Marat

For a while the Governor of Georgia was giving out free tapes of classical music to all pregnant women in the state on the theory that by listening to classical music in utero, their children's IQ would increase. This issue has been debated extensively with some arguing that test-taking ability improves after listening to classical music but not after listening to non-classical music. If this is empirically confirmed, it would make sense to me, because it seems that the pleasure of classical music is that the listener's mind is induced to follow the complications of musical structure and is then enjoyably overwhelmed by them, which is certainly mentally stimulating in a way that 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' isn't.

It's been common wisdom since about the time of the split in the Republican Party between the Taft conservatives and the Teddy Roosevelt progressives that the Republicans have no other political interest than governing the country to benefit the richest 5% of the population, no matter how much harm has to be done to the national interest or to the other 95% of the population to accomplish this. That is why the Republicans always have to go to great lengths to ensure that political campaigns are silly (should we blame Gore for being part of the administration that was headed by someone who cheated on his wife? should we vote for George Bush I because he went to a flag factory while Michael Dukakis looks funny in a tank?), since in a rational campaign they would lose. But I would have thought that the recent tax cuts for millionaires issue would have forced the Republicans to come out into the open and get blamed forever for being what they are: the political agent of rich people rather than a legitimate party in a democracy. But no, it seems as if the American electorate has been schooled so well and so long to be brainless that a majority of people who will never be rich and who themselves need federally funded social programs to prosper will still always support the upper 5% of the population.

Some Marxists argue that most of the five million people who die of starvation each year go without food because capitalism promotes the maldistribution of wealth throughout the world, and the U.S. as the prime political and military protector of capitalism carries the major share of blame for this. If you accept that reasoning, then North Korea is a petty criminal compared to other forces in the modern world.

The argument that failing to treat intelligent animals as equal to humans is just speciesism is clearly disproved, since we treat it as murder if someone kills an anencephalic infant with essentially no brain at all, and treat it as no worse than ordinary kiling if we murder a genius rather than an idiot. So since rights holding has nothing to do with intellect, the fact that some kinds of animals are smart is irrelevant to their having rights. Humans are alone of all species in being able to meet Kant's test for moral significance, which is possessing the ability voluntarily to submit themselves to act not out of any animalistic motivation but just in obedience to a self-constituted rule commanding respect for something ideal and higher than mere desires, which is the rule that we respect the freedom of other humans as of equal worth with our own. I was at a conference once where some scientists presented preliminary experimental results showing that islet cells from pig pancreases could be encapsulated in a differentially permeable membrane to treat diabetes without having to use toxic immunosuppressive drugs to allow the porcine graft to survive. The press rose up in self-righteous outrage to demand how the researchers could harm poor little pigs just to save human lives, until one of the scientists asked how many members of the press that week had eaten a ham sandwich.

If we had a carefully researched and democratically agreed upon measure of what work was really worth in terms of its difficulty, unpleasantness, and true value to society, then there would be a better argument for saying that people 'who contribute more' so get to keep their money. But the problem is that an investor can make more money in a one-minute telephone call than a coal miner can make in his entire life, and Johnny Cash made a fortune by singing off-key while many talented graduates of the Julliard Opera program can never earn a living, so people don't generally 'deserve' their money by any rigorous criteria of desert.

The assumption that history is going to repeat itself is almost always misleading, since at each new occurrence of similar circumstances, the overall conjuncture of world history is totally different, so the outcome is also different. Marx here is superior to Santayana when he says that "history always repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as comedy" -- since he in effect here says that history only appears to repeat itself. A good example of how misleading the old 'history repeats itself' slogan can be was the frequently-repeated mantra during the War in Vietnam which stated that "we appeased Hitler and just encouraged World War II, so we have to respond with insane over-aggressiveness to every tiny event anywhere in the world that opposes our interests since otherwise the same process of appeasement leading to worse enemy aggression will repeat itself." All so-called 'laws of history' just ignore historical reality, which is constantly changing so its lawlikeness is minimal.

