Confessions of a regular mind

On rare animals, the futility of predictions and rebels without a cause

2011-10-27T00:00:00.000+03:00

Nicholas Taleb is an epistemologist/mathematician/philosopher/risk engineering professor who wrote a book called The Black Swan. Nothing unpredictable until now. Mathematicians are prone, statistically speaking, to write books about predictions. Taleb is one of them. Nevertheless, it is what Taleb proposed that is unpredictable. Black Swans are rare events with maximum impact, which, as in the phenomenological world, depend upon the observer: "What may be a surprise, a rare event for a turkey, it is not a rare event for the butcher, or what was a rare event, a black swan, for victims of September 11th was not a black swan for terrorists.”

Taleb says that the triad that governs our lives is composed of rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability. How comes “retrospective”? What kind of predictability is that if there's no perspective? Simply, we do not realize the potential predictability until things happen retrospectively. In other words, after the events of September 11, putting together what we have learnt, made it look easy to predict what happened.

Predictability is the degree to which one can make a prediction or prognosis of a system or condition, thing that can be done quantitatively or qualitatively. In other words, to forecast is to make prophecies based on data collection.

Taleb is convinced that the Gauss Bell, which makes us feel normal (so predictable and banal, even though we all secretly want to get out of it and be exceptions) is "the greatest intellectual fraud as it does not study extreme deviations but focuses on normal, giving us the impression of taming uncertainty. "

But the author argues that both amateur statisticians and other prophets (such as social scientists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, etc.) operate with the false confidence that they can measure the uncertainty, whatever they predict being no more accurate than astrology. Ouch, I know. The author of Lebanese origin (or Levantine, as he likes to call himself) argues that this combination of low predictability and high impact makes out of a black swan an enigma, blinding us in front of the randomness. In this sense, Taleb proposes the following exercise: "take into account the significant events, inventions and technological changes in our environment that have occurred since your birth and compare them with what was expected before their appearance. "

"Is it not strange that an event will take place precisely because it is not expected to take place?" Taleb asks rhetorically. Not exactly, we should be tempted to respond, though he does not expect us to answer, as the exceptions are predictable and we do expect them to happen. We expect that the exceptions and the extremities of Gauss Bell to exist and take place. We expect that a woman over the age of 35 to be more likely to bear a child with Down syndrome. What we do lack indeed is our mental and physical preparation to cope with such rare events. Although Taleb launches an interesting hypothesis, namely "the inability to predict isolated cases implies failure to predict the course of history" it is not necessarily so. We are able to predict the occurrence of isolated cases. The Lebanese Civil War that took place in 1975-1990, which Taleb gives as an example insisting that there was no prerequisite for its appearance, was expected for both Lebanese and the rest of the Arab or European populace. Sure, the war was a false black swan for the Fiji Islanders. I say false because the Lebanese civil war, although a rare event, had a minimal impact on the people of Fiji Islands. The socio-political context of 1975 Lebanon was volatile and tense. One does not have to be a sociologist to realize that when the arm trafficking increases, some 15 religious sects coexist on a small territory of 10.000 sq km, all applied to a society with a highly flammable temperament is almost self-understood that a conflict will not delay to appear. .

If you are still not convinced that whatever happens cannot be subjected to predictability, and that we are victims of randomness, then let's do the exercise that Taleb proposed: "Examine your own life, choosing a profession, meeting your partner, the origin of your country exile, the betrayals that you have suffered or the sudden enrichment or impoverishment. Whenever these things adhered to a plan? ". Not many times, right?

Frankly, the equation above equaled for me in a result with many decimals and a bunch of X factors, currently being the outcome of irrational and unexpected choices rather than of calculated and rational ones.

Although we like to think we are rational and act on the basis of calculations dominated by Nash equilibrium (a player who has no advantage is the one who changes strategy) and zero-sum game (that game where the sum is zero earnings) both Taleb’s and Ariely’s conclusion, his Israeli neighbor, is that we are deeply chaotic and irrational animals. One of the highlights of our irrationality is altruism. However, evolutionary psychologists argue that we our altruism is nothing more than kin reciprocity and, by extension, the aid we offer to a complete stranger is ordered by out archaic brain, which lies to us by saying that stranger could be a member of our tribe.

Nash equilibrium, underlined by the Coward Paradox, can be seen in action in the film Rebel without a Cause, where two vehicles drive toward each other in full speed. Whoever steers the wheel (the coward) first, loses. The principle is to create enough pressure, until someone fails.

OK, if we are rational and predictable beings, we can calculate which of the two people will give up and will steer the wheel. Sure, with a margin of error, knowing the history of the two, their physical, mental and socio-cultural context, we can predict who is more likely to pull the wheel, saving his life and being, paradoxically, a loser. On the other hand, ironically enough, the irrational one that does not pull the wheel, and who blindly throws himself into a possible collision, does some sort of calculation of benefits minus costs, and by acting that way he increases his status that comes with the "courageous” label. Sometimes bluffing works. Therefore, the irrational individual, who is willing to risk his life (in a stupid way, we might add), makes his calculation, maybe not at the conscious level, and he is the one that ends up with an increased status. Isn’t irrationality beneficial after all? If irrationality weren’t good for us, we would have gotten rid of it like we got rid of the claws and fur.

People are a shallow and dishonest race, says Taleb, besides being irrational, add Dan Ariely, Kahneman and Tversky, who proposed that our judgments are based on uncertainty (alternatives with uncertain results) and probabilities.

The emergence of a black swan does not invalidate the hypothesis that all swans are white, although with Karl Popper in mind we might say that's enough to have just one black swan to falsify the idea that all swans are white. However, not all statements that are falsifiable in principle are falsifiable in practice, such as "it will rain here in a million years" is theoretically falsifiable, but not practically. Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian philosopher, rejected the perspective of naïve falsificationism, according to which all theories must be rejected in their totality, if they are falsified, meaning infirmed by empirical and experimental results. However, naïve falsification does not supply a way of handling competing hypotheses for instance conspiracy theories and urban legends. People arguing that there is no support for such an observation may argue that the differences are too small to be statistically significant. Therefore, naïve falsification does not enable scientists, who rely on objective criteria, to present a definitive falsification of universal statements.

Taleb seems an extremist epistemologist: he cannot stand the Gauss Bell, the statisticians, the scientists who are looking for theories just to fool themselves, and our impulse to focus on what seems logical. But in a world proposed by Taleb, where we are like the yellow leaves of the branch barely hanging in the wind of uncertainty, how much can we maintain our mental health?

The ordinary human being behaves like a scientist and this is how he acts best in the world: he forms a prediction system which reduces his level of anxiety. We use the statistics that give us a calculated lie and along with it the peace of mind that we ourselves are not the exceptions, but the average. When we take the plane, we say that, statistically speaking is the safest means of transport, being more likely to die in a car accident in the city or in a domestic accident, slipping in the shower, rather than in a plane crash. However, still statistically speaking, in a car accident, you have more chance of survival than in a plane crash.

Taleb does not insist that we should try to predict a rare event, which is impossible, but to build robustness in front of the negative black swans and exploit the positive black swans as much as we can.

Ariely has studied this very issue (of irrationality which is, from his point of view, totally predictable) and concluded that people have one defining feature- emotion based irrationality. Ariely has proposed an experiment, which shows that fully grown men are lost and forget what is rational, in certain circumstances. Namely, he asked the subjects to answer questions in a state of calmness, then answer the same questions while being sexually aroused, dominated by emotion, while masturbating. Obviously, the outcome was predictable. No matter how lucid, informed and rational seemed the subjects in a non-aroused state, the more they become irrational and took the worst decision while being aroused. Thus, people who knew they should not have unprotected sex, who believed that cannot possibly be attracted to 12 year old girls, or believed they would never have sex with another man or animal, or seemed repulsed to the idea of an urinating woman, or felt they did not like to have their ass slapped while having sex, have radically changed their choices when the decisions were taken under the sway of emotion.

Suddenly, all their choices of rational, moral and informed people, went down the drain and most said they were ready to have sex with men, animals, fat women, 12 year old girls, people they hated, that they would drug or get drunk their partner to have sex with her, or that would have sex with someone even if she said no, that would not use condoms if they were too excited, even if they did not know the sexual history of their partner and are aware of the HIV/AIDS dangers. What does this experiment tell us about ourselves? That our choices are not rational, that we are not rational human beings, and that the situations when we make take decisions are not ideal and we are not fully informed individuals; the impressions we formed about ourselves are way too good and way too wrong; that we have many convictions which we should not have; that our will can be broken at any time and that our power to decide does not lay in the rapidity we concoct logical inferences but in our limbic system. Pretty predictable, no?

The People versus Satoshi Kanazawa

2011-06-07T14:35:00.002+03:00

I have read Satoshi’s posts any now and then. Sometimes for scientific amusement, other times for his incontestable journalistic flamboyant style. Not once I felt offended by his hypothesis as at all times I had an inconvenient truth in mind: “science - if you don’t piss people off, you aren’t doing it right”.

Without being subject of comparison, Satoshi forwarded, like many of his predecessors (Socrates, Darwin, Crick, Kevorkian etc), some cheeky but mainly bothering and sensitive headlines, yet loved by the media and fellow Psychology Today bloggers alike. He picked on every minority equally, trying to look deep inside the human mind and giving human behavior a rough scrutiny.

However, no one protested when he said that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was an act of utmost compassion, or why suicide bombers are Muslim (lack of sex), liberals are more intelligent or women are essentially prostitutes, or even called Victoria Beckham a whore (a word he later removed). Why did so many people get irritated to the point where they asked Kanazawa’s head on a silver plate, when he called black women ugly? Are the egos of the colored minority so fragile, to the point where they only felt safe if they discarded the Japanese psychologist from the academia ? Less fragile than those of Asians, Eastern European Jews, Conservatives, women, gays or David and Victoria Beckham’s, which were all subjects of Satoshi’s sharp scientific tongue?

I am almost certain that most of us rejoiced and had a warm feeling of self-fulfilled prophecy and a big fat confirmation bias when Satoshi wrote an entire book about how beautiful people have more daughters. You, parents of daughters, have just been scientifically confirmed you are beautiful, haven’t you? As long as he told us what we wanted to hear and validated our strong opinions about ourselves, we tacitly smirked and admired his acid journalistic style to only burn the man alive when he touched a more sensitive issue.

