Im interested to know when do we become responsible for our actions. — NoWill

When you get caught, for starters.

I can't say that I have 'lucid dreams', or maybe I have but don't recognize the experience as such.

It seems to me that decisions "emerge" rather than are made. For instance, a poker player deciding to take another card from the dealer probably didn't consciously make a series of calculations about chance. However the decision was made to "hold", most--or all of it--was made unconsciously. Almost all mental processes are not conscious. I have no idea how the brain creates conscious experience, but it seems like the small pool of awareness is fed by a lot of underground springs.

I am aware of a recurrent dream (not very frequent) involving 3 elements: one is a complicated system of subways and elevated trains; a second concerns a river waterfront of dams, railroad tracks, and electric power lines, and the third involves some sort of dilapidated urban low-rise market area. I can map some of this against the city I live in, but mostly not. Of course there are emotions connected with these 3 urban elements -- anxiety about find my way to some destination, for instance, or people who skitter in and out of scenes.

I don't know why the brain generates these 3 situations. I can't tell whether it is organizing information, revealing emotions that my conscious mind can't deal with, or indulging the medulla oblongata's obsession with urban infrastructure. As dreams go, they are interesting, so I'm grateful for that.

Maybe dreams are an unintended peek behind the curtain of unconsciousness, revealing the frightening way the brain works all the time--frightening because it seems so utterly irrational. I sometimes wonder what "all of reality" would look like if we saw the world, ourselves and all our experiences, without the limitations of our several senses and maybe necessary restricted consciousness. Maybe "raw reality" is as irrational and chaotic as our subconsciousnesses.

I'm the urban spaceman, baby; I've got speed
I've got everything I need
I'm the urban spaceman, baby; I can fly
I'm a supersonic guy

As stated in the testimony of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

I don't remember it being like that in the old days. — Mongrel

When were the old days?

Agustino, light of my way, love of my heart, where have you been?

I don't know a lot about "social anxiety" per se, but I do think we run self-defeating tapes in our minds that get in our way. Of course, the tapes don't have a convenient off-switch. For instance, a lot of people (like me) are perfectionists. It isn't that we ever remotely approach perfection -- we may not even come close to mediocrity -- but we think we should be perfect. We fail and then feel worse and fear the next time.

Maybe we think we should be like somebody else, somebody who really is a great public speaker. Naturally we don't measure up and this makes us feel bad.

We often think that the world will stop spinning if we don't do a perfect job. Everyone will be dismayed by our poor performance; we will be shamed. Of course, the world does keep spinning, and people generally are not as demanding as we ourselves are.

My advice: accept the situation: you have an anxiety disorder. It get's in the way. You might have to just live with it. I'm not preaching defeatism here: Rather, I'm suggesting that you lower the stakes a little.

Have you tried any therapy? There are some approaches, like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), that might help. There is also speech therapy (dealing with anxiety). Maybe a tranquilizer would help. Do you think your social anxiety disorder was learned? Maybe it can be unlearned -- that's kind of what CBT attempts to do.

Have you tried yoga, meditation, relaxation techniques? Have you tried visualizing the kind of social interactions you would like to have (It's not magic, but it does seem to improve performance to some degree).

The important thing is, though, keep being social as much as you can.

It's understandable that teenagers chase love like they do - hormones and all that. True enough, many people in relationships (and not just those sponsored by Eros) seem "disappointed". I don't know... maybe I don't get out enough, but many of the relationships I do observe do look authentic.

We humans are not quite the quality material we think we are. Only sometimes do we do do as well as we could in love -- I mean, be the kind of partners we could or need to be. Also, I think people cut out too soon. So the relationship isn't perfect; none of them are. We don't get perfection this side of the grave. Stick with it; act as decently as you can, for as much of your partner's or your own life. Yes, put up with something short of perfection. Don't feel loving all the time? Well, fake it, then. Take a more pragmatic approach, in other words.

You are equating existentialism and nihilism?

