Marat

Some parts of the world operate with very different concepts of the importance of honor relative to the importance of human life than we in the West have, and some have very different notions of the independence of each individual from the ethical identity of the family than seem natural to us. If you can get yourself to think of a notion of selfhood in which each member of the family is not really autonomous apart from the family, then such actions as occurred in this news report don't seem so unethical. You would have to step back and ask whether the entire culture and its more communitarian notion of the ontology of the self is legitimate or not, and the answer to that would depend on how willing you are to accept cultural relativism or adhere to a universal notion of human identity and moral rights.

There are plenty of physical theories for how life first came into existence from inorganic matter, so I'm sure there is no need to rehearse them all here. Your question seems like asking why apple seeds have so much cyanide when for almost everything else in the universe cyanide is toxic and inconsistent with life. It is just that when you focus on any particular thing in isolation and note its distinctness, the fact that everything else is different from it seems somehow incongruous. It is like asking why there are so few Earth-like planets, or so few planets with eccentric orbits, or so few planets with planetary rings, etc. There is really nothing troubling in the fact that a division of the objects of the universe into certain categories by various criteria produces subsets with vastly different numbers of objects in them. A google search shows that no one else recorded in cyberspace has exactly the same name as I do, but why should that cry out for explanation?

The whole question of what exactly causes diabetic complications is a complex one. It is puzzling, for example, that certain animals, such as hummingbirds, live their entire lives with a very high blood sugar level and never develop the least histological trace of diabetic complications. It is also difficult to explain why some diabetics develop severe complications very quickly despite minimal hyperglycemia, while others with massive hyperglycemia fail to develop complications for decades. Some diabetics present with complications at diagnosis, even when the onset of their diabetes, as in the case of type 1 diabetics, is quite acute, so there is fairly good evidence that some of the complications develop independently of the characteristic hyperglycemia of the disease. Part of this explanation might have to do with how well the body is equipped with the necessary enzymes for metabolizing excess glucose to its ultimately harmful form, the advanced glycation endproducts. There is now a harmless pro-vitamin, benfotiamine, which has been demonstrated to block three of the four metabolic pathways by which hyperglycemia results in advanced glycation endproducts, and this has great promise in preventing diabetic complications. Some of the complications seem to be pre-programmed by genes inherited along with the gene cluster which predisposes people to develop type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Some of the vascular and neurological damage is caused by the autoimmune processes which initally attack the beta cells of the pancreas in type 1 diabetes, and to this extent hyperglcemia is a concommitant but not a cause of the complications of diabetes. Since insulin is either not produced at all, or only produced in insufficient amounts in type 1 diabetes, some of the complications in type 1 diabetics may be caused by lack of c-peptide, which is normally produced along with insulin. Since c-peptide cannot pass through the cell walls in type 2 diabetes, this ineffectiveness of c-peptide may also play a role in causing the complications of type 2 diabetes. But to say that the development of complications in diabetes is directly proportional to the degree of hyperglycemia is much too simple.

It sounds as though there are a number of different things going on here. First, the 'floaters' seen in the visual field, known as 'muscati fugitens,' are just the symptoms of a harmless shedding of cells within the eye. This increases naturally with age and is not indicative of a disease process. Some people actually continue dreaming after waking up, in a form of lucid dreaming described in the 19th century by the English author Thomas De Quincy. That may explain the patterns you see on awakening, or it may just be a residual contrast image from changing background lighting intensities after waking up. Seeing engorged blood vessels in the visual can also be either insignificant or significant. One possibility would be neovascularization near the macula suddenly appearing in the visual field as something new and thus noticeable. This is the symptom worth having checked by an ophthalmologist.

Although there may have been some medical logic to forbidding the consumption of pig meat in Judaism and Islam, some have argued that eating pigs seems too close to cannibalism -- given the similarity between pig faces and some human faces, as well as between the image of a pig and an overweight, naked human -- so the revulsion at eating our own species was transferred to pigs as well. Whenever I have been driving in the country, I have always noticed that the people seem to look like the animals they raise: pig-faced farmers raise pigs, the sheep-faced have sheep, and horse-headed folk have cattle ranches. Is this just the power of suggestion or is there something else going on here?

