End of This Blog

I have just discovered that Google has quietly enabled "per country" censorship of blog posts on this Blogger service. Therefore, I have stopped all blogging. I will not be part of Google's compliance with dictatorships and the suppression of human rights.

From Wired magazine:

Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

By David Kravets January 31, 2012

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

This censorship by Google puts the lie to its supposed corporate code of conduct of "Don't be evil".

In fact Google is just another greedy corporation that blows smoke about social concerns and "putting the customer first" when in reality their only bottom line is corporate greed.

I'm disillusioned. I foolishly believed that ethical corporations can be run with a mandate to service three critical stakeholders: their shareholders, their workers, and the broader community that provides the matrix (the legal infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, etc.) which makes capitalism possible.

But Google has proved that my idealism is poorly supported by facts on the ground. Instead, greed and evil is endemic in capitalism and Google has shown itself to be just another greedy corrupt and evil corporation.

Goodbye.

Psychopaths Are Among Us

Here is a bit from an excellent article by William D. Cohan in Bloomberg News:

Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?: William D. Cohan

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

Go read the whole article because the reporter includes a great deal more detail about Brody's thesis.

I found the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work to be useful in exposing this problem with modern corporations. This book has Robert D. Hare as co-author. It is Hare who developed the Psychopath Check List - Revised (PCL-R) which is the standard instrument for identifying psychopaths.

Bottom line is that these monsters create havoc and ruin many, many lives:

Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.

He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”

And if you need more scare put into you. Here is a bit from an article in The Los Angeles Times by Andrew Malcolm:

Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.

Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.

These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.

But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)

Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.

Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.

"This allCapitol Hill Domeows them to do what they want, whenever they want," he wrote. "Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders."

Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.

The New Morality in America

Paul Krugman has written a very important article in the NY Times. He looks at the splintering of America into two moral views. The traditional society that values society and government programs as part of the fabric of a civil society. And the new face of rabid Republicanism that hates government and declares itself for an unforgiving "libertarian" vision of relations between individuals:

Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.

But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”

I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.

...

In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

I don't think Germans knew what they really were voting for when a plurality voted for Hitler in 1932. Similarly, I don't think those attracted to radical right in the US really understand just how deeply radical and different that vision of "society" is. Just like Germans didn't know they were putting in place a megalomaniac who would demand that every German die defending their country -- a country that had created death camps and terrorized and abused all of Europe -- die defending their country to the last man as he committed suicide in his bunker. Similarly today, thos "fellow travellers" who are excited by the Tea Party and the radical right of the Republicans have no idea how deeply disruptive and anti-social their political choice truly is. They've fallen for the simplistic messages just as the Germans did. They simply don't know who radically evil the heart of the Tea Party and the rabid Republicans truly is.

The Real Dick Cheney

Here is the start of a great article by Robert Scheer in The Nation:

Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue. The deceit of Dick Cheney is indeed of Shakespearean proportions, as evidenced in his new memoir. For the former vice president, lying comes so easily that one must assume he takes the pursuit of truth to be nothing more than a reckless indulgence.

Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader.

Not to mention that bin Laden was killed in his hiding place in Pakistan, a nation that the Bush administration had befriended after 9/11 by lifting the sanctions previously imposed in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a program connected with the proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how and the sale of nuclear material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Pakistan joined with only two other nations, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in granting diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government that provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda as bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 attack. But instead of focusing on the source of the problem, Cheney led the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had ruthlessly hounded any Al Qaeda operatives who dared function in Iraq.

You don’t have to slog too deeply through Dick Cheney’s advertisement for himself to grasp not only the wicked cynicism of the man but also how shallow are his perceptions.

You really should read the whole article.

It was telling for me when in a recent interview Dick Cheney couldn't honestly answer the question: "if waterboarding is not torture, then you would not mind if a nation like Iran took an innocent American, claimed they were spying, and waterboarded them 'to get information' about the spying". Cheney never answered the question. Instead he wanted to draw invisible distinctions saying that waterboarding by Iran is torture, but waterboarding done by the US is not, it is only "enhanced interrogation".

Dick Cheney is the Adolf Eichmann of the Bush administration, i.e. a "bureaucrat" who blandly pursued evil and vicious policies while believing that he was serving "a higher purpose".

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

The poisonous fruits of the Tea Party fanatics are now being reaped. The stock markets around the world are falling. On Monday all kinds of interest rates in the US will rise as a "hidden tax" on Americans. The public can thank the right wing (supposedly "pro America") Tea Party for this body blow to an already down and struggling American public. I've personally watched my retirement accounts shrink by 15% over the last 3 weeks as the "drama" in the US Congress played out. I have the right wing nuts in the US to "thank" for this poisonous gift.

Here are some bits from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.

So these people are now pronouncing on the creditworthiness of the United States of America?

...

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.

Go read the whole article.

I find the US a perplexing place. In their Declaration of Independence they set high ideals of "all men are created equal" but their Constitutional Convention squabbled over slavery and how to allocate votes to slave holders for the "non-persons, i.e. their slaves". They came up with 3/5 of a vote for each piece of property. (One wonders why there weren't votes for acreages and houses and factories!)

As a kid I watched as poisonous Southern Democrats (who have morphed into the Bible Belt Republicans of today and the leading Tea Party fanatics) stood at the school doors and denied entry to black students saying that "over my dead body will this black child be allowed an education". These are the fanatics who have the US by a stranglehold today. And you can thank Richard M. ("I am not a crook") Nixon for this because his Southern Strategy is what delivered the hate-filled south to the Republican party.

I would love to wipe my hands of the US and say "let the Devil take you" but unfortunately the US dominates Canada. Our politicians have to kowtow to Washington's whims and our economy is very, very dependent on the state of the US economy. So I have to worry. The right wing nuts in the US have their hands about my throat and when they threaten to take the US down in a default on its bonds, they are pulling me (and Canada) under with them. Oh how I wish I could break free from the evil dominance of the US and its poisonous politics.

The Brave New World of "Open Source" Weapons

Here is an interesting video about Stuxnet virus. In 3 minutes it will explain to you what it can do and what it did.


Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

The video ends with a sobering worry: This is a weapon that can be used to destroy infrastructure anywhere in the world. Who will use next and where?

We live in a crazy world that has been made much, much less secure by this concoction of the dark arts brewed by the US and Israeli military.

Obama Joins Bush as an Evil President

Bush will be infamous in history for ordering US troops to torture and turning the US into a torture nation.

Obama will be infamous for turning a blind eye to the abysmal treatment of an accused, Bradley Manning, in effect torturing an as-yet innocent man because you hate his actions.