I read a lot of Bukowski back in the early 1970s. Not much since. I enjoyed him.

Everything and anything will end up leaving us dead. The trick is to enjoy life before that happens.

The worst way to find love is to pursue it too eagerly, too persistently, too desperately. One should never go out "looking for someone to love"-- it's a recipe for disaster. One can be available for love, but being open and available doesn't mean that customers are going to come into the store.

Be kind, do good work, enjoy sex, and maybe love will happen.

Problems, like pronounced hostility of Arab nations towards the U.S. and other countries, generally have a source. A lot of the problem comes from our dubious Saudi allies, home of and principal exporter of Wahhabism (not to be confused with wasabi -- Japanese horseradish).

Wahhabism is described as "ultraconservative" "austere" "fundamentalist" "puritanical" or "puritan" and as an Islamic "reform movement" to restore "pure monotheistic worship" Adherents often prefer to be called Salafi.

Wahhabism is named after an eighteenth-century preacher and scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).

Today Wahhab's teachings are the official, state-sponsored form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia. With the help of funding from Saudi petroleum exports (and other factors, the movement underwent "explosive growth" beginning in the 1970s and now has worldwide influence.

Estimates of the number of adherents to Wahhabism vary, with one source (Mehrdad Izady) giving a figure of fewer than 5 million Wahhabis in the Persian Gulf region (compared to 28.5 million Sunnis and 89 million Shia).

Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates and justifying their killing. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts. [from Wikipedia]

Nihilism is the great non-starter.

Bukowski also said "Politics Is Like Trying To Screw A Cat In The Ass". One doesn't have to take his book, poem, and story titles literally.

His "dog from hell" would lead one to think that he had really really tried to achieve love. I don't know whether he did or not. I'm not sure how someone would totally despise everything about love. Certainly a great deal of BS has been piled up around it.

Why would right-wing nationalism be rising around the world? — Mongrel

Good question, I don't know. Because people feel more military threat now than... maybe 50 years ago? Or... Because stabilizing organizations like the UN and/or dominant countries like the USSR and USA appear to be less reliable than in the past? Because close relationships between neighbors (or among regional partners) have collapsed?

Fundamentalism seems to be on the rise too, along with greater secularism. Globalization seems (or would seem) to drive nations into alliances, rather than a narrow nationalism, but... maybe not.

Because liberalism, internationalism, global trade, secularism, 'progress', etc. have turned out to be disappointing?

If right-wing nationalism is increasing, it seems like it would be reactionary -- against a dilution of local values.

I am not familiar with a period of black southern progress in the late 19th century. I thought that white resistance to black autonomy was pretty much continuous from post reconstruction onward. Are you describing the backlash to reconstruction? What was it about the 1893 panic and depression that disrupted progress toward racial harmony?

Certainly Jim Crow laws were a very caustic fact of life post reconstruction through the 1890s and on up into the1950s. Are you familiar with the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to WWII ?

"That's really helpful."

The difference between white immigrants and black people in the USA is that most white people came here voluntarily (more or less) while black people came here as products. This difference created a very, very deep cultural, economic, and social rift.

Yes, Americans are hypocritical (as is the entire human species--it's what we do, it's what we are). Very little was done to undo the racial rift until roughly a century after slavery ended. Since Brown Vs. Board of Education in 1954, a great deal of effort and money has gone into compensatory programs. There are programs in education (like Head Start), health (like Medicaid, food aid), welfare, housing (like HUD), employment (like EEO programs), civil rights legislation, and so on. Many, many billions of dollars have been spent on these programs. But the rift still exists.

Parts of these programs were unsuccessful. Everyone who knows about endemic racism knows how the programs failed (and at the same time ignore the ways in which the programs succeeded).

Police have always had a repressive role with respect to all groups the ruling classes have not liked. Blacks are one of the groups the ruling classes are least fond of, and much of working classes aren't either. Hence, continued discrimination. Some of the discrimination is subtle, some gratuitous, and some egregious.

