Marat

Since the point of the social safety net is not to make profit by investing capital, but just to help promote humanitarian values by investing capital at no direct profit to the investor, which is usually the government or some charity, I wouldn't say it was capitalistic. It does produce some returns for the general economy, such as when a scholarship is invested in a bright young student at 0 return for the charitable investor or government, and that student, because he is educated, becomes much more productive for the society than he otherwise would have been. But this is not like capitalist profit, which doesn't go toward the common good but just toward private interest. It is certainly true that the capitalist is more efficient at bringing resources to economic demand than a command economy would be, but it is in fact extremely inefficient at producing the ultimate commodity of 'human happiness,' since the needs which demand satisfaction in capitalist society are only contingently backed with sufficient capital commensurable to the human importance of those needs. Instead, those needs are satisfied only if and to the extent that there is money to interest the capitalist in fulfilling them, and for the most desperate needs in society, such as those among the very poor for shelter, food, clothing, and medical care, there is no money so there is no satisfaction of need. The capitalist system is thus an astonishingly irrational system still to be in existence after Max Weber defined modernity circa 1900 as the era of rationality, since it deliberately fails to serve the most important needs over the less important needs, and leaves desperate needs utterly unsatisfied unless it coincidentally turns out that the market value of satisfying them can be met by the people who have those needs. The result is that capitalism is always massively inefficient in serving human interests, since the vagaband who lives in a dumpster needs a good meal and decent shelter a trillion times more desperately than a billionaire needs a Picasso painting, and yet the resource distribution system of capitalism insanely ensures that the much lower human need to buy the Picasso is met more often, more securely, and more easily than the much higher human need for a roof over one's head and a Big Mac. This is literally crazy, but its ubiquity and familiarity keeps most people from noticing it.

If we start with giving better education to women so they become empowered to gain control over the number of their pregnancies, and this in turn reduced the population in countries with too many people already for the local economy to sustain, that would seem a good thing. Until we consider that the poor families now deprived of enough children to support them financially in their old age or to ensure the other members against financial or medical disasters will suffer and perhaps die out, which would be a terrible price to pay for population decrease. Also, a more educated family would see this problem coming and still decide to have a large number of strong, young, and employable children to cushion itself against the threats of unemployment, ill health, injury, and old age for the rest of the family, especially its senior members. In this they are not irrational, but are just facing up to the same problem which Western governments are confronting on a large scale, which is that declining birth rates mean that there are now too few working young people to support the pensions of the many senior citizens. You could say that more educated women may take their skills, leave their homelands, work in more developed countries for higher salaries, and send their surplus income back home. But the males in Third World countries have already been doing this for a long time, which is why remittances make a major reduction in poverty in countries like Mexico and the Philippines.

Archimedes died on a beach by being run through with a Roman soldier's sword there. That seems more like a reason for not going to the beach -- too many bullies kicking sand in your face. True, Werner Heisenberg settled his ideas about Quantum Mechanics by taking a vacation to the beaches of Ruegen, but to get that benefit from the beach you need to be Heisenberg first, then go to the beach. A young university student should still be working on step one and go to beach much later for step two.

I could make up a scam and sell it as a true religion, but if it also included an elaborate doctrinal system, it could just be true by coincidence, so we shouldn't infer that just because Scientology might have originated in a fraud then its doctrines must be false. Just out of curiosity, I thought I might as well read the basic Scientology text, which I found I could only obtain for free by submitting my name and address to the local Scientology Church. Of course it turned out to be not that simple, since ever since then they have been contacting me to try to persuade me to sink deeper into their doctrine, though always (at least at this stage) in a very polite way. The doctrine seems to be based on the experiences of Mr. Hubbard when he worked in a Navy psychiatric hospital, and the point of his recommended behavioral modifications is to transform people into maximally efficient success-machines, even if this can only be achieved at the cost of losing their sensitivity for the darker side of life, its unpleasant memories, and the essentially tragic nature of the human condition. They seem not to ask themselves seriously why the ultimate point of life should be achieving success within the assumptions of the existing power-, fame-, and wealth-distribution system of the social conventions of our community, rather than appreciating more poetic, philosophical, and wistful but less practical realities of our human nature.

With respect to the circulatory demands of having a brain so far above the heart in giraffes, I have always wondered how they deal with the massive blood pressure required to preserve usable consciousness when the head is up so high. Somehow, even though they are mammals like us, a blood pressure of 220 over 100 doesn't seem to cause the same sort of damage to them that it would quickly cause in our kidneys and retinas, for example.