Law has a lot of interesting puzzles revolving around the concept of continuing actions. If the injury produced by my assault on someone is a continuing, non-trivial cause of his later death, then I am guilty of murder, even if my contribution to the death is small. Thus if I stab a Jehovah's Witness who then refuses a blood transfusion at the hospital because of her religious beliefs and she dies as a result, I can still be guilty of her death. (cf. R. v. Blaue) But what if I lock someone in the closet and deny him food for three weeks and then I let him out. When he gets out he decides he will go on a hunger strike, and after another week without food he dies. Am I still guilty of killing him, since the continuing effects of my having forcibly deprived him of nutrition for three weeks have weakened him sufficiently so that he can now die of starvation after just a single additional week without food, or has the suicidal act of my victim once he got out of the closet broken the chain of causality? Cf. People v. Lewis for a similar real-world case.

As a democratic community we could potentially possess as many or as few of our material assets in common as we wish. As soon as progressive taxation was permitted by Constitutional Amendment, it became possible to set that progressive taxation at any level, with the result that a system could theoretically be introduced in which everyone would have exactly the same income, or an income (through a system of deductions) varying only according to basic needs. Whenever taxes are discussed, we are simply recalibrating that balance between how much of the nation's net wealth will go to buy luxuries for the few, where the net effect of that wealth will do the least good in terms of producing human happiness, and how much will go to pay for basic needs for the poor and the middle class, where that wealth will do the most good in terms of producing human happiness. The fact that we routinely prefer to direct wealth via the tax system towards buyng third yachts for people who already own two instead of paying for decent healthcare, food, shelter, clothing, and education for people who desperately need these things expresses our willingness to limit the net human happiness we can produce with our total stock of wealth just to support the class interests of the rich. A thousand years from now anthropologists will have as hard a time explaining why we do that as they now have explaining why the Aztecs cut the hearts out of living humans to please the Sun.

There is also a U.S. federal rape statute independent of the state criminal code definitions of rape.

Another thing about the experience of classical music which I think is special is the delightful sense of the mind being drawn in by the vast complexity of everything going on simultaneously in a good symphony and then held captive, helpless in the overwhelming sense of intricate structure filling the mind from every direction. When I listen to popular music I simply can't understand how people can enjoy it since it is just too thin to produce this interesting sensation of the paralysis of thought and sensation. Just the constant drumbeat of the same thin melody supported by an overly loud and invariable rhythm in the background repeated over and over again with no comprehension of the need to play repetition off against variety. Instead of the experience being like listening to complexity and intelligence in motion, as it is with classcial music, with popular music the experience is like being in a boiler factory where some loose handle keeps banging against the side of a pipe.

To answer whether it is important to remember that day we have to ask why we want to remember it? If it is because we feel a sense of outrage and moral self-righteousness with respect to what Roosevelt called "a deliberate and sneak attack," then historical relativists might disappoint us. Some now argue that the U.S. was essentially squeezing Japan into a situation in which they would have to attack us, since Japan needed to import large amounts of strategic raw materials to fight its long-term war with China, and the U.S. had embargoed exports of these vital goods to Japan. The result was that they would have to invade the Southeast Resources Area to get them, which we also forbade them to do, or they would have to give up their hopes of success in the ongoing war with China. So we had them in a box: Either get the resources you need to fight by doing something we say will cause us to declare war on you, or wither away and die as a result of our embargo. Seen from this perspective, some might argue that attacking Pearl Harbor was a defensive move to escape from the cul-de-sac the U.S. had created for Japan. On the other hand, I always find it ironic that Japanese make such a self-righteous, public fuss over the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, but Americans never go and stand in the public square in Tokyo to protest the Pearl Harbor attack which was the ultimate cause of the atomic bomb being dropped.

On the extradition issue, it is worth noting that you have to extradite criminals from one U.S. state to another if they are guilty of state rather than federal crimes. So the European Union is not that bad for having to resort to the same sort of clumsy legal procedure that the U.S. often has to use domestically.