Many of his Psychology Today fellow bloggers asked for his apologies, the students at the London School of Economics petitioned for his resignation and basically quite a handful of associations of various political colors insisted to show the world they back the human rights of not being considered less attractive by some eccentric scientist. The man was vilified and his career is at a crossroad. Are his accusers happy? To my recollection, no one really remembers Anytus, Meletus and Lycon as doing the world a favor from saving the Athenian youth from corruption, but you certainly all heard about Socrates. Some might say that comparing Satoshi with Crick, Darwin or Socrates might be a bit far fetched and to those I can reply that they all had one goal alone: they were true to themselves, and mostly they served a truth they believed in. Sure, you might say, so did Hitler, Stalin and all the “racist purifiers” who turned a simple stereotype into mere atrocities. As make no mistake: a stereotype that is not held in check leads to the Holocaust, there is no doubt about that. Yet, are we one step away from such thing that we so imperiously felt the urge to take measures against one man and excommunicate him?

Come to think of it, stereotypes, like legends, are founded on a core of truth. Generalizing them is painful, but nevertheless stereotypes are true. They are, after all, oversimplifications of a set of attributes a group of individuals have, especially underlying the negative ones. However, it doesn’t mean they are not based on true attributes. OK, the fact that we nonchalantly dismiss so many people and stereotype Americans as fat, doesn’t mean they are not fat. In this particular case, though, the minority of 40% that are within weight limits might feel offended, but yes, Americans, most of them, are fat.

Stereotypes are usually formed on “the basis of prejudice and are employed to explain real or imaginary differences due to race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, socio-economic class, disability, and occupation, among the limitless groups one may be identified with”. Real is, in this context, key!

Unfortunately, stereotypes don’t seem to affect only the minorities. If someone, who is still not politically and correctly aligned with the new E.U. norms and regulations, addresses Romanians as gypsies, the latter will feel offended. Being identified with this particular ethnic minority, came in time to mean an insult. The gypsies themselves have their roots somewhere in India. They are nomad people who are generously spread all over the world, but mostly in Eastern Europe. Some of the members of this minority steal, kill, rape and pillage. So do the members of a Danish or Swiss society, of course, with less frequency, but when that happens, it must have been an “immigrant”. Hence, the entire minority of gypsies is labeled consequently. Moreover, a country that hosts a large number of this particular minority came to being labeled as such. The problem with stereotypes is that sometimes creates double standards. The inference is this: when applied to a minority based on what a majority is, might result in a truism, when applied from a minority towards a majority tends to be false. Ayn Rand, whom I particularly don’t like but I happen to agree with at times, once said “whenever you think you are facing contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong”.

I can't believe I am quoting Wikipedia, but here it goes: “sociologists believe that labeling is not only necessary but is inescapable. Even though stereotyping is inaccurate, it is efficient. Categorization is an essential human capability because it enables us to simplify, predict, and organize our world. Once one has sorted and organized everyone into tidy categories, there is every incentive to avoid processing new or unexpected information about each individual. Assigning general group characteristics to members of that group saves time and satisfies the need to predict the social world.” So all we have to do is set our stereotypes straight to save everyone’s time.

History taught us that either absorbed in childhood or at a later stage in life, once it is learnt a stereotype becomes self perpetuating. It dejectedly becomes an immune disease of our mental patterns.

David Cronenberg once said that “all stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true”.

What is truly painful is that fellow scientists hurried in a mob mentality frenzy, as if they didn’t know any better, to crucify Kanazawa. Some said what he did was not science, others used his data to prove black on white that Black women are scientifically proven as being attractive. And that is the end of it, we use science as the ultimate proof to make a point, forgetting it should be neutral. But we are not neutral, so why should science be?

As a woman, an Eastern European with a half Middle Easterner child, I had multiple reasons to dislike “the scientific fundamentalist” Satoshi Kanzawa and yet I didn’t. Am I more tolerant than the rest of the civilized Western world? Maybe not, and Juno knows I am prone, like anybody else, to stereotyping, which is an active process of simplifying our surroundings and ease up our cognitive processes.

Yet, this time, Satoshi seemed to have stepped on a few sensible toes and most probably the reasons for which he is being ostracized are mostly political.

As someone who was born, raised and lived most of her teenage years under a communist dictatorship I always and unconditionally admired the ease and luxury of free speech the civilized West had. After a while, I realized there is no freedom, as we have no free will – another debate that is worth a two cent opinion-, and political correctness is just another trick invented by the spin doctors to get a few extra votes from the minorities. And sadly, the West never seemed uglier that these days.

About disgust, purulent infections and politicians

2011-04-27T16:40:00.003+03:00

Feces, vomit, urine, sexual fluids, mucus, spoiled food, fleas, cockroaches, flies, lice, rats, dirty objects, bodily mutilation, surgical operations, organs and blood, death (or decomposing corpses) infections, pus, incest, cannibalism and politicians. All these things disgust us.

Anthropologist Richard Shweder also proposes the following list of actions that could make us say, yuck, this is so goddamn wrong, and be disgusted, guilty, ashamed or outraged: masturbation, homosexuality, abstinence, polygamy, abortion, circumcision , corporal punishment, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, democracy, burning flags, mini skirts, long hair, baldness, children sleeping in the same bed with parents, granting women the right to work and not allowing women the right to work. I almost forgot pedophilia, pornography, prostitution, zoophilia, begging and swearing.

Disgust all the way. Within a couple, it seems that there is no chance to safeguard the relationship when disgust occurs. Most flaws seem forgivable, but if one day, the habit of collecting the husband’s dirty socks and underwear begin to disgust you, be sure that is the beginning of the end. But disgust is not only linked to unpleasantly stimulating smell or visual senses, it can be generated by a variety of behaviors, from infidelity to personal habits such as nail biting or picking your nose or teeth. Or arranging the testicles inside your pants.

Before the plethora of articles on disgust, there were only a couple of definitions about it, one as it was drawn by Darwin in "In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" which says that disgust refers to something revolting. “Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. Andras Angyal (1941) defined disgust as repulsion to the idea of incorporating an offensive object.
The fact is that most times, disgust is associated with a visceral response rather than morality, although there are few situations in which we declare our disgust vis-a-vis the political class, unusual sexual practices or massacres of other nations.

The insula is the main neural structure involved in the emotion of disgust and has been shown by several studies to be the main neural correlate of the feeling of disgust both in humans and in macaque monkeys. Stark and colleagues concluded in a 2007 study that both fear and disgust resulted in activations in the occipital cortex, prefrontal cortex and in the amygdala but the insula activation was only significantly correlated with ratings of disgust, pointing to a specific role of this brain structure in the processing of disgust.

OK, what would happen to someone who would have an affected insula? Logically speaking, this person would be unable to feel disgust. Calder (2000) and Adolphs (2003) showed that lesions on the anterior insula lead to deficits in the experience of disgust and recognizing facial expressions of disgust in others. How useful is the ability to experience disgust, from an adaptive point of view? Evolutionary psychology advances the idea that disgust is adaptive, but what is not adaptive to the evolutionists? Therefore, we feel disgusted with anything that might attack us or harm our physical and mental health. Nausea during pregnancy associated with a profound feeling of disgust to food odors is explained by an ancestral precaution to protect the body from rotten food or poisonous odors, which could endanger both mother and fetus.

From a physiological angle, as opposed to fear and anger, which are associated with a predominant response of the sympathetic system, and come with increased heart rate, disgust can produce specific answers in the parasympathetic system, such as low blood pressure, decreased heart rate and decreased skin conductance.

In terms of taxonomy, disgust has been on the list of basic emotions along with anger, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise as they were categorized by Eckman.

So,what is disgust? A visceral sense of disgust, reflected by the mirror neurons? Can we feel self-disgusted? Is it a defense mechanism? Or is it something deeper and exclusively human, such as moral disgust toward certain actions of our peers? However we define it, it is clear that disgust compels us to distance ourselves from an object, event or situation and can be characterized briefly as a rejection (Haidt, 2008). However, unlike other emotions that can be measured by an external observer, disgust is generally measured by self-reporting, based on our own value system, or physiological threshold of acceptance.

Yet, within the popular culture, disgust and disgusting acts are often associated with common sense frame, omitting the moral dimension of it. Etymologically speaking, the word comes from a Latin word which means taste. In this aspect, something disgusting amounts to something related to an immediate sense, with a wide range of synonyms which express about the same thing: aversion, nausea, horror, revulsion, loathing, repugnant, nasty. Or how bioethicist Leon Kass defined it disgust is “the wisdom of repulsion” (1997).

Wheatley and Haidt (2005) found for instance that hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe. So how do we react to the disgust? In addition to facial expression, we chose to seem outraged, revolted, or repulsed. But could the emotional or behavioral response may be associated with disgust?

Within philosophy, qualia is a term used to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience, and comes from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind".

„Qualia, the mental or feeling component of emotion, may be the most difficult to study. The qualia of disgust are often described as revulsion. In comparison to other emotions, the experience of disgust appears to be rather short in duration” (Scherer & Wallbott, 1994) unlike other emotions such as guilt, satisfaction, guilt or shame that are longer lasting and could be leading to chronicity. The intensity of disgust is generally short lived but intense, a chronic state of disgust could be leading to general weariness and possibly to heart problems.

Although the decoding of the emotional response of disgust is quasi universal, there are times when the taxonomy is more or less cross culturally applicable. What it seems disgusting to some, might not seem so to others. Just as the moral system can vary from one culture to another, so can vary our response to disgust, either visceral or moral. What seems to be acceptable in a society, e.g. self-flagellation, consumption of human flesh, incest (not to forget that in Africa 30-50% of marriages are consanguineous, and in the U.S., marriages between relatives were allowed until 1861), mutilation or body modification etc, it is considered taboo and unacceptable in another. Taboos are unwritten social laws and moral prohibitions, with a very strong social effect that seem to ordinate and "legislate" the taste of a community. While the violation of some taboos can lead to criminal penalties (incest would be an example), the violation of others only cause public disapproval or feelings of embarrassment or shame.

Although ideally the center of disgust has its cradle in the insula of all the homo sapiens sapiens, we are not uniformly disgusted. Disgust, therefore, goes hand in hand with the morality of a society, and this is often based on emotional predictors, which seem not to be universally valid. Doesn’t Donald Trump just disgust you? No, I don't mean his hair.