Although the dominance of feminist ideology today absolutely requires 'women's empowerment' to be the solution to everything, somewhat the way 'Aryan empowerment' was the solution to everything in 1930s Germany, actually that is not the best method to deal with Third World overpopulation and the poverty it causes. The reason why people -- both men and women, I have to say rather unfashionably -- in poor countries want large numbers of children is that there are no social insurance systems in those countries, so the only insurance families have against one member becoming sick or the parents becoming old and unable to work is to have a large number of children to support them out of familial affection. In this way poverty breeds poverty, since poverty initially causes there to be no money to create a national social safety-net, which in turn requires each family to produce its own social safety-net in terms of its children, which then creates too high a population for the natural and institutional resources to sustain.

Though in some ways what you are saying would amount to having to say that Nazism was good, since in terms of its own meaning and value system, it affirmed that it should continue to exist. Similarly, in terms of the only meaning context and point of reference we have, we find that the continued existence of that meaning context and point of reference -- the linguistic community, the other minds who keep its rule use stable and thus make a public language possible, and the self-consciousness it calls into being -- is affirmed, since there is no meaning perspective outside of it available to our knowledge from which we can refute it. But we can at least see that things die, and can imagine what it would be like if all the noise of experience stopped, and sometimes, from a certain existential perspective, people evidently see that as a good thing. An interesting old text to look at that makes very clear Kant's discussion of how individual consciousness comes into existence only from the existence of a stability given outside of it is Peter Strawson's 'The Bounds of Sense" (London: Methuen, 1966).

Every cultural era and its iconography looks ridiculous once it is over, but the seventies -- perhaps because the ensuing cultural transformations were so diametrically opposed to the sevenities ideology -- seem particularly exotic and amusing. In a remarkably short span of historical evolution, we have gone from "Do your own thing," "Whatever gets you through the night," and "Let it all hang out," to "Get with the program!," "Good guys finish last!" "Get your ass in gear!" and "What a Loser!" 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and 'Hair' have had to make way for 'Mr. Gecko' and 'Top Gun.'

It has been noticed among canines that there is occasional transfer of the role of alpha dogs in groups, perhaps because the alpha dog has so many additional responsibilities (being vigilant, patrolling and defending the group's territory, fighting intruders, etc.) that most of the rest of the back actually don't want his job, even though he gets first pick of the food. Many dogs simply show no interest in competing for the alpha dog role in the first place, even though they might be larger and stronger than the one who becomes alpha dog. Perhaps a difficulty with your theory is that it would fit homogenous groups better than groups with many specific niche roles. In a primitive human community, there will be nurturers, child-rearers, nest-builders, hunters and gatherers, night guards, warriors, and leaders, and each role has its own special advantages and disadvantages. Since the community as a whole needs each niche role to be fulfilled in order for it to survive, it will be to the advantage of the group to distribute resources commensurably to each role, rather than to concentrate them on the leader(s). Pack animals of all sorts are more like ant and bee communities than lone individuals in competition with each other for selfish use of resources. The result is that there is little or no motivation for everyone to strive to be the leader. A topic I have worked on the question of why the genes predisposing people to become schizophrenics have survived for so long even though schizophrenics over the last century have reproduced themselves at a rate of only 0.8 children per schizophrenic, which should have led to their extinction by now. One answer is that schizophrenics may have been especially valuable to primitive groups of humans because of their inclination to stay awake through the night while the rest of the group wanted to sleep, thus allowing them to serve as night guards. This may have enhanced the survival of groups which had large numbers of schizophrenics and thus a larger than normal amount of schizophrenogenic genes in the group, thus keeping the schizophrenia genes in existence up to now. But schizophrenics, for obvious reasons, would never have been the group leaders, but only important niche-role occupiers.

If you are planning to fill your summer with travel and you are not a cold-blooded animal so you a) don't have to rely on the circumambient temperature to keep warm and b) have the circulatory capacity for a well-oxygenated brain and some degree of intelligence, then go somewhere for the historic sites and the museums, rather than to a hot beach, which you will find to be pretty much the same in most of the world. Or just save yourself a few thousand dollars and pour some sand and hot water into the bathtub and turn on a heating lamp.