Here's the relevant assessment from Mark Kleiman:

Asked about the extraordinary conditions imposed on Bradley Manning and the even more extraordinary remarks of the State Department spokesman dumping on DoD for that mistreatment, Barack Obama sounds completely clueless. Clueless at the Bush level:

I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assured me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.

Surely the President knows as well as anyone else that asking people accused of maltreating a prisoner whether the prisoner is being properly treated is like asking a drunk how much he’s had to drink. Since Barack Obama is not a fool, this can only mean that he’s reluctant to countermand Gates and Gates’s subordinates. (Note that he didn’t say that he’d had the allegations checked out and found that they were false.)

Obama reminds me of those German civilians living next to a Nazi death camp who claimed they "never knew" what was going on in the camp and weren't curious enough to attempt to find anything, not one thing, about what was going on in the camp. That was evil because they weren't that innocent. You can't live by a death camp and literally have "no idea" what is going on. Obama knows that the military is torturing Bradley Manning, an accused man but one who is still innocent until proven guilty. And even if the brain-dead military finds him guilty of treason (because he released material incriminating the US military is war crimes), it would not justify the torture they are putting him through. Obama is a lawyer. He knows that. But he is pulling the "nobody told me" excuse. Well... the Nurenberg trials made the point that you can't use the excuse "I was only following orders". And similarly "I didn't know that my underlings were committing crimes" is not exculpatory. Obama is evil.

Here are the facts according to Wikipedia:

Juan E. Mendez, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture submitted a formal inquiry about Manning to the U.S. State Department in or around January 2011.[35] In the same month, Manning's lawyer filed an Article 138 complaint, arguing that under Article 13 of the UCMJ the conditions of the detention amounted to unlawful pre-trial punishment.

And the British are pulling the same lying and fakery as they are with Julian Assange:

Amnesty International asked the British government in early 2011 to intervene on the grounds that Manning is a British national. Citing the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association in London, The Guardian wrote in February 2011 that Manning acquired British nationality by descent through his Welsh mother; under the British Nationality Act 1981 anyone born outside the UK after 1 January 1983 whose mother is a British citizen by birth is British by descent. The British embassy in Washington told The Guardian that it had not received a request to visit Manning.

I guess the British "lost" Amnesty International's request. And I'm willing to bet they will "lose" every one they get from Amnesty International. Yeah, sure Britain loves to tout Amnesty International for the "fine job" it does defending freedoms in countries Britain doesn't like. But if Amnesty International puts its nose into British misdeeds, the British suddenly find they can't understand how requests from Amnesty International get "lost". So much for "justice".

Mark Kleiman is willing to give Obama higher marks than I will:

Our actual choice next November will be between an incumbent who would more or less like to do the right thing about torture but isn’t willing to cash in all his chips to do so, and who also has sane and decent views about poverty, ignorance, and environmental catastrophe, and a Republican candidate who is enthusiastic about torture and also about poverty, ignorance, and environmental capacity.

I think the 2012 choice will be between (a) an evil shill for the ultra-rich eager to torture (the Republican) and (b) an evil hypocrite who claims virtues he is unwilling to practice, in short, a "leader" who doesn't have the courage to lead (the Democrat). Pathetic

How the US Wages War on its Own Citizens

The US loves to pretend that its is "law abiding" and never petty or vindictive. But when you run afoul of what Uncle Sam wants, then surprisingly strange things happen to you. Things that look vengeful and vindictive, but Uncle Sam claims that just isn't so. Here's a bit from a Wired magazine article:

PayPal has frozen the account of a group that has been raising money for the legal defense of accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, citing a failure to meet PayPal’s requirement for nonprofit groups.

According to Courage to Resist, a military veterans advocacy group that has been raising donations for Manning’s defense, PayPal froze the account after the group refused to link its PayPal account to its checking account, which would give the online payment provider access to funds in the checking account.

“We exchanged numerous e-mails and phone calls with the legal department and the office of executive escalations of PayPal,” said Jeff Paterson in a press release. “They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization’s checking account by default. Our accounting does not allow for this type of direct access by a third party, nor do I trust PayPal as a business entity with this responsibility given their punitive actions against WikiLeaks — an entity not charged with any crime by any government on Earth.”

[PayPal has since unfrozen the account. See update at bottom of this post.]

The advocacy group has been raising funds for the Manning Support Network and has so far paid Manning’s defense attorney at least $50,000 from money that it raised on the soldier’s behalf. Paterson did not respond to a call for comment, but said in the press release that his group opened the PayPal account in 2006.

Funny how that group was using Pay Pal for four years with no problem, but suddenly after the US has declared war on Julian Assange and everybody and everything associated with him, Pay Pal suddenly "discovers" a policy and decides to enforce it very selectively on just this one advocacy group for Bradley Manning!

Here's the really sleazy part:

Asked why, if the Courage to Resist account was opened in 2006, PayPal hadn’t raised the issue of linking it to a bank account earlier, Nayar did not have an immediate response. He said only that nonprofit organizations are allowed to open accounts easily and quickly.

“We don’t limit them prior to opening and saying they’re a nonprofit before allowing them to open an account,” he said.

With regard to PayPal’s assertion that it’s only following company policy, Courage to Resist says it repeatedly requested and was refused formal documentation from PayPal describing its policy.

“They opted to apply an exceptional hurdle for us to clear in order to continue as a customer, whereas we have clearly provided the legally required information and verification,” the group wrote.

Hannah Arendt made clear that great evil can be put forward in a form that is boringly banal. It uses the cover of indirection, denial, bureaucratic "requirements" to cover the unrelenting evil within its intentions. This soporific approach is sufficient to go under the moral radar of most people, so sleazy, evil regimes can work their murderous intent undisturbed. Uncle Sam is just using these "tools" to carry out an under-the-radar war against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It is sleazy. It is evil. Obama should be ashamed of himself!

But I've learned since the 2008 election that Obama isn't "change you can believe in". He is the same old bureaucratic evil slime that went before him. He is just "more of the same". Sure he is a toned-down evil. He is definitely preferable to the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Reagan, Oliver North, E. Howard Hunt, Nixon, and Scott Walker characters, but he is not on the side of the angels. He is just their "little brother" who believes that you shouldn't beat an old lady with a big and bloody stick, instead you should quietly put a pillow over her mouth and "relieve her of life's burdens".

Libertarianism and Self Interest

Funny... here's a story about the icon of Libertarians, Ayn Rand, having feet of clay. This was published in the Huffington Post:

Miss Rand, famously a believer in rugged individualism and personal responsibility, was a strong defender of self-interest. She was a staunch opponent of government programs from the New Deal and Social Security to the Great Society and Medicare.

