturally produces. So my question is, why spend billions of dollars trying to win the war against physical human misery by producing a net balance of physical happiness through training millions of doctors, buying countless imaging machines, constructing hospitals, developing new drugs, etc., but then throw away something capable of producing more physical happiness than all of that -- which is what human sexuality is. Prudish recommendations for why sex should be restricted in this way or that should always only be discussed in a cancer ward.

Capitalism is confronted by an essential paradox. The wealthy buy the means of production so that they can make themselves even more wealthy by employing labor at a wage less than the value of what that labor produces, and then selling products to people for more than they cost to make. This sucks up wealth from those who are first disempowered by having nothing to sell except their labor and who are second disempowered by being in a weak negotiating position with capitalists over the prices charged for commodities. But eventually so much wealth is sucked up to the top by the capitalist straw that it lacks investment opportunities for all the surplus capital. It can buy new factories, employ new workers, and produce more commodities, but then profit margins will shrink, since the workers are being increasingly impoverished by the double theft of producing more by their labor than they are paid and paying more for their consumer goods than these goods are worth. Eventually the profit margins shrink to the point where there will be no new investment, and this state has often precipitated a market crash, especially since it drives capital into extremely risky or artificial investments, such as buying stocks on low margin in 1929 or soaking up excess capital in exotic financial instruments like derivatives in 2008. Fortunately for capitalism, there is another way out of this impasse, which is simply to start a war to destroy capital. With the massive destruction of capital caused by warfare -- in someone else's country, of course -- new investment opportunities are opened up for capital once again to be invested at a profitable rate of return. Changing public tastes through advertising, planned obsolescence built into substandard goods, minor technical changes creating artificial demand for new products (vinyl records become passe so that all their music has to be re-recorded on tapes, computer discs, etc.), are all everyday forms of technically unnecessary destruction to open new opportunities for productive investment. So capitalism is normally simultaneously creative and destructive: It is destructive of the wealth of non-capitalists under normal conditions of operation, since it underpays labor for its productiveness and overcharges consumption for what it gets, and then when capital accumulation outpaces the capacity of the now impoverished laborer-consumers to sustain it, it seeks to destroy capital to open up new spaces once again for investment.

In a system of state ownership of the means of production, we could enforce conservation, hours of work, reward for efficient, long, or high-quality work, etc., all just by assigning rational inducements or disinducements for whatever outcomes we wanted the economic system to yield. This could be done by variable monetary awards (limited by our fundamental respect for genuine human need and the equality of all humans), by fines or compulsory labor to discourage non-conservation, etc. Economists often note that our recent historical era is the only period which has not experienced an increase in leisure as a result of improvements in productivity, as were experienced throughout the world ever since the late 19th century, when people used to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. But why, with all the improvements in productivity since 1946, do we still have the same work week as was usual then, 8 hours a day and 5 days a week? The reason is that capitalists demand ever increasing profits, so the leisure which should be produced as a side effect of the rise in productivity instead goes to inflate profit, with the work year being held constant.

Inbreeding is not such a significant risk as some make it out to be. The Egyptian royal family, for example, was obligated to maintain the royal blood line's purity by having brothers marry their sisters in each successive generation, generation after generation, and yet by the end of it Cleopatra still seemed not only normal, having a sufficiently high IQ to manage the complex politics of her era, but was also attractive, albeit by the standards of her time, when a nose hooked down over the upper lip was evidently acceptable, at least to Mark Anthony. Inbreeding really only becomes significant when there are specific diseases in play. Thus a type 1 diabetic male has a 7% chance of diabetic offspring, while a type 1 diabetic female has a 4% of diabetic offspring, but if the two marry each other, the chance rises to 25%. The fact that monozygotic twins are only 50% concordant for type 1 diabetes shows what a large impact environment can have on the expression of many genetic predispositions.