Interesting results like this emerge all the time, but if they are too far outside of the mainstream or point to the superior action of cheap chemicals which cannot be patented which could replace expensive drugs which are patent-protected, somehow they are never properly tested. E.g., niacin for cholesterol reduction; intravenous oxygenated infusion of hydrogen peroxide to treat infections in the 1920s; heating the patient's own blood and adding high levels of glucose to it, then returning it intravenously to the patient to kill only the rapidly metabolizing cancer cells (Dr. Ardenne); injecting small doses of animal cells to restore loss of function in the corresponding human glands (Dr. Niehans); treatment of peripheral neuropathy by electric currents; detaching glucose from diabetic hemoglobin and thus reducing damaging advanced glycation endproduct formation by the application of ultraviolet light to highly vascularized, superficial regions of the body (e.g., the feet); use of the pro-vitamin Benfotiamine to concentrate levels of vitamin B1 in diabetics to block three out of the four metabolic pathways by which diabetic complications form, etc. Only if the power of the physicans and Big Pharma are protected by using only prescription medicines to treat disease will cures ever be submitted to adequte testing. Thus everything else can always be honestly dismissed as 'unproven,' not because it cannot scientifically be proved to work, but only because the institutional resources to prove it will never be summoned.

Or another puzzle: Let 0.999... = x Subtracting equals from equals: 9.999... = 10x - .999... = -1x 9.000... = 9x Dividing through by 9 1.000... = x But we started with x = 0.999...?! No wonder limits seemed so troubling to Leibniz and Newton in the 17th century.

Padren: Of course everything you are saying is right from within the perspective of capitalism. But the fundamental question is whether capitalism is the proper system to be using in the first place. Most people are not naturally entrepreneurs, and their goal in life is to concentrate on friends, family, hobbies, and the search for meaning rather than money. To support this orientation toward life they need stability more than anything else, so the 'nest' which forms the setting within which they can love and nurture their family, enjoy their friends, and develop a sense of leading a fulfilled life is safe and secure. For this they are eager and willing to work, but they don't want to share in the boom and bust cycles created as the side-effects of capitalist millionaires struggling to become billionaires. They cannot live their small-scale lives focused on value and meaning if they are constantly threatened by unemployment, downsizing, wage cuts, competition, financial deceptions, exhorbitant interest rates, exploitative wages and prices, the demand that they pull up stakes and move to keep their jobs, that they suddenly undergo retraining if they want to continue working, inadequate insurance coverage, risk of catastrophic medical expenses, and their inability to pay for a university education for themselves and their children. What we have is a society built not for the majority of people who live in it and their real human needs, but one designed to facilitate capitalism's interests and nothing else. There is of course no monolith of capitalists, but still, the commonality of the class interests of people living by capital investment rather than by their labor in minimalistic taxes and poor labor regulations at the cost of inadequate social programs and workers' suffering functionally defines them as an essentially unified group.

Values quickly accommodate to the demands of the dominant form of production in society. The oldest forms of human community recognized special roles for each type of individual, and no role was denigrated. Being a mother, a housewife, a homemaker, a servant, a serf, a duke, or a merchant were all acceptable roles, since there was less of a general concept of universal personhood than we have today. A serf felt fulfilled in the role he was born into and would have felt foolish if he had been asked to ride a horse into battle, which was the proper role only of someone born into the lesser nobilty of the knighthood. The goal of life was to fulfill the role that fate and birth had assigned you, not to explore your full potential and embark on free self-development. But this value system fits best with feudalism, and as the market economy developed, a nascent capitalism demanded that individuals become fungible, able to be mobilized for any and all uses that capitalism might require them for. This required in turn a loss of a sense of stable roles and of the validity of all the interlocking roles in society, and the beehive model of society had to give way to the universal liberty of equal persons, who each had the same right to become plumbers, carpenters, floor sweepers, or lawyers as capitalist productivity might require. The last stage of development of this abandonment of role-specific humanness occurred in recent years, from about 1970 to today, when capitalism told women that they had to think of themselves as inferior unless they went out into the world of work and imitated male values of competitiveness, ambition, and money-making, rather than seeking meaning in being nurturers at home and forming the center of emotional security for a whole family of people. Somehow it was unquestioned that money-making was more meaningful than helping and loving people. Now women assume that they are 'liberated' only if they become imitation males, with all the historical faults of competitiveness, money-grubbing, aggressiveness which the male role required. Has women's liberation been tricked into playing right into the hands of capitalists and their demand for a larger work force to depress wages? If the economy goes into a long downturn, does that mean that capitalism, now no longer requiring such a large reserve army of workers to hire and fire as needed, will try to convince women that a new stay-at-home role is what their liberation is all about?

It's disturbing that society finds it can accept the risk of large-scale damage to the economy and profound human misery to poor and middle class people if capitalists require downsizing of their operations, thus generating massive unemployment, or if capitalists want to call in tardy mortgages and hurl families out onto the street. But the risks at the top, that capitalists themselves may have to pay when the risks they take turn out badly, are deemed intolerable. Interestingly, when the risks capitalists take turn out well for them, they simply keep all the profits for themselves, rather than putting a large share of those profits into a public insurance fund to cover the costs of bailing them out in the future, if necessary. It is so much easier to keep the profits and just bill the tax payers to provide an insurance policy for capitalists which imposes no fees on the insured. Privatizing profits; socialize losses -- there's a game you can't lose.

