Marat

Since some medical and pharmacological research firms allow employees to use their facilities to do their own research on their own time after their work for the company is over for the day, having an MD/PhD may provide you with an avenue for entrepreneurship in developing your own innovations through research. A friend of mine with an MD/DPharm exploited just such an option, took the drug he developed with his employers' lab facilities on his own time to market, and now eats $100-bills for breakfast.

It really has to depend on the specific circumstances. If there were a God, he would probably not have been on the side of the Communist rebellion against the bourgeois Kerensky government in 1917, or of the Nazi revolt against the Weimar Republic in 1933 (though Nazi legal theorists themselves debated whether it was actually a rebellion rather than a technically legal transition). Luther and other early Protestant theorists took the view that it was part of the duty of the good Christian to support the local monarch (e.g., in opposition to the Bundschuh rebellion), and Christianity often endorsed the myth that monarchs had a divine right to rule.

Although Britain often poses as 'the cradle of liberties' because it was the first society to establish liberty rights for its citizens (Magna Carta 1215; the conditions of coming to the throne imposed on William and Mary, 1689), in fact it has now slipped below the standard of liberty accepted as essential in many other Western nations. For this reason it often finds itself in the dock under the European human rights system. Part of the problem may lie in the fact that the protections offered by the basic principle of the common law, that everything not specifically forbidden by statute is permitted, and that statutes must be construed by the courts to favor individual liberty, were for too long taken as fully adequate protections of freedom, which they are not, since a clearly-worded statute can destroy freedom. Another part of the problem is the strange notion, dating from the time when the monarch was the executive, that Parliament significantly defends liberty by restraining the executive. But in modern times, when the executive has become just an elected central committe of Parliament, there is really no gulf between them so Parliament really cannot protect liberty. Becoming too complacent with these minimal protections of liberty, Britain eventually fell below the liberty standard of countries with constitutionalized rights protections. Even the European system of rights doesn't help much, since it is crafted to be deliberately weak so that a wide variety of jurisdictions could sign onto it.

PhDWanna: My discussion of the typical age of onset of schizophrenia was in reference to Ringer's speculation (post 16) that an earlier age of death in previous historical periods may account for the absence of reports of schizophrenia prior to 1790, given that "schizophrenia ... tends to develop later in life." You can make captious objections to the best age range to provide, but I am sure you are aware that the typical age of onset of schizophrenia is a topic of debate, and for the general point I was making, that schizophrenia is a disease with an early age of onset, fussing over the best range to cite is irrelevant. Generally, though, I'm disappointed that you didn't make a fuller reply to my long discussion about the evidence indicating that schizophrenia may be a new disease, since it is an interesting topic. Professor R. M. Hare has two articles about this subject which I'm sure you'd find interesting.

Marvellous, now we can put a thought-policeman in everyone's brain even without all those expensive Scientology training sessions! Does the importance of exploring thoughts and emotions freely and spontaneously, and experiencing every mood, whether good or bad, they might create in us, have nothing essential to do with being fully human? Or is our sole goal just to develop techniques to suppress negative thoughts and moods to transform ourselves into more efficient thinking and feeling machines? If you study the exerience of melancholy in the 17th century (e.g., Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy'), you will note that at that time it was felt to be an important part of being human to explore the full depths even of negative moods. There are some useful feedback systems to control some genuine medical problems, however. Thus it has been known since the 1980s, for example, that patients supplied with automatic intraocular pressure readings from a continuous tonometer could learn to diminish their glaucoma by testing which thoughts raised pressure in the eyes and which thoughts reduced it.