Smart people do not pay their taxes

2010-11-16T12:59:00.006+02:00

According to Merriam Webster, to tax means to make onerous and rigorous demands on the job, to charge, accuse or censure or to levy a tax on. Now, the word levy itself makes us think to conscription, collection and definitely imposition.

Consequently to tax means to constrain. Yet, we willingly pay it. Now, there is a catch. The willing part. How willing and free are we when the state (any state for that matter) makes us pay the taxes. We take pride in living in democratic and free countries, yet we cannot speak of freedom. Physical freedom does not exist as we are determined by biology. Have you tried to exercise free-will when you have a full bladder? Not much freedom to express, is there? Freedom to choose between evil and good, you say? Well, not exactly your choice, either. Empathy, and by extension morals, are determined by biology (think of the mirror neurons which play a key role in empathy and other conducts that we thought were exclusively moral). Moral reasoning is generated by emotion and not cognition and some studies have shown that the right temporo-parietal junction is the place of intentions, thoughts and beliefs. And that can be modified by applying a magnetic field to the scalp. Yes, there is a moral centre in the brain and we can fidget with it. Oh well, not very encouraging to know that we can send an innocent to jail or let a criminal walk free if we are under the influence (of a magnetic field, that is). But, let’s go back to taxation.

Let alone the lack of freedom at a physical level, we live in a society and that by itself implies a series of new restricted liberties: obey by the rules (social, political and so on) to be accepted. The key word here is obey. One cannot fully and justly claim that he is free when, at the end of each month, the state steps in and claims a part of his labor.
According to Nozick, when the state takes a dollar from Bill Gates (the example belongs to Michael Sandel from Harvard Uni), to give it to a poor one, it is as if the state forces Bill Gates to work for the poor person. I know, Bill Gates is rich and he can afford it. But we are not rich, and we are equally taxed. You too work for the poor and the unemployed. Is that fair, you might honestly ask? Not exactly, with all do respect for the poor and the unemployed. It is admirable indeed to freely give your money and your time to help the poor. But, what if you do not wish to give the money or the time?
We have to get used to the idea that some are more talented, others have more luck (meaning more chances and opportunities brought together at the right time), others work more or have a higher IQ. Why does the state oblige us to level these natural differences (let’s not kid ourselves, we are not equal) by setting up a false and badly understood equality? Communists tried to level people by force, based on the idea that we are all equal, so they graciously failed. Pretty much like all the communes based on Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, where goods, women and children were held in common. Communism did not fail because of the atrocities committed by its eventually corrupted rulers. It failed because it went against the very basic human law of property. Not everyone is willing to share and we tend to keep things for ourselves. Communism failed because it was too idealistic while humans are highly pragmatic.

The work imposed on another person without his consent is mere slavery and the taxation is theft. Continuing Sandel’s line of arguments let’s assume that Gates would have consented to voluntarily give away that dollar, and that would have been done based on his free will. I doubt anyone asks Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Julia Roberts or us, as a matter of fact, if we are willing to donate that dollar to the state. Or maybe in your part of the work, there is a dedicated person that asks for your consent at the end of each month, when you get the pay check, if you freely want to contribute to the general welfare. But I doubt that again, so consequently, the state takes some 31% (in the USA), some 50% (in Sweden) and 16% (in my homeland).

Honestly, not speaking of Jon Haidt type of moral judgments here, if there were no laws to keep us within the legal frames, how many of us would be willing to pay their taxes? Moreover, why?
To be able to enjoy agorism, meaning a truly free market, based on the volunteer exchange among free citizens, we need an elevated degree of conscience. And we, as species, lack that. And if we can outwit someone, we will.

Nevertheless, the libertarians claim – and I fully agree- that the fundamental right of each individual is the right to freedom. Meaning, we are theoretically born free, and we are not at the disposal of the society or the state’s demands. In other words, we are free to live our lives as we please as long as we respect the other people’s rights. Now, here is the catch: my rights pretty much end where the nose of others begins, and my inner freedom so highly praised by optimists is just a chimera. Allow me to attempt an explanation: although I am not a smoker, I do believe that smokers should be free to smoke their brains off without additional taxes or penalties imposed by a state with paternalist ambitions.
Maybe the state should not compel us to pay taxes for a future retirement pension, as it is our free and aware choice to live right here and right now, in the present, spending our income as we wish. The state’s attitude to decide what is good and what is bad for me, by forcing me by law to pay a facultative pension is condescending and highly offensive, and it reduces me to the position of an ignorant child (not that children are ignorant we just treat them as if they were).

But if I am treated like an ignorant child, who has no clue what is good for him, and I am imposed firm limits by a fatherly like state, why am I then forced to work like an adult?
Why does the state think that it is smarter and knows better than me? Don’t I really know that seatbelts can save my life? Do I need to be reminded with a fine that I can die if I don’t buckle them? Question: how comes that most democratic and free countries are in fact paternalist type states, that are warmly appreciated by their citizens for their social support and laws, where I am obliged to wear a helmet when I ride the bike or the seatbelt when I drive? Where is my right to have an accident or end my own life? Where is my free-will and my freedom as tax paying citizen? That is right, pretty much to hell.

To redistribute my income towards unemployed and poor (meaning the unique taxation which I, a single working mother, equally pay along with some Nouveau riche politician) is unjust. As simple as that.

I am not absurd and I do understand and agree that a certain level of taxation is needed and greeted, to entertain services that we all equally benefit from, such as ambulance, police, fire squad, or road maintenance. But why should I pay from my income the plastic bags that the city hall buys for the dog owners to pick up their feces? I certainly want a clean city, but I should not be obliged to pay for other people’s pets maintenance, no?

Taxation literarily implies taking off my own income, meaning ripping off the fruit of my labor without my consent. Now, Nozick asks, if the state gets a portion of my work without my consent, isn’t taxation morally equivalent with forced labor? And what is forced labor if not slavery? So what is taxation if not slavery?

Consequently, to tax someone equals coercion and to use a person for the general welfare – so praised by utilitarianism- is morally wrong as it doubts the moral foundation of self-possession. How can I be my own master if I cannot decide upon my fundamental rights of disposing of my labor as I please, of my right to live or die (assisted suicide is another example of a paternalist state who claims to respect human rights), the right of conscience of raising and educating my child as I please, since the state insures religious education by law- as if was supposed to assure me of her future moral spine. How can I pursue happiness if I cannot pursue freedom?

Placenta with garlic, anyone?

2010-11-01T15:01:00.019+02:00

His name is Armin. Not Armin Van Buuren, the Dutch DJ who sings In and Out of Love, but Armin Meiwes, a German citizen. In 2003, Armin, 42 and IT technician by trade, decided to post an Internet ad that read: "I am looking for a man, well done, about 20-30 years, to be killed and then consumed.” To his surprise, he received hundreds of responses, but only one appeared serious: that of Bernd Brandes. After a long correspondence, the two staged meeting that was to fulfill his dream. Below is an excerpt from the conversation that they had before committing the act (cator99 is the nickname of Bernd Brandes, and Armin Meiwes's antrophangus). Translated from German by Jina Moore.

CATOR99: Hallllooooo????
ANTROPHAGUS: Hi, Cator, what do you do professionally, that you are up so late at night?
CATOR99: I can’t sleep well anymore because of our meeting
ANTROPHAGUS: That’s a sensible reason. Yesterday I was incredibly tired, it was a stressful day
CATOR99: I’m in telecommunications
ANTROPHAGUS: Oh, that sounds interesting
CATOR99: I believe you
ANTROPHAGUS: I’m looking forward to our meeting; it will definitely be really cool
CATOR99: I want it to be! I hope it’ll be really cool. Are you setting an alarm clock?????
ANTROPHAGUS: It’s only a few days until March 9
CATOR99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth
ANTROPHAGUS: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth
CATOR99: I hardly know what to expect. Have you slaughtered a man before?
ANTROPHAGUS: Unfortunately, only in my dreams, but in my thoughts I do it every night
CATOR99: So I’m the first? You have eaten human flesh before, or you haven’t?
ANTROPHAGUS: No, you don’t exactly find it in the supermarket, unfortunately
CATOR99: How do you know if it will taste good to you, or that the blood won’t make you sick?
ANTROPHAGUS: I’m readying myself with my dreams. Once I was so excited I grabbed a needle and drew my own blood so I could drink it
CATOR99: And your blood, it tasted good to you?
ANTROPHAGUS: It was quite tasty. Once I was drilling some holes and the drill slipped right into my hand, that was a real treat. Blood is the juice of life. It contains everything a person needs for nutrition
CATOR99: Then I hope you won’t wilt, that you can really see it through without a problem
ANTROPHAGUS: To bite into your penis will certainly not be easy—living flesh is somewhat more resistant than fried—but one thing is certain: our dream will be fulfilled
CATOR99: But there’s not so much in it as there is in muscle
ANTROPHAGUS: Yeah, but the penis is principally a spongy material filled with blood
CATOR99: For both our sakes, I hope that’s true. I hope you have also already thought about what’s to be done with the rest. Fulfilling the dream shouldn’t become a nightmare for you. No one will know where I’ve disappeared to
ANTROPHAGUS: After you’re dead, I’ll take you out and expertly carve you up. Except for a pair of knees and some fleshy trash (skin, cartilage, tendons), there won’t be much of you left
CATOR99: There will be a good bit, like the knees, I hope you have a good hiding place for them
ANTROPHAGUS: I’ll dry out the knees and grind them up soon after
CATOR99: Okay, they’re good as fertilizer, I heard that once. I see you’ve thought about it. Good! Sounds like I’m the first
ANTROPHAGUS: And you won’t be the last, hopefully. I’ve already considered catching a young person from the street, but I would rather kill only those who want to be killed
CATOR99: That also doesn’t sound bad. But yeah, seeing as it’s not so totally legal, this is in my eyes better than yanking somebody directly off the street
ANTROPHAGUS: Exactly, I’d do it, if it were legal.

To shorten the story, based on which it was written at least a book and made a movie (Grimm Love), the two eventually met. Those who victimize Bernd, branding Armin, I would like to ask them to wait a little while with theirs predictions of moral judgments based on emotion, so they can pass one based on cognition. Therefore, I promise to increase the pace of action and present the story as accurate as possible.

Bernd was only one in a long line of people who wished to be killed and eaten. Before him were the 32-year-old Borg Jose, Matteo, Andreas (who had a fantasy of being picked up in a cattle truck, with Meiwes wearing rubber boots and then slaughtering him like a pig), Alex (who wanted to be beheaded and which Meiwes refused on the grounds that he would be ‘too fatty for consumption’).