A Library of Congress survey of the most influential books on American readers, "Atlas Shrugged" ranked second only to the Bible. Rand's influence is encyclopedic ranging from Alan Greenspan to Paul "I grew up on Ayn Rand" Ryan (R-Wis), a "Young Gun" who aims to cut or privatize Medicare and Social Security.

The Right should be commended politically for their ability to develop and stick to a unified message. But close inspection of this unified message reveals a disappointing secret identified by a student of the Godfather of Neo-conservatism, --- the University of Chicago's Leo Strauss. The student, Anne Norton ("Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire") identified what she called VIP-DIP meaning Venerated in Public, Disdained in Private. "Do as I say, not as I do." The list of vip-dipers on the Right runs from Harold Bloom to Newt Gingrich, but certainly not Ayn Rand. Right?

...

A heavy smoker who refused to believe that smoking causes cancer brings to mind those today who are equally certain there is no such thing as global warming. Unfortunately, Miss Rand was a fatal victim of lung cancer.

However, it was revealed in the recent "Oral History of Ayn Rand" by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that in the end Ayn was a vip-dipper as well. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Apart from the strong implication that those who take the help are morally weak, it is also a philosophic point that such help dulls the will to work, to save and government assistance is said to dull the entrepreneurial spirit.

In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.

This is funny because it shows that Ayn Rand was consistent in her beliefs. She believed in self interest. If that meant that you sell the suckers a philosophy of "objectivism" to make it easier to pick their pockets, that is fine. If it means that you are a VIP-DIPer, that is fine. It is for small minds to be consistent. For demi-gods like Ayn Rand, the rules don't apply. They are simply rules to allow her to acquire great wealth worthy of her noble mind. Leave it to pettyfoggers and the impotent to quibble about consistency and the "principles" of libertarianism. Ayn Rand knew what she was doing. She was selling snake oil to line her pockets. Only fools would believe that snake oil is "medicine". It isn't. It is a vehicle for self aggrandizement by the "great minds" of history such as Ayn Rand.

From the Wikipedia article on Libertarianism:

Modern libertarianism was influenced by Ayn Rand's international bestsellers The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and her books about her philosophy of Objectivism Two other women also published influential pro-freedom books in 1943, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom and Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine.

In the 1950s many with classical liberal beliefs in the United States began to describe themselves as "libertarian." Academics as well as proponents of the free market perspectives note that free-market libertarianism has been successfully propagated beyond the US since the 1970s via think tanks and political parties and that libertarianism is increasingly viewed worldwide as a free market position. However, Libertarian socialists Noam Chomsky, Colin Ward and others say the term is still considered a synonym of anarchism in countries other than the US.

Arizona United States Senator Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented challenge to authority had a major impact on the libertarian movement,[45] through his book The Conscience of a Conservative and his run for president in 1964.[46] Goldwater's speech writer, Karl Hess, became a leading libertarian writer and activist.

Admit it... you have to rank "libertarianism" up there with the other great "systems of thought" like Hitler's "nazism" and Mao Tse-tung's "little red book".

The wonderful thing about Ayn Rand is that she helped the social system by making sure that those "little people" who would simply suck wealth out of the economy for their petty interests could be tricked into believing he confection called "libertarianism" which would allow the truly noble minds of their time -- like her -- to enjoy an even bigger share of the social wealth. She convinced them to disdain government. That left more for her. This is the secret of all great minds. Get people to throw away their lives in order to let you have more goodies to frolic with and waste. In short, treat humans an objects to be disposed of as fits your fancies.

Property "Rights" and Wikileaks

Here's an interesting posting by Cory Doctorow on the BoingBoing site:

Spain's Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It's an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative.

But it gets gets more interesting: 115 of the Wikileaks cables intercepted from the US embassy in Madrid were tagged with "KIPR" -- that is, relating to "intellectual property," The big question has been: will El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that has the complete trove of Wikileaks cables release them in time to effect the vote on the new law?

Well, now they've started. The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain.

So here's the new question: when the Spanish Congress votes on America's copyright law this month, will they vote for their sovereignty, or act like a US puppet state?

The funny thing is that Americans don't understand why they aren't "loved" by the rest of the world. The media in the US presents a picture of a benevolent state who only does good, spreading liberty, and democracy around the world. The reality is that the torture state does many dark things. Sure it does some good things, but when you do evil all the "glow" goes out of the good things you do. People remember the evil a long, long time.

Who are the 'Good Guys'?

Most Americans will assure you that they are the 'good guys' in the world. That they hold themselves to a higher ethical standard that most other countries of the world. And they certainly didn't stoop to the lows of the Nazi doctors who did unethical "experiments" on unwilling victims.

Well... truth is stranger than fiction.

Many way know about the Tuskeegee experiments. From Wikipedia:

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health Service syphilis study) was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. Investigators recruited 399 impoverished African-American sharecroppers with syphilis for research related to the natural progression of the untreated disease.

The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.

For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance.

The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards, primarily because researchers failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease. Revelation of study failures led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies. Now studies require informed consent (with exceptions possible for U.S. Federal agencies which can be kept secret by Executive Order), communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results.

So... that was a once-only, egregious "mistake", right?

Sorry... not so. Here's a bit from Boing Boing about the recent revelation that:

A researcher studying the infamous Tuskegee experiment discovered that American researchers had performed similarly immoral medical studies in Guatemala in the 1940s.

In an attempt to figure out whether penicillin could prevent, as well as cure, STDs, researchers affiliated with the U.S. Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government exposed almost 700 Guatemalans to syphilis and gonorrhea without their consent—both through direct inoculation and via hiring of infected hookers.

It's unclear whether any of the subjects ever received treatment to cure the diseases they were unknowingly given.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued apologies for incident today.

Go read the Boing Boing original to get the embedded links.

Still convinced that Tuskeegee was just a exception to the "high moral standards" of American medicine and US government projects?

I offer the following short list to "jog your memory"...

• The CIA doing drug experiments on unsuspecting individuals, killing some.


• The US Oak Ridge "experiments" on terminally ill cancer patients who were told they were being given treatment for their disease but in fact were being given various levels of lethal radiation dosages so that government "scientists" who record how long it took to die from the new atomic weapons.


• Biological warfare "experiments" carried out secretly over US cities, including New York and San Francisco.

A short Internet search will turn up pages like this that document many, many, many of these "out of character" and "extremely rare" deviations from basic ethical behaviour.

And may I remind you that the US is one of the few countries (other than corrupt dictatorships) that practices torture as public policy (oh sure, it is not "torture" but "enhanced interrogation techniques") and it is the US that brought you the gory details of Abu Ghraib (and many other less well documented horror stories of state-sponsored torture).