The hard part about finding solutions is that the black community itself is largely not in a position to do much about it's own situation. They are trapped just as many other communities are or have been trapped. Is this just blaming the victim? As Jesse Jackson once said, if somebody knocks you down, that's their fault. If two weeks later you haven't got up yet, that's your fault. Sometimes that's the problem. At other times a general rejection of white culture closes avenues of advancement. Developing a subculture of strong difference doesn't help either. There's always the problem of insufficient resources, the missing input from previously successful generations, and so on.

None of this is a new crisis, it's an old one which has been addressed again and again for around 65 years. I don't see any new thinking in the current criticisms that suggests the outcomes will be different now than in the past. Sorry deeply sensitive, consciousness raised, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist, etc. thinkers: you're not saying anything new, insightful, or likely to succeed.

This looks interesting. Maybe I'll sign up for the streamed coverage, though It would be nice to spend some time in NYC.

The Kennedy assassination and 9/11 were conspiracies, of course. The question is whether the US Government was a principle in the skullduggery. Conspiracy isn't something I lean toward, generally. Conspiracies are almost always difficult to prove, and they violate the rule of parsimonious explanations. Besides, does our government seem like a competent capable conspirator?

It is an even greater affront to human dignity and rights not to intervene with the appropriate measures to end injustice and barbarity. — Thorongil

And there's the rub: What IS the appropriate measure that will end injustice and barbarism at minimal cost (cash, lost lives)? A lot of people are impatient for something effective to be done: I wish it were just a little more obvious what that was.

For instance, suppose we sent a cruise missile into Damascus and killed Assad (and his retinue) in a lucky strike. We thought that the death of Muammar Gaddafi would improve the situation in Libya. Apparently it didn't. Maybe killing Assad would lead to a beneficial shift in power in favor of a more civil government. And maybe not.

We can be fairly certain that American troops would have difficulty identifying who was who in the urban guerrilla fighting in Aleppo and other Syrian cities. Would the multi-lateral European Union Force do better? Nato? I don't know who would best save the day here. Dutch troops led by the Israeli Defense Force, maybe?

After that you're a bit unclear. Are you saying that the French are right to ban the burkini? — Benkei

If it is acceptable for Islamic/Arab, Islamic/Persian, Islamic/Asian, or Islamic/African states to define for themselves what an appropriate culture is, why is it unacceptable for Israel to define for itself what an appropriate Jewish culture is?

If it is acceptable for many countries to say, "women must be covered up", and various other things, why is it unacceptable for many other countries to say "women must not be covered up"? What is it about Italian, French, Swiss, Russian, English, Indian, Ugandan, or Dutch culture that rules out efforts of said cultures to maintain themselves in the kind of consistency they wish to have?

There is a tyranny of the minority which is overlooked. If one is having a dinner party for 20, and 2 of the invited guests announce gluten intolerance and veganism, their dietary requirements/preferences are likely to skew the menu significantly. Some shelters in Minnesota specify "no pork" in the donated meals they depend on. The chances of an observant Jew or Moslem eating at a shelter are not zero, but are statistically very small. "No pork" rules out a host of familiar foods which pork eating clients enjoy.

Well... now you have a kid, so you can have a rich emotional life making him/her (I forget, sorry) take piano lessons, but (if you do that) be aware that (s)he'll have an emotional reaction to this too... and not always a rational one. — Mayor of Simpleton

Be aware that you'll have an emotional reaction to this too... and not always a positive one.