As I pointed out in the earlier thread, the real force generating the deficit is not excess spending but inadequate taxation to meet the inherent demands of a modern state under pressure to sustain the degree of humane intervention that people rightly insist upon. As long as the illusion persists that cutting spending is the only way out of the problem of large shortfalls between income and expenditure, rather than higher taxation, the problem can never be solved, since the pressure of humanity to maintain some protection for the poor and vulnerable, together with the ludicrous but immovable commitment of America to the national potlach of wasting money on excess defense spending to preserve the illusion that power still depends on the number of tanks a country has, will always limit cost-cutting. To get some idea of how miniscule the American level of taxation to meet basic necessities of running a state is, despite the fact that the U.S. spends vastly more on its military than other nations do, just look once more at the league table of the amount of gross domestic product taken by leading nations in taxation: France: 46% Germany: 40% United Kingdom: 39% Canada: 34% United States: 28% Thus the tax intake in the U.S. is just absurdly low for the needs of a modern state. In many ways this reflects the predominance of right-wing interests in the U.S., since low progressive taxes help those with the largest incomes, and a high debt increases interest rates so that the excess wealth which only the rich have in large amounts can be invested at a better return. So the rich benefit coming and going from the artificial creation of a large debt by low taxes. But the debate is entirely framed in terms of the need to reduce this already insanely low level of taxation in the U.S. Interestingly, no one ever mentions in this debate the main political significance of taxation, which is that it redistributes wealth and improves the condition of the poor and the middle class at the expense of the wealthy. The fact that this part of the debate is suppressed shows how illegitimate the entire political process is in the U.S., since obviously the wealthy and their political agent, the Republican Party, hope to delude the vast majority of the electorate who benefit from the redistributive effects of higher taxes by pretending that deficit reduction through spending reduction is the only relevant issue, and is also merely a technical issue of sound accountancy, rather than a political choice about humane redistributive efforts vs. the inhumane maldistribution of wealth.

But given that all military action inevitably involves some civilian deaths, and that this is even more of a problem with untrained, undisciplined militia firing guns whose operation they hardly comprehend, shouldn't NATO be stopping the rebels already without waiting for specific incidents of civilian deaths to be documented? The fact that they are going to cause such deaths in the future and have already done sone is a statistical certainty, and the UN Security Council resolution orders them to prevent only this problem. The issue seems to depend on how many civilian deaths are too many, or how negligent the cause of those deaths has to be to count as criminal rather than innocently accidental. Since all these questions call out for bright-line distinctions to be made on matters of degree and for factual evidence to be sifted and evaluated, the International Court of Justice, not some political body like the Security Council, is the only fair judge of this. But even though the ICJ is empowered to review the actions of the Security Council under article 24 of the UN Charter to ensure that they are consistent with the fundamental purposes of the UN Charter, for some reason they don't, and this means that international law is ultimately unjust. It's irritating that the Western media simply become brainless propagandists on this issue, uncritically thumping the drum for NATO with no interest in the legality of what is happening, but just the unreflective assumption that the countries in which they incidentally happen to live are always right. Who needs a Propaganda Ministry when the free press performs that role spontaneously? With respect to NATO warning the rebels that they, too, will be bombed if they kill civilians, we may now have the truly ridiculous situation of NATO intervening in a civil war so that it can bomb both sides, which seems to be required by the UN Security Council resolution legally authorizing NATO action. Since NATO forces killed innocent civilians in its bombing of Brega a few days ago, no doubt the Security Council authorization, properly interpreted, requires NATO now to bomb itself as well to protect civilians. Couldn't the effect of all these reciprocally opposing interventions have been less expensively achieved by just staying out of the conflict altogether?

Descartes' basic insight, that sophisticated thinking has to begin with radical doubt so that secure foundations can be provided for whatever is developed afterwards, became a basic premise of scientific thinking. It is no mere accident that Descartes' century, the seventeenth century, was really the foundation of modern science (Galileo, Kepler, Hooke, Newton). But the specific application that Descartes made of his insight, that he can only be absolutely sure that he is a thinking being, while other things have a subsidiary reliability, is generally taken today to have been disproved by Wittgenstein and other writers in the 20th century. Simply put, the only possible source of stable rule use is a community of independent subjects whose cooperative interaction ensures that the rule use is kept stable. Now since stable rule use is essential for the possibility of using a language, and since only using a language allows us to pick out and re-identify objects from the continuum of our experience, we can only really know our own inner subjectivity as something, as an object of experience, if we already exist in a world of other independent selves whose use of language with us stabilizes that rule use and language. So the certainty of knowing yourself as a thinking being is itself parasitic on your experience of the outside world and other thinking beings, thus showing that it is not primary.