Paranoia, you've independently hit on John Stuart Mill's famous 'harm principle,' which holds that in a liberal state, no one has the right to forbid anything unless it can be demonstrated to cause objectively real harm to someone else. Generally I find that an excellent starting point for attempting rationally to analyze any political issue. England introduced 'closing hours' for pubs at 11 PM every night during World War I because it was feared that late night drinking would reduce the efficiency of workers in munitions plants and harm the war effort. These laws are still in place today, since no one seems to have noticed that the excuse for them disappeared. But many things cause some degree of harm yet are not regarded as behaviors that need to be prohibited or criminalized. For example, the sociologist Max Weber has argued that Catholics are less effective in a capitalist world because they are too much oriented to their hopes for the next world to concentrate properly on issues relevant to this world. If this were true, then the state should ban Catholicism for the same reason it prohibits drug use, since both undermine worker productivity by inducing the wrong state of consciousness for efficient operation in a capitalist system. But instead the state makes religious belief a protected constitutional liberty, whatever its ill effects, while drug use is prohibited even if its ill effects are hard to demonstrate. Clearly what is going on here is that majority simply prohibits what it doesn't like and then tries to invent sufficient reasons ex post facto.

Some countries allow dual citizenship while others do not. Some countries regard citizenship of birth as inalienable while others permit people to renounce their citizenship after they reach the age of majority. Generally, people acquire multiple citizenships for tax purposes, since by manipulating their times of residence in various places, or declaring their 'official' home in one country rather than in another, they can expose their assets to the less expensive tax rates in the country of their choice. This is why Richard Burton and other Hollywood actors have been 'Steuerbuerger' of Switzerland, or why Sean Connery is now a legal resident of Gibraltar. Occasionally, stateless persons seek to acquire citizenship this way rather than relying on the travel document made available to them by the United Nations. This is quite a complex area of law, so it is best to consult a tax attorney for the details if you are wealthy enough for this to be important to you. Some countries even allow you to buy supplementary citizenships for various purposes. This is usually done by investing a certain amount of capital there, which often has to be capital investment beyond mere home ownership. Costa Rica is one such place where alternative 'investor' citzenships are available for a price. Just as a curiosity, some people acquire citizenship in 'Sealand,' which is a 'country' which has been established on an abandoned English anti-aircraft platform anchored to the seabed in the North Sea. Sealand issues its own passports, has a flag, a national hymn, and a constitution, but ever now and then it revokes the passports it has issued out of fear that its 'citizens' may return, take up residence, and depose the present 'government,' which just consists of a very few people at any given time.

Thanks, Random!

All human liberty creates some elevation of the risk of harm to other people in the same society. The fact that we give people the freedom to drive cars on public streets kills 40,000 Americans a year, but we value that freedom sufficiently that we feel the freedom is worth it. So when we look at the rationale for banning cigarette smoking in public places based on the harmful effects of second-hand smoke, we really have to ask whether the actual magnitude of the harm this causes is sufficient to justify banning it. The issue is more one of society officially hating tobacco use, the prohibition of which has become a new religious value of social conformity, so the benefit of the freedom to the minority who still smoke can be outweighed even by the small harm caused by second-hand smoke.

The whole area of the etiology of diabetic complications is vastly complex, since autoimmune and genetic factors play a role in their genesis along with hyperglycemia, and it is difficult to determine how much of the problem comes from each factor, or whether it is the interaction among the factors which is key. After the DCCT, there was fixation on the idea that all the complications were caused by hyperglycemia, but now after the ACCORD study it is evident that for type 2 patients more normalization of blood glucose levels is harmful, rather than helpful, as the theory would predict. Another confusing factor is that type 2 patients have a much easier time controlling blood sugar levels than type 1 patients, yet type 2 patients develop the classic diabetic complications much sooner after diagnosis than type 1 patients do. Is this because the type 2 patients go undiagnosed for much longer than the type 1 patients do, is it because their age of onset is typically older, or is it because their disease is different in some unknown way? Many of the complications of diabetes, even though perhaps caused by hyperglycemia, are best controlled not by addressing the hyperglycemia per se but rather by addressing related risk factors. Thus for example, trying to prevent diabetic nephropathy by blood sugar control is not very effective, but controlling blood pressure in the presence of developing diabetic nephropathy is important.