Now millionaires will be able to afford a bigger yacht, billionaires will be able to afford another summer house in Majorca, and all at the cost of less federal funds to protect poor people against the cold, malnutrition, substandard housing, rats, and disease. Just imagine the entire population of the U.S. were one single person. Would it be anything other than utter lunacy for that person to buy a yacht and a summer house in Majorca if he was also suffering from malnutrition, cold, disease, and a rat infestation since he didn't have enough money left over after buying his luxuries to pay for these basic needs? It is no less insane to trade off provision of basic needs for the poorest people against luxuries for the wealthiest on the wider scale for the whole population. If the government takes an additional million dollars in taxes from Bill Gates, it can provide a small apartment for someone living in a dumpster, it can provide basic dental care to some poor person losing his teeth, it can provide warm winter clothing to a needy family, and it can provide a decade of adequate nutrition to a poor family facing malnutrition, and probably still have money left over. But since Bill Gates will only lose about 1/30,000th of his net worth, he won't even notice any loss whatsoever as his price for providing these life-changing benefits and enormous sources of happiness for the poor. In short, extending the Bush tax cuts is just an enormous potlatch which irrationally wastes the real capacity of money to provide happiness, since it concentrates money where it will do the least good possible in answering the strongest human needs.

Since my mother was a concert violinist, as a child I never heard any music other than classical music, so I never developed a taste for anything but that. However, I think classical music is objectively better, because it is the only music that seems able to provide anyone with that sense of shivering and goose bumps during the most moving passages. When I ask people who like jazz, rock, country and western, etc., if they ever get that feeling while listening to music, they never seem even to know what I am talking about, yet for me that is the main enjoyment of music. Most modern music simply seems unintelligent compared to classical music. For example, in modern music, the repetitions are endless, driving, boring, and monotonous. But anyone accomplished in classical music knows that it is always a carefully calibrated balance between the artistic force of repetition and the interruption of that repetition by strategic variations. Thus if you consider for example Beethoven's famous 5th Symphony, the familiar 'knocking' signature of 'da-da-da-daah' is never heard twice in the same form, but is often repeated in a similar form. To get this balance right requires considerable skill, so when it is contrasted with popular music which goes on forever with no appreciation that its endless repetitions will sound oppressively machine-like without some variation, it doesn't sound so much like a different musical taste as just a less intelligent one.

Consider the interesting English case of Fagan. Fagan accidentally drove his car onto a policeman's foot. So far there is no crime, since the act was accidental, and accidents belong to the realm of negligence and tort rather than malice and crime. The policeman then yelled at Fagan and told him to drive his car off the policeman's foot, but Fagan refused and just sat there. Now there is no criminal 'act' in doing nothing; an ordinary citizen has no legal duty to carry out commands of the police; so was Fagan's just sitting in the car a criminal action of applying force to the policeman against the policeman's will? In terms of physics, there was no new act of applying force, but just a passive response of not removing the existing force being applied. But the court decided to interpret the decision of Fagan to 'continue applying the force of his car to the policeman's foot' as a new act which could provide the new, non-accidental, positive application of force for criminality. Some of the cases of 'rape' by not getting out in time are analogous to Fagan and would probably be interpreted by a court on similar principles.

Sir Isaac Newton not only grew up in a world filled with nonsensical ideology, but he even subscribed to it, devoting much of his life to kabbalistic interpretations of the hidden meaning of the Bible. His counter-example and that of many people like him indicate that the amount of nonsense you absorb doesn't act as a block to the development of the intellect.

I'm sure that nearly 90% of the members of a science forum will view schizophrenia as a primarily if not exclusively biological disease, so it is interesting to find some dissenters here from that view. In support of the biological interpretation of schizophrenia, the fact that there is a genetic predisposition to it that persists even in children who are reared away from their parents and their home environments is good evidence for at least some physical factors conditioning the development of the disease. There are also other neurological deficits in schizophrenics, such as the inability to track moving objects as well as healthy people do, or an unnatural, shuffling gait, which suggest that it is more a neurological disease than merely a pure social construct. Recent research even indicates some subtle differences in the neuroanatomy of schizophrenic brains which also promote the hypothesis that the disease is a physical one. But it is certainly odd that if does not seem to exist in primitive or pre-modern societies, and that it suddenly popped into existence with the rise of industrial society in England circa 1800. This could be due to an environmental toxin associated with industrialization being necessary for the schizophrenia gene coming to expression, or it could be because only a particular type of society produces the requisite social stresses for it to appear. When conditions like schizophrenia appear in primitive societies, they tend to be acute rather than chronic, as schizophrenia in the modern West normally is, so again, culture seems to play a large role in the type of disease that can appear.