There is epidemiological evidence showing that certain psychiatric problems, such as depression and schizophrenia, are at least partially genetically conditioned, but like most genetic problems, the right environmental trigger also seems to be required to bring the potential problem to expression. Theories about the actual gene or genes predisposing people to develop various psychiatric illnesses are still speculative, however. To get the proper epidemiological odds on children inheriting familial mental diseases you would first need an exact diagnosis of the conditions you mention, since illusions can occur in depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc.

Natural science operates with two contradictory methodological principles, which are always in tension with each other. First, it is committed to studying seriously whatever empirical evidence emerges and registering its implications for our theoretical understanding of the universe no matter how radically challenging these might be. This can be seen in the examples of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton insisting that the empirical data be accepted to its logical implications, even if it contradicted with other parts of the theoretical web of belief. Second, it is committed to weaving new data, as far as possible, back into the accepted paradigms of explanation already established. So if I count out three socks and two socks, but when I combine them I seem to have only four, instead of allowing this to imply that 2 + 3 = 4, I instead feed the pressure of the incongruous result onto less central aspects of the web of belief, such as the possibility that I miscounted, that I dropped a sock, etc. Obviously the first and second methodological principles are in tension with each other. Generally, whether we adopt option one or two depends on how central to our theory system the ideas are that would have to be revised by the new data. In the case of there being living dinosaurs, this surprising new data would not represent an extremely serious challenge to the existing paradigms of explanation, since it would just represent a minor addendum to natural history, and not upset the foundations of physics as though we had found a perpetual motion machine. The theory of the sudden destruction of dinosaurs by a massive collison of the earth with an asteroid, which produced such huge effects that all dinosaurs should have been wiped out by it, would be challenged, but that theory is already under some stress for other reasons. So, I'm not saying that I seriously believe that dinosaurs exist in Cameroon, though some reputable observers claim to have seen evidence of it, there exists photographic footprint evidence of it, and the films of natives identifying images of a brontosaurus as mokele mbembe I have seen look as if the natives are quite sincere in their confirmation. Marcellin Agnagna, a biologist from the University of Brazzaville and an official of the Brazzaville Zoo claims to have seen it, as does the explorer William Gibbons, who is also credited with having discovered and retrieved the body of a new species of monkey, cerocebus galeritus, during the same 1985-1986 expedition on which he says he saw mokele mbembe. The possibility of there being a living dinosaur in Cameroons was also taken seriously enough for the Smithsonian Expedition to send a 32-man expedition looking for it in 1919-1920. Looking at all of this I would say I regard it as unproven speculation, but still as something more substantial than alien landings at Area 51.

Modern international law generally defines all war as illegal, except for a few very specific exceptions, one of which is the right of every nation to exercise self-defense until the UN can intervene to eject the invader. So it seems evident that pushing out foreigners who attempt to intervene militarily in your own homeland is legitimate, whether civilians or military forces eject the foreign invaders. Hitler, incidentally, had nothing against the Jews having a homeland, as long as it wasn't inside Europe. Under the Nazis' 'Madagasgar Plan, the Jews were to be resetlled peacefully in Magagascar, and the notion of doing anything worse to them only first arose when the prospect of shipping the Jewish population of Europe to Madagascar began to seem unrealistic because the Free French took control of the island in 1941-2.

Well, I don't think that the comparison with the Nazis' Rassensbemerkungsamt is essential to the discussion, since it is only cited to show how difficult it is to base any legal distinctions on bright-line divisions about race, ethnicity, and religion. The Nazis encountered two groups of persons in the Ukraine, one of which were ethnically not Jewish but religiously Jewish, while the other were the inverse. Classifying them as one or the other was as difficult as any empirical division of people into absolute categories has to be, given that the features people have are always either on a continuum or mixtures of opposing features. An alternative model to illustrate the same problem is the famous American legal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, in which a person 1/8th black, and thus legally black in his home state of Louisiana, attempted to sit in the 'Whites Only' section of a train under the jurisdiction of federal law, since it travelled on an interstate railway line. He was allowed to sit there since he looked white, but then he informed the conductor that he was in fact black, and was then forcibly removed, thus creating the test case which his presence there had been designed to raise, which was whether transportation under the supervision of federal laws could respect categories of racial discrimination. Empirical reality is always a bundle of conflicting predicates on a coninuum, but the law likes neat categories, so when the two encounter each other, there are bound to be problems. So if you want Israel to be a 'Jewish state,' you have to match the concept of the essence of Jewishness to the empirical ambiguities of real persons' identities, which are often only partially Jewish, and problems have to arise.