Schizophrenia is usually marked by emotional flattening, sometimes called 'la belle indifference,' in which a patient may say something like, "I just heard that my mother died," and then just shrug and smile, but show no appropriate affect. Since normal emotional responses to stresses are not characteristic of schizophrenia, I don't know if there is much written on schizophrenics suffering PTSD from their own episodes, which of course would be stressful in people with normal emotional reactions. There is a very interesting memoir by a Berlin publisher, Friedrich Nicolai, of his experiences with schizophrenia, published in the early 19th century. You might be interested in reading it if you can get a copy. He often had both auditory hallucinations and visual delusions of dead people in varying states of decay appearing to him, but his responses to these experiences were much more flattened than those of a non-schizophrenic would have been.

I think the OP was probably referring to the alternative medicine theory that by drinking your own urine you can induce your body to produce a health-promoting reaction to toxic allergens. Some people have even injected their own sterilized urine subcutaneously for this effect. It supposedly makes people very tired after the injection and then after a few weeks of this treatment they start to feel stronger and healthier. I don't know if any serious research has been done in this speculative subject.

But once capitalism introduces the paradigmatic example of ruthless rationalization in one large sphere of human life, that model tends to be generalized, so before long people who in their everyday lives become accustomed to rational analysis to structure this new form of human life stripped of traditional, ritualized modes of prescribed behavior and having to accommodate rational structures of bureaucratized social institutions around them also stop believing in fantasies like god, or stop thinking that hope is a sensible way to deal with life's stresses, or that there is anything special about a 'sacred' statue beyond its cash value. Not all of these generalizations of the seed of rationality originally planted by capitalist organization necessarily support capitalism. Everyone used to cite Foucault all the time in the 1980s, but now the shockingly thin patina of research supporting his grandiose conclusions has led to people taking him much less seriously than they used to. Generally, while he is right that knowledge claims and scientific theories are sometimes used to support power claims and silence others claiming their own social power, the vast majority of knowledge claims are about things which are objectively true or provable and have only tangental connections with social power.

1) I'm not sure it is generally assumed, or has to be assumed, that a God would have free will. If his nature constrains him always to choose only what is perfect in terms of morality and wisdom, then it would seem that his options are so drastically limited that unless there are two equally good or wise things available to choose, his goodness and wisdom would have to leave him no options. One way to make this more of a problem would be to say that if God cannot have free will since he must always choose only the highest good and the most wise option available, then he cannot be a truly morally signficant entity, since there can be no sense in blaming or praising him for anything, since he has no alternative but to choose the best, and does so by a machine-like preconditioning rather than by any exercise of laudatory free will. But does he need this to be good? Is goodness only the exercise of a possibly morally defective free will in a good way, or can it be the choice of the good even when this choice was predetermined by one's nature? It would seem that in both cases, whether the person chooses good against a temptation to do evil which could have succeeded, or chooses good because his nature constrains him to do so, he still deserves to be characterized as good -- either in effort or in result. 2) If God had created people with both perfect morality and free will, so that they always chose freely but just happened always to choose the good, they might arguably be morally insignificant beings, since they would not exist at a level where truly good or evil actions could be chosen. Being a creature of such stature that it can commit sin, as opposed to an instinctively driven animal which has no morally significant choice, is a great gift, and perhaps this gift to humanity is of sufficient value to outweigh the value of the alternative, which would be creating human automata which always choose the good without the moral significance of a true test. 3) Now we have it that in the case of God, he claims goodness as a result -- that his choice is always constrained to be good so he must now be characterized as good; while in the case of humans, we claim goodness as a process -- that of choosing the good when we could have chosen the alternative. But I don't think this distinction in the grounds of goodness has to be a problem, if we assume first that God and man are of such essentially different natures that different governing principles of goodness apply to them.