The problem is that humans have a built in "blindness". By default we see ourselves as the "good guys" and are always suspicious that the other guys are the "evil ones". It is very, very hard to take an honest look at oneself and see that one is capable of unspeakable horrors, especially when it is your government. But take a walk through US history and you will find ghastly treatment of natives, foreign wars where foreign lives are cheap and "playthings" of bored soldiers, where immigrants are mistreated, where a whole race was subjugated to slavery, where suspected "radicals" and Communists were hounded from their jobs, abused, and imprisoned. The list goes on.

Canada has its own sordid past. It is on a smaller scale because it is a smaller country. I was reminded of this when I taught high school in the mid-1970s in the interior of British Columbia. During WWII Canada, like the US, interned the perfectly innocent Japanese whether they were citizens or not. The property of these internees was seized and never returned. Many were left broken and poor. So I was amazed to discover in my classes many Japanese descendants in a school in the interior, far from the fisheries and farms that the Japanese immigrated to Canada to set up. But these were remnants of a Japanese immigration that was swept up by racism and war hysteria and interned far from their homes penniless after the war and there they remained thirty years later. A historical wrong was never righted.

In short, all countries, and everyone, is capable or vicious deeds. We best keep that in mind to help keep our bad impulses under check for it is when we are convinced that we are the "Good Guys" that most evil is done.

Republican Lies

Here is a bit from a very straightforward post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Bush Deficit Bamboozle

OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.
They really do think that we’re idiots.

So, that 3.2 percent number comes from here (pdf). Where’s the bamboozle? Let me count the ways.

First, they’re hoping that you won’t know that standard budget data is presented for fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So this isn’t the “last year of the Bush administration” — they’ve conveniently lopped off everything that happened post-Lehman — TARP and all.

Second, they’re hoping you won’t look at what was happening quarter by quarter. Here’s net federal borrowing as a percentage of GDP, quarter by quarter, since 2007:

Go read the whole post to see the graph and get more details of how the Republicans are lying. Plus get the links embedded in Krugman's post.

His conclusion is what makes me despair:

I’d like to think that the raw dishonesty of this latest Bush defense would be obvious to everyone. But after the past decade, I’ve stopped believing such things. They think we’re idiots — and they may be right.

The Republicans think the electorate is full of idiots. And everything I see says they are right. The puts me into a black mood of despair. These liars have destroyed the economy and not only are they laughing all the way to the bank with their Wall Street buddies, they are laughing at the electorate and fully expect to get back in power in November. Incredible!

Why do I care... I live in Canada? Well, the Canadian economy has big chunk of it tied up in US-Canada trade and as the US goes down, it sucks down Canada with it. I want a healthy US so that Canada can be healthy. But I watch with despair as the Republican "wrecking crew" destroys the US.

That reminds me, a very good book to read is Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule:



While you are at it, go read this post by Paul Krugman where he explains why this recession is a "postmodern" recession.

If I were abandoned on a desert island, the one thing I would want would be access to Krugman's NY Times writings. The guy is phenomenal. He gets things right years and years before anybody else. He writes beautifully. And he puts up with the fact that the mainstream press ignores him despite the fact that he knows what he is talking about (and has the Nobel prize hardware to prove it). Instead the media keeps going to the same idiots who never see the cliff we about to go over, and when we go over it, they go back to these same idiots to have it "explained" who we could have gone over it and how we couldn't have seen it coming. (Recognize something here about how the Republicans operate?) Krugman is vilified by the right wing press. They hate the fact that he gets things right. But the good news for the Republicans is that the mainstream press generally ignores Krugman so they can chase after the ill-informed, the mis-informed, and the scheming liars who want to dis-inform.

The Argument of "Better Not to Have Been"

You don't have a cynical view of the "animal rights" people. They care more about animals than people. Here is my proof...

Here is a bit from a NY Times opinion piece by Peter Singer, the philosopher who is the main spokesman for "animal rights". He is selling the idea that people shouldn't reproduce because it is "cruel" to have babies.

South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” One of Benatar’s arguments trades on something like the asymmetry noted earlier. To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her. Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.

...

So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

In short, he is laying down a persuasive argument for people to die out. What he doesn't tell you is that he wants to free up the space for his beloved animals and all their "rights". The guy is a monster. He would rather kill humans than lab rats!

If you think I misunderstood his piece, he has written a follow-up piece to "clarify" the positions he put forward in the earlier piece:

But “Last Generation?” isn’t a piece about overpopulation or environmental destruction, and it makes no assumptions about whether developed countries can cut down on consumption. It just isn’t about that question at all. It asks a deeper question, one not dependent on the environmental constraints on our planet, nor on the number of people now on Earth. Even if there were only 1 million humans on this planet, all living at the level of an average citizen of, say, Switzerland, we could still ask whether it would be a good thing to have children in order to continue the species.

Sure... Peter Singer claims to be pro-human and claims to be "misunderstood". He makes this statement:

This brings me to the second common misunderstanding found in the comments. I was surprised by how many readers assumed that my answer to the title question of my essay was “Yes.” Perhaps they stopped reading before they got to the last paragraph, in which I say that I think that life is, for most people, worth living, and that a world with people in it is better than one without any sentient beings in it.

But the fact of the matter is that he values animals over humans and has a dim view of "human rights". For all his effusive claims to "love humans" he keeps coming back to this point:

These issues do matter. Even if relatively few people engage in ethical thinking before deciding whether to reproduce, the decisions are important for those who do. And since public policies affect the birthrate, we ought to be giving some thought to whether it is, other things being equal, good for there to be fewer people. Of course, in our present environmental crisis other things are not equal, but the underlying question of the value of bringing human beings into the world should still play a role in decisions that affect the size of future generations.

From Wikipedia, here is some text about Singer's book Animal Liberation:

Published in 1975, Animal Liberation has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement. The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that 'the greatest good of the greatest number' is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to other animals. He introduced and popularized the term "speciesism", which was originally coined by Richard D. Ryder, to describe the practice of privileging humans over other animals.

My response to this line of thinking is that if it merely a utilitarian calculation in which no species is privileged, then all higher forms of life would be "voted off the planet" because the domains of Archaea and Eubacteria outnumber the Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia by thousands to one. And they outnumber the Animalia by billions to one. And they outnumber humans by billions of billions of billions to one. So we get voted off the planet under Peter Singer's "ethics".

Personally I don't think I have to defer to insects. I respect them. But they have no rights that supersede mine. And anything simpler than insects doesn't even register in my "ethical" calculations.