1) There wasn't LEGAL free speech in 1517, beyond the limited right to post notices asking for theological clarification from superior authority on the Wittenberg church door, but there was was always the potential for and the human capacity of exercising free speech anyway, not only then but in every historical period. That is what I meant. 2) To advocate breaking a law denying free speech is not to advocate breaking every law. 3) Free speech gives people and society the potential to grow or relapse, but at least it makes us more intelletually empowered and significant beings. Since thought grows by its interaction in the public sphere with other thinkers, as long as we believe in rationality we implicitly have to accept that free speech is a net good. 4) There are of course many milestones in the history of human development. The Renaissance (1200), Humanism (1400), the Reformation (1500), the Enlightenment (1700), Existentialism (1900), etc., and certainly each stage has made its contribution. What they all have in common is that they tend to augment our interior space for reflection, criticism, doubt, and individual autonomy and ground us more firmly in thought and less in an external, unthinking, communal identity. In this sense the Reformation might well have been the greatest contribution to human development of all these stages. 5) Answered in 3).

Although the names and explanations of various clinical conditions have obviously changed over the years (e.g., 'melancholia' was the old name for our modern term, 'depression'), the clinical pictures are usually easily identifiable as the same over great spans of time. The Ebrus papyrus from Ancient Egypt in 1400 B.C. very clearly presents a case with exactly the same clinical picture as we recognize in modern type 1 diabetes, although the name 'diabetes,' meaning 'sieve' in Ancient Greek, since the flesh of the patient was imagined to be drained off through a copious production of urine, dates from much later. Thomas Willis also presents an excellent description of diabetes in the late 17th century. In medical history you trace the history of diseases by clinical pictures, not names or theoretical constructs around the names. Now of course sometimes a theoretical construct can disguise a disease by embedding it in another condition. For example, many historical cases described as tuberculosis may in fact have been cancer, since many of the symptoms of wasting are similar. But with fuller clinical descriptions it is often possible to tease the reality of an historical case out of its misdescription by historical writers. The striking thing with schizophrenia, however, is that it is extraordinarily difficult to tease out a single clinical picture of schizophrenia in a case reported prior to around the beginning of the 19th century. One author has argued that the character of 'Mad Tom' in Shakespeare's play, 'King Lear,' might suggest the picture of what we would diagnose today as schizophrenia, but this is disputable and the figure of Mad Tom is not very well fleshed out. Detailed clinical records for patients were made centuries age; those by Ambroise Pare in the 17th century, for example, are meticulous and much more extensive than most modern case notes, but again, after scouring through these records of patients in psychiatric asylums, every case seems like modern manic-depressive psychosis, dementia, neurosis, neurosyphilis, etc., but never schizophrenia. Also, why when Dr. Haslam reported his index case of schizophrenia in 1790 did he find it so unusual and worth reporting at length? By then he had already had years of practice as a 'mad doctor,' so it shouldn't have seemed noteworthy to him unless it was novel. The theory that schizophrenics were not appearing because they were dying off early in difficult conditions won't work as an explanation, since schizophrenia is a disease of early onset, typically around puberty, usually appearing between 16 and 23 but no later. Another factor pointing to the possibility of schizophrenia being a new disease is the burgeoning asylum population throughout the Western world after 1800. Where before there was always a fairly steady and small number of patients in asylums, after 1800 they couldn't build asylums fast enough to hold them all. This could have been a manifestation of a sudden social intolerance for odd behavior in a rationalized, industrializing world, or it could actually measure the increase in the extent of a new illness. Interestingly, other diseases such as type 1 and type 2 diabetes started increasing dramatically at this same time. Were they all diseases of civilization, perhaps from an industrial toxin or new viruses? It has been found that the odds of one person being diagnosed with schizophrenia increase greatly if someone else in the same apartment building has just been diagnosed with it, so this supports a viral hypothesis.

Look at the Newsweek article from 1975 that I referenced and then ask yourself whether there was really no widespread concern about global cooling back then. Newsweek isn't the National Enquirer. The problem with peer-reviewed articles in the field of climatology today is that scientists have split into two groups of competing peers, with 'denialists' (sounds like Holocaust denialists, and some of the emotion against them seems the same) retreating to their own journals after having been banned from the non-denialist-dominated journals, so we have the unusual situation in climatology of having different groups of 'peers' to pick from. Also, I clearly abandoned political arguments on this thread after the moderator instructed us to do so.