The sixth man, Stefan got to the stage of being hung from a meat-hook inside Meiwes’ slaughter room. He would have killed him, however it Stefan got cold feet and was set free. The seventh potential victim was 27-year-old Dirk Moller. Meiwes was able to get as far as chaining the man to his bed and marking him out to be chopped up, but like Jose, Moller got cold feet and was set free.

The final man to reply to the message, was none other than Bernd-Juergen Brandes, who answered the ad: "I am a man who loves the thought of dinner. My flesh is real and is yours. Fry me, boil me, take me to a barbecue, I do not care as long as you enjoy your meal. I want to be your meal, it is my call and I am ready .- Usenet: March 31, 2002, 7:09 pm

After they met, the two stood chatting for a while, and then Brandes took a handful of tranquilizers and a bottle of Schweppes to put off his anxiety. Together, they have severed Brandes' penis, which they cut into pieces and cooked with olive oil with garlic. They tried to eat it, but it seemed too chewy, so they dropped the erogenous appetizer. Thereafter, Brandes went to take a bath, where due of alcohol, bleeding and vasodilatation has lost consciousness.
In the bathroom, Armin has slit his neck with a single strike, then sliced him and the next months, he consumed about 20 pounds of Brandes' flesh, washing it down with a fine wine from South Africa.

After a relatively short while, police caught him and Armin was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison. Perhaps you're wondering (I did) why such a light sentence? This man was, after all, a cold blooded killer and a danger to society. The answer is quite simple: as Germany, like most civilized states, has no explicit law prohibiting cannibalism. Cannibalism, pretty much like incest, is beyond any written law (and Paul Bloom, a charismatic Yale professor, wonderfully speaks of it in How Pleasure Works). They both are a taboo.

Consequently, the German state could only prosecute Meiwes for homicide, not 1st degree murder. He was eventually found guilty of premeditated murder and now serves a life prison sentence.

Probably after the first lines you already got desensitized (due to prolonged exposure) and now we can speak less emotionally about cannibalism. Was Armin guilty of murder if the victim consented and wanted to be killed? If yes, what is the difference between Jack Kevorkian's mercy killings and Armin's consensual eating of Brandes, if both fulfilled the desires of those who wanted to die? Sure, Dr. Kevorkian motivated his acts by saying that part of the medical profession is the physicians’ duty to relieve the suffering of the sick, not to extend it (any doctor in the house to respond to that one?). But the main question here, is not why Armin wanted to eat another man (that is rather obvious), but why did Brandes want to be killed and eaten by another man?

Cannibalism is not new and we, as humans, performed and still do various forms of cannibalistic acts. Some anthropologists argue that no human society was exclusively cannibalistic and if it were, it did so to be able to defend or feed in extreme cases. Most ate their enemies, and this process almost always equated with eating / exterminating the threat. Sometimes, people have resorted to cannibalism out of desperation or hunger during the drought and hunger, or other extreme conditions (as were the four sailors from the yacht Mignonette, which ate Parker, 17, after drifting without food and water for several days at sea), or during the siege of the first Crusade, when the crusaders had eaten the bodies of the enemies at al-Numan Ma'arrat. Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese writer (who was awarded the Goncourt in 1993 for The Rock of Tanios) recounts incidents of cannibalism of Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem, actions who were to be buried by the Catholic Church. I will not even mention the invitation to cannibalism as addressed by Christ: "my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life." (But I did anyway).

Or there are societies engaged in consumption of the dead, such as Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea who enjoys eating the brains of the dead. This is called endocannibalism (Paul Bloom explains in How Pleasure Works) and usually the cannibals wait up until people die of natural causes, and then eat them. Unlike exocannibalism which involves a degree of cruelty, because it implies searching for young and healthy people, killing them then eating them. Between the two types of cannibalism, it clearly seems that exocannibalism is more severe because it involves murder.

Cannibalism, explains Bloom, is not only consumption of human protein; but it involves the consumption of an individual’s core essence. It is more than consumption of protein. Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, says that among the most bizarre things he sniffed it was his father's ashes. Sure, it is possible that Richards was dead drunk or high as a kite, but perhaps beyond the idea based on the histrionic desire of an infantile rock star, was the desire to assimilate the essence of a loved one. Jeffrey Dahmer claimed that he ate all his lovers because he did not want them to leave him. In fact, what is oral sex if not an act which symbolizes the cannibalistic desire to devour and preserve the essence of the loved one?

Cannibalism is an expression which, besides the metaphysical explanation of the desire to assimilate the essence of the person, it shows some transient or permanent mental disorders upon which I will not insist: trichophagia (hair eating), onychophagia (nail biting), dermatillomania (skin picking), dermatophagia (obsessive-compulsive disorder of biting their own skin), cheek or lip biting, nasal mucus eating, self vampirism or as Brandes did, eating one's own organs.

There are cases of forced or imposed self-cannibalism, which are considered crimes, unlike the others, like the case of the Hungarian Erzsebet Bathory who forced her servants to eat their meat; the Spanish colonists who forced natives to eat their own testicles; or those in Haiti during the 1991 coup, or 1990 in Sudan, where some people were forced to eat their own ears.

Another form of self-cannibalism, which is not only acceptable but sometimes recommended in certain social circles (see Tom Cruise's enthusiasm when his wife was pregnant), is placentophagia. In some cultures there is a placenta lady who comes over and helps you cook it. While eating the placenta is a regularly met habit in the animal regnum, in the human world, this is not necessary, as mothers are well nourished, therefore eating the placenta, as an immediate source of protein, is pretty much useless. It is striking, however, that many midwives recommend the use of placenta food (or pills) as a palliative for post-partum depression, although no scientific study supports this argument. But humans are highly irrational and logic is not what defines us. In addition to nutritional intake, today's placentophagia has no other benefit.

But for fine gourmet taste, I recommend the recipe that I came across the other day: finely chopped placenta, garlic, salt to taste, all stir-fried in olive oil. For a satisfying taste, season with coriander and freshly ground pepper. You can serve with a glass of white wine. Bon appétit.

The Genovese witnesses-the power of anonymity

2010-07-14T15:14:00.007+03:00

The crime
Kitty Genovese was a 28 year old woman, who was stabbed to death by a black person, in 1964, New York. I am not sure how important the color of the criminal is, but it was mentioned in the police report. Most probably you are saying that Kitty was neither the first, nor the last victim to die of stabbing inflicted wounds. I couldn’t agree more.

What is fascinating in Kitty’s story, is that while she was being attacked by Winston Mosely, 38 witnesses were assisting the crime. Normally, those who don’t know the story, are wondering how comes that none out of 38 called the police or the ambulance. As all of them thought that someone else would do that. Eventually, no one did it and Kitty died.

Let us personalize the victim a bit, although tens of books have been written about the subject. Kitty was born in an American Italian family, and her family has moved from Connecticut to New York, after Kitty’s mother has witnessed a crime herself. Some might call this an irony of fate. But we don’t really believe in fatalist determinism, right? We are the masters of our own destiny. So we like to think.

On March the 13th, in a cold spring New York night - cold enough to make people keep their windows shut-, Kitty was on her way home. She was working as a bar manager. Around 3 A.M., Kitty has parked her car, some 30 meters away from her building. Winston - let’s personalize the murderer, too-, attacked her from behind, puncturing her lungs, and thus incapacitating her to scream for a vigorous help. Kitty did manage to shout “Help me, I was stabbed! Help me! Help me!”

Except Robert Mozer, a neighbor that shouted “Leave the girl alone!” no one did another thing. Winston did run away and Kitty managed to crawl near the entrance of her building, in a dark area where she could hardly be heard or seen. Most so-called witnesses believed, later on, that it could have been a drunkard brawl. What is truly fascinating is that Winston came back after some ten minutes to finish his attack, continuing to stab Kitty. As she was dying, he also raped her. Later he confessed that the only mobile of the crime was sexual assault. He also confessed he was a necrophiliac.
That particular night, Winston has kissed his wife goodbye, and went out hunting for victims. Kitty was his third.

A few years after he was caught and sentenced to life, he assaulted a guard and escaped. Helped only by a baseball bat, he managed to take five hostages and rape the wife of one, under the man’s eyes. You most probably, are asking again, how comes that a single man, armed with only one baseball bat, can take five other adult men hostages and no one did again, a thing?
Long story short, Winston was caught again after two days of manhunt, and imprisoned for life (again). In 1971, he also took part in the Attica prison riots. Eventually, while in prison, he did manage to get a degree in sociology. His parole was denied in 2008, but the next hearing is scheduled for 2011.

The Experiment
As a result of Kitty’s assassination, Bibb Latané and John Darley have done a study which demonstrated the bystander effect (social apathy) and the diffusion of the responsibility. Briefly, the higher the number of witnesses to an incident, the more diffuse the responsibility.
In corporate terms, this can be translated with the 80/20 report, which says that 20% of the people do the work of 80%. Meaning, the more numerous the team, the more they take to finish a task.
The effect of the responsibility diffusion can be counter-acted if the number of the witnesses to an incident decreases. Although, Kitty’s case is mentioned in every Social Psychology textbook, it is not necessarily correct. The sources are mainly biographical and are based on New York Times’ reports which titled two weeks from the crime that “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police”.

The 1964’s USA
The article was written by Martin Gansberg in 1964. The criminal was black. Only one year before, in 1963, The University of Alabama has refused to enroll black students, and president Kennedy had to send the federal troops to allow the only two black students who had the courage to enroll to enter the premises.
The same year, two black young men, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were atrociously killed by KKK. They were both 19. One of the killers was a Baptist preacher. But what can we expect from the clergy if God himself allowed his only son to die?
The 60’s USA was not black friendly. Most probably if the killer were white, we would have not heard about such a highly advertised murder. Maybe. But just consider that the same year, other people have been murdered and none has triggered such media frenzy and made social psychologists come up with experiments. Andrew Goodman, Sam Cooke, Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders, Michael Schwerner were all killed in 1964. Some 93,627 people were arrested in 1964, in New York alone.