Sam Harris Blogs at the NPR Blog

Below I've copied the content of blog posting from the NPR blog. I haven't pulled all the links, so go look at the original get that and a few more details. But the following is the extensive argument that Sam Harris gives for his view that morality can be founded as a science. I agree. I find the following so important that I've posted on it despite that I have an earlier posting on Sam Harris's talk at the TED Conference here.

The dialog started with this presentation at 2010 TED Conference:



Read and think about the following NPR blog posting, it is very important:

Over the past couple of months, I seem to have conducted a public experiment in the manufacture of philosophical and scientific ideas. In February, I spoke at the 2010 TED conference, where I briefly argued that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. I had these conversations at TED, of course, and they were useful. As luck would have it, however, my talk was broadcast on the internet just as I was finishing a book on the relationship between science and human values, and this produced a blizzard of criticism at a moment when criticism could actually do me some good. I made a few efforts to direct and focus this feedback, and the result has been that for the last few weeks I have had literally thousands of people commenting upon my work, more or less in real time. I can't say that the experience has been entirely pleasant, but there is no question that it has been useful.

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like "well-being" and "misery" are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them.

Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of "good" and "evil" are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don't think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the "contextual" legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven't done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "anti-realism," "emotivism," and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.

My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy is unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the prominent philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.

Many people believe that the problem with talking about moral truth, or with asserting that there is a necessary connection between morality and well-being, is that concepts like "morality" and "well-being" must be defined with reference to specific goals and other criteria — and nothing prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions. I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one's basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter. But this holds for all phenomena and for every method we use to study them. My father, for instance, has been dead for 25 years. What do I mean by "dead"? Do I mean "dead" with reference to specific goals? Well, if you must, yes — goals like respiration, energy metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. The definition of "life" remains, to this day, difficult to pin down.

Does this mean we can't study life scientifically? No.

The science of biology thrives despite such ambiguities. The concept of "health" is looser still: it, too, must be defined with reference to specific goals — not suffering chronic pain, not always vomiting, etc. — and these goals are continually changing. Our notion of "health" may one day be defined by goals that we cannot currently entertain with a straight face (like the goal of spontaneously regenerating a lost limb). Does this mean we can't study health scientifically?

I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: "What about all the people who don't share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is 'healthy'? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy you are?" And yet, these are precisely the kinds of objections I face when I speak about morality in terms of human and animal well-being.

Is it possible to voice such doubts in human speech? Yes. But that doesn't mean we should take them seriously.

The physicist Sean Carroll has written another essay in response to my TED talk, further arguing that one cannot derive "ought" from "is" and that a science of morality is impossible. Carroll's essay is worth reading on its own, but in the hopes of making the difference between our views as clear as possible, I have I excerpted his main points in their entirety, and followed them with my comments.

Carroll begins:

I want to start with a hopefully non-controversial statement about what science is. Namely: science deals with empirical reality — with what happens in the world. (I.e. what "is.") Two scientific theories may disagree in some way — "the observable universe began in a hot, dense state about 14 billion years ago" vs. "the universe has always existed at more or less the present temperature and density." Whenever that happens, we can always imagine some sort of experiment or observation that would let us decide which one is right. The observation might be difficult or even impossible to carry out, but we can always imagine what it would entail. (Statements about the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria are perfectly empirical, even if we can't actually go back in time to look at them.) If you have a dispute that cannot in principle be decided by recourse to observable facts about the world, your dispute is not one of science.

I agree with Carroll's definition of "science" here — though some of his subsequent thinking seems to depend on a more restrictive definition. I especially like his point about the Library of Alexandria. Clearly, any claims we make about the contents of this library will be right or wrong, and the truth does not depend on our being able to verify such claims. We can also dismiss an infinite number of claims as obviouslywrong without getting access to the relevant data. We know, for instance, that this library did not contain a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. When I speak about there being facts about human and animal well-being, this includes facts that are quantifiable and conventionally "scientific" (e.g., facts about human neurophysiology) as well as facts that we will never have access to (e.g., how happy would I have been if I had decided not to spend the evening responding to Carroll's essay?).

With that in mind, let's think about morality. What would it mean to have a science of morality? I think it would look have to look something like this: Human beings seek to maximize something we choose to call "well-being" (although it might be called "utility" or "happiness" or "flourishing" or something else). The amount of well-being in a single person is a function of what is happening in that person's brain, or at least in their body as a whole. That function can in principle be empirically measured. The total amount of well-being is a function of what happens in all of the human brains in the world, which again can in principle be measured. The job of morality is to specify what that function is, measure it, and derive conditions in the world under which it is maximized.

Good enough. I would simply broaden picture to include animals and any other conscious systems that can experience gradations of happiness and suffering — and weight them to the degree that they can experience such states. Do monkeys suffer more than mice from medical experiments? (The answer is almost surely "yes.") If so, all other things being equal, it is worse to run experiments on monkeys than on mice.

Skipping ahead a little, Carroll makes the following claims:

I want to argue that this program is simply not possible. I'm not saying it would be difficult — I'm saying it's impossible in principle. Morality is not part of science, however much we would like it to be. There are a large number of arguments one could advance for in support of this claim, but I'll stick to three.

1. There's no single definition of well-being.

People disagree about what really constitutes "well-being" (or whatever it is you think they should be maximizing). This is so perfectly obvious, it's hard to know what to defend. Anyone who wants to argue that we can ground morality on a scientific basis has to jump through some hoops.

First, there are people who aren't that interested in universal well-being at all. There are serial killers, and sociopaths, and racial supremacists. We don't need to go to extremes, but the extremes certainly exist. The natural response is to simply separate out such people; "we need not worry about them," in Harris's formulation. Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being. But how do we draw the line between right-thinkers and the rest? Where precisely do we draw the line, in terms of measurable quantities? And why there? On which side of the line do we place people who believe that it's right to torture prisoners for the greater good, or who cherish the rituals of fraternity hazing? Most particularly, what experiment can we imagine doing that tells us where to draw the line?