There have been some well-documented cases in the Western world of cannibalism excused under the defense of necessity, such as R. v. Dudley and Stevens, when crew members adrift on a wreck in the South Atlantic killed and ate the dying cabin boy to allow the rest of the crew to survive until rescue. They were found guilty of murder and imprisoned, though pardoned after a short period. At the other end of the moral spectrum are characters like Albert Fish, who in the 1940s in the American Northwest like to murder and eat little girls. When he was electrocuted for his crimes the charge partially bled off because, as it was later discovered, he also had to the hobby of inserting metal pins into his scrotum.

Sometimes schools halfway between a community college and a major university can be good, since they are still large enough to have a good faculty but small enough to ensure more personal contact between professors and students. At very large, quite prestigious institutions, the downside for undergraduates is that the school is focused on graduate education and provides only second-rate resources for undergraduates. You might find yourself taught by not very impressive Ph.D. candidate grad students at a major institution, but at a second-rank insitution you would be taught by full professors. That said, you also have to remember that the kind of funding you can get for your graduate studies and your fate in the competitive process of getting into a good graduate school can be heavily influenced by the reputation of the place where you did your undergraduate studies. This is often quite unfair, since in my own experience, grading and standards at second-rank institutions can often be tougher than at first-rank schools.

I don't think you can make much of an argument that resisting the invasion of your own home by foreign invaders amounts to xenophobia! What would the people of Afghanistan have to do then not to be xenophobic? Welcome every invader with open arms? Xenophobia is an irrational hatred of foreigners just because they are foreign; hating people for invading your homeland, who also just contingently happen to be foreigners, doesn't meet the dictionary definition of xenophobia. The rules for recognizing those entitled to the protected status of enemy combatents were developed from the war conventions instituted at the very beginning of the 20th century, when it was either not anticipated that non-militarily designated people defending their homelands would be a significant concern in warfare, since the model was state-to-state combat with organized armies, or when the European imperialists did not want the contemptible African and Asian peoples they were colonizing to have any legal protection when firing back at them in self-defense. That imperialism should not be continued to this day by denying combatent legal status to the people exercising the rights of self-defense and of necessity -- recognized in the domestic legal code of every country -- to resist the armed aggression of a foreign invader.

I think there's a huge difference between those who seek to undermine arguments by comparing some trivial, inessential aspect in what an opponent advocates to an equally trivial, inessential aspect of Nazism, and those who draw attention to substantive and informative similarities of some position with the substance of Nazism. What I was saying here about the Nazi Rassensbemerkungsamt falls into the latter category, since it touches on the very essence of the problems confronting a state which seeks to define itself by some announced racial/ethnic/relgious character, such as 'the Jewish State.' Since all racial, ethnic, and religious characteristics people may have are variable, able to be arrayed along a continuum, and thus debatable as to their proper category, these substantive definitions of what the state has to be will always be contentious, and as such they provide a poor foundation for justifying the exclusion of some people and the inclusion of others. It is safer to prefer the more determinate grounds relied upon by the traditional, Western, secular state, which are usually birth in the state, birth to a father or mother having legal citizenship in the state, naturalization by compliance with established, non-discriminatory legal forms, etc.

I guess there are no forum members from Papua New Guinea to enlighten us -- or do they just eat the brains? Perhaps there are none left who can remember, now that they have been dissuaded from this practise by Westerners warning them of the dangers of Kreuzfeldt-Jakob disease.