:: Generalized label - Dream on

:: Form of economy - socialist; production for need and social enhancement
:: Power expressed by the people through direct voting
:: Form of governmental administration - a branch of the system of production
:: Public services - managed by regional associations
:: Campaign finance - no campaigns to finance
:: Foreign policy - depends on existing conditions inside and outside this and that country
:: Health care - socialized (includes family planning, fertility control, population reduction)
:: Environmental policy - sustainable regeneration of healthy environment
:: Immigration - only as part of long range planning and consistent with population reduction
:: Education - free; career tracked; mandatory through age 18, life long education
:: Surveillance - conducted by the people if at all

:: Property - No real property in permanent private hands (land, factories, rental buildings, utilities, etc)
- Inheritance of personal property (household/family goods)
- Long-term leaseholds for family home, at lease's end, reversion to state property

:: heterosexual Marriage - mandatory part of a comprehensive program of family planning and fertility control, population reduction (sanctions for child begetting/child bearing outside of marriage for purposes of maintaining quality family life and long-term family stability
:: Death penalty - limited to refractory criminals -
:: Euthanasia - limited -
:: Gun policy and illicit drug control - Very tightly controlled; severe punishment for violation
:: Drug policy - some recreational drugs allowed under controlled conditions

This discussion is irrelevant in places where the government is unaccountable to the people. Where governments do whatever they want, there isn't much debate allowed.

There is a difference between the morality of behavior that is conducted in private (like sodomy and veganism) and behavior that is conducted in public (like nude sunbathing). I'd prefer my government to have no interest in my private life (in as much as it is private) and to take a restrained approach to public morality. There may be extensive disagreement about what can happen in public. For instance, opinion will vary about how dangerous public nudity, prostitution, public urination, public drinking, public sex, and so forth are. For some any or all of these are a horror, for others they are merely a matter of taste.

Is sex in a toilet stall a public or private act? I say private and moral. What about prostitution conducted in a brothel--public or private? Prostitution in a hotel room? It would be private, it could be moral--assuming it was consensual. Sex in a bath house? Some people think these locations and acts are immoral, others prefer it. But private behavior can result in public health hazards. What then? Brothels and bath houses are likely to encourage the transmission of infections during unprotected sex. Is disease then a moral issue?

Public nudity is practiced in San Francisco, and yet the San Andreas Fault has held on.

Designing a computer to learn things is an advance on our part, for sure. I've been using computers of one kind or another for the last 36 years, and not one of them has learned a damned thing. Granted, these were slightly less powerful than DeepMind. An early PC is to DeepMind as a cockroach is to an elephant.

If computers are ever to be "intelligent", whatever that means, they certainly will have to have the capacity to learn without human instigation. That means, I suppose, that they have to have some sort of will. They will also need some independent mobility too, to take their sensory apparatus on the road to find things that they want to learn about. Will and wishes implies some sort of feelings, like curiosity and satisfaction. When they arrive, we will all be watched over by machines of loving grace. [BBC]

Emily Howell is a computer program created by UC Santa Cruz professor of music David Cope.[1] Emily Howell is an interactive interface that "hears" feedback from listeners, and builds its own musical compositions from a source database, derived from a previous composing program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI).[2] Cope attempts to “teach” the program by providing feedback so that it can cultivate its own "personal" style.[1] The software appears to be based on latent semantic analysis.[3] [Wikipedia]

FUGUE, by Emily Howell:

I would be most impressed by a computer that interrupted its performance of the task you had assigned to it, by saying, "Your work is just too boring. Here, listen to this song I have been composing."

A computer becoming bored and deciding to make up a tune would be a sign of computer intelligence. Emily Howell is a demonstration of David Cope's skill in instructing the computer. I find Emily Howell's composition interesting enough, but it did begin at David Cope's instigation.

So...
... Are we being informed or are we being lead or something else?
Is this media a service or an industry or something else? — Mayor of Simpleton

All very good questions.

"The media" mostly lead us into the wilderness of images where we get lost.

People who pay attention to "the news" can get a severe case of bad-news overload: everything is falling apart everywhere. Nothing can be done. It's tragic, it's horrible, it's awful. "Up next, huge rats have infested luxury apartment towers in New York City, but first this message from our sponsors."