This is where Carroll and I begin to diverge. He also seems to be conflating two separate issues: (1) He is asking how we can determine who is worth listening to. This is a reasonable question, but there is no way Carroll could answer it "precisely" and "in terms of measurable quantities" for his own field, much less for a nascent science of morality. How flakey can a Nobel laureate in physics become before he is no longer worth listening to — indeed, how many crazy things could he say about matter and space-time before he would no longer even count as a "physicist"? Hard question. But I doubt Carroll means to suggest that we must answer such questions experimentally. I assume that he can make a reasonably principled decision about whom to put on a panel at the next conference on Dark Matter without finding a neuroscientist from the year 2075 to scan every candidate's brain and assess it for neurophysiological competence in the relevant physics. (2) Carroll also seems worried about how we can assess people's claims regarding their inner lives, given that questions about morality and well-being necessarily refer to the character subjective experience. He even asserts that there is no possible experiment that could allow us to define well-being or to resolve differences of opinion about it. Would he say this for other mental phenomena as well? What about depression? Is it impossible to define or study this state of mind empirically? I'm not sure how deep Carroll's skepticism runs, but much of psychology now appears to hang in the balance. Of course, Carroll might want to say that the problem of access to the data of first-person experience is what makes psychology often seem to teeter at the margin of science. He might have a point — but, if so, it would be a methodological point, not a point about the limits of scientific truth. Remember, the science of determining exactly which books were in the Library of Alexandria is stillborn and going absolutely nowhere, methodologically speaking. But this doesn't mean we can't be absolutely right or absolutely wrong about the relevant facts.

As for there being many people who "aren't interested in universal well-being," I would say that more or less everyone, myself included, is insufficiently interested in it. But we are seeking well-being in some form nonetheless, whatever we choose to call it and however narrowly we draw the circle of our moral concern. Clearly many of us (most? all?) are not doing as good a job of this as we might. In fact, if science did nothing more than help people align their own selfish priorities — so that those who really wanted to lose weight, or spend more time with their kids, or learn another language, etc., could get what they most desired — it would surely increase the well-being of humanity. And this is to say nothing of what would happen if science could reveal depths of well-being that most of us are unaware of, thereby changing our priorities.

Carroll continues:

More importantly, it's equally obvious that even right-thinking people don't really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it. Here, the response is apparently that most people are simply confused (which is on the face of it perfectly plausible). Deep down they all want the same thing, but they misunderstand how to get there; hippies who believe in giving peace a chance and stern parents who believe in corporal punishment for their kids all want to maximize human flourishing, they simply haven't been given the proper scientific resources for attaining that goal.

While I'm happy to admit that people are morally confused, I see no evidence whatsoever that they all ultimately want the same thing. The position doesn't even seem coherent. Is it a priori necessary that people ultimately have the same idea about human well-being, or is it a contingent truth about actual human beings? Can we not even imagine people with fundamentally incompatible views of the good? (I think I can.) And if we can, what is the reason for the cosmic accident that we all happen to agree? And if that happy cosmic accident exists, it's still merely an empirical fact; by itself, the existence of universal agreement on what is good doesn't necessarily imply that it is good. We could all be mistaken, after all.

In the real world, right-thinking people have a lot of overlap in how they think of well-being. But the overlap isn't exact, nor is the lack of agreement wholly a matter of misunderstanding. When two people have different views about what constitutes real well-being, there is no experiment we can imagine doing that would prove one of them to be wrong. It doesn't mean that moral conversation is impossible, just that it's not science.

Imagine that we had a machine that could produce any possible brain state (this would be the ultimate virtual reality device, more or less like the Matrix). This machine would allow every human being to sample all available mental states (some would not be available without changing a person's brain, however). I think we can ignore most of the philosophical and scientific wrinkles here and simply stipulate that it is possible, or even likely, that given an infinite amount of time and perfect recall, we would agree about arange of brain states that qualify as good (as in, "Wow, that was so great, I can't imagine anything better") and bad (as in, "I'd rather die than experience that again.") There might be controversy over specific states — after all, some people do like Marmite — but being members of the same species with very similar brains, we are likely to converge to remarkable degree. I might find that brain state X242358B is my absolute favorite, and Carroll might prefer X979793L, but the fear that we will radically diverge in our judgments about what constitutes well-being seems pretty far-fetched. The possibility that my hell will be someone else's heaven, and vice versa, seems hardly worth considering. And yet, whatever divergence did occurmust also depend on facts about the brains in question.

Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

2. It's not self-evident that maximizing well-being, however defined, is the proper goal of morality.

Maximizing a hypothetical well-being function is an effective way of thinking about many possible approaches to morality. But not every possible approach. In particular, it's a manifestly consequentialist idea — what matters is the outcome, in terms of particular mental states of conscious beings. There are certainly non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality; in deontological theories, the moral good inheres in actions themselves, not in their ultimate consequences. Now, you may think that you have good arguments in favor of consequentialism. But are those truly empiricalarguments? You're going to get bored of me asking this, but: what is the experiment I could do that would distinguish which was true, consequentialism or deontological ethics?

It is true that many people believe that "there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality," but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality. This is a logical point before it is an empirical one, but yes, I do think we might be able to design experiments to show that people are concerned about consequences, even when they say they aren't. While my view of the moral landscape can be classed as "consequentialist," this term comes with fair amount of philosophical baggage, and there are many traditional quibbles with consequentialism that do not apply to my account of morality.

The emphasis on the mental states of conscious beings, while seemingly natural, opens up many cans of worms that moral philosophers have tussled with for centuries. Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good. Now imagine that we achieve it by drugging a person so that they are unconscious, and then manipulating their central nervous system at a neuron-by-neuron level, until they share exactly the mental state of the conscious person in those conditions. Is that an equal moral good to the conditions in which they actually are healthy and in love etc.? If we make everyone happy by means of drugs or hypnosis or direct electronic stimulation of their pleasure centers, have we achieved moral perfection? If not, then clearly our definition of "well-being" is not simply a function of conscious mental states. And if not, what is it?

Clearly, we want our conscious states to track the reality of our lives. We want to be happy, but we want to be happy for the right reasons. And if we occasionally want to uncouple our mental state from our actual situation in the world (e.g. by taking powerful drugs, drinking great quantities of alcohol, etc.) we don't want this to render us permanently delusional, however pleasant such delusion might be. There are some obvious reasons for this: We need our conscious states to be well synched to their material context, otherwise we forget to eat, ramble incoherently, and step in front of speeding cars. And most of what we value in our lives, like our connection to other people, is predicated on our being in touch with external reality and with the probable consequences of our behavior. Yes, I might be able to take a drug that would make me feel good while watching my young daughter drown in the bathtub — but I am perfectly capable of judging that I do not want to take such a drug out of concern for my (and her) well-being. Such a judgment still takes place in my conscious mind, with reference to other conscious mental states (both real and imagined). For instance, my judgment that it would be wrong to take such a drug has a lot to do with the horror I would expect to feel upon discovering that I had happily let my daughter drown. Of course, I am also thinking about the potential happiness that my daughter's death would diminish — her own, obviously, but also that of everyone who is now, and would have been, close to her. There is nothing mysterious about this: Morality still relates to consciousness and to its changes, both actual and potential. What else could it relate to?