The UN by-standers
However, the psychological experiment of Bibb Latané and John Darley, has a truthful core, although it was based on inexact deeds, and the responsibility diffusion effect is still standing. A viable and present example of such effect is the Rwandan war. In 1994, approximately 800,000 (meaning 20% out of country’s population) of Tutsi citizens haven been murdered by their compatriots, the Hutus while the entire world was helplessly assisting. Let me repeat this again. A quarter of the country’s population was exterminated while the world was watching. A quarter. Was the world indeed helpless?
Romeo Antonius Dallaire, a Canadian general in charge with the UN Peace Keeping Forces in Rwanda was such a helpless (let’s call him a “Genovese”) witness. Although he did ask armed support from the UN HQ, no more than 5000 people, the Security Council of the UN (which is composed of 192 countries out of a 195 existing) refused, mainly due to the USA opposition which became skeptical after the Somalia tragedy.
Deserted mainly by the Belgian UN troops, Dallaire encounters how betrayed and helpless he felt: 'I stood there as the last Hercules left...and I thought that almost exactly fifty years to the day my father and my father-in-law had been fighting in Belgium to free the country from fascism, and there I was, abandoned by Belgian soldiers. So profoundly did I despise them for it...I found it inexcusable.'

What have we learnt?
Not much, sadly. In 2009, lieutenant Mark Gagan from Richmond police, USA, tells that as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was gang raped and beaten for two hours. Police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed. They actually laughed while a girl was being raped and beaten. What is wrong with us?
The bystander effect became the norm. Drew Carberry, a director at the National Council on Crime Prevention explained that if you are in a crowd and you look and see that everyone is doing nothing, then doing nothing becomes the norm. Conformity is validated. After we comply and identify, we internalize the idea as being our own.

Yet, it is not always bad
The responsibility diffusion is not always a bad thing. In a firing squad, one or more of the shooters are randomly offered a gun which contains a blank cartridge instead of a real bullet. This permits the members of the quad to think that he did not fire a fatal shot, and consequently he is not a criminal without will. Same multiple option goes for the electric chairs, which have several switches, but only one is connected.
Such responsibility diffusion works out not only for the “responsibility assuming” but also for the “responsibility non-assuming” and it is benefic for the psychological balance of those involved.

"It was not my fault" is a bad excuse
Consequently, the diffusion of responsibility was used as a legal defense by many of the Nazis being tried at Nuremberg and later the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre. “I only followed orders. There was nothing I could do” was the main excuse. That is not entirely true.
Claus von Stauffenberg did something.
So did Paul Rusesabagina
And Oskar Schindler.
And Lance Orton.
And John Busch.
And Joe Darby.
And Wesley Autrey.
I know. You never heard about them. Schindler maybe, as Steven Spielberg did a Hollywood blockbuster movie based on his story.

What can we do?
How justified is our helplessness and non-involvement? Evolutionary speaking, it is less probably to assume the responsibility for someone else’s deeds, except my own. The “It is not my business, why should I interfere” has a solid motivation, even if it is dastardly.

Our mothers’ advice “stay safe” is justified. Although it is pro-socially desirable and ego flattering, heroism is against the socio-biological dictate which tells me that my basic purpose is to stay alive, while a heroic intervention might jeopardize my life. Heroes with supernatural powers are not good examples. A good hero must be an ordinary person who does something extraordinary in certain circumstances, as Zimbardo pointed out. However, we are not born to be heroes. The altruist impulse might justify a potential status increase – heroes always marry the beautiful girl with whom they have more daughters (so claims Kanazawa). Everybody loves them, as they do things we would not personally do. Watching the heroism of others is part of escapism. We sort of envy them, but we would not want to be them. It is like going to the movies. Being a hero is demanding, risky and highly unappreciated. Batman and Robin Hood were proscribes. A post-mortem increased status might only help my heirs, if any.
Let’s make a rapid calculation based on an example. I am a woman, and I witness a crime. It is my moment of heroism. What do I do? I estimate my forces and I conclude that me alone, unarmed, I cannot –in spite of my altruistic desire to help- face the aggressor. Therefore, I call the police and helplessly assist the crime or even flee. By the time the police arrive, the crime would have been done. The hero in me is calculated and selfish and cannot surface. I can choose to interfere and eventually get myself and the victim killed in the process or I can assist and live with the guilt. Zimbardo- the author of the failed and atrocious Stanford Experiment- advised that we should teach our children to fight inactivity and let the heroes inside them surface. Based on what Zimbardo says, I should teach my 4 year old daughter, that when she sees a man with a knife attacking another person, she should interfere. This could be a death sentence for my child. Yet, how can we combat and shed social apathy? Can we? The good news is yes, we can, but not how Zimbardo proposed. Social apathy is shed the moment we realize that whatever we lose is lesser than what we gain. And sometimes, life is not our major loss.
So what stops me? Maybe fear, which is a healthy desiderate of preservation of species. The organic law dictates to fight or flight. And you might not be able to fight. What is it to be done? In the animal environment, a gazelle would never interfere to help another gazelle escape from the lion’s claws. Not even the gazelle’s own mother. But we are not gazelles; we are human beings with an elevated moral sense, conscience and altruism. Are we? How many of us would, statistically speaking would interfere, if they witnessed a crime? No, 99% is too optimistic. Let’s try again. Yes, only 31%. Meaning a not so holy trinity. So, atheist or not, pray that in case of an attack, in the middle of a crowd, you are not amongst victims. The statistics claim that there are only 31% chances to be helped if there are more than four witnesses of the incident.

The irrationality of the Good Samaritan Law
There are some countries that try to fight social apathy within the legal frame (The Law of Good Samaritan), where it becomes mandatory to help a victim otherwise it is considered tacit consent. But, how moral are we if we legislate altruism and we threaten with imprisonment or fine if we don’t help? Doesn’t this Law defy the foundation of altruism itself, which claims to we should perform acts of kindness unconditionally and out of moral impulse? Why none of those 38 witnesses of Kitty Genovese’s murder did interfere? The same reason 192 countries did not interfere in the Rwandan genocide. Shame on us.

Some say the anonymity is to be blamed in such cases. This is why criminals use masks during burglaries, crimes or riots. No face, no name- everything is allowed. However, the big cities come with another sort of mask: social anonymity. The bigger the city, the wider the degree of liberty and the higher the anonymity. Anonymity gives birth to monsters and heroes alike. And in between monsters and heroes, are the faceless and nameless inert spectators, simple social numbers and corporate robots who live in the shadow of non-implication.

Thirty-five

2010-07-06T16:00:00.002+03:00

1975
I am born.
Franco dies.
Guinea waves Portugal goodbye. People come, people go.
Brother kills brother in Lebanon.
Saigon becomes red.
The Altair: cyber praying.
Shave and throw. Disposable.
Jimmy Hoffa?
8,000 ceramic warriors.
Microsoft.
Apollo-Soyuz.

1976
Soweto...
First artificial gene.
Apple Computer.
Karen Ann Quinlan allowed to die.
Mao Tse-tung turns to dust.
Concord.
Entebbe Air Raid.
West Point says “I do”.

1977
Sadat goes to Israel.
Neutron bomb.
MRI.
NY blackout.
First black Miss Universe.
First Woman Episcopal Priest.
USA and USSR "curb" the spread of nuclear weapons.

1978
Jonestown fruity cyanide.
First test tube baby.
Camp David for Middle East peace.
Ultrasound.
Larry Flynt shot & paralyzed.

1979
The Shah flees, Ayatollah in Iran.
Margaret Thatcher.
Soviets in Afghanistan.
Mother Teresa Nobel Prize.
Wahhabi terror in Mecca.
Nicaraguan Revolution: viva la Sandinistas.

1980
Who Shot JR?
Post-It Notes.
John Lennon shot by Chapman.
Reagan wins.
RU-486.
ABSCAM.
Saddam in Iran.

1981
The 1st launch of a space shuttle.
Pope shot by Turk.
Mitterrand.
Charles and Diana tie knot.
MTV.
Spanish divorces.
Poland crushes Solidarity.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
52 Americans freed in Iran.
Regan almost killed.

1982
"Thriller".
Ozzy bites the head off a bat.
Argentina invades Falklands.
Italy wins the Soccer World Cup.
Helmut Kohl.
Leonid Breznjev dies.
Sun Myung Moon marries 4,150.
Tylenol Scare.
Nancy Reagan as a bag lady.
Princess Grace RIP.
Mexico's economy collapses.
Liposuction.
Hama Massacre in Syria.
Israel leaves Sinai.
Lebanon War: "Operation Peace for the Galilee”.
Bachir Gemayel RIP.
Sabra and Shatila.
51% of Americans hate gays.
First artificial heart transplant. Into your life.

1983
U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, 63 die.
Marine Corps barracks blow up in Beirut, 241 die.
Microsoft Word.
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
USSR shoots South Korean flight 007.
Camcorders.
US invade Grenada.
Karen Carpenter dies of anorexia.
CDs.
Montagnier discoveres HIV.

1984
Indira Gandhi assassinated.
Chemical disaster in Bhopal.
Stonewashed jeans.
Megabit chip by Bell Labs.
Olympics in LA.
Vanessa Williams naked.
Michael Jackson on fire.
Run-D.M.C.
Reagan jokes: "My fellow Americans, I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." The microphone was on.
Macintosh.

1985
Crack cocaine.
Rainbow Warrior. For a reason.
Glasnost.
Bernhard Goetz charged with attempted murder.
Hole in the ozone layer.
Nintendo.
Olaf Palme is assassinated.
Rock Hudson dies of AIDS.

1986
Challenger explodes.
Chernobyl.
Nyos, cloud of carbon dioxide.
Iran Contra Scandal (Who can forget Ollie North?).
Return of Haley's Comet.

1987
Perestroika.
German lands airplane on Red Square.
Black Monday - Stock market drops 22%.
Condom commercials on TV.
US budget reaches the trillion dollar mark.
Porn star Cicciolina wins a seat in the Italian parliament.
World Population reaches 5 billion.

1988
Soviets leave Afghanistan.
Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie.
Bobby McFerrin "Don't worry, be happy".
Prozac.
Benazir Bhutto.
Iran-Iraqi war ends. A season.

1989
Fall of the Berlin wall.
Ceausescu is shot on Christmas. The same day Jesus is born again.
Cold fusion.
Cold War ends.
Salmon Rushdie wanted dead.
Hillsborough Stadium.
Tienanmen Square.
Ban of ivory.
Panama invasion.
Rob Lowe porn video.
Menendez brothers.
Collin Powell.
Burma becomes Myanmar.
The Montreal Massacre.
Vance vs. Judas Priest: "Better by You, Better than Me".