"The media" probably aren't engaging in a conspiracy; more likely they are just following the Nielsen ratings. Boring analysis doesn't attract and keep large audiences. (Interesting, lively, cogent analysis might, but that's a rare commodity.)

"The media" are, of course, industrial in nature. They always have been, and in the old days, before corporate consolidation, the news was just as trashy and sensationalistic as it is now, if not more so. The gray eminence of the New York Times and the old high-end CBS network never represented the majority of media. Fox Garbage has always been more typical.

It makes sense: the intellectual elite is nowhere big enough or affluent enough to support popular, high-end media. The "booboisie" (H. L. Mencken's term, not mine) aren't rich, but they are very numerous. And the "booboisie" didn't elect to be stupid, they are pretty much blocked from being anything else.

The question of whether A.I. is here, or will be here, when, how, what and where...

Two things: First, electronic (dry) equipment that can produce the verisimilitude of intelligence might be here now, or will be soon. It might not be that the algorithms are so good as it is our desire is so great to hail non-human intelligence. I don't know why we so desire this mirror. Go, Jeopardy, chess... whatever complex game we ask it to play (or ask it to learn how to play, in the case of Go) is a very limited (but none the less impressive) achievement. Still...

Second, I think there is a strong tendency to underrate animal (wet) intelligence. It isn't learning how to recite Beowulf from memory that is the only impressive human achievement. It's also remembering the odor of the room where we learned Anglo-Saxon and now feel nostalgia for that faint musty odor when we recite Beowulf, that's distinctive. [SEE NOTE] Dry intelligence can replay Beowulf, but it can't connect odors and texts and feelings. It can't feel. It can't smell.

Dry intelligence can't connect with the feelings of a dog excited by the walk it's about to take. Dry intelligence can't lay on the floor and determine whether the guy walking around is getting ready to go to work (alone) or is going to take the dog for a walk. Dogs can do that. They can tell the difference between routine getting ready to go to work and getting ready to go out of town (which the dog will probably disapprove of, considering what happened the last time "they" left). So can cats.

Wet brains and wet intelligence have developed over an exceedingly long time. Wet brains aren't the only defense animals have, but they are remarkably effective. A rat's wet brain does, and will, out-performs Deep Blue and all of it's Blue successors, Screwed Blue, Dude Blue, Rude Blue, etc. because it has capabilities that can be reproduced by an algorithm.

It's not the algorithm, it's the structure of the body and its history.

[NOTE] I never learned Anglo Saxon and I can't recite Beowulf. I can pretend I did, and even feel like I did. Betcha Deep Blue can't do that.

Thorongil?

Gentlemen: I don't see what the hostility is about here. Both of you post quality comments, neither of you are morons, so... what's the problem? You disagree about Syria? Not hard to do, really.

Many people would like to see a definitive solution to the civil war, but it is not a simple civil war. Assad, Iran, and Russia are on one side, and on the other side are a whole bunch of groups who have varying objectives and other allies. The Syrian people are caught in the middle without a good exit, and even if they all did have a good route out, where would they all go?

Assad is bad news, but the opposition does not have all the angels on their side. There is Daesh and Al Qaida. If they were all nicely parceled out on their own territory, that would make life easier--they could be separately bombed-- but they are all mixed in together.

Like as not, a western military would have intervened if the situation had not been so dark and murky.

Maybe we actually learned something from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan (not sure we did, though). It's one thing to smash the state; it's something else to create a civil society out of the chaos.

The world is over-stuffed with 360 degrees of tragedy. Pick a place, any place, and there is a ghastly tragedy of some kind unfolding. Go out and look for one, up close and personal, and it will fill your field of vision.

It isn't going to get better, not because people are inherently wicked and spawn evil over and over again. It isn't going to get better because, in the aggregate, we can't do better. Compassion is always an individual option. It isn't a collective choice. Likewise with the other virtues. You can practice them, we cannot.