3. There's no simple way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.

The big problems of morality, to state the obvious, come about because the interests of different individuals come into conflict. Even if we somehow agreed perfectly on what constituted the well-being of a single individual — or, more properly, even if we somehow "objectively measured" well-being, whatever that is supposed to mean — it would generically be the case that no achievable configuration of the world provided perfect happiness for everyone. People will typically have to sacrifice for the good of others; by paying taxes, if nothing else.

So how are we to decide how to balance one person's well-being against another's? To do this scientifically, we need to be able to make sense of statements like "this person's well-being is precisely 0.762 times the well-being of that person." What is that supposed to mean? Do we measure well-being on a linear scale, or is it logarithmic? Do we simply add up the well-beings of every individual person, or do we take the average? And would that be the arithmetic mean, or the geometric mean? Do more individuals with equal well-being each mean greater well-being overall? Who counts as an individual? Do embryos? What about dolphins? Artificially intelligent robots?

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal wellbeing. I discuss these issues at some length in my forthcoming book. For those who want to confront how difficult it can be to think about aggregating human well-being, I recommend Derek Parfit's masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. I do not claim to have solved all the puzzles raised by Parfit — but I don't think we have to.

Practically speaking, I think we have some very useful intuitions on this front. We care more about creatures that can experience a greater range of suffering and happiness — and we are right to, because suffering and happiness (defined in the widest possible sense) are all that can be cared about. Are all animal lives equivalent? No. Are all human lives equivalent? No. I have no problem admitting that certain people's lives are more valuable than mine — I need only imagine a person whose death would create much greater suffering and foreclose much greater happiness. However, it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing. Of course, I could be wrong about this — and that is precisely the point. If we didn't behave this way, our world would be different, and these differences would either affect the totality of human well-being, or they wouldn't. Once again, there are answers to such questions, whether we can ever answer them in practice.

I believe that covers the heart of Carroll's argument. Skipping ahead to final point:

And finally: pointing out that people disagree about morality is not analogous to the fact that some people are radical epistemic skeptics who don't agree with ordinary science. That's mixing levels of description. It is true that the tools of science cannot be used to change the mind of a committed solipsist who believes they are a brain in a vat, manipulated by an evil demon; yet, those of us who accept the presuppositions of empirical science are able to make progress. But here we are concerned only with people who have agreed to buy into all the epistemic assumptions of reality-based science — they still disagree about morality. That's the problem. If the project of deriving ought from is were realistic, disagreements about morality would be precisely analogous to disagreements about the state of the universe fourteen billion years ago. There would be things we could imagine observing about the universe that would enable us to decide which position was right. But as far as morality is concerned, there aren't.

The biologist P.Z. Myers has thrown his lot in with Carroll on a similar point:

I don't think Harris's criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can't... Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

It seems to me that these two quotations converge on the core issue. Of course, it is easy enough for Carroll to assert that moral skepticism isn't analogous to scientific skepticism, but I think he is simply wrong about this. To use Myer's formulation, we must smuggle in an "unscientific prior" to justify any branch of science. If this isn't a problem for physics, why should it be a problem of a science of morality? Can we prove, without recourse to any prior assumptions, that our definition of "physics" is the right one? No, because our standards of proof will be built into any definition we provide. We might observe that standard physics is better at predicting the behavior of matter than Voodoo "physics" is, but what could we say to a "physicist" whose only goal is to appease the spiritual hunger of his dead ancestors? Here, we seem to reach an impasse. And yet, no one thinks that the failure of standard physics to silence all possible dissent has any significance whatsoever; why should we demand more of a science of morality?

So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.

Carroll and Myers both believe nothing much turns on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. I disagree. Granted, the practical effects cannot be our reason for linking morality and science — we have to form our beliefs about reality based on what we think is actually true. But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science's failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

Sam Harris has it right. I struggled against relativism when I was a philosophy student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was on the losing end because the vast majority of philosophers took the relativist position. But just because I was a minority didn't (and doesn't) mean I was wrong. Moral truths are objective in the same sense that colours are objective. I'm colour blind so I don't see the same colours as you, but through science we can explain why I see things differently. Similarly, I may subscribe to an "ethics" that is different from yours, but we can use science as a tool to understand the basis of ethical judgements. Harris claims a utilitarian "universal well-being" is the measure of ethics. I don't agree.

Ethics is a shared value system and when, in his TED talk, he shows a "moral landscape", I take that to reflect not measures of "utilitarian happiness" but of the resulting moral communities. Similarly, I don't think there is "one physics" for the universe. Don't get me wrong, I do believe there is a single universe out there. But our theories are our tools to reach out and describe that universe. I can easily imagine alien beings with a healthy physics that isn't string theory! If their physics is effective, it would be a peak just as our string theoretical physics is a peak. But those aliens who build a physics similar to the Greeks with four elements of earth, air, fire, and water with two forces of love and strife. They won't be a peak, but a valley. That something is objective doesn't mean we all end up with the same description. (Think of the blind men and the elephant who come up with different theories of what the "true reality" of this beast is. They are all correct but incomplete.)

A science doesn't have to be "complete" to be true or useful. Newtonian science is true (in a limited sense that we understand but Newton didn't) and it is very useful. Einsteinian physics is even more useful. But no sensible physicist would declare physics dead and done with Einstein. Science will be an endless search for truth. Similarly, ethics is real and we can have theories of it that are useful, but limited, and the search will be endless to "perfect" our knowledge and bridge cultural gaps and ethical differences between human societies (and alien societies).

The point that Sam Harris is important and true: morality should be explored as a domain in science because "ought" can be derived from "is" despite what David Hume said.

The Good Guy Doesn't Always Win

Here is a sad story of psychiatric abuse by Vaughan Bell in his Mind Hacks blog site. It points out that good guys don't always win. That you can do the right thing and be shunned by your peers and your society. That evil can be supported by your government and you get pushed aside. It is a sad story:

I've just discovered the powerful story of the German psychiatrist Alice Ricciardi-von Platen. She refused to take part in the growing eugenics movement in the 1930s Germany that targeted people with mental illness for sterilisation and euthanasia, resisted the Nazi party and wrote a book documenting Nazi medical abuses of psychiatric patients after being asked to observe the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg.

As a result, she was ostracised from the German medical community and her book was repressed. It wasn't rediscovered by German historians until thirty years after it was published in 1948.

Afterwards she became highly respected for her work developing group therapy and worked in Britain and Italy right into her late nineties.

There is surprisingly little about her online or in the academic literature although she received two glowing obituaries in the British press when she died in 2008.