1990
Noriega surrenders to Americans.
Stasi archive debunked.
McDonald's in Moscow.
Nelson Mandela freed.
The USSR withdraw all 73,500 troops from Czechoslovakia.
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Soviet Union apologizes for Katyn Massacre.
Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua.
Homosexuality no longer a disease.
Elections in Romania.
Stampede in Mecca kills 1,426.
Iraq invades Kuwait.
Brian Keenan is released from Lebanon.
One Germany.
Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount.
Syrians invade Lebanon.
Akihito is emperor of Japan.
Mary Robinson in Ireland.
Slobodan Milošević president

1991
UN condemns Israel.
Desert Storm.
Rodney King, police brutality.
Boris Yeltsin.
Collapse of Yugoslavia.
Michel Aoun leaves Lebanon.
KGB is replaced by the SVR.
Magic Johnson has HIV.
Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland freed in Lebanon.
Terry A. Anderson is released after 7 years' captivity as a hostage in Beirut.
Constitution of Romania is valid.
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns.
The Soviet Union ceases to exist.

1992
George H. W. Bush vomits on Kiichi Miyazawa.
Japan apologizes for forcing Korean women into sexual slavery during World War II.
The Maastricht Treaty is signed, EU comes to life.
The Supreme Court of Ireland rules that a 14-year-old rape victim may travel to England to have an abortion.
Bodyguard assassinates Muhammad Boudiaf.
Andrei Chikatilo guilty of 52 serial murders.
Pope John Paul II lifts edict against Galileo Galilei.
Folies Bergere closes.

1993
Czechoslovakia: Velvet Divorce.
EuroNews.
Bill Clinton.
Václav Havel president.
Janet Reno.
Bombay bombings.
Warrington bomb attacks.
Pentium.
Ezer Weizman.
Jiang Zemin.
World Wide Web @ CERN.
Tansu Çiller.
Lorena Bobbitt, outch.
Bill Clinton: “Don't ask, don't tell”
Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands.
Russian troops withdraw from Poland.
Battle of Pooneryn.
War on Drugs: Pablo Escobar gunned down in Medellín.
Israel and Vatican shake hands.

1994
Nancy Kerrigan clubbed.
Markale massacre in Sarajevo.
Baruch Goldstein opens fire at Cave of the Patriarchs.
Rwandan Genocide.
Aum Shinrikyo and sarin gas attack at Matsumoto.
Israel and Jordan shake hands.
Russian army leaves Estonia.
Mitterrand's secret daughter.
Russian troops into Chechnya.

1995
Yahoo!
Sarin on Tokyo subway.
Oklahoma City bombing.
Atlantis docked to Mir.
Srebrenica massacre.
DVD.
eBay.
Yitzhak Rabin blown away.
Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa and Ogoni.
Dayton Agreement.

1996
Motorola StarTAC.
Dunblane Massacre.
Grapes of Wrath.
Qana Massacre.
The Khobar Towers in KSA.
Veronica Guerin, another journalist down. More to stand.
Dolly the sheep.
Andrei Lukanov, killed.

1997
Madeleine Albright.
Massacres in Algeria.
Princess Diana killed by paparazzi.
Mother Theresa RIP.
Harry Potter.

1998
Universe's expansion rate is increasing.
Paula Jones.
Fatwa against all Jews and Crusaders.
A Brief History of Time.
George Michael sex scandal.
Lewinsky scandal.
Matthew Shepard symbol of gay-bashing.

1999
Euro.
King Hussein RIP.
Napster rocks.
The Columbine High School massacre.

2000
Y2K.
United States v. Microsoft.
ILOVEYOU virus.
Israel leaves Lebanon after 22 years.
Bashar al-Assad.
Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Bill Clinton goes to Vietnam.
Christmas Eve Indonesia bombings.

2001
Noah, a gaur, is born. What is a gaur?
George W. Bush.
Ariel Sharon is PM.
FBI agent Robert Hanssen is Russian spy.
UK foot and mouth.
Sherpa Temba Tsheri, 16 conquers Mount Everest.
Nepalese royal massacre.
Andrea Yates kills her babies.
World Trade Centre in NYC.
USA PATRIOT Act into law.
Pope John Paul II sends the first papal e-mail from a laptop.

2002
Daniel Pearl murdered in Karachi.
Siege of Nativity Church in Bethlehem.
Pim Fortuyn assassinated.
Serena beats Venus.
WorldCom files for bankruptcy.
US Airways declare bankruptcy.
Civil war in Côte d'Ivoire.
Bombs in Bali.
Iran bans the advertising of United States products.
Romania in NATO.
Attack at Miss World.

2003
The Letter of the Eight supports the USA to invade Iraq.
Arsonist in Daegu, South Korea.
UAE asks Saddam Hussein to step down.
Human Genome Project is completed.
Riyadh Compound Bombings.
Pana-Wave Laboratory predicts.
Casablanca terrorist attacks.
Arsenal beats Southampton.
Prometea is born.
Martha Stewart imprisoned.
David Kelly found dead.
Uday and Qusay Hussein killed.

2004
Hajj stampede in Mina.
Facebook.
South Korea clones 30 human embryos.
Train attacks in Madrid.
Serbian pogrom in Kosovo.
Romania joins NATO.
Nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu freed.
Northern Ossetia school Russian crisis.
Mohammed Bouyeri kills Theo van Gogh.
The Orange Revolution.
North Korea bans mobile phones.
Colin Powell resigns.
NASA's hypersonic Scramjet goes Mach 9.6.
The Nexialist Manifesto.
Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

2005
Mahmoud Abbas in Palestine.
Adriana Iliescu gives birth at 66.
Mandher Devi temple in Mandhradevi.
KSA and Iraq vote.
Rafik Hariri TNTed along with 15 others.
YouTube.
1 million strong for Beirut.
Pope John Paul II dies.
Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles marry.
Kuwaiti women vote.
W. Mark Felt is "Deep Throat”.
Live 8.
London Tube explodes.
Innocent Jean Charles de Menezes gunned down by UK police.
Katrina.
Kashmir earthquake.
Amman bombings.
Andrew Stimpson 'cured' of HIV.
Gebran Ghassan Tueni dies in car bomb.
Karen is born.
Another second is added.

2006
Securitas depot robbery.
Slobodan Milošević dead.
The Global Night Commute.
Buffett donates $30 billion to Gates.
Lebanon War: Israeli troops invade Lebanon.
Pope Benedict XVI picks on Islam.
Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion.
Al Jazeera English.
Pierre Amine Gemayel killed.
Holocaust conference in Tehran.
Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in Libya.
Saddam Hussein executed.

2007
Bulgaria and Romania in the EU.
Red Cross + Red Crescent = Red Crystal.
Moshe Katsav charged with rape.
Windows Vista.
Tony Blair answers for 'cash for peerages’.
Ehud Olmert admits Israel planned attack on Lebanon.
Australia turns off its lights.
Second Orange Revolution.
Gliese 581 c.
Nicolas Sarkozy.
Chinese slave scandal.
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum donates €7.41 billion.
Clashes in Tripoli, again.
The favela of Complexo do Alemão massacre.
Fires in Greece.
Ehud Olmert goes to Jericho.
Burj Dubai.
Treaty of Lisbon.
Mathlete Alexis Lemaire mentally extracts the 13th root of a 200-digit number in 70.2 sec.
Riots in Kenya.

2008
Bridgestone scandal.
Raul Castro replaces Fidel.
First bionic eyes.
Global financial crisis.
Russia loans Iceland 4-billion-euro.
2008 TC3 impacts Earth.
Icelandic Financial Supervisory Authority takes control of the 3 largest banks in the country. Hungary receives $25 billion.
Barack Obama president.
Frozen water on Mars.
Riots in Greece.
Israel beings massacre in Gaza Strip.
An extra leap second is added.

2009
Barack Obama first US black president.
Iceland’s banking system collapses
Deadliest bushfire in Australia.
Serbian Milutinovic aquited.
Earthquake in L’Aquila.
Roh Moo-hyun commits suicide.
Air France 447 crashes.
Riots in Iran.
Michael Jackson dies.
Longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century ( 6’ 38.8”).
Pan Am Flight 103 bomber released.
4.4 million-year-old hominid skeleton 'Ardi' discovered in Ethiopia.
Roman Polanski arrested.
European astronomers discover 32 exoplanets.
CERN restarts the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Geneva.

2010
MMX. Never a lifetime.
Volleyball killings in Pakistan.
Earthquake in Haiti, Chile, China. Death toll: 232,497.
Polish president dead.
Island offers second surprise after Lazy Town: the volcano ash cloud. Name of the volcano is unpronounceable: Eyjafjallajökull.
Scientists suggest that Neanderthals and humans may have interbred.
Riots in Gaza. Again.
Planes crash in Beirut, Poland, Libya and Pakistan. Death toll: 447.
FIFA World Cup is held in South Africa. The Netherlands lost to Spain, 0-1, after an unspectacular game.
And the world is still revolving around its axis.

You are right, you really do not have time!

2010-06-15T13:59:00.019+03:00

Folk mentality claims that one of the lamest, yet most effective and hardest to counter-attack excuses, right after “I am fine”, is “I don’t have time”. Relax, this is not another peroration about relativity, Einstein, McTaggart, presentism or time and how “it keeps everything from happening at once”. It is neither about its social importance or having economic value, nor about something being measured in attoseconds, tachyons or money. It is about time as priorities ordering tool. The sifter of ultimate choices.

“I don’t have time” is, in fact, a very reasonable excuse to be offered to us or to others when take them off the priorities list. Within a relationship, that means “you are not important to me enough to make time for you”. When we give it to ourselves it works as a defense and coping mechanism: I don’t have time to start a diet or go to the gym or give up drinking. It is true. In order for you to do so, it would require a good amount of energy, well packed with drive and motives. That implies focusing your attention and eventually changing a few patterns. And that is hard to do and requires not only energy but lots of time to re-wire those paths of good old habits.