The sole legal ground under international law for NATO to be intervening in Libya is the UN Security Council resolution, which only permits them to act in order to prevent civilian casualties. Since the only way absolutely to ensure that there will be no civilian casualties, either from NATO action, from rebel action, or from Gadaffi's forces, is a ceasefire, and Gadaffi has today agreed to that but the rebels have rejected it, obviously NATO should now be attacking the rebels as the sole remaining danger to civilian lives, since all shooting would stop under a ceasefire. Since NATO is not going to do this, the entire mission is exposed as the imperialist fraud -- utterly illegal at international law -- that it always was.

The East Anglia Univeristy 'Climategate' scandal of November 20, 2009, in which data was found to have been falsified to enhance the global warming hypothesis, was so widely publicized that I am surprised it has now apparently been forgotten. Just google 'Climategate' and you will find a host of references to it. If you look a the 'Global Cooling' article in Wikipedia you will find a full account of the panic in the 1960s and 1970s over the 'impending ice age,' brought to us by the same brand of intellectual marvels who are today telling us the exactly the opposite. It makes one suspect that climate science is not all that accurate. You can also find online one of the more embarrassing relics of that panic, the April 28, 1975 Newsweek article by Peter Gwynne on global cooling. The fact that there are at least two respected climate scientists, professor emeritus Reid Bryson from the University of Wisconsin, and current professor Richard Lindzen from M.I.T., who dispute the usually-accepted versions of climate change, should at least encourage people to approach the hypothesis of global warming with scientific scepticism rather than with a messianic zeal that seems eager to elevate global warming into the ever-expanding, quasi-religious Pantheon of Things We are Officially Required to Believe in order to be politically correct. Since the Earth's climate certainly does change dramatically for non-anthropogenic reasons, unless we can securely distinguish its spontaneous temperature variations from those caused by human activity we should be careful about predicting with such certainty that greenhouse gas doom is on the horizon, rather than most of the climate change now detected being just the effect of our continued emergence from the last Ice Age. The fact that recently new record low temperatures, too far off the trend line of the posited global warming process to be within the range of reasonable statistical variations, are being recorded in various places around the world, such as the Canadian northwest last year, has to raise questions about whether the trend line has been correctly drawn.

Natives had a different sense of possession and property from the Europeans they encountered, and this was bound to create conflicts. Ultimately the murder of Captain Cook by the Hawaiian natives may have arisen from such a confusion over whether handing something over to someone meant loaning or giving it, or whether something belonging to someone but temporarily abandoned was still legally the property of that person. The question is, what is the politically correct name for this cultural confusion today? First Nations-Giving? The karmic theory of God's punishments cannot relieve him of guilt for the injuries inflicted, since he ultimately determined the design of the universe, and when he was deciding how to make the real world, it was not necessary that misbehavior ultimately lead to injury. Many bad things we do have no negative consequences, or much milder negative consequences than they arguably deserve, so why didn't God just make a padded universe where no one can ever be bruised, but just perhaps mildly rebuked for doing the wrong thing? If you've ever seen children turning themselves inside out with wretching after chemotherapy in a hospital, you might wonder whether the karmic punishments for sin are not a tad over the top. The real transcendental silliness of the whole God idea emerges when he flatly says, "Thou shalt not steal." You have to wonder, does he mean that anything which the entirely arbitrary and often profoundly unjust legal systems of all the various states of the world establish as 'legal ownership and its violation' is carefully noted by God with a massive ledger in Heaven so that he can keep pace with the evolving legal codes of each nation? If for example some jurisdiction's legal system were suddenly to permit a defense of necessity where it had not done so before, so that destroying private property by breaking into an abandoned cabin to save yourself from dying from exposure was no longer defined as a criminal act, does God then have to erase that type of 'stealing' of property from his roster of punishable sins and revise it, depending on the decisions of the earthly legal commission or the changing rulings of the local supreme court? Does he have to let out of Hell everyone he imprisoned there earlier for committing that type of stealing which is now no longer defined as such? What about people from less modern legal jurisdictions which don't yet recognize the defense of necessity? Does God still feel obligated to keep their souls burning in Hades because the laws are slow to change in their home jurisdiction?