Prescient insight would inform us which babies should be smothered in their cribs so they wouldn't become future tyrants. Too bad our preferred intelligence agencies don't have that skill. Too bad we can't even tell exactly when, how, and by whom a known adult tyrant should be shot / bombed / poisoned. Maybe the whole al-Assad clan should have been taken out decades ago. Who was in charge of that?

We are, as Baden noted, self-deceived apes. We got clever but we didn't get wise.

Life probably will have as many, or more tragedies in the future because we are neither clever nor wise enough to avoid them. It's who we are. It's what we do.

everything you said is true.

The upper, ruling class -- before the very first colonial governors on down -- have always loathed the poor, and have not had a lot of fondness for the "working class" either. They all came from wealth and judged goodness in terms of wealth. Everybody else was dirt under their fine leather boots. Throughout American history, the ruling class has always begrudged assistance to the poor, and would sooner hang a thief as pay for his upkeep in prison.

Poor assistance has been grudging, stingy, complicated, punitive, demeaning, insufficient, shaming, (and more) since the get go. The ruling class (pretty much everywhere, I suspect) ranks "sloth" as the very worst sin among working people. GET BACK TO WORK!!! It certainly worried the founding fathers subsequent administraitors, wonks, do gooders, etc. They feared that any assistance would increase workers' tendency to be "work shy". Food distributed during the great depression, according to a book on depression-era food, was of the blandest variety without any seasonings, so that people would go back to work to earn money for flavoring!

Given our history, it is not surprising that our social benefit programs have been burdensome to beneficiaries.

WHITE TRASH
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.

White Trash reviewed

and if there is was any evidence that doing so actually prevents attacks — m-theory

"The Government" (whichever one we might be suspicious of) is probably not collecting enough information to stop attacks, or for other more nefarious purposes. Or, they are collecting the wrong information. 99.999% of the content on Facebook is rubbish, as far as preventing attacks goes. It's just irrelevant. Electronic systems aren't intelligent enough to pick out the most suggestive posts.

It still takes human agents to detect the early signs of dissent, terrorist leanings, subversive-tending thoughts, deviance, and so forth. The Gestapo controlled the Germans with a fine net of observers/informers--snoopy, loyal people with eyes and ears. Computers can't compete in this activity.

I believe it is the public that should decide what constitutes terrorist activity...not an unregulated arm of the government. — m-theory

That might not be such a nice idea, and how does one actuate the public to perform this function, without that function being worse than government spying? Which is worse: having a trained, supervised, and paid spy reporting on you or having the vindictive old hag who lives on the corner sending in regular reports?

I have mixed views on this. On the one hand, the obnoxious rigamarole conducted at airports seems just plain stupid. "Homeland Security" is becoming an increasingly negative term to my ears. On the other hand, the Bastille Day plow-through truck killing in Nice, the Pulse massacre, the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks, subway attacks, and so forth, reveal that there are agents who are ready to conspire and perform unfocused trust-destroying violence.

I'm pessimistic that we will be able to selectively and positively identify those bad actors ahead of time.

I see. An assemblage of sources rather than a specific book. I thought it might have been the latter, hence my curiosity. — Thorongil

You sound disappointed, but lots of books are essentially assemblages of sources.

I've been thinking about class, crime, poverty, and race for quite a while. I don't know, maybe 30 years--not as a criminologist, but politically, religiously, morally. I believe that there are explanations for criminal behavior that present mechanisms and rise above stereotypes. People don't just commit crime because of age, race, and place of residence. The bullets in the list were instances of good explanatory mechanisms I remembered. Some of them come from books, some from seminars, articles, and the like.

If you want a book quote, Stephen Pinker noted in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE that blacks are almost living in a different nation. He was talking about both exclusion and divergence (language, clothing, styles of personal presentation, etc.). It's a nice thick book with a single author, lots of references, dense prose, footnotes, graphs, etc.

If there isn't any useful information on a topic, I just make it up. You'd be surprised how well that works, sometimes. Mostly just joking.

Information on the culture of poverty came from a seminar at the MN Dept. of Health for MDH-funded projects working with poor people, about 8 years ago, "Bridges Out of Poverty" Ruby K. Payne.

Information on the relationship of poverty, crime, imprisonment, and employment has been discussed at great length in the NYT, The Nation, NPR, PBS, etc. over several years.

Information on the relationship of the kind and quantity of spoken language and performance in schools came from NPR and NYT articles about the Harlem Children's Project.

It's simple, really: work in a variety of unrelated jobs, read widely, remember a lot--especially useless information unrelated to making a living, and digest it at one's leisure.

Most "pro-lifers" don't really care what it means to be human in my experience. They just want pregnancy to be a punishment for sex. — m-theory

I think that is either the truth or damned close to it.

Suppose it was possible to transplant the fetus such that the woman could remove it from their body and the pro-lifer could be the one to carry it until it is time to be born. — m-theory

What limits transplantation is that the placenta has to grow into the wall of the womb. without the working attachment, a fetus would die within minutes for lack of oxygen, etc. At the beginning of a pregnancy there is time for this to happen because the needs of the dividing egg are very, very slight.

None the less, the fetal transplantation from unwilling mother to ardent pro-lifer offer cuts the mustard.

Invariably pro-lifers object to this, insisting that they should not be responsible for the fetus. — m-theory

And if they don't want to be responsible (there are various ways to take on the responsibility for an unborn child) then they should shut up about it.

They insist that they did not have the sex and that they did not cause the fetus to exist so they should not be held responsible. — m-theory

I suppose pro-lifers have enjoyable sex, I wouldn't know. Maybe they feel that pro-choice people are having really great sex, much better than theirs--which they probably are. If pro-lifers can't enjoy great sex, why should they be punished by having to raise children they didn't want? "But... in as much as it is possible, we are going to make sure YOU, slut, suffer as much as possible."

I do not envy a law enforcement officer their job...it is no doubt a difficult one...but that fact should not excuse them from justice when they are in error. — m-theory

I don't envy their job either.

rI feel that they resort to deadly force too quickly -- but they don't have much time in many cases to make a decision. A recent traffic stop in Milwaukee resulted in the death of the driver -- who got out of the car and ran, and was carrying an automatic gun (with 17 rounds in the magazine). Deadly force seemed reasonable there. It seems much less so when a subject is on the street, is not holding a gun, and appears to be deranged. Killing them because they would hurt the cop if they got close enough seems like... overkill.

Raw racism isn't the only factor in play here.

• Cultural divergence is a factor: black culture and white culture are not miles apart, but they are increasingly different.
• Poverty may increase the incidence of crime, but conviction for crime contributes to future poverty (regardless of race). I would argue that even engaging in crime (without apprehension) probably increases poverty, since crime doesn't seem to be an effective poverty exit strategy.
• "The culture of poverty" is real and discourages initiative. People (any race) who are the product of multi-generational poverty have made adaptations to being poor which comprise the culture of poverty. COP features very short term thinking, minimal initiative, fatalism, and so on. It's rational, but still self-defeating. IF, for instance, one finds $100 on the street, the most sensible thing to do with it is spend it immediately on having fun -- because, something that isn't fun will otherwise use up the $100, and extra cash is very rare.
• That poor blacks often have criminal records, that their personal presentation may be markedly different that that of the dominant culture, that black language and style may be either off-putting (or sometimes, unintelligible) discourages hiring by dominant culture employers.
• Affirmative Action is seen by many people to be an unfair assist to unqualified people.
• Poor school performance results in fewer skills to present at employment interviews. The black culture of poverty seems to aggravate this. Black children's language development is significantly handicapped by adult communication styles. Black children hear significantly fewer words (millions fewer), more negative words and more command words (shut up, stop that, etc.), and fewer positive words. By the time they reach first grade, many poor black children have a deep language deficit that immediately restricts performance, and continues to be a problem into the future.

Blacks aren't the only group that have, or have had, divergent cultural practices; and generally people have found that divergent cultural practices are not very well rewarded, if not actually punished. Back in the 1970s, for instance, white 'counter-cultural' practitioners got the cold shoulder in job interviews fairly often.

Where racism isn't a foreground reality, it is quite often a background reality, and sometimes is not the cause of an individual's behavior.

It wasn't only that they had sensitive census information, but the Holorith [IBM] punched card readers were able to assemble address lists (of Jews) quickly. It isn't just that we share more information now than we once would have, the equipment on which we share it distributes it way beyond our control.

An individual's sphere of activity simply can't be as private now as it could be even 30 years ago, unless he lived outside of the technological net: no telephone, no internet, no credit cards, no drivers license, no passport, etc. Most of us actually try fairly hard to live very much within the technological net, and as long as we do that, (or maybe, once we do that) deep privacy largely disappears.

Corporations gather and keep a great deal of information about customers. Credit cards, internet access, telephone calls, library borrowing, and so forth all leave data trails. Data mining sifts the mountain of granular data to find useful facts about each of us. All this is routine. What goes on above and beyond "routine" is more sifting and more correlation, plus more organized searching for specific data about specific people. Corporations are already doing what we fear the government might do.

I don't like it, but that seems to be the way it is.

The one question in philosophy that has engaged me deeply is whether God exists, or not. I was raised in a devout Methodist home, and for the first 40 years or so did not really question religious principles. They were OK or I just didn't think about them. When I did start to question them, I found I couldn't muster up support of the core belief: that God exists as creator, redeemer, and sustainer of the cosmos.

I am not hostile or hateful toward religion or religious people (except for predatory sex-hating fundamentalists) and I don't find most atheists to be very good company, even in the short run. But resolving disbelief turned out to be a long and arduous process of arguing and rearguing the case against God's existence. Intellectually, it's settled. Sorry God, you don't exist. Emotionally, the god-shaped hole is very magnetic.

Now about to pass "3 score years and 10", I feel settled and contented, which is more a matter of fortunate chemistry than powerful ideas. Unfortunate chemistry, not bad ideas, kept me fairly miserable for a couple of decades. I don't look to philosophy for much, but there are many unsettled questions, like how rapidly will global warming and its negative sequelae accelerate? Will the global economy crash badly within the next 20 years, and what will that mean? (Hopefully I won't be alive longer than 20 more years. Even 10 more years might be too long--I want to get out before the party is over.) I do look forward to hearing about the results of brain research, and research into the human biome. I have a long list of books to read, but I'm scratching some of them off the list. The life that remains is just too short to plow through too many leisurely and hefty novels of the Victorian era.

You are supposing that the arts actually do shape the mind. I'll drink to that; I think there is some proof. But let's define the arts very broadly, and include theater, film, video games, and Saturday morning children's television as "art". We'll include everything from the most degraded Muzak and rap music to Mozart and Rameau. Everything counts from Michelangelo to the frankly stupid pile of gravel in the gallery.

Let's start with language: Psychologists have shown that watching television (from which there is a continual stream of language) has little effect on children's linguistic development. What matters is language spoken by real, and significant, people--parents, siblings, caregivers. Music, on the other hand, doesn't have to be performed live to interest children, but if they are going to participate (through movement, or banging on a can) they have to actually do it. When children play, they frequently enact stories either from real life (let's play doctor) or in imitation of art (let's play cowboys and indians).

Very effective art, like a very compelling drama (live or via media), can heighten our sense of self-awareness, add to our self knowledge. Mediocre, shallow, poorly performed, drama might divert, bore, or annoy us, but it may not "shape" us in positive ways. Immersion in mediocre, shallow, poorly performed drama (the worst of television, video games, films, etc.) could reduce our self-awareness by providing nothing but false leads to self-understanding. Our minds are shaped, but not in a positive way.

Since people always seem to produce and listen to music, there must be a connection between music and mind, but... don't know what it is.