Some people have theorized that governments are afraid of arresting and/or prosecuting him, because they fear a backlash from a public who regards him as a kind of folk hero for opening up government secrecy so that those who are supposed to be in democratic control of their governments can actually know what the people they are in theory supposed to be controlling are doing. But I think it was foolish of him and counterproductive to his efforts not to have ensured that his own behavior was impeccable before releasing the Wikileaks information. He must have anticipated that anything he had ever done wrong in his life would be used by governments to discredit him or to distract people from the significance of the information he was releasing, so he should have made sure that the public face of the Wikileaks movement was clean. If he already had skeletons in his closet, then he should have had someone else be the public face of Wikileaks.

It sounds as though you have been reading Thomas Szaz and the works of the anti-psychiatry movement. Some people have tried to argue that the rise of schizophrenia circa 1800 was because around this time the rich world of fantasy and imagination which had always been part of the ordinary objective world -- with its saints, magical places, special holidays, belief in miracles, superstitions of witches and spells -- was driven out of objectivity by the increasing rationalization of society which was required by the rise of industrial and capitalist forms of life. The unpleasant side effect of this 'de-magification of the life world' (as Max Weber called it) was that psychiatric stresses could no longer be relieved by being acted out in objective rituals of magic and imagination, so all attempts at self-healing had to involve people making up their own subjective behaviors to recover the lost magic of the pre-modern world. But because these actions were no longer part of a new objective reality which needed to maximize production and efficiency and had no time for fantasy, the people seeking self-healing through these behaviors were simply regarded as sick and rounded up and packed into prison-like asylums where the conditions were so awful that they completed the process by literally driving their inmates insane. If you look at statistics on the rising asylum population in Britain from 1800 to 1900, it is obvious that a miraculous increase in brain disease cannot account for the doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of the asylum population, but that changes in social tolerance for deviance are driving the increase in numbers. Of course the brain biologists won't accept any of this, but I'm just offering an account of what the social factor party suggests may be the cause of the increase in schizophrenia cases with Westernization and modernity.

I think it will get slightly worse over the next five years. Part of the problem is that Canada now has a huge intake of new immigrants, typically from poor Third World countries where there is little or no healthcare available, so as soon as they arrive in Canada they rush to the nearest doctor, clinic, or hospital to make up for the previous 30 years of no healthcare. "Where is market here in Canada? I get goat testicles no where here in these places!" is the typical conversation you hear next to you as you wait for eight or nine hours for your walk-in clinic physician to call your name. We are also still catching up for the idiocy described earlier, of healthcare officials in the 1990s restricting medical school intake as a 'clever' way to cut down healthcare costs, since the fewer doctors the smaller the bill, they thought. It never occurred to them that disease doesn't go away because there are fewer people to treat it. Another problem is the foolish way medicine is practised in Canada, which has always had a strong police instinct and very little appreciation for human rights. Instead of addressing the problem of limited healthcare resources in Canada by leaving people with untreatable conditions alone, Canadian clinics, hospitals, and physicans over-monitor them, constantly insisting on tests, studies, and appointments, even though no therapeutic interventions could ever arise from the result of this monitoring. It does serve a role which both Bentham and Foucault would appreciate, however, in forcing patients to assume the disease role and keeping them in line.