Probably the most severe public insult to the greatest number of people by the use of free speech was Martin Luther's nailing up his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Not only did enormous pain and hatred flow from that act of free speech, but also the deaths of countless thousands in the religious wars that followed. And yet that public insult was also one of the milestones in the evolution of human consciousness, and many of its insights, which expressed a fundamental cultural shift to the creation of a sense of interior space, conscience, and full subjective consciousness in people who up until then had been rather superficial and lost in external forms and rituals, have gone even into forming the more modern version of the Roman Catholic Church which initially opposed them. So assuming you wouldn't want to forbid that cultural development which was dependent on free speech being permitted to insult and even harm others, where would you draw the line? American law draws it at immediate and unquestionable incitement to physical danger to persons nearby, such as 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.'

A whole school of thought has developed out of Jaynes' initial writings, and it was the views of this entire school, in relation also to those of R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, that I was outlining. Though even in terms of Jaynes' own work, it is interesting to ask why schizophrenic-style thinking was so predominant at one time in cultural history if it wasn't in some sense just a version of normal thinking. Presumably it was the mode of thought which evolution had produced up to that time, which would then have been the human cognitive style for most of our history on Earth. Jaynes emphasizes the sense of loss and longing which people experienced for the decline of that primitive form of thinking, since so often in the literature at the time of transition to more modern thinking styles, ca. 1200 B.C., there is a desperation at no longer quite being able to hear or understand what the gods were now 'whispering' or 'intimating,' where before they had spoken clearly (cf. the Old Testament and the Homeric writings). Also, if schizophrenic thought styles have not come to be perceived less as a mere variant of ordinary thought and more as a diseased form of thought with the rise of modernity, then why was schizophrenia never clinically identified prior to the rise of industrialized and rationalized social forms in England ca. 1790? (Cf. the writings of R. M. Hare on this question.) In the still predominantly agrarian German society, you don't see the same sudden panic in the medical literature about the sudden appearance and burgeoning expansion of a new form of insanity until the 1830s, which is when industrialization started to take hold there. Even today in 'primitive' societies schizophrenia in its Western form does not appear, or appears as an acute illness that rapidly burns out without treatment. This suggests it is somehow culturally created, unless environmental toxins are playing a role in its etiology.

There are certainly several sources of international law, as you point out. Customary practice of states used to be the only source, but since then international treaties, UN declarations, and International Court of Justice rulings are all generating new international law. It takes a while and a lot of precedents for state practice to crystallize into international customary law, but at what point there has finally been enough practice is always going to be debatable. There are also always going to be disputes about when the facts of any given situation actually trigger some international law criterion for state action, such as the claim of a right of humanitarian action to protect civilians being killed by their own government. High-speed police chases often kill civilians, but no one would argue that a high tolerance in a given country of civilian deaths from this source would excuse humanitarian intervention. The best response to all these matters of degree and theoretical dispute seems to be to have an agency specialized in the neutral resolution of such matters, the International Court of Justice, resolve them, rather than UN Security Council resolutions without ICJ review just charging ahead to make might right by the fiat of the great powers and the influence they can exercise over the non-permanent members of the Security Council.

In the U.S. the free speech protections are much stronger, since to be forbidden, any exercise of free speech has to threaten imminent and tangible harm, such as would arise from an anti-semitic speech in front of a Neo-Nazi crowd gathered before a synagogue, not any sort of speculative harm. Forbidden free speech thus has to be very close to the crime of inciting a criminal act, rather than just disrupting the social fabric in such a way as to disturb the public peace.