Go to the summer school of another university and take parallel courses to those you are planning to take at your current university next year. If you do well in the summer school courses, apply to count them toward your degree requirements at your current school. If you don't do well in the summer courses, never tell anyone you took them so they won't affect your transcript. They will at least prepare you to do much better when you officially take the courses next year. This technique has been used by more than a few people to leverage performance in order to get into competitive graduate school programs.

Two related themes are running together in this thread and are becoming mixed. One is whether there are any accurate images of the historical Jesus surviving today, which I think we can agree is probably unlikely, given the inability of Jesus and his supporters to access the resources necessary to preserve his image in lasting form by depicting him in a bust, a statue, a coin, or a mosaic. The other theme is whether Jesus was really a historical figure or not. Generally, by historiographic principles, we would have to admit that determining today whether any specific individual less important than an Emperor, King, Senator, general, or famous inventor existed 2000 years ago is not something we can reliably achieve by the rules of evidence historians accept. In terms of an analogy with astronomy, saying whether any particular person among the countless itinerant magicians, faith healers, prophets, or religious preachers of the time actually existed is something we cannot claim now to 'see' with the type of 'telescopes' now available. We don't even know whether the Ancient Romans had invented the stirrup -- of which there must have been millions of exemplars if they had them -- given the paucity of our sources and the lack of archeological evidence, so how could we possibly still be certain that an object of much smaller today mass such as a specific person was a real individual, rather than a mythic, symbolic composite of a number of persons of similar type, such as Homer is now generally believed to have been. We don't even know for sure exactly where Hannibal's massive army was at any particular time en route to Italy, since even that gigantic object is 'too small' to see by the historiographic techniques available today. There are plenty of magical and miraculous tales from Antiquity which supposedly had many witnesses, and it is likely that many people in that superstitious age really did think they saw miraculous things happening, even though these were in fact deceptions. The extremely cautious and accurate ancient historian and travel guide Pausanius reports his direct witness of miraculous events occurring in a Greek mystery temple, but we don't take him seriously on this point although we accept most of the rest of what he says. Even the Old Testament in Ex 7: 8-12 talks of Egyptian magicians being able to turn staffs into snakes in front of many witnesses, so we have to accept that if a miracle can be invented, then it is not all that difficult to make up witnesses of it to go along with the miracle. We even see that going on today in our own much more rational culture with people supposedly witnessing little people coming out of alien space ships at Roswell. Perhaps 2000 years from now these imaginary beings will be worshipped by a major world religion!

What you say replicates a series of philosophical insights from Kant to Wittgenstein, which I also agree with -- at least when I'm not toying with ideas just for the sake of speculating. Essentially the accepted theory is that it would be impossible for us to notice ourselves as an object of our own, inner experience, unless we had a relatively stable world of experience outside of us to frame ourselves into determinate contrast with it. Similarly, we could not even fixate on individual objects and experiences within our consciousness unless we lived in a linguistic community which fixed these meanings into determinate form by other speakers using naming and identification rules for experiences in a stable way -- such as could only be made possible in a community of speakers correcting and thus holding steady each others' identification of things. Thus, ultimately, the ability of our own consciousness to make us aware of our most basic 'object' -- our continuing self-awareness as a self -- and of all individual objects and experiences, is parasitic on our living in a linguistic community whose social, linguistic, and rule-using instructions tell us how to frame, unitize, and re-identify these sensations as discrete things. This is encapsulated in Wittgenstein's dictum: "There can be no private language."

Many substances are banned from interstate sale or the use of the federal mails, even though individual states (usually Nevada) may permit them. Any product which requires professional assistance to administer or use safely is in effect banned by professional society regulations. The risk of tort suits for failure to observe the usually primitive 'standards of contemporary practice' will dissuade most physicians from trying anything in the least bit imaginative.

Are we back to Descartes?!