The usual assumption among historians and sociologists, starting with Max Weber, is that the rationalization of production of goods, distribution of goods, sale of goods, financial planning, and labor organization demanded by the goal of profit maximization in captalism, beginning around 1720 in England, introduced a corresponding rationalization throughout society. This general rationalization of society meant that instead of each class of person having special legal rights and duties, the streamlined world of capitalism required all people to be treated as equal for simplicity of labor exploitation, capital mobilization, contract formation, and trade. Similarly, all days of the year had to be treated as identical so that there would be no breaks on commercial efficiency. There could be no special sacred places either, since everything had to be open to efficient capitalist development. Superstitution had to give way to science, since only science operates with a thoroughly rational methodology. Thus once one large aspect of society, such as the economy, has to become rationalized, that rationalization spreads ruthlessly throughout the rest of society until we find ourselves living in a generally logical world, since each surviving illogical element looks all the more incongruous compared to the general rationality.

The basic paradox of capitalism is that its goal is to generate excess capital as a return on investments, but for this return then to find profitable sources of investment, the size of the potential investment opportunities has to grow continuously, which it does not naturally do. Capitalism responds by artificially expanding the market by creating unnatural consumer demand for trivially 'new' versions of products which already exist and have already completely flooded the market and satisfied the natural demand. This is what happened with devices to play music: first the market was flooded with vinyl records, then these all had to be replaced by tapes, and then these in turn all had to be replaced by casettes, so essentialy the same product is sold three times over to create an artificial expansion of investment opportunities for surplus investment capital. New computer software represents the same foolishness, in that the cost of the new product in terms of its expense and the energy investment required to learn how to use it far exceeds the additional value it provides over the previous product. The tragedy is that while capitalism ties up so many productive resources in making these useless things to sell and re-sell essentially the same products to those who can afford them, it never devotes the necessary resources to answering true human needs among those who cannot reward capital with sufficient profits, like people starving in Africa, Third World residents who can't afford vital medicines, etc.

If you visit Iowa, you will find that the houses, the politics, and the general culture are quite New Englandish, and the explanation always given by the locals is that Iowa was mainly settled by people from New England who left their cultural stamp on the state. But that was in the 19th century, and now it seems as if migrants assimilate rather than bring their culture with them, much as the old Yankee family of George Bush has now become so ultra-Texan in just a few generations.

A "good superior to perfect morality" is only nonsense if morality is the highest value in the universe. Perhaps from the perspective of divine omniscience, a good higher than morality is creating beings with the free will to choose evil, since only their capacity for this choice makes the world they live in one in which morality -- that is, praise or blame for good or bad ethical choices -- possible. When God is usually defined as good or perfectly good, does this mean that he has to be capable of being perfectly good in a way inconsistent with the importance of creating entities with free will so that their potential good and bad choices make morality real? It seems that we have to have the moral scale before we can worry about whether God is good, and this scale only first comes into existence because morally significant choice, which is the choice of good or evil, is possible. Does God's being perfectly good have to involve him in the kind of perfection that would be inconsistent with the created universe of beings with the free will to choose badly, given that this is the only way that morality could even come into existence as a relevant scale for that world? Perhaps God's 'perfection' only consists in his having to be sufficiently good to choose the best of all possible worlds for beings to exercise morally significant free will in. This may yield a 'better' universe by some divine cosmological standard than one in which a morally perfect deity just sat alone in darkness, so it would be an imperfection in God to choose the empty but non-evil universe rather than the one populated by humans with free will which has some evil in it.

Of course, 'lack of insight' of the patient into his own condition is another important diagnostic feature of schizophrenia, and that would seem to disqualify you!