If I am talking with someone in the 120 F heat of the desert, have not had a drink of water in ages, and he is casually slurping a spilling water from a jug he occasionally brings up to his lips, I obviously cannot concentrate on a thing he is saying, even if it is very interesting. Share the water and stop treating it as some sort of magical, religious object which can only be very rarely shared after an extremely difficult set of rituals have been complied with and suddenly I can concentrate on the full human person in front of me, rather than just fixating on his water bottle. What we have here in Islam is the same thing we find in other religions: To establish their power over people, they alienate people from their most basic physical needs by making access to the satisfaction of these needs impossible without performing rituals which acknowledge the superiority and mastery over the subject of the religion. Referring to non-sexual things as 'higher' and sexual matters as 'lower' already gives away the culturally arbitrary foundations of the whole reasoning presented, since these terms already implicitly accept the validity of religion's strategy of valuing the ideal over the real, as though the real were intrinsically 'dirty' so it had to be 'cleansed' by resort to religion's power. But if you adopt instead a naturalistic, positivistic, scientific worldview, everything is on the same level of value unless it demonstrably causes concrete physical harm to people, and if so, the goal is just to abstract the harm from whatever we want to do by various precautions.

Yes, the instruction was just 'mouse' with no (conscious) pointing or other directions.

You should have a look at the writings of the Princeton psychology professor, Julian Jaynes, on the 'bicameral mind.' Essentially his theory is that schizophrenia is not so much a disease as just a typical way of conceiving things in the historical era concluding around the Homeric period, relying on conscious thought-processes submerged and channelled through subconscious processes which then re-emerged as subvocalizations strong enough to seem to emanate from a source outside the thinker. Schizophrenics today have a 0.8 fitness, so why didn't they simply die out long ago? One theory is that they were an advantage to the groups of non-schizophrenic genetic relatives they lived with, since they could think in a different way and were better at nocturnal vigilance, which was yet another survival benefit to their group. This view of schizophrenics as having a different form of cognition from others rather than being diseased is consistent with R. D. Laing's work indicating that schizophrenics behave quite well if not treated as though they are sick and dangerous, with Thomas Szaz's anti-psychiatry movement, and with the otherwise astonishing fact that there are no clear clinical pictures of even a single case of schizophrenia anywhere in the literature prior to the case Dr. Haslam reported first in the 1790s. This strongly suggests that schizophrenia could be a cultural artifact of the perceiving society, which as it becomes more rationalized and industrialized, is also forced to select and label those who have a different style of cognition as 'sick' and start filling up lunatic asylums with them because they don't fit into the new model of society as an industrial machine.

I doubt that climate change is that predictable. All through the 1960s there was a rising drumbeat of panic among climate 'scientists' about 'coming Ice Age,' which was 'long overdue,' just as there is now about the predicted global warming. Many random factors also seem to make oversized contributions to the general trends, such as the explosion of Krakatowa in the 1880s causing something like a 'nuclear winter' around the world. And what could have caused the 'Little Ice Age' of the 18th century which caused it to snow in June in New England? The number of humans and cows, which generate a large amount of methane, was sharply increasing at that time, so the greenhouse gases produced by that process interacted with various unknowns to produce a net negative effect on temperatures. No one has yet offered an explanation of what so dramatically warmed the planet before the year 1000 A.D. that central Greenland was an agricultural area able to support large Viking communities, as archeology can now confirm, and why two centuries after the start of the industrial revolution that same region is now covered with glaciers. Because the island nation of Tuvalu in the South Pacific is so flat there has always been concern that global warming would swamp it, since melting ice ultimately has to cause the ocean levels around the world to rise, but markers anchored to the ocean floor there have yet to disclose rising ocean levels. So what are we to make of so many loose ends in a theory which today is being presented as a religious dogma we are required to believe in or be socially ostracized? Why is the scientific community reacting so peculiarly to this issue, with competing theories being banished to opposing journals, since neither group will tolerate the publication of the other group's data and arguments? How do we account for the fudging of global warming data at the University of East Anglia? These are the types of occurrences that characterize scientific fraud rather than clearly established fact. Can these problems with the theory and tensions in the scientific community be explained because of the fact that though in principle the effect of greenhouse gas emissions is calculable, there is theoretical controversy about how the oceans interact with greenhouse gas emissions?