Countries will only extradite people if they are charged in the foreign jurisdiction for a crime which has an equivalent in the country where the people being sought are residing. Since the definitions and treatment of rape now vary widely because of all the transformations of rape laws over the past 20 years, where Mr. Wikileaks is now hiding may not be able legally to extradite him to Sweden because of incompatibility between the two jurisdictions' rape statutes. On an aside, the quote above from the Ewanchuk case was misleading, since it only describes why a review court could substitute a guilty verdict and has nothing to do with the case per se. If the Supreme Court had not itself been able to substitute a guilty verdict because of the technical nature of the court processes prior to its ruling, it would simply have referred the matter to the court of original jurisdiction with instructions to bring its decision into line with the Supreme Court's ruling. From now on, with the Ewanchuk rules in place, unless you can read the woman's mind successfully she can make you guilty of rape by just saying that she was thinking 'no' while saying 'yes' with her actions. Your only defense, as Justice L'Heureux-Dube said, would be if you could prove that you vigorously enquired at every step and stage whether consent was really present or not. The bottom line: If you have sex with a woman in Canada, better have your lawyer coaching you from the closet with a tape recorder running. As Andrea Dworkin says, "All sex in a patriarchal society is rape."

Since schizophrenics have a poor reproductive fitness, due to social factors which make it difficult for them to find partners, the schizophrenic population would decline by 20% each generation if it were entirely driven by genetic factors. Since schizophrenia has clearly existed since the first clear cases were reported in the 1790s by Haslam, it should be more or less extinct by now if it were purely genetic. Schizophrenia is not really a disease entity so much as a cluster of symptoms which describe the final common pathway of a number of different neurological injuries which result in diminished social functioning. Does exposure to emotional trauma play a causal role in some cases? One thing that is known is that if patients with schizophrenia in remission are returned to their families, and if their families have high expressed emotion (EE), the patients tend to relapse much quicker and more readily than if their families have low expressed emotion (ee). Is schizophrenia an entirely biological condition? Since there is some dispute about whether schizophrenia existed in the world prior to the development of industrial society, and seems to have appeared first in the most industrialized society of the time, England, there may be some social factors involved in its etiology. Schizophrenia as known in the Western world does not exist in 'primitive' societies which are more like Western society used to be prior to industrialization, and the forms that schizophrenia assumes outside the developed world are more likely to go into remission than those of the Western world. These differences could be explained by some pollutant related to industrialization, or by the special forms of life required in industrialized societies. It could even be that it takes a highly structured, industrialized society to spot, diagnose, and count schizophrenia cases. Much is still unclear about schizophrenia's etiology.

It's important to realize in this discussion how much radical feminism has changed rape laws almost everywhere in the world from the traditional principles that the defendant is entitled to present every possible defense, that conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and that both parties to any case must receive a full hearing. I don't know anything about Swedish law, but I would suspect that it has become quite politically correct by now. In Canadian rape law, for example, the defendant to a rape charge is not even allowed to present his explanation of what happened and why he thought the woman was consenting unless his story conforms in its essentials to her story, since by definition rape is when the man fails to understand whether the woman is really consenting or not. So in one case, R. v. Ewanchuck, where the woman was at many times during sexual interaction with the man consenting or behaving ambiguously, he was nonetheless found guilty of rape because at one point during the act she decided that she didn't really feel that she was consenting, even though she was acting in a way that suggested she was consenting. You see, since the matter is all about what's in the woman's mind, unless the man is a mind-reader, he can be found guilty of rape. So if Sweden has a rape law provision like that, then Mr. Wikileaks and his leaking condom won't have a chance of defeating even the flimsiest case.

Even consuming alcohol in moderation is a bad idea, since if you have any cultural familiarity with alcohol at all, you are preparing yourself to become an alcoholic if ever some terribly frustrating or tragic event occurs in your life and drives you to search for some chemical way to negate it.

On the one hand there are subcontained but isolated societies for special purposes within the general society, such as the Shakers, certain strict sects of Amish, Hutterites, Moravian Brethern, etc. On the other hand there are or have been subcontained societies of people dedicated to pursuing knowledge, such as the Royal Society, the Rosicrucians, the Lincei, the Kabbalists, the Bourbaki Society, or the nerds club at MIT. Combining social isolation with pursuit of technology would be difficult, however, since technological progress requires money, and wealth only comes from intensive social interaction.