I never buy this excuse, as I also sell it. I never had time for those who did not matter enough to me to make time for them. When we offer something as volatile, imperceptible and irreversible, yet so strenuous on our energy drive, such as “time”, we offer instants of our lives. Hold that thought for a second. How important should anyone be to be offered a slice of our lives, a bit of our only chance on earth? Damn important, I tell you. Yet, we offer plenty of time to things that seem but are not necessarily less important, and we do that with no qualms of conscience. We give time to our jobs, which we think might “take us somewhere”. Where? Maybe a higher position on some corporate ladder, which comes with a handful of benefits, and loads of personal sacrifice. We make split decisions, ordering the weight and consequences of things, people, tasks, and silly pretenses (prior to tense, after all) and then we wisely conclude “we don’t have time”. We really don’t.

But some gladly give their time to that. Why is that? How do we decide the order of priorities? A friend of mine might comment saying “Well, I increase my status if I score high on the corporate ladder, that would get me a nice female mate with whom I would have daughters- as some think beautiful people have more daughters- and that would insure that 50% gene transmission into my offspring, assuming jealousy plays its evolutionary role and prevents her from cheating on me. While if I go out with a beer-belly buddy and give him that time, it might not increase my status so ultimately, the survival of my genes is the basic idea of how I choose my priorities and to whom I give time. So I give my time to whatever/whoever increases my status”. It sounds logic to me. What is the ultimate destination that impulses our tiny little egos, except social recognition? Could be a temporal investment into the survival of the fittest theory? We tend to offer time, and thus invest our feelings and energy into something that rewards us enough to compensate for the feeling of time loss. If we believe the compensation is smaller than the investment, we do not go for it. We don’t participate in contests for the sake of action, in spite of what sensation seekers claim, we do it because we want to win. This is why I never believe the Oscar losers who claim it was an honor just to be nominated. No, it was not. It would have been an honor if they won. This is why they replaced “And the winner is….” with “the Oscar goes to….”. To compensate the ones, who did not win the award, for their loss of time.

Obviously, all our selections, either we are aware of them or not, are a sum of benefits minus costs. What do I gain and what do I lose if I spend something I don’t own, yet is the most precious thing to me, my time, with you? That is a pretty big investment. It is like a down payment for an apartment in a building that is not built yet. If the outcome results in a higher benefit, I would obviously effectuate that particular choice. Our lack of time is justified. We really do not have it. It is Universe’s fourth dimension, not ours, but it gives us sense and ordinates us internally. All we have is the knowledge that we are determined by its shortness -80 years on earth are not that much-, and the shade of fatalism that we could lose that at any given time. What will happen in the future - death that is- is already unavoidable, as death is the most imminent and immanent result of life. It is like seeing a new movie with Jesus Christ or the Battle of Hastings. How do you think it will end? There is no surprise there.

Thus, the first “lack of time” excuse we've uttered must have coincided with the discovery of life’s inevitable end. That was the moment we lost our credulity in afterlife and first said it. So, when was the first time you said it? When did the anxiety of time loss kick in? Was when you were around nine, right?

The conceptual divorce of deaf dyslexics: who takes the Dog ?

2010-06-01T13:00:00.004+03:00

A friend’s grandfather wisely said “potatoes need shit to grow, not prayers”. True enough, in a universe which is spatially flat with a margin of error of 2%, we would need more than prayers to feed ourselves (with more than hope). Elias’ grandfather, while harvesting his potatoes in the valleys of Lebanon, a country which is cyclically torn by wars held in a name of an unaware god, had no idea who Crick was. Or what his astonishing hypothesis said. Yet, at an intuitive level, he knew that those solarium tuberosums (potatoes) are an ensemble of molecules of amylase, amylopectin, mono-saccharide, suberin, lignin and sucrose and prayers would not help much if potatoes are not helped by another organic matter such as “shit” (carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, salts, cells, cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose).

We like to believe that Crick was a slick politically driven reductionist, and we are more than a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Are we? Can’t we appreciate Bach’s sonatas just because we know that we just a bunch of molecules? No, we cannot appreciate Bach unless we agree first on the stuff both Bach and I are made of. The fracas emerges when everyone is claiming or is attempting to take monopoly over the right to be right.

Humans cannot just be, they need to be right, validated, praised, thanked for, agreed with, looked up to, conduct, rule. This claim at "the right to be right" leads to a wide palette of various social struggles and intellectual conflicts that transform into a perpetual and conceptual debate over who/what is right: science vs. non-science, beliefs vs. non-beliefs, and atheists vs. religious. Provided that “right” can be considered right only within a certain social community, and be completely “wrong” in another, this story has no happy ending. These irreconcilable conceptual divorces are the end result of “the right to be right”, to which we are all entitled to. Responsibility engulfs maturity, which comes with understanding of other points of view. A constant level of maturity and responsibility is not only hard, but almost impossible to maintain.

None seems to hear what the other has to say. “What if you are wrong?” became a treasured motto to both sides. Some debaters present lengthily theories, which seem to enrapture an ignorant, credulous and thirsty for circus public. Either detractors or supporters, each seems to have a point and each thinks is right. Who can referee? In time, the debate became like a messy break-up of “she said, he said”.

In their spirited debate, while trying to pick the lower well ripped fruit, the agnostics, both sides make appeal to all kinds of arguments among which argumentum ad ignorantiam seems to preferentially stand out.

1. God must exist because no one has proven he does not- in which case it is true, as no one proved it is false.

2. God cannot exist, because no one has proven he exists- in which case is false as no one has proven it is not true.

It is not far the prospect where the argumentum ad baculum will be also used. Some seem to have a specific weakness for false dilemma fallacy and they abundantly use it by claiming that any gap they find in the evolutionary theory consequentially becomes a proof of the biblical creation. Their favorite stand on this take is: there are only two possible ways, your way and my way, and if you are wrong, that makes me right. The fallacies are smartly conceived, but especially willfully deceptive unfortunately with a major impact on the audience.

The debate is pretty much futile as it greedily engulfs two subcategories which make the object of the discussion: one is religion versus areligion, and the other is believer versus non-believer. Meaning, one can have a religious sensibility or an inclination towards magic and spirituality without having to believe in a super-natural power. Religion, as a tool of social cohesion, is almost mandatory. Why are there religious people? As religion is the norm, and if we all live in a benefits minus costs world, where the perfect strategy to be applied is Nash's Equilibrium, it is obvious I have nothing to gain if I change my strategy unilaterally. In a world with almost 5 billion believers, my strategy is to eventually be religious. Otherwise, your opportunities to pro-create diminish.

People adapt their mating strategies according to the number of chances offered by the environment at a certain point. Douglas Kenrick, a social psychologist, studied the role of religion on mating strategies and concluded that if the competition is higher, women tend to be more religious. The explanation behind the moral choice of religiosity is actually a very simple evolutionary one. Religion denotes and resonates with a pattern of sexual loyalty, promising like a white check a trait, which biology does not necessary endorse, which is fidelity. It is obvious that the man will opt for the religious = loyal female which enhances the belief that the offspring is his. Religion thus became a moral guarantee. If we leave aside the metaphysical meaning of religion, people prefer, at least at a declarative level, to self-describe as religious if this ensures mating and perpetuation. The reasoning behind it is quite simple: so my competition is acrimonious; therefore fidelity would work in my advantage. So fidelity is good. Religion preaches fidelity, therefore religion is good and becomes a sort of social badge, representing desirability. A religious person comes with the guarantee, yet unfounded, of morality and its allies (justice, loyalty, altruism etc) and hijacks what is naturally human. The Nash Equilibrium works. I will not go astray from the social rule, if I my loses outweigh the gains as I have nothing to gain if I change my strategy unilaterally. And at times, in spite of our real “religious” options, we prefer to perpetuate a social lie, in order to keep the balance.

If Summer's theory was right, and I tend to believe it was, it is always about us and the others. And "we" are always smarter, better, faster and more superior. If we weren't, we would already be "the others".

Truth makes you fat!

2010-05-25T20:38:00.001+03:00

Truth, semen, e-mail, TV, lack of sleep, and AC make you fat - but not necessary in this particular order. Fruits make you fat. The air we breathe makes us fat. Apparently everything makes us fat, including fat. Apart from the obvious don’ts like deep fried thingies, seminal fluid (a tablespoon of semen contains 25 calories and 150 mg of protein, 11 mg of carbohydrates, 6 mg fat, 3 mg cholesterol, 7% US RDA potassium and 3% US RDA copper and zinc) and debaucheries with fondue French cheeses and Spanish wine, we have a new palette of fattening enemies.

Experts say AC and heating keep us where we should not be, in a “thermoneutral zone”, which is a temperature range where we don’t have to regulate our body temperature. When our bodies are above or below this zone, we increase the amount of energy we spend which decreases energy stores, such as fat. So basically, we fool our bodies that the temperature is a comfortable 22C instead of an excruciating 40C and accordingly, the body stops sweating, burning calories and consequently, staying thin.

And as insane as it might seem, some advance the idea that the lack of sleep makes you fat. How? Well, is quite simple, really. When you are tired you don’t have enough time to exercise so you are tempted to over eat to compensate, in order to gain energy. Moreover, the lack of sleep disrupts one of our hunger hormones (leptin and ghrelin), which can make us fat. Researchers at UCLA claim that poor sleep causes increased ghrelin and decreased leptin during the day, which doubly increases your appetite when you don’t get enough sleep.

Not thinking about leptin and ghrelin, Timothy Dumouchel sued the cable company, claiming it made his wife fat, gave him a liver disease and turned his children into lazy monsters. Tim claimed that if the programs were fewer and lousier, his wife wouldn't have been tempted to watch the TV all day long and thus exercising less, his children would have studied more and he wouldn’t have picked up on his old habits of smoking and drinking.

Oh, by the way, did you know that the email (and, by extension, blogging and social networks) makes you fat? That is without doubt a no-brainer. Instead of running up and down those stairs in the business building to spread the juicy gossip, you prefer to update your Facebook status or to push the send button. If you are worried about your waistline, next time try going down the stairs to the hot chicks at HR from the 3rd floor.

We all know which are the habitual enemies: fat food, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, faulty genes, contraceptive pills, cold medication (a sachet of Fervex contains 11.7 g of sugar, so 7 days of flu x 2 sachets/day deposit 163.8 g sugar on your rollerblader butt), diet beverages (aspartame makes you crave for real sweets), being stressed, a fat partner, sugary beverages, quitting smoking, this and that and the other. What is it to be done? Well, for starters break up with your boyfriend, turn off the AC, and sleep yourself to death. Or you can try this innovative and highly speculative hypothesis, which was not verified enough as I only lost 10 grams or so since I started writing it.