Bahrain and Syria are now shooting civilians, and no doubt many other nations routinely shoot innocent civilians as part of the side-effects of their police actions in suppressing ordinary crime, illegal demonstrations, or open revolts. The firing of live ammunition by the National Guard at Kent State in 1969 which caused innocent civilian death was not so long ago as to be outside the scope of 'modern state practice,' which defines international customary law. It is important to note an essential distinction in this argument. I am not just saying it is all right that Libya shoots innocent civilians now because the U.S. and other nations also do it, and if one agent does something wrong that makes the same wrong committed by a different agent morally acceptable. That assertion would of course be untrue. But I am saying something rather more technical about what is legally wrong by principles of international law so that it can be cited as a valid reason for invoking one of the very few permitted exceptions for aggressive military action, which is humanitarian intervention to protect people from death in a foreign jurisdiction. Since there is no world legislature to pass statutes of international law which all countries are bound to respect, international law develops from the customary practice of states. What states ordinarily do and regard as acceptable is what international law regards as legal. "Customary international law is, of course, derived primarily from state practice, that is to say, unilateral action by various states." (Hugh Kindred, et al, 'International Law,' Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2006, p. 149) So if state practice is ordinarily to tolerate the killing of innocent civilians as an unavoidable side-effect of domestic policing actions, then it cannot be illegal at international law, because it is consistent with the source of international law in customary state practice. And if something is not illegal in customary state practice, then how can it be cited to justify military intervention in the domestic affairs of a foreign sovereign on 'humanitarian' grounds, since what is consistent with international law, that is, the general customary practice of states, cannot conceivably be so 'inhumane' as to justify its legal suppression under international law, since then the international law of justified use of aggressive military action would be in conflict with the very foundation of international law itself!

It seems as though the Renaissance man in this case is lucky, since society has already marked out several fields where his existing interests in information technology and psychology overlap. Artificial intelligence has been suggested, and neurobiology, and psychobiology all seem like probable areas of interest. Try reading one of Ned Block's books to see if you find this field interesting. It is also important to note that going to university may change your whole range of interests in surprising ways.

The great intellectual revolution in the West, which the East did not participate in, was the recognition by Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger that humans are the type of beings for whom freedom of choice is more important that making the right choice, so any society which aims to treat people with respect has to give primacy to their free self-development over prescribing to them their proper range of acceptable choices. As Sartre put it, for humans alone of all things, existence precedes essence. In other words, while we can prescribe what a chair, a dog, a house, or a nuclear reactor should be before it even exists, for a human there is no formula for being the best it can be, but rather, each person has to create and expand the concept of humanness through his own free exploration. Obviously there is a limit on this freedom in a social context, which is usually stated in the West as the rule that everyone's freedom reaches to the maximum extent possible as long as it does not interfere with the equal freedom of others. An objectively neutral concept of physical harm has to regulate this boundary so we don't just wind up imposing arbitrary cultural values as the limits to freedom. Since Islam operates with a pre-modern, pre-existentialist concept of the self and social value, so that people doing the right thing is more important than people being free to develop their own concept of the right thing, Islam and the attenuated, secularized remnants of Christianity now prevalent in the West can never be reconciled, given that once a society has matured to attain an existentialist insight, it can never go back. To illustrate this by a specific example, consider the notion that women should be covered up to promote a suppression of sex presumed to be valuable for some assumed cultural reasons, or to prevent women from being viewed as sex objects, which is also taken for granted to be wrong. All these values set up as limits on the right of individuals freely to shape their own destiny and sense of self-hood are disputable, but the fact that they are embedded in traditional culture is taken to establish them as supreme over individual liberty, which is obviously not valued very highly if even public cultural values which cannot be proven can override it. E.g., when I play chess with someone, I just regard him as a chess-playing brain, so does this disrespect the full human he truly is, with emotions, friends, lovers, culture, language, and a personal psychological history? Of course not, since all humans have different aspects and in many situations we interact selectively with one aspect or another, but not with all aspects. Enjoying dancing with someone is in this sense no different from regarding someone purely as a sex object, since when I take him/her as a dancing partner I regard him/her purely as a dancing partner object, and yet no one minds this narrow focus in the second case, while everyone goes into an attack of vapors over the narrow focus in the first case! The cultural value is exposed as ridiculous, and yet it still trumps human freedom in Islamic societies, since they value traditional cultures over the primacy of human liberty and its claim to accept or reject cultures as it sees fit, and not to abide by any restrictions of human freedom unless these can clearly be proved to be objectively necessary to prevent abuse to other people's freedom.