leveling off at around 11 billion people by 2100 — karl stone

Don't worry, there won't be 11 billion people by 2100.

It would probably be less environmentally damaging just to spray a whole can of hairspray on my head everyday — karl stone

There is a hair-care product better than aluminum foil or hair spray. I recommend SUAVE DAILY CLARIFYING SHAMPOO.

Daily Clarifying Shampoo is loaded with nanoparticles and neurotransmitters that burrow through the scull, right into that tangle of confused neurons and synapses. Daily Clarifying Suave dispels the fog of bad information, misapprehensions, mistaken notions, confusions, vague anxieties, unjustified biases, wrong ideology, and politically abhorrent memes. Through regular application of this fine product you may progress from being a complete idiot to a much sought-after guru. (Results will vary.)

Bring out the sparkle in whatever mind you have left! That's DAILY CLARIFYING shampoo.



It's fixes your head, if not your hair.

Good way of putting it.

I also decided to start this discussion because all discussions I speak in resort to Objectivism and Ayn Rand, so we'll just have those discussions here so we don't derail any other discussions. — AppLeo

Monomania is tiresome. Comparing thinking to a phonograph record... "Are you in the groove? You mean ever diminishing circles?" (quoting Marshal McLuhan)

There is no society or common good. There are only individuals. — AppLeo

That is an extreme statement; one could flip it and say there is no such thing as individuals: everything belongs to a group of some kind. It seems to me we are both individuals and members of groups. This is so biologically, socially, economically, politically, existentially--any way one thinks of it.

We simply can not be only individuals. We don't arrive as fully formed individual adult economic operators. We start out with two parents and are born into a culture composed of complex configurations of groups. And individuals, of course. And as we progress through life we get more complicated and at once more group-invested and individuated.

You might continue following objectivism and Ayn Rand as your guiding light till the end of a long life, but it is quite possible that you will abandon it and her somewhere along the line--maybe this year, even. This may happen several times -- different philosophies will seem like the brightest light on the horizon, until they don't anymore. If you, a 20 year old, did abandon a love affair with Rand, or Sartre, or Aristotle, or whoever, that would be 100% normal. I fully understand that seems impossible right now and you are not going to entertain the notion that next year you might not be interested in Rand.

I'm speaking as a 72 year old who has gone through a whole bunch of enthusiasms, and watched a whole bunch of other people doing the same thing. Today it's Buddha, tomorrow it's Lenin, or Esperanto, or virtual reality, or ...

The enthusiasm of today always seems like the last stop on the railroad. Until it doesn't.

On a different note, are you familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect? Rand was deeply impressed with Wright. I love Wright's architecture. Wright himself was a difficult prick, to be blunt about it. Asshole of the year, some times. None the less, he designed some gorgeous buildings. I don't have to love FLW to admire his buildings, fortunately. Here's a picture of Falling Water, a house he built in SW Pennsylvania for a department store magnate. A "summer house".

Maybe. If we didn’t, then who cares, let’s just start working on countering the problems with climate change. If we did create climate change with fossil fuel usage, does that mean we should stop using fossil fuels? Well no, because our economy and livelihood depends on fossil fuels. So it wouldn’t make any sense to stop using fossil fuels. Abandoning fossil fuels for other energy alternatives isn’t cost effective or productive.

Can we prevent climate change?

No, I don’t think we can, so whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Let’s not worry about it and prepare for it.j — AppLeo

I agree with you that, at this point, we can not prevent climate change. Whatever is going to happen is making itself manifest already.

Can we make it worse? Yes.

Are we going to stop using fossil fuels? Not today. But wind/solar power have become competitive with coal-fired electrical generation. Is there enough wind and solar power to go around? Yes; the sun is generous. Where the winds blow regularly, there is enough wind -- but there are places where the prevailing winds are insufficient.

You are quite right about fossil fuels: they are inextricably part of the world technology and economy.

I used to be a climate optimist but I have been pushed to the climate pessimist position: we're screwed. We're screwed because individually we can not see our common interests with sufficient clarity and force to act upon them effectively. Hell, we can't even see our own interests clearly half the time.

Not something I am familiar with. — Banno

That's OK, because I had never heard of him either. I use Wikipedia to manufacture fake omniscience.