The good news is that lying keeps you in a tiptop shape. You now obviously wonder why your co-worker is so damn thin! Here's why. Stats claim that the most common lie in the world is considered to be “I’m fine” as most people would rather lie about how they feel at the moment. Lying, as in oral or written deception in communication, takes way too much energy of a person, as it involves creativity and mental stimulation, if we let aside the obvious immorality of such practice. We are not talking about how indecent is to lie, as lying is, as Nietzsche said, a condition of life. But when someone is lying (imagination), he needs to remember the details of his lie (memory), and follow it up, eventually, invent new details (creativity). Unless you have a subarachnoid hemorrhage in your frontal lobe, which would turn you into a chronic confabulator, the above mentioned processes involve some heavy thinking, and we all know the brain requires a tenth of a calorie per minute, just to stay alive. To produce the neurotransmitters, neurons extract 75% of the sugar glucose (this is why you seem smarter after gulping down a Mars) and 20% of the oxygen in the blood. The frontal lobe of your brain is where your thinking takes place, so if you are joggling with big questions (the chicken or the egg? Mars or Venus? Atheism or Religion? Why am I here? and similar) you need to bring on the sugar. It is an avalanche effect. The more you lie, the more you have to work to keep your lie alive, and that requires a lot of mental energy, hence you burn more calories. So we might conclude that a liar that strenuously works to keep up with his concoctions might have more chances to stay fit than someone who is telling the truth (of any kind subjective, relative, objective, absolute, coherent, correspondent or kripkean). Hence, the truth could be illegal and certainly is immoral but one things is sure: it makes you fat. Oh, by the way, you look wonderful today!

No more emodom for you!

2010-05-13T13:52:00.010+03:00

In Orwell’s “1984”, the chocolate ration was only 43 grams weekly. However, a year later the weight of the bar "went up" to 25 grams. The process of re-writing that piece of bad news without altering the reduction was named, in that particular case, chocorat.

By extension, emodom has become nowadays a state of renunciation to emotional freedom. Let me explain what I mean by emodom. A person that is considered mature and balanced has emotions that are directly proportional with the intensity of the emotional factor. Meaning, if your boss just gave you a load of crap, you do not throw the laptop in his head, you rather try to repress your genuine emotions of anger, maybe frustration or even pure hate, and pretend you have a state of calmness and inner-poise. Your heart beat goes up, your eye is twitching, you get an extra-systolic every five beats and your pulse hits 120. Yet, apart from extreme redness in the face, you show no other signs. How could you? You are a civilized adult and being an adult implies not necessarily having emotions which are proportional to the emotional factor, but lying about how we express them.

However, we often react indirectly proportional to the situation. Regardless of whatever we know about emotions and emotionality and how we label others ('Oh, she is an emotional mess', or 'He is so over emotional') in the end our emotions do not necessarily take the best of us, but reveal our true inner selves. 'The best of us' is just an erroneous collocation, an uncreative cliché, which can never be taken by a genuine expression of emotion.

During our childhood, our educators inculcated us the idea of self restraint. In some societies, emotional honesty is highly appreciated and even recommended. In some others, it is regarded as mental unbalance. An emotional person is not predictable and society mechanisms require predictability. Hence, what is considered normal (within norms) in the Japanese society (eg: smiling respectfully when you are scolded) is not considered normal in the American society (eg: accepting the scolding, eventually bowing your head, avoiding eye contact).

Although truth is greatly valued, most of our dissensions are basically generated by the way honesty and emotional expression is perceived in our societies. The emotional sincerity is not always regarded as a virtue, even though was considered ideal by certain societies. In order to socialize properly you need to mask a certain amount of sincerity in social wrapping. To be accepted means to keep your feelings restrained. We are turning into emotionally mutilated machines as apparently, modern psychologists view sincerity as a construct rather than a moral virtue, and we seem stuck in an answerless conundrum where the joke is on us.

Some cultures even consider expression of emotions as a possible threat to the social order. Others went further and imagined how a world without emotions and Two Minutes of Hate would look like. It looked bleak. The two minutes of hate were not necessarily a way to allow people to “freely” express their emotions but were a mode of brainwashing by throwing them into a controlled frenzy of hatred. In Romania, The Pitesti Prison (known as the Pitesti Experiment) was a brainwashing experiment carried out by Communist authorities between 1949 and 1952 and was meant to "re-educating" the political prisoners, opposed to the authoritarian regime. The experiment's goal was for prisoners to dispose off their political and religious convictions, and to adjust and rewire their personalities to the point of absolute obedience. The number of people that have been brainwashed in three years was estimated to 5,000 and Pitesti was considered the largest and most intensive brainwashing program in the Eastern bloc.

The usage of emotional torture followed by physical torture was a main stage of the re-education program. Humiliation was the one that worked best. The inmates were forced to denounce their beliefs, loyalties, and values, betray family members, forced to clean the WC floor with a rag clenched between the teeth, or eat their own feces. Frequently, they were asked to torture other prisoners and repress their own feelings of mercy, empathy, pity, clemency, and kindness. Sometimes beating was not even necessary. Humiliation would suffice. After a while, an inmate became a re-educator. The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), conducted 19 years later, confirmed what communists knew already: that the best and most efficient punishment is the psychological one, aiming at emotions, such as fear, shame, guilt along with coercion and intimidation. All extremely powerful tools. And while Stanford Experiment was just a science experiment that went bad, the Pitesti one was an applied and atrocious one that went well.

Nowadays, 50 years later, in a society that fortunately eliminated (at least theoretically) torture and repression, we are told to repress our feelings as a sign of civilization and maturity. Yet, torture (of any kind, psychological, emotional, or physical) is still practiced in some 45 countries. As of June 2008, only 145 states are parties to the Convention against Torture. As the research in the field of psychology refined, so did the coercion methods, and torture by proxy or extraordinary rendition became a modern technique. Meaning, the torturer apprehends and extrajudicial transfers the suspect/victim from one state to another where torture is practiced, without getting his hands dirty. The rendered suspects are denied due process because they are arrested without charges, deprived of legal counsel, and illegally transferred to third world country with the intent and purpose of facilitating torture and other interrogation measures which would be illegal in the USA, let’s say. According to a European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention against Torture. The Patriot Act became the Über Alles rule. All authoritarian regimes had a supreme utilitarianist rule, of group welfare versus individual liberties, and the excuse that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome. If the outcome is justified by the potential group safety, any action prior to that (torture included) is morally acceptable.

Apfelbaum and Sommers claim there is an inner bigot within us and we choose to celebrate the power of mind to make hard choices, despite our emotions. So, I am asking you, where it will lead this rejection and repression of our true feelings? I hear someone in the back said happiness. Civilization you say? Oh, really? You think so?

Happiness is a falsifiable theory

2010-05-11T13:26:00.001+03:00

A while ago, BBC came up with this piece of news that Romanians are the unhappiest nation on earth. Is Romania a country suffering from ecstatic impotence? What prevents Romanians from having that childish attitude of positivism doubled by naïve optimism? Is Romania a living example of Murphy’s Law that “if things can go worse, they will?”

The foreign observers’ opinions are radically split. While some claim that Romanians are friendly and sometimes perfunctory gregarious, easy going people or just easy, some insist that Romanians are clinically and chronically unhappy. And this has nothing to do with standard of living. Romanians have an extra gene (or rather a missing one) that prevents them from being happy. They are chronically yet understandably unsatisfied, envious and egocentric.

David T. Lykken believes that 50% of one's happiness depends on one's genes (plus the neurobiological factors such as dopamine, opiate, serotonin), based on studying identical twins, whose happiness is 50% correlated even when growing up in different houses. Only 10% to 15% is a result of various measurable life circumstances variables, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, health, income, sex and others. The remaining 40% is a combination of unknown factors and the results of actions that individuals deliberately engage in to become happier.

The survey also claimed that Russians (with Moscow being the most expensive city on earth) along with Armenians and Romanians, consider themselves the unhappiest nations on earth.

For a moment, I thought that maybe SES (socio economic status) is strictly related to how people perceive happiness these days. You have less (money, education, friends, hopes, dreams, stability), you are less happy. Then as I further read the statistics and what makes people happy, I have found out to my surprise that Nigerians – an example of poverty by excellence- are happier than the richest nations. Ironically, the happiest people on earth are Nigerians in spite of only $2,100/ income per capita per year, a public debt of 14.4% of GDP, 310,000 AIDS deaths/year and 45% of population below the poverty line.

Leaving aside its infamous poverty, generalized corruption, and symptomatic legislation, lack of education and sanitary needs, and skyrocketing death rates, the Nigerians define themselves as HAPPY. So, once more we are tempted to agree with the proverb that “money doesn’t bring happiness”.

In this case, I am tempted to believe the popular credo held by monks and opposed to the current belief of the consumerism society that the desire for material goods suppresses happiness.

What makes the Nigerians happy then? What is their secret? Sure, it is well understood that material comfort plays an important role in insuring a basic happiness which satisfies the immediate needs: good clothing, good food, sexual comfort and well being, access to better medical services, etc. But well-being is not happiness. Joy is not happiness. Contentment is not happiness. Felicity is not happiness. Blessedness is not happiness. Satisfaction is not happiness. Ecstasy is not happiness. Comfort is not happiness. Fun is not happiness. Again, what is happiness? Bluntly said, happiness is a state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.

Yet, there is an Amazonian society called Pirahã which has no number words at all. The Pirahã uses hói to describe a small number of objects, hoíg to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. These words seem to mean "around one," "some" and "many." Explaining addition and subtraction to Pirahã is explaining what happiness is to people who have never experienced it.

Maybe the best way to define happiness is the same way we define faith, by negation. Can we define happiness by saying it is not unhappiness? Is happiness falsifiable? Yes, if it is a theory. Are all people happy? If we find one single unhappy person, logic allows us to conclude that the statement that all people are or could be happy is false. Well, apparently, happiness is a theory. The Greeks used to say “theoria” to something that you look at, view, or behold. In philosophy, there was an interesting definition of theory, which came to refer to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action, including "practice". Apparently, all we can do about happiness is theoretically contemplate it, and yet never practice it.

Bow to small breasts, gentlemen!

2010-05-07T20:54:00.006+03:00

I have small breasts. However, according to biology, I breastfed my daughter until she was 14 months old. As my Anglo-Saxon pals would say, that is way too much information. But! This personal info has a purpose. I have recently read an article written by Satoshi Kanazawