Marat

With reference to the earlier point about the legal problems of introducing reparations for slavery, I think it would be quite simple. Just add a few percentage points to federal income taxes and then spend the additional money collected only in the form of federal scholarships, federal aid to first home buyers, federal welfare benefits, federal grants for starting new businesses, etc., which would be directed only to Blacks. Some of this already exists, such as federal grants for minority businesses. If progressive federal taxation is legal and federal affirmative action programs are legal, what would be illegal about combining the two? The Supreme Court has been fussy only about aggressive affirmative action programs by the states (as in the Webber decision), which have always been more strongly suspected by the highest Court of discriminatory practices.

Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century published a papal encyclical which stated as one of the reasons why condoms should be prohibited the principle that "wer suendet, soll zahlen," as the famous German formulation had it, or "he who sins should pay." The idea was that people using condoms so as not to get STDs from sleeping non-monogamously should pay for exercising their lust outside of marriage. The Church de-emphasizes this reason today, because it sounds too cruel and ridiculous for modern tastes.

Don't be misled by the early term 'natural philosophy.' What speakers using that phrase in the 18th century actually meant was people doing studies of what we would today call 'science,' not philosophy. The only reason the term 'natural science' was used was that 'science' and 'scientist' didn't come into vogue until the 19th century. It is not correct to say that philosophy is only concerned with logic rather than empirical reality. Branches of philosophy such as action theory, existentialism, phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of law, ethics, philosophy of science, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, and cosmology all study empirical data for its deeper conceptual implications. You can find a lot of philosophy of science texts which are loaded with extensive discussions of the conceptual implications of cutting-edge research in science, so there is really not much of a gulf between disciplines. You might say that philosophy is any use of the material generated by an academic discipline, whether empirical or not, with the intention of developing its implications for the most fundamental conceptual questions or for the logical foundations of that discipline.

Since the retina detaches around the edges, patients with retinal detachment or traction along the retinal margins see swirling white lights or flame-like phenomena along the outer edges of the visual field. Also, running or strenuous exercise can intensify this phenomenon. Your diagnosis sounds more like visual snow, so it is worth getting it checked just for reassurance.

Arteriosclerosis can cause this problem as part of the aging process, so it is best to have the exact cause determined. I remember having to drive a considerable distance with a car full of people and a dog who had a terrible, foul-smelling eye infection, and only my mother-in-law was able to hold it on her lap because she "didn't notice what everyone else was complaining about."

If you accept Wikipedia as a source which is at least universally accessible, the AIDS transmission risk seems quite low. If you have sex with females in Europe or North America, their HIV incidence is much lower than the world average, but just to be generous to the alarmists, let's assume that they share the world's 0.6% risk of seropositivity for HIV. The risk of HIV transmission to a man during a single incident of vaginal intercourse with an HIV-positive woman is 0.04%. Multiplying that low rate of transmission by the low incidence of HIV infection, you have only a .024% chance of getting HIV from a single random case of sex with a woman. Another way to look at this datum is that if you have unprotected sex with 400 women, your HIV risk is still only 10%. The serious risks for AIDS are only in Third World countries where parasitic infections have made AIDS more transmissible, where people have suppressed immune systems from malnutrition or generally poor hygiene, or where the mechanism of transmission is blood transfusion, being the passive partner to male penetration, anal intercourse, rough intercourse which induces bleeding, or intercourse in the presence of bleeding sores from other STDs.

Another problem which is little discussed is the cultural difficulty of getting people to adjust to an energy-saving economy. I grew up in the U.S. where energy was cheap and lavishly used and then spent some time living in Britain, Germany, and Austria where energy is expensive and strictly rationed in household economies, and I found the difference quite shocking. It seemed to me that by living in these energy-sparing economies I had to worry the entire day about energy use in a way I had never even contemplated while living in the U.S. Unless Americans can be expected to adjust to a way of life in which they have to wear coats indoors during the winter to keep warm; prepare their baths by running ice cold water through a pipe over an open gas flame; set a timer on a water tank and on their radiators to draw heat during the cheap hours over night; read for as long as they can next to the window to avoid having to turn on the lights too early; and hold onto the radiator pipes with their bare hands in the university library to keep warm, then no amount of rational economic analysis is ever going to change public behavior to make serious energy conservation possible.

What is the point of having a democratic form of government if the people are not permitted to know what the government that they in theory own and direct is doing in foreign policy? There is no better demonstration of the detachment of the actual apparatus of the state from its supposed foundation in democratic consent than the rage of the Establishment over the Peasantry finding out about its dirty little secrets. But obviously some government business has to be kept secret, so to distinguish what should be released to the general public from the very little which should be hidden there should be a Freedom of Information Act which truly favors the public interest over government secrecy, which we do not yet have and which is the motivation for the Wikileaks activity.

An important distinction made by the 'Radical Republicans' in the 1860s was that reparations for slavery should come from selling off the property of the large slave-owning plantations, who clearly bore the greatest guilt for sustaining the slave system and also enjoyed the greatest profits from it. They did not feel that poor Whites in the South who did not own slaves and who were often subject to economic exploitation of a milder sort than the slaves endured from rich Whites in the South should also have to pay reparations. The problem now with the idea of general reparations is that some impoverished Whites cleaning toilets would be forced to pay increased taxes for reparations which would be paid in part to upper class Blacks. If the injustice of the legacy of slavery is now economic, and economic disadvantage in the U.S. today does not perfectly correspond to racial identity, then it is not clear whether the reparations due should aim solely at redistribution of wealth (socialism/communism), or solely at racial identity (a kind of tax-based affirmative action program). And how would we count disadvantaged races who had not suffered any deprivations from slavery, such as Latinos, Native Americans, Jews, Asian Americans, recent immigrants to America from Africa, etc.? It would seem odd to require the present-day grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to pay a special tax to compensate the present-day great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of slaves for the inherited effects of a disadvantage now 150 years distant, when no one was paying them for the inherited effects of a disadvantage only 70 years distant.

For a number of years humans were distinguished by the physical attribute of being the only featherless bipeds, but then some counter-examples were found. Ultimately, the distinction between human and animal is physically arbitrary but not arbitrary within our system of cultural values. Thus if you want to use intelligence as a way to distinguish what should have human rights from what should not, then an anencephalic infant, which has no intellect beyond that of a reptile, should be able to be murdered with no legal consequences, while killing an ape would attract serious penalties. But we don't do things that way, since we assume that humanness per se without any further features attracts special legal and moral status.

Since our Puritanical society still hates sex, it naturally exaggerates the physical risks associated with sex, since it constantly seeks for some objective reason to discourage sex which can reinforce the constantly weakening force of the moral reasons against it. Most STDs are either completely curable or of minor significance (syphillis, gonorrhea, yaws, herpes) so it is not necessary to worry much about them. The serious STD, AIDS, is minimally transmissible to males by ordinary sexual intercourse. I have seen the figure quoted that there are NO cases of males who have developed AIDS from conventional sexual intercourse with a female in North America (where parasitic infections don't generally serve to make AIDS more communicable). This is not what they tell you in high school health classes, of course, but then again, a survey of American Medical students in 1959 showed that half of them were sure that masturbation was physically harmful.

Some have suggested that the United States government, via increased taxes on the present population, should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves kept in the U.S. up to 1865 for all the injury caused to them by this inhumane treatment. There are some problems with this suggestion, however. First, many of those now living in the U.S. are in no way implicated in the wrongs of slavery, since their ancesters came with the vast waves of immigrants who poured into the U.S. after the end of the Civil War. It would seem unfair for Kurdish refugees from Saddam Hussei's attacks, for example, to be confronted with a bill for U.S. slavery on coming to the U.S. Second, the nexus between those now alive and the injuries committed by those who profited from slavery is quite tenuous, since no one now living ever contributed to the maintenance or advancement of slavery. Third, the link between present-day American Blacks and their slave ancestors is also quite tenuous, since the effects of even severe mistreatment are considerably mitigated by 150 years of history. Fourth, even slavery itself was not entirely the fault of Whites committed against Blacks, since the slave trade to America operated via Black and Arab slave traders catching slaves deep in Africa and transporting them to the coasts where the White Americans merely picked them up for their final transshipment. Fifth, about 10% of the world slave trade consisted of Blacks from among the Barbary Pirates seizing Whites and selling them into slavery, so any damages paid would have to be discounted for this effect. Sixth, the exact magnitude of the reparations due would be almost impossible to calculate, given all the historical cross-currents of vast economic forces between then and now. Seventh, if slavery was legal up to 1865 in parts of the U.S., was slavery really still wrong in a sense permitting damages to accrue in a U.S. court against the U.S. government? After all, many White workers were also employed until a few generations ago at wages far below what we would now regard (in constant dollars) as a morally just wage, given that there used to be no minimum wage laws, so wouldn't the descendants of these people also have to be compensated by the same principle that would compensate the Blacks? Where would all the compensations for past injustices stop? -- E.g., if unfair tariffs, unfair contract laws, unfair labor safety laws, unfair welfare protections, unfair railroad safety statutes, etc., injuried families in the past, wouldn't that all have to be compensated in making a just society?

While it might be theoretically useful when contemplating one's university major to think of what discipline will make the most important contribution to the world, the fact is that unless you are doing something you love because you find it fascinating, you will not be able to endure studying it for four years, much less pursuing a career in it. So by all means, look to your heart first. But when you are still in high school, it is impossible to get a clear idea on what direction you want to set for the rest of your life, which is why most universities give you a year of general studies before you have to pick a major. At this stage you have to keep your mind and your options open, because odds are that what you are doing when you are 30 will have only a general connection with what you now think you will be doing. So the best choice for you would be to pick a major in general chemistry (or perhaps organic chemistry if your school offers that as an alternate) and then inch forward always looking at everything around you to make sure you don't want to change course. It could well be that when you get more information about things by being exposed to the broader world of university you may decide you really want to be a physicist, an astronomer, or perhaps major in French Literature. Don't be surprised if you surprise yourself!

Considering the matter in a purely biological sense, of course humans are a type of animal. But considering the matter in terms of law, ethics, culture, and philosophy, an enormous difference exists between humans who have rights against other humans and animals who have no rights. By playing simultaneously on these two different senses of the statement, "are humans animals," all the paradoxes of the question emerge. Generally, we simply stipulate for reasons of culture, religion, and law that humans are beings with free will, while animals are beings which are completely causally conditioned by external forces and internal drives, hormones, chemicals, and instincts. We can determine our actions by our free choice to do what we believe is right on rational and moral grounds, while animals can only do what the forces within and around them make them want to do. Now from the point of view of natural science, everything is determined by laws of causality, so there really is no free will, but still, the assumption that some species do have free will while others do not is central to our belief system which puts humans in a special place. The temptation is great to assume that there must be some scientific reason which justifies the sharp distinction we make between humans and animals, but of course there is not, since in terms of intelligence, capacity to feel emotion and pain, ability to act in support of communal interests, ability to sacrifice our own interests to save others, we are on a continuum with animals. But still, I will suffer life imprisonment if I kill an anencephalic infant with no intelligence whatsoever, but I will only get a light sentence for destruction of property and animal cruelty if I murder the world's most intelligent ape.

The 'selfish gene' hypothesis essentially views people as mere gene recepticals whose sole purpose is to ensure that the genes are propagated. Our selfish genes push us into mating to ensure their surival for another generation, and they also drive us to mate with people who phenotypically express the same characteristics as our own genes do, thus helping to ensure that our genes will not be phenotypically submerged by some opposing, dominant gene in a mate who does not look like us. Unfortunately, this seems to work only 'at first sight,' since after you've locked eyes from across the room with a perfect 10, after initial introductions it all too often turns out that what looks like a perfect 10 firmly believes that the Earth is hollow and its interior is populated by an alien race of people, that Sarah Palin should be President, and that Plato is famous for having invented the plate.

Another problem not often discussed is that the transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a greenhouse gas reducing economy is itself going to require the expenditure of a massive amount of energy, which will at least temporarily increase rather than decrease greenhouse gases. Given that the economy can collapse into a recession even with all the advantages of using fossil fuels and freely dumping the by-products of industrial production into the atmosphere, rivers, oceans, and landfills, just imagine how much more frequent these recessions and depressions are going to be when the economy becomes more fragile by burdening all productive activities with the costs of environmental protection, which itself generates no marketable products.

A Canadian psychologist, Philip Rushton, published a study some years ago showing that Orientals have the most intelligent brains, Caucasions the second most intelligent, and Blacks the least intelligent. This of course created a national outrage, with the Premier of the Province saying he wished tenure regulations would permit him to fire the scientist from his post for publishing that data. There is of course a fundamental mistake here, which is to think that we support the right of all people to be treated equally because they just contingently turn out all to be equal, rather than that we endorse universal human equality because it is a basic moral value.

If your brain develops through learning a Western language, your linguistic and mathematical skills are stored on opposite hemispheres of the brain, so you get the typical phenomenon of Western culture of a cultural divide between humanists and scientists since these skill sets are separate rather than integrated and mutually reinforcing. However, if your brain develops through learning an Asian language based on ideograms, your mathematical and linguistic skills are stored in the same hemisphere of the brain, where they mutually support each other. Ergo, you are smarter. Cultural differences with respect to the importance of success, the work ethic, and respect for learning also make an important contribution.

If you look through ancient and medieval law, there are countless examples where all sorts of injuries were punished as wrongs regardless of the actor's intent or mental state. The wrong was the negative act, pure and simple. This is why there was even judicial punishment of animals and inanimate objects if they were associated with injuries, such as an oak tree into which someone ran his wagon and was killed being chopped down by the public executioner. Evans, 'The Judicial Punishment of Animals' (1907, but available in modern reprint) has many examples of these incidents. If you notice, I began my post by saying that this was the approach taken "in legal theory." I am not saying that the M'Naghton rules are sensible, just that those are what are used in many common law jurisdictions. The absurdity of those rules is that they require an insane person to have the right type of delusion for him to be innocent. Thus if a schizophrenic believes he is shooting someone in self-defense because the person is lunging at him with a sword (but is in fact merely pointing with a pencil) then he does not have criminal responsibility. But if he believes he is shooting someone because he is the King of Siam and deserves to die for dancing poorly with Julie Andrews in 'The King and I,' then the schizophrenic is guilty, because this type of delusion doesn't make his act justifiable in self-defense. Something more sensible should be substituted, such as a defense of 'global disorientation of the intellect.'

Whether there is dangerous global warming caused by human activities or not, the main question has to be: What shall we do about it now given the competing arguments? If we do institute violent measures to deconstruct the fossil-fuel-based economy at enormous costs to productivity, the poorest people will be the hardest hit, and not only will poverty worsen in the developed world, but starvation may even result in the Third World. On the other hand, if we don't do immediate and enormous damage to the existing economy now in order to diminish greenhouse gas emissions and the human-caused global warming predictions are correct, then it will be too late to stop the spiraling processes of global warming and catastrophic results will ensue. Those who doubt that the anti-global warming campaign will destroy the world economy should consider this: The usual argument is that tearing down and rebuilding the existing fossil-fuel economy will generate 'green jobs' which will compensate for the losses in existing industrial capital. But just consider the simple example of a company which today employs 100 workers to make 1000 widgets a year for $10 each. The total wealth produced is $10,000, of which the workers can receive $50 each while $5000 goes into profit. But now think of the anti-global warming world, in which the company now still employs 100 workers to make 1000 widgets a year worth $10 each, but has to employ an additional 100 workers to counteract pollution effects and diminish side-effects of industrial activity which contribute to global warming. Now the same $10,000 worth of widgets will have to provide salaries for 200 workers instead of 100 workers, minus the profits for the owners. Now the system is not called capitalism for nothing, so the owners are not going to absorb this cost themselves, and it will instead be shifted to the workers. The result will either be that the price of a widget worth $10 will have to double so all consumers will lose half their wealth by having to pay double for the same value of goods, or the wages of the workers making those widgets will have to be cut in half since there are now double the number of workers since half of them have to work to protect the environment, which is not a saleable and thus not a profit-generating 'product' of their activity.

It all depends on what kinds of vitamins were in the multivitamin tablets consumed and how many were eaten. While many supplements are relatively non-toxic up to very high amounts (e.g., you could take a single dose of 10 gms of vitamin C or 2000 IU of vitamin E without having any serious reaction), others are extremely toxic in smaller overdoses, such as vitamin A. Generally, the severe toxicity would appear quickly, so if the patient is still all right probably no problems will arise. Also, keep in mind that multivitamins usually have pathetically small doses of all their component vitamins and minerals. An important distinction should be made between the dose of supplements required to prevent vitamin or mineral deficiency disease -- which is extremely low -- and the dose required to gain beneficial health effects beyond just avoiding vitamin or mineral deficiency disease. The Medical Establishment, which lives in terror that its captive patients will ever gain control over their own health by being able to access effective non-prescription treatments which the Establishment cannot control, always pretends that the only possible effect that supplements can have is to avoid vitamin or mineral deficiency disease. But in fact, it is the much higher doses which can produce the truly beneficial health effects of reducing cancer, diabetes, and heart disease risk, but they don't want you to believe any of the thousands of scientific studies which confirm these benefits.

The reason in legal theory why a schizophrenic murderer isn't punished is as follows: In ancient law, people were punished purely for what they did, regardless of what their intention or mental state was. If you accidentally tripped, bumped into another person, and the other person fell over and knocked someone over the edge of a bridge, you were guilty of murder because your action was wrong. But modern law advanced several centuries ago to appreciate that legal guilt should be a matter of two factors: the wrongful act and the wrongful state of mind of the offender. So now, in order to be guilty of murder, you not only have to kill someone but also you have to know what you are doing when you kill them and do it deliberately. These two elements which are necessary to convict anyone of any serious crime are called the 'actus reus' (the thing done) and the 'mens rea' (the mental attitude). Both have to be present for criminal guilt to exist. In the case of a schizophrenic who does not know what he is doing when he kills someone, lawyers say that 'his mind does not go with his act,' because when he killed someone he thought (perhaps) he was just lopping the head off a daisy. He is really no more guilty of murder than someone tripping and causing someone else to fall off a bridge. The McNaugton rules (from an 1842 ruling) used in most common law jurisdictions clarify this point by stating that a criminal must know 'the nature of his act and the fact that it is wrong' before he can be criminally liable for it. That said, being imprisoned in a state mental hospital is no picnic and is in many ways a worse punishment than going to a regular prison, where at least there are decent recreational and rehabilitative programs, as opposed to forced feedings, electroshock 'therapy,' abusive imposition of psychiatric 'medications,' and the company of violent and dangerous lunatics.

iNow: When I said that wealth was more efficient at producing happiness when it is distributed evenly, I was of course referring to that more even distribution as an end state, not as the device to reach that end state, which would be counterproductive, because with people having initial holdings which are unequal, giving everyone the same amount of wealth would only preserve, rather than correct, the inequalities. Why anyone would want the kind of redistribution of wealth which would preserve inequalities, when the inequalities already exist even without redistribution, is beyond me. Since I was arguing througout the entire thread for a more even wealth distribution as an end outcome, I can't understand how you could interpret what I was saying as endorsing something totally incomprehensible like the state exacting $1000 from every person so that the state could then give that $1000 back to every person to achieve 'an even distribution of wealth.' You may note that I did not refer to any poster by name in my own comment, but just tried to make a general response to a number of earlier objections, among which was the view that poor people may deserve their poverty because of their own poor choices or lack of motivation. I didn't mean to create the impression that any particular person was responsible for any one of the range of different objections I was responding to.

I should have bashed not the Republicans but the American Right, which includes many Democrats of the so-called 'Blue Dog' variety. Since Obamacare was a left-wing policy, in that it defended the interests of the medically and economically disadvantaged against the interests of those advantaged by wealth, health, and their control of the insurance industry, the proper context for assessing Obamacare's political struggles is on the left-right political axis, not the Democratic-Republican opposition.

My previous reply was only to his initial statement in the post before that, which was discussing what is the basic premise of natural science and whether it should include the assertion that 'all events have to be causally explained, and nothing can be self-caused.' The reason we were discussing that was because he had said that some of the poor were that way because of their own fault in terms of their laziness or lack of ambition, and I was arguing against it that since everything has to be explained by external causes, the fact that some humans are lazy shoud not be explained because they are blameworthy for having exercised their own free will to be that way, but only because their social environments had caused them to be that way. With respect to the previous statement of his that you quote, I would offer the following response: We know that at least moderate versions of socialism, such as that practised in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, can work effectively in modern societies. The failure of more extreme versions of socialism, such as those practised in Maoist China, the Soviet Union, or Erich Honnecker's East Germany, cannot be separated from the extraneous variable that these socialist systems were all engrafted onto societies which had all been in one way or the other failed states before their socialist experiments. It is quite likely that the totalitarian or inefficiently structured social forms, cultural dispositions, and popular attitudes just persisted to ruin the newer socialist systems just as they had ruined their respective predecessors. Japan could argue persuasively to the League of Nations, when they were accused of having violated the sovereignty of China in 1932, that China was so chaotic and ineffective as a state that it was in effect not a state at all, but only a geographical expression. Tsarist Russia before the Soviet take-over had the per capita GNP of Portugal, which is today the poorest country in Western Europe. And because the invading Soviets never uprooted the Nazi culture they found when they moved into Eastern Germany in 1945, historians characterized Communist East Germany as essentially just a totalitarian persistence of Nazi Germany into the modern world. Since wealth is vastly more efficient in producing human happiness when it is more evenly distributed so as to answer the basic needs of all rather than service the demands for luxury of the few, it seems that efforts should be made to put that obvious, a priori principle into practise. This may prove technically difficult, but the advantage evident in that initial principle is so great that it would be a pity to give up on it prematurely just because of some failed attempts in the past.