Not quite; better, the story of Pegasus exists, as does its associated history... it's just use. — Banno

Pegasus is a character in a story, and because the story exists, pegasus exists. In practice we often cite fictional characters that don't exist outside of their story. Dracula, Frodo, Jesus, Sam Spade, et al.

Fictional stories are real fictional stories; see, there they are on the book shelf: Dracula; Lord of the Rings; the Gospel of St. Matthew; Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon. Real stories. Not true stories, just real.

What's real is real, what's not real is not real. Dracula and Frodo are not real beings. Donald Trump is a real character in a real tragedy. Theresa May is real, too, and lives in an English tragedy. I gather that Scott Morrison MP is a real person too. Does he live in a tragedy, a comedy, or a bore?

As to use, we can say "Dracula and Frodo are real characters" as long as we understand that they are fictional characters in fictional stories that actually exist. Donald Trump and Theresa May can "get real" and I wish the hell they would, but Dracula and Frodo can not get real. Being fictional characters, they of course have no existence, no agency outside of the stories that real people wrote and published.

The point here is that being real and existing are not the very same. — Banno

So, Pegasus exists without being real. No horse with wings (let alone being bright red) was ever real, but one did exist as a fictional character. Now Lassie the precocious canine and Champion the Wonder Horse were both real and existed -- there were several collies name Lassie who did their dog schtick and Champion even had his own TV program -- The Adventure of Champion the Wonder Horse.

I heard the wonder horse was into bestiality with boys. He had ulterior motives in being nice to the creepy Ricky North. As for the Canyon of Wanted Men, I'd very much like to visit it.

Thank you for appearing when only twice summoned. Some spirts require 3 summons before they are able to appear. Pretentious spirits...

This reminds me of the James Thurber story about the Unicorn In The Garden:

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him.

"The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; now he was browsing among the tulips. "Here, unicorn," said the man, and he pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife again. "The unicorn," he said,"ate a lily." His wife sat up in bed and looked at him coldly. "You are a booby," she said, "and I am going to have you put in the booby-hatch."

The man, who had never liked the words "booby" and "booby-hatch," and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He walked over to the door. "He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead," he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn; but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat down among the roses and went to sleep.

As soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned a psychiatrist; she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist arrived they sat down in chairs and looked at her, with great interest.

"My husband," she said, "saw a unicorn this morning." The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. "He told me it ate a lilly," she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. "He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead," she said. At a solemn signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped from their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.

"Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?" asked the police. "Of course not," said the husband. "The unicorn is a mythical beast." "That's all I wanted to know," said the psychiatrist. "Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jaybird."

So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.

Moral: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched. — James Thurber

Ding an sich?

That's a picture, what it represents doesn't exist. — MindForged

If it represented nothing, how could it exist?



One could object that a hot dog is actually a sausage, but that wouldn't help you when ordering your food.

There the old horse is! He exists.

@banno

Banno started a very long discussion on the old Philosophy Forum about whether Pegasus was real. It seems to me that many were agreed that Pegasus, wingéd horse, was real. How can that be?

Characters in fiction are not real in the same way my cup of coffee is real, (or maybe they are) but the fictional story is as real as the cup of coffee once it is told. That is so whether the story is told around a campfire or printed, bound, and sent to you from Amazon by under-paid and abused proles, slaving away for the greater glory of Jeff Bezos.

Someone reading this thread can not be 100% sure that Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank exist in the flesh, but he can be sure that we at least exist as characters in a thread. (Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank are in bigger trouble if they are not sure they are real either as flesh or as characters in this thread.)

I still have my 1988 Mac Plus in the basement. Lovely thing it was, with the coat hanger tool to open the case, should one want to expand RAM, for instance, as one would since it the original's RAM was something like 1 megabyte. It didn't even have a hard drive--sold separately. But it was, never the less, amazing.

Back to @Purple Pond's Aboutness of language...

The question is too obvious. As you said, it's like supposing there is a mystery to a screw driver.

If a fellow tries to fix his phone he finds that it is not so simple: Philips, blade, 5 point, tri-wing... etc. -- several special varieties to foil the drive to screw Apple or Huawei out of a fucking fixit fee.

I remember from my first teaching gig in 1968 using 'programmed learning' for adult literacy that "The cat is on the mat.". It used simple line drawings showing the cat on the mat, the rat has a hat, and ants without pants. From what memory in your head did you choose "The cat is on the mat"?

In any case, the statement "The rat has a hat." might be true, or it might be false. How would I know from the context of that one sentence? The cat/mat nexus is valid only if the cat actually is on the mat.

As to cats and mats, words refer by triggering memories in a brain. My adult learners who did not know how to read did not register the sentence as meaningful--hence the line drawings... cats sitting on mats, rats with hats, ants without pants. You see or hear the words, the auditory/visual/speech system processes them, and voila! a cat is on the mat. If you see the words "кот на ковре" the words will refer to nothing. Unless you speak Russian.

I can't find much wrong with your ideas, but I am not quite sold either. — ZhouBoTong

Fair enough.

I once over heard some black workers discussing terms: "We used to be called niggers, then it was negroes, then it was blacks, then it was African Americans. I don't know what we'll be called next." True story.

Some people use the term "aboriginal" for Australia's 'first people' and for Canada's 'first people'. Indians, redskins, native Americans, American Indian, etc. I try to use whatever term people seem to prefer. Niggers and redskins is pretty clearly not a good choice.

Hair, the musical. You familiar with it?

Bear in mind this very popular musical is from the 1960s, a much different time than now.



Here are the lyrics:

I'm a
Colored spade
A nigger
A black nigger
A jungle bunny
Jigaboo coon
Pickaninny mau mau
Uncle Tom
Aunt Jemima
Little Black Sambo
Cotton pickin'
Swamp guinea
Junk man
Shoeshine boy
Elevator operator
Table cleaner at Horn & Hardart
Slave voodoo
Zombie
Ubangi lipped
Flat nose
Tap dancin'
Resident of Harlem
And president of
The United States of Love
President of
The United States of Love
(and if you ask him to dinner you're going to feed him:)
Watermelon
Hominy grits
An' shortnin' bread
Alligator ribs
Some pig tails
Some black eyed peas
Some chitlins
Some collard greens
And if you don't watch out
This boogie man will get you
Booooooooo!
Booooooooo!
So you say . . .

I've heard some of those words used to reference blacks - but not recently.

Have you considered becoming a monk on Mt. Athos? Or becoming a holy hermit living in a cave? Something like that? After a few years of that the wretched world might start to look good.

I don't see giving charity as an exercise in me displaying grace, surely you don't either. — schopenhauer1

No, I don't see it that way either. Grace isn't something one displays or does.

So, what exactly do we do with this whole structure, work, charity and all? — schopenhauer1

Are you familiar with the religious idea of being "in the world" but not "of the world"?

Not being "of the world" represents one separating and distinguishing one's self from "the world" (structure, work, charity, social media, all that stuff) to the extent that one is able. It means identifying what in the world "is not for me" and what in the world "is for me". Philosophers have observed that people are driven like slaves by the demands of the world--not just that you work, but that you have a weed free lawn, drive a nice car, keep the monetary value of your property up, and so on. Strivers are all about achieving maximum rewards and displaying them to best effect.

You don't have to associate yourself with all that. Do you have to work for your daily bread? So you do because you don't want to starve. But you don't have to be a striver; you don't have to be the fastest worker, the top salesman, the largest grossing real estate agent, etc. You can arrange your life to get by with as little as possible -- thus requiring the least amount of effort possible, and least possible commitment to "the system".

How well does that work? At best, I'd say "so-so". At worst it is just another existential shit pile.

I would think it fair to terminate me based on the implication that I might not work well with other races. — ZhouBoTong

I don't much like southerners as a group, never had any sympathies for the Confederacy, believe reconstruction was too mild and ended too soon, etc. But the fact of the matter is, the Confederacy is part of American History, and so is Robert E. Lee. The car from the Dukes of Hazard, though, can hardly embody anything significant about American History, Lee, or the Confederacy.

If you were fired or not hired because you once dressed up as a car which, in the TV series had the confederate flag on its roof and was called the General Lee, then I think the personnel department at the firm to which you applied should probably be examined for psychiatric disorders.

Really, there is something quite neurotic in the obsession some people have with statuary, names, and symbols here and in other countries. That would go for people who feel they owe allegiance to the long-gone Confederacy as well as people who are enraged by seeing the symbol.

I believe in achieving social justice, but social justice isn't about symbols, statuary, and names. It's about the fair distribution of material resources and the opportunity to make desired economic choices and pursue opportunities.

Magic mushrooms. Seriously. They’re doing research on it for depression (at Harvard I think) and it seems to work wonders. — Noah Te Stroete

So I've heard. I have no experience with the drug.

What am I saving and why? — schopenhauer1

The life you save may be your own?

I think what Un is talking about, and he can speak for himself, is something called "grace". Grace is freely given and unearned. You probably are suspicious of grace, or unfamiliar with the idea. It's not charity and it's not materialistic. Suppose you don't like, don't believe in God? Is there then no grace for you? Grace isn't a deal: We don't -- we can't -- do anything for it. It's a gift. "I believe in God the father, almighty" isn't an incantation that forces god to shell out grace. I haven't audited god's accounts, but as far as I know, god can give grace to whoever--believers and nonbelievers, Hindus and atheistic communists.

Is there a secular, non-christian, non-religious version of grace? Yes, and it is elusive. It's a paradox that you can not struggle to get grace. You can't force even godless grace to just appear. You can prepare yourself but you have to let grace happen to you. (At least, that's the way I understand it.) It's like love -- you can't make yourself love somebody, and you can't force somebody to love you. But what you can do is let it happen.

You have to "let go".

Meditation would probably help you, if you were directed toward the right goal.

But that’s the attitude change. If it’s a choice, what does it mean to choose society’s need for production? At the end of the day that’s what I’m choosing. — schopenhauer1

You don't have to choose "society's need for production". There is over production as it is.

There is no rebellion outside of the abstract notions which are just talk around the behemoth material social reality that is to be accepted with joy. — schopenhauer1

I know people who didn't, who haven't accepted the behemoth material society reality with joy. I didn't accept it with job. To paraphrase the liturgy of baptism, "...behemoth material society reality, I reject you" (instead of "Satan, I reject you").

I, and others, like you may have to put up with social crap, but we don't have to rejoice in it. You can be as nonconforming as you can manage, and have as little as you can to do with the toilet full of social crap. Granted, it isn't easy. If you have to work (for daily bread) then you are likely to be dealing with at least some social crap. But you don't have to soak in it up to your eyeballs like some people do.

Keep complaining -- it's good for people to hear dissenting voices. But for your own happiness, carve out a little niche where you can feel OK at least sometimes.

What does one do when one is born but doesn't want to do what is required of being alive? — schopenhauer1

Drop dead? No, just a snarky comment -- not a serious suggestion.

Since you do exist, as unfortunate as that might be, it would seem that you could do whatever you wanted to do to make life as pleasant for yourself as possible. Of course there are downsides to existence. Gravity, for instance. It's a drag. Life sucks.

At times, we all can feel the futility of soldiering on through the swamp of existence. You are not the first person to lament it. You do seem unusually immobile, however. I don't know what idea or drug or strategic shove would get you moving again. Here in the northland winter people are forever getting stuck, spinning their wheels on ice. Sometimes pushing doesn't help. It's tough to get out of an ice rut. But... eventually they do, else they are found in the spring, frozen, clutching a nihilist anti-natalist tract in their dead hands. Figuratively, of course.

You have an idée fixe. You could dislodge it with a little effort and that might help.

It's cool and trendy to hate Ayn Rand. And I don't know why. Because what she says is amazing. — AppLeo

No, people have been loathing Ayn Rand for decades. It's old hat.

That you are 20 years old correlates well with liking Ayn Rand. Young adults, moving toward independence, in college or starting to build a career, equity... tend to like her. I read her several decades ago and thought she was, you know, OK. At my age of 72 she is not on my list of books to re-read; if I was sure I had another 30 years of mental acuity (and existence, of course), I'd find time to revisit her, but... the clock is ticking.

Yeah, you probably wouldn't know who Flannery O'Connor is. She was a Georgia writer whose short stories wonderfully expressed her rather dry, unsentimental Roman Catholic faith. She died at age 40 in 1964 from Lupus (an immune system disease). Some of her stories were regulars in freshman literature anthologies. She's hopelessly politically incorrect these days; a Flannery O'Connor story would be a multiple triggering event for fragile college students.

And now I know who John Rogers is.

William F. Buckley, conservative author, public intellectual, publisher of National Review, etc. interviewed Rand, but I can't find the clip I was looking for. Below is an Ayn Rand interview from 1979 with Phil Donahue, who is nothing like Buckley. I mention these just to note that Rand used to be a quite visible personality, and lots of people saw her on TV, as well as read her best selling books.

Here's the first Paragraph of Buckley's Ayn Rand obituary.

Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was, in fact, stillborn. The great public crisis in Ayn Rand’s career came, in my judgment, when Whittaker Chambers took her on—in December of 1957, when her book Atlas Shrugged was dominating the best-seller list, lecturers were beginning to teach something called Randism, and students started using such terms as “mysticism of the mind” (religion), and “mysticism of the muscle” (statism). Whittaker Chambers, whose authority with American conservatives was as high as that of any man then living, wrote in National Review, after a lengthy analysis of the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy, “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

Welcome. I'm glad you took a step past reading and wrote something.

Is there anything that Tom, Dick, or Harry could have done 10 years ago that would matter? — ZhouBoTong

Indeed there are things that could, would, and should matter 10 years later.

Let's say that Tom was being considered for a job in a bank, and had been convicted of embezzlement 10 years earlier. That would be a fatal problem for his application.

Let's say that Dick was being considered for a job in a bank as a security guard, and had an arrest for assault and battery. He paid a fine, no jail time. Security guard? Minor assault? Might be an advantage. Hire him.

Let's say that Harry was being considered for a job as loan officer. 10 years ago in college a woman accused him of attempting to force her to have sex with him. There was no police investigation, the college took no action after a cursory investigation, They were both 18 years old at the time. The bank has no idea what happened, except the record on social media revived by @me2. Apparently it wasn't very serious; the college or the police would probably have acted if a claim of rape had been made, especially if an exam showed that he had raped her. However, none of that happened.

I say it should be ignored because they were both juveniles at the time, both capable of misinterpreting the other's signals. No rape occurred. The woman didn't accuse him of attempted rape, but attempted sex (somewhat different). He has no criminal record; he has an excellent employment record since graduation (3.9 gpa). This ghost from his past is too tenuous to worry about. Hire him.

In the context of #me2, women (or men) can make an accusation of merely inappropriate behavior that is usually unsubstantiated or unwitnessed, and expect that everyone should believe the veracity of their accusation. No, sorry. Unsupported accusations are not good enough. Coming forward and accusing someone of unpleasant or criminal behavior that happened 10 or 20 years ago when the claim can not now be investigated by more than hearsay evidence is not fair. Now, some events that happened in the past can be investigated. If a rape investigation was made, the evidence (tissue sample) probably still exists. If someone murdered someone 10 or 20 years ago and was not previously accused but now has been, police can usually make some kind of investigation and either find evidence or no evidence.

The standards that are being applied in all sorts of situations in response to statements or actions which may be in fact innocuous often border on hysteria. Institutions are SO concerned about negative publicity that they sometimes go to quite unjust extremes to distance themselves from someone who said the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way... etc.

It would be possible to train a crow, or a parrot to do this, and note, these were banded birds, so... I'm rooting for the crows, but how naive the crows were... don't know. Clearly they weren't all that naive by the time they made their televised debut. Now, IF one observed a crow doing this in a natural setting, that would be more impressive. Like, if you set up this experiment out by a corn field and waited for a crow to land on the platform of the experiment, and it sized things up and proceeded to perform as filmed... Even better would be if the crows found their own pieces of gravel and dropped it into the tube.

Still, birds have been observed using sticks (which they had to "prepare") to spear insects in tree crevices.

The Minnesota DNR has a batch of cameras set up in various places to catch wildlife doing their thing without people being around. One of the cameras observed a wolf fishing. The wolf was beside a typical creek where one would find non-game fish like suckers swimming around. Interestingly, the wolf watched the water, grabbed a sucker, then deposited it on the bank above the water (biting it to kill it). Then it went and repeated the fish capture. It had 5 or 6 not-very-big fish collected before it ate them.

No one has observed wolves fishing, that I know of. Was this a pioneer wolf or is this just previously unobserved behavior? Don't know.

There's been enough videos made of various animals (like squirrels and raccoons) figuring out how to open doors, for instance, and not just by pushing, for us to suppose that they are capable of fairly complex problem solving. Cats and dogs are observed doing some of these sorts of things too.

Okay, so eating a human infant is fine then? — NKBJ

See A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.

see above. Is it employing any reasoning at all, or just randomly plucking at straws, so to speak?

Well, I don't know how they do it either. I'm not sure how my brain solves problems (or frequently doesn't even recognize that there is a problem).

But take the crows that figure things out that are of interest to crows--like fishing a grub floating on water in a tube, but below the level the crow can reach with it's beak... The crow, in this situation, picked up pebbles and dropped them into the tube--raising the water level until the grub was close enough to grab.

Trial and error? (I've certainly used that method successfully on a couple of occasions. Read the instructions when all else fails...) Now, the experimenters had placed a solution at hand (or at beak). Supposed several different kinds of objects -- twigs, bits of polystyrene foam, little ball bearings... small stones. How long would the crow have taken to figure out that only bits of stone worked well? Would the crow have checked out the options first, and then selected small stones?

Crows have large bird brains and they are very social. They make many sounds besides their familiar 'caw'. They maintain relationships with their parents over a year at least. They can recognize specific human faces (identifying the faces attached to people they consider trouble as opposed to faces of people who tossed food around). And it is the face, not the body -- masks were used in the experiment and birds used the mask to identify the wearer. In the experiment there was some indication -- not a lot but some -- that crows could pass this information about nuisance or useful people from one generation to another -- not biologically, but by 'communication' of some sort. Unfortunately, too many of the crows had disappeared during the au natural experiment to produce much data on this last item. One adolescent child of the surviving parent crow did correctly recognize a mask as trouble. But... too little data to be trusted.

If squirrels and crows could cross breed, they's probably be running things.

I mean yeah, but that observation is trivial and doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Humans need to reason and cannot rely on instinct to live. — AppLeo

The real "grand scheme" puts humans and animals in the boat together. One of the ways religion poisons, is by splitting humans off from the rest of the animal kingdom, claiming divine favor, godliness, exclusive reason, etc. for humankind and a rather flat existence for everything else.

Much human behavior is genetically (or instinctually) directed--probably less than in other animals because our brains are organized for reasoned, instinctual over-rides. We tend to focus on behaviors we have reasoned control over, and pay much less attention to behaviors which are directed genetically.

Genetic control governs HOW we respond to WHAT. It doesn't govern whether we like Progresso more than Campbell soup, but it could very well govern how insistent we are about making our own soup. Instincts are what decide whether we will try -- and enjoy -- a ride on a roller coaster or not. Risk aversion or risk tolerance isn't something you choose.

As for animals reasoning, we have observed birds and mammals both doing problem solving. Crows are not reading Aristotle, but they have problems and they solve them--sometimes. We don't always solve our problems either, and we are reading Aristotle.

Animals can only know reality through observation. They navigate through life with their instinct.

Humans navigate with reason. — AppLeo

It would be more 'reasonable' to think of reason and instinct as a continuum rather than either/or. Non-human animals can exercise some reason and some human behaviors are instinctual.

The ancient idea of "an eye for an eye" was an advance in justice. The victim of an assault or a theft isn't entitled to inflict just any amount of damage he or she might wish--like death for the lost of an eye. Damage and punishment should be balanced.

Balancing damage and punishment is still a sound principle. The theft of property isn't worth capital punishment -- though as recently as 250 years ago in England it was. Even the criminal's death is not considered a balanced punishment for killing someone in many jurisdictions around the world. (Though there are places were being gay merits the death sentence.)

More enlightened policy calls for rehabilitation or restorative justice, if restoration is possible (as it would be in the case of petty theft).

Back in the 1960s was it? Dr. Karl Meininger, a psychiatrist, wrote about The Crime of Punishment--where the form of punishment the state uses is a crime in itself. Being imprisoned in a hell hole for 30 years for drug crimes probably counts as a crime in itself. Juveniles are certainly subjected to criminalized punishment.

Have you seen The Sopranos--Tony Soprano, et al, the TV several year long serial story about the mafia? The Mafia was very strict about the rules. Break a rule and you'll find yourself being strangled to death. Or shot, beaten to a pulp, and so on. The Sopranos illustrates the question of why we like this creep and his crooked cronies. I don't know. I really enjoyed watching the series, even though the Soprano and Co. behavior was repulsive.

How do we become moral people? We become moral because, as children, we fear punishment. We are told to behave properly, or we will be punished (required to be quiet for 10 minutes or being spanked). The child fears the loss of the parents' love, so it anxiously complies with demands to behave properly.

The small child internalizes this system, and as the child matures, the system remains in place but becomes more sophisticated. So it is, that adults do not need to be threatened with punishment every 5 minutes. They understand that behaving properly is better, and when they don't behave properly -- even if they are not detected -- they feel very guilty. Guilt is a gift that keeps on giving society well behaved people.

There are some people with varying degrees of psychopathy for whom this system of internalization was not possible. They don't have strong connections between their pre-frontal cortex and their limbic system -- the emotional center where guilt, love, fear, etc. live. It may be that the lack of neural connections between PRC and LS are literal.

Does the justice system work? Like locks exist for honest people, laws exist for moral, self controlled people. Once a crime is committed, the person needs to either be dissuaded from committing crime again, or they need to be secluded from society. Some people never commit a crime again after being punished (or they don't commit that particular crime again, anyway) and others get even better at crime, and do crime again and again.

The best way to reduce crime (there is no such thing as eliminating crime) is for adults to do a good job raising moral children. Unfortunately, there are people raising children who do not know shit from shinola. Their homes are too chaotic and disorganized for proper love, tender care, and beneficial discipline to operate. The children in these homes are screwed from the get go.

And, of course, adults who had excellent rearing occasionally decide to act against some social interest or rule. I have always been a very well behaved person, law abiding, and so forth; but even I have, on occasion, decided to commit some minor criminal offense. We need not go into details, but I think this is really quite common.

Some people, some societies, are just more crime prone than others. For instance, somebody told me a joke once... it was the recipe for an omelet from the Balkans. Step one: steal six eggs.

It appears we are out of luck. This thread does not seem to be the definitive discussion of abortion.

among libertarians — AppLeo

Which you sound a lot like.

What gives you the right to distribute money. — AppLeo

Well, to the best of my knowledge, no body has given me the right to distribute money. I do have some ideas about what to do with a few hundred billion dollars. I do not expect to get the opportunity.

Do you know what capitalism is? — AppLeo

Ummm, I think I have some vague notion of what it is, yes.

Which means capitalism is the only system that values the individual — AppLeo

Surely you must be joking, Mr. AppLeo.

You know what's greedy? People who want to take money from the rich even though the rich created their wealth through sheer productive ability and built major businesses that increased the quality of life for everybody. — AppLeo

Very lame. If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich? Or, if you are so rich, why are you not smarter? It's a puzzlement.

Labor creates all wealth. Some people have ideas, some people are able to marshal investment capital and arrange for a factory to be built. But the building the factory and making whatever is made in the factory (useful goods or wasteful crap) is made by workers transforming raw materials into commodities of one sort or another. People get rich by expropriating the surplus value that workers (the vast majority of the population) create.

It's a pity philosophers don't take her more seriously. — Wallows

John Rogers (whoever the hell he is) says “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Flannery O'Connor says "I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

Karl Marx had nothing to do with the American Experiment, yet we committed genocide upon the aboriginal peoples in our territory and we brutally enslaved millions of Africans. 1 in 25 men were killed during the civil war (population of 16m males, 640k killed). We seized the northern half of Mexico for ourselves. Former slaves experienced decades of terrorism. Labor obtained an 8 hour day and a 40 hour week only through bitter struggle. Roughly 50,000 people a year were killed on the highway for decades because of bad but very profitable engineering. so on and on

We are quite willing to attribute the horrors of the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution to Karl Marx, but we are reluctant to attribute anything to the spirit of free enterprise in which the US was conceived. Maybe we are not looking closely enough?

Our species is not very nice a good share of the time, regardless of the economic system we operate within. Everyone (especially in groups) are capable of doing really bad things. Human history 9or the last couple of centuries) is chock full of horror stories, all true and many understated.

My point? Capitalism, Industrialism, National Socialism, Communism, Maoism--pick your poison--entail massive processes which end up crushing the individual. Yeah, Communism was not nice, but it managed to achieve enough industrial production in less than a quarter century between 1918 and 1941 to defend itself from and defeat the German army. Nazi Germany was capable of prodigious production to support its war, and the UK and US pulled off equally amazing feats of production.

You don't like distributivism; I don't think economic freedom (unfettered free enterprise) is a good thing.

It just seems to me that democratic socialism, with its curbs and limits on corporate excess and individual greed offers more advantages for the future than another hundred years of predatory capitalism.

The literature seems consistent that mothers nearly always grieve termination of their pregnancy. — tim wood

Even though I am in favor of abortion being legal and readily accessible, I wouldn't for a moment suggest that aborting a fetus is a matter of indifference to the parents, particularly to the woman who experiences it first hand. A very early miscarriage can send parents into grieving, depending on the emotional investment in the pregnancy. For most people, conceiving, delivering, and parenting children is the central experience.

On the other hand, ending a pregnancy one didn't wish for, and preventing the child that was not planned on and perhaps definitely not wanted is also a great relief. Bearing the unwanted child is no small burden, and lasts a long time.

Which problem -- the problem of class or the problem of getting a good education?

For those in the upper classes, there is no class problem. They are at the top, they like it, and they plan on staying on the top.

The class problem belongs to working class people who spend their lives producing wealth which ends up concentrated in the hands of the richest .001% to 5% of the population. The solution is for working class people (who are at least 90% of any country's population) to understand how much they are getting screwed by the rich. Labor produces all wealth, ultimately, and when labor withholds its labor, the mighty will fall.

Yeah, you've heard something about this idea -- it's from Karl Marx. The solution is revolution: The revolution of redistribution of wealth and power. OK, so you don't like what happened in China, the USSR, or Cuba. Fine. You don't have to like it. Marx didn't spell out how the working class should put together a new, just society. Surely Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn't have all the good ideas.

The new society will be built by the working class as they see fit.

As for getting a good education, no matter what high school you went to, no matter what college you graduated from - Podunk State or Harvard - commit yourself to life-long learning. Education is always achieved by the individual through individual effort. This has been proven many times: Students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Berkeley who screwed around all the time learned nothing. Some people who never went to college became quite learnéd.

many bloody revolutions have been ignited by the melancholic. — TheMadFool

Or by the very pissed off.

The current psychiatric method of treating depression seems to be just an ad-interim measure - staving off the serious consequences of depression - — TheMadFool

True, because that is what is possible for a psychiatrist and a patient given the present conditions.

without any attempt to correct the larger causative social ills. — TheMadFool

The larger, causative social ills are going to require a revolution (literally, if not figuratively) to resolve. Who is going to do this? Everybody is going to do it because the problems are that big, or it isn't going to happen at all.

The deeper roots of opposition to abortion are that the fetus belongs to either a god or the father. An abortion deprives a god or a man of a baby. Men beget babies, women bear them. Women are suppose to get pregnant and bear children. That's their function. Aborting a fetus is a perversion of women's function.

In many societies controlling what women do has been an overriding concern. Women are supposed to be subservient (obedient servants). It isn't their place to make important decisions about life and death. Women are not entitled to decide whether to bear a child or not. Fewer and fewer people accept these notions.

We can not suppose that abortion of a 5 month or less fetus is a horrible experience for the fetus. It is not, because at 20 weeks, fetuses have neither consciousness to experience horrible experiences nor a sufficiently developed CNS to feel pain.

Later on, At 8 months for example, a fetus can feel pain, and can usually survive if delivered at that time.

I believe an acceptable position is that "Abortions may be performed up to the end of the 20th week without justification. After 20 weeks, abortion may be performed only if the fetus is found to have developed very abnormally, or its continued presence in the women endangers the life of the mother.

20 weeks is more than sufficient for a woman to consider whether bearing a child is an appropriate decision for her to make.

Aside from the individual men, women, and fetuses involved, the welfare of the world is at stake. Every effective means of birth control must be in play: sterilization, contraception through drugs or barriers, and abortion are all important methods of limiting fertility.