Any finance capitalist will tell you that having to come up with liquidity and loan it to someone at less than the interest rate which would normally be required to match the risk of the enterprise seeking the loan is a loss. You should instead have kept the money to benefit from it yourself or loaned it to another equally risky enterprise for the proper commercial rate of interest required to offset the risk. What happened in the bailouts, even if they were paid back with interest, is that the taxpayers' didn't get interest value for their money, and their money was tied up in keeping a private profit machine for rich people in existence instead of going to provide better schools for the children of ordinary people. That's a loss. The economy will be boosted by a stimulus no matter where it is applied over the wealth hierarchy, and where you choose to apply the stimulus will depend on whose fingers you want the boost to stick to on its first pass through the economic system, rich people or poor people. The economy could just as well have been saved by a stimulus to the bottom rather than to the top, with the government intervening to rescue mortgages on the verge of default and to seize corporations about to default by paying the owners their real value -- at the depths of the recession nearly nothing, since they were about to go bankrupt -- and then to take them over and run them in the public interest. The result would have been that instead of all the profits of those companies now going to rich shareholders as dividends and to corporate CEOs as massive bonuses, the government could have directed those profits to benefit those for whom the extra money would have been vastly more beneficial, the poor and the middle class. A $10,000 bonus to a family unable to afford to send its children to university and wearing coats because the winter heating bills are too high would be worth a trillion times more in producing real human happiness than the same money being devoted to increase the wealth of a billionaire by one-onehundred-thousandth. Everyone knows this, but capitalism, as the reigning system of production, constructs whatever ideologies it needs to delude everyone into not acting on the obvious if that is to capitalism's disadvantage. Logically, the political outcome of the recession of 2008 caused by hyperspeculation as a result of the excess capital accumulation caused by 30 years of neoliberalism and the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street should have been public socialist rage against Wall Street, the speculators, and capitalism. Instead, in the smartest judo-throw ever contrived, capitalism transformed the target of that rage into its opposite, and formed out of the public's dumb anger the Tea Party, which once again promotes neoliberalism! Miraculous!

The images we have of historical figures from that time are almost all from statues, busts, mosaics, or coins, as far as I know. I don't think any images from the first century have been passed down on crumbling papyrus to the present, or could have been, given the state of those written papyri that have survived. Roman images are especially good, since the Ancient Romans took it for granted that a portrait should really look like the person, rather than represent an idealized depiction. A coin with Cleopatra's head on it from around the beginning of the Roman period of control over Egypt shows in profile the most hideous crone imaginable, though perhaps the tip-of-your-nose-touching-your-lip look was considered attractive at the time. But given that Christ was not sufficiently integrated into the power structure of his time to be able to afford or to have anyone bother to make a statue, bust, mosaic, or coin with his image on it, I would guess that the face of the historical Jesus is lost. Incidentally, some cultures now depict him in surprising ways. In the capital of the Dominican Republic there is a massive statue of a black Jesus with furious, bulging eyes threatening the entire island. It's primary use seems to be as a scarecrow.

I think that at some point everyone goes through the uncomfortable experience of wondering whether when I see an object I call 'red,' and another person sees that same object and also calls it 'red,' in fact we are both disguising by our use of a common language in response to common stimuli just how utterly incommensurable our own inner experiences are, since when I see 'red' I actually have an image in my mind of what the other person would call 'orange' or 'green.' On a higher level, since I understand 'father' and 'paternalism' in reference to my own experience with my own particular father, even though I also understand that that concept, as a public term, has a wider application than my own experience, I still can't entirely separate it from my own associations. For this reason, if we were both to converse about 'fatherhood,' we would not really be sharing the same meaning, though it would take a lot of discussion to clarify all the distinctions. So if you multiply the different shadings of all meanings in everyone's head from all their personal experiences, abstract learning, and personal beliefs, we must all be truly radically incommensurable persons, who only seem to communicate with each other and share experiences because a common language and a common socialization simplify things sufficiently that the great differences are abstracted down to common denomenators which hide the dissonances between us.

Good point. I don't think anyone was arguing that vision had to be the only or primary criterion of self-awareness, but rather, it is just one way to try to test the sophistication of self-awareness. For many animals smell would certainly be a more important sense to measure the contents of consciousness. I often wonder what human culture would have been like if we had had the olfactory capacity of blood hounds. Would we have libraries with information encoded in a variety of scents? Would telecommunications be more concerned with reproducing the smells of distant communications and environments? We do seem to be anthropocentric in favoring visual data as the route to understanding animal intelligence.

It is also often found that overweight people are also, ironically, malnourished, since they eat only the wrong foods. If they eat only the healthiest foods this problem at least would be avoided, though they would still be carrying too much fat. Keep in mind that the higher the body mass the greater the cancer risk, and fat people run about double the lifetime cancer risk of people with a normal BMI. Longevity tables show that both overweight and underweight people have shorter life expectancies, and the data suggest that being too thin may in fact be a worse problem than being too fat. Experiments with mice which were kept on very low calorie diets while growing up show that they experience a large boost in life expectancy. There are also some islands off the coast of Japan where it is a cultural usage to leave the dinner table only 80% full and thus still hungry, and these thin people have a significantly better life expectancy even than mainland Japanese.