We like to think that each of us would stand up to human rights abuses even if everyone else around us was involved but we know from countless social psychology experiments that it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Consequently, I always have immense admiration for people like Ricciardi-von Platen who did so in the most difficult of circumstances.

We also like to think that the Nuremberg trials put an end to the political abuse of psychiatry but a recent article in Schizophrenia Bulletin tracked the history of these abusive practices noting that they have been regularly used throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

From the Soviet use of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia to silence dissidents, to the Nazi's incorporation of psychiatry into eugenics, to psychiatrists' collaboration with torture during dictatorial regimes in Latin America, to China's use of psychiatric hospitals to persecute Falun Gong members and to the collaboration with 'war on terror' torture in the US (albeit in the light of outright condemnation from the American Psychiatric Association).

Sadly, psychiatry has been co-opted many times over as a tool of oppression. Complacency is the enabler of these abuses and people like Alice Ricciardi-von Platen are a reminder that even the most powerful forces can be resisted.

Go to the posting to get the links to Alice Ricciardi-von Platen's obituaries and a picture of her.

I get depressed when I think of stories like this. Civilization is like the myth of Sisyphus, the good guys are condemned to endlessly struggle to reassert goodness while the bad guys keep popping up and doing bad things. There is no happy ending. The guy in the white hat doesn't ride off on his white stallion leaving the happy citizens of the frontier town to live blissfully ever after in quiet and peace. Oh well.

Disgraceful, Shocking, but to be expected...

From an article from the Times newspaper:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

...

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

The Bush administration lied to the American public without qualms. They were ideologues who knew they were "right" despite the facts, despite any morality, despite any sensible political strategy, despite any sensible military strategy, despite the long term interests of the United States, and despite the economic implications of their policies.

You wonder how the Germans could be herded like sheep by Hitler? You can get an idea by looking at how the American public was (and still is) herded like sheep by right wing ideologues in the US.

Evil is Among Us

Here's an interesting viewpoint, one that claims that the devil is real and lurks everywhere, even inside the Vatican. From an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper:

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.
He added that the assault on Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Eve by a mentally unstable woman and the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the Anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See.

"The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences," said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See's chief exorcist for 25 years.
"He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I'm a man who is happy in his work."
While there was "resistance and mistrust" towards the concept of exorcism among some Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has no such doubts, Father Amorth said. "His Holiness believes wholeheartedly in the practice of exorcism. He has encouraged and praised our work," he added.
The evil influence of Satan was evident in the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, with "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon," Father Amorth said.

So I guess we now know the ultimate defense to be used by all those pederast priests: the Devil made me do it!

I think it is pathetic to live in the 21st century and have these medieval and ancient beliefs taken seriously. I can understand why ignorant peasants would believe these things, but in today's world? We now understand a great deal about myth-making and human psychology. It is clear that the Salem "witches" were burned because people -- under torture -- were willing to say whatever their torturers wanted them to say. You know, the same thing as happens day in and day out in Guantanamo, that modern day Salem set up by the Republicans to "ferret out the evil" of terrorism.

Justice... Free as a Bird

The idea of justice flits around and flies off in the US... it is as free as a bird... no limits... no laws to limit it... torture today, tomorrow, and forever. That was the policy of Bush and it appears to be the policy of Obama.

Here's a bit from a blog posting on Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish:

Another detail we discovered about then torture techniques adopted by Bush and Cheney was confinement in tiny boxes and total sensory deprivation. This was done to Jose Padilla, an American citizen, for years. with permanent shackles, ear-muffs and goggles to blind him.

We also know that the Cheney regime put individuals in upright coffins, as well as using the stress positions photographed below. Since the CIA destroyed all the evidence of many of its torture sessions - with impunity - and since the Obama administration seeking to "move on" from what it itself called "torture" (itself making the Obama administration more baldly in violation of the Geneva conventions than even the Bush administration which publicly claimed it was not torturing anyone) - we have no photos of this. ... It's not clear what horrors apart from total dark and soundlessness were in that box - maybe the insect the CIA used to terrify one victim or the caged rat made famous in Nineteen-Eight-Four - but the concept is clearly identical.

...

There is simply no dispute that the US, under Bush and Cheney, authorized classic torture techniques from the Inquisition to the Gestapo and to the Khmer Rouge. I'm sorry, Mr president, but I refuse to move on until these war criminals are held accountable and brought to justice.

Go read the original posting to see the pictures.

This wasn't the "change you can believe in" that I thought I heard Obama proclaiming in 2008.

I guess this shows you should never elect a lawyer. They bend & twist -- and, yes, torture -- words as they please. All those lawyer jokes are real. They are the lowest form of life.

Obama is an Idiot

The experience of the Great Depression was that government had to substitute for missing consumer spending until the economy healed itself. It took nearly 10 years for this to happen. In 1936 when FDR fell prey to the "deficit hawks" and decided to balance the federal budget the US economy fell into a mini-depression inside the Great Depression. From Wikipedia:

In June 1937, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and increased taxation in an attempt to balance the federal budget. The American economy then took a sharp downturn, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production fell almost 30 per cent within a few months and production of durable goods fell even faster. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising from 5 million to more than 12 million in early 1938. Manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak and was back to 1934 levels. Producers reduced their expenditures on durable goods, and inventories declined, but personal income was only 15% lower than it had been at the peak in 1937. As unemployment rose, consumers' expenditures declined, leading to further cutbacks in production.

Well... Obama has decided to repeat this experience. Here is a Reuters report:

Obama to seek three-year freeze on domestic spending

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, under pressure from deficit hawks, will seek a three-year freeze on domestic spending in his 2011 budget that would save $250 billion by 2020, administration officials said on Monday.

Obama will outline the spending hold-down in his State of the Union address on Wednesday and will spell it out in detail on February 1, when he unveils his second budget.

Obama is under fire for a record deficit and has called for a bipartisan congressional commission to consider spending cuts and tax increases to improve the country's fiscal outlook.

Democrats are jittery after the Massachusetts election of a Republican for the Senate seat long held by the late Edward Kennedy, worried that it may be a warning sign for congressional elections in November.

Already stock markets in Asia are down 2-4% on the news (on top of the last weeks 5% slide). I foolishly thought that economists were trained and politicians were educated, but no. The idiots in charge are as stupid as they were in the 1930s.

I just hope it doesn't take a WWIII to get the global economy to recover from this mess.

I thought George Bush was evil and stupid. I now think Obama is stupid but I'm still waiting to decide if he is evil. But to throw more millions out of work so that he can "control the deficit" in the middle of a depression strikes me as evil.