The US is rather silly for making pornography a special category of unprotected speech. It would be much more sensible just to apply the usual 'time, manner, place' restrictions to pornographic speech to ensure that people who are offended by it would not be exposed to it against their will, and otherwise to protect it. Almost all speech is delivered so that it can have some effect, and some of the effect of speech on some people will be to cause them to commit crimes. But I find it interesting that while the society becomes hysterical over the fear that pornographic free speech will cause sex crimes, no one seemed very much concerned when the fellow who shot at the city council members on television last week indicated that he had been directly inspired by the 'Vengeance' movie. That was only violence inciting violent behavior, not pornography, so its potentially lethal effects need not inspire any moves toward censorship.

The curious thing about the shift of America's population from the Northeast to the Southwest over the last thirty years has been that the people who moved seem to have adopted the local thinking of the places they moved to, rather than importing their own ideas. Why do liberal New Englanders who used to spend their afternoons discussing Emily Dickenson's poetry at the Boston Athenaeum suddenly become right-wing Texans barbecuing steaks in the football stadium parking lot just because they are now living in a different environment? I've always thought of the United States as a gigantic person whose blood (population) is now draining from his head (the Northeast) to his feet (Florida, Texas) with a corresponding decline in IQ. European cultural historians now describe the U.S. as "the world's only first-world economy with a third-world culture."

If we accept the possibility that there could be motivations operating on God which are higher than the requirements of what to us are the supreme demands of morality, then he might have good reasons for choosing to create the best of all possible worlds even though it is not perfectly good. For example, if creation is a good superior to morality, or if the existence of beings with free will is a good superior to morality, then God might have an overriding reason to create the kind of world that exists. Perhaps Kant's ethics offers an alternative. Only if something has free will can it deserve praise and blame for its actions. Since morality is all about the reasons for praising or blaming actions, morality can only come into existence or have relevance if there are beings with morally significant free will. For there to be morally significant free will, there has to be the possibility of choosing to do either the right thing or the wrong thing, which means choosing good or evil. Evil choices produce suffering, so for God to produce a world in which morality can exist, he has to create a world with suffering. If human free will could do nothing but make morally indifferent choices, such as between chocolate and vanilla, then humans would not be truly empowered and significant beings or genuine moral significance, so they have to be able to choose evil, and the world has to be at least in part bad.

But I would argue that that does nothing to impeach their ontological warrant, since all concepts of numbers, and indeed, all concepts, are just human abstractions imposed on artificially insulated slices of the continuum of sensation and labeled with a name. It is tempting to think that if we see four dead branches on the ground in front of us the 'four' is somehow already implicit in the empirical nature of what we are seeing prior to any interpretive act, but in fact the 'fourness' of that ensemble is something we conceptually impose on it, and so it is also 'man-made.' The 19th century German mathematician Gottlob Frege discussed this notion.

The general question posed is an interesting one, however. That is, how is it that we have now lived for the last four centuries in a scientific world which is quite concerned to be maximally accurate and rational in its design of economic plans, air conditioning units, airline schedules, mass production lines, mathematical hypothesis, computer programs, etc., but its thinking with respect to social organization still ranges from the ad hoc and imprecise to the grossly irrational and superstitious. You would think that all levels of rationality in a single society would be similar.

I agree that it would fall into the category of 'soft' sciences, if it is a science at all. But my concern was that it is not very scientific even at that level, given its characteristic overextension of inferences based on thin supporting data and glib assumption that artifacts from the distant past can be interpreted on the assumption that the people making and using them thought the way we did. In 'The Portable Greek Reader' (New York: Viking, 1948) p. 17 the editor comments: "If there is any reaction to the Greeks which may be called typical of our age compared with preceding times, it is, I think, a feeling that they were very odd people indeed, so much so that when we come across something they wrote which seems similar to our own way of thinking, we immediately suspect that we have misunderstood the passage." Now if it is true that ancient peoples like the Greeks thought in a way that was incommensurably odd to our own way of thinking, then it simply makes no sense for archeologists to interpret the ancient artifacts they find from that era and before on the assumption that those ancient people think very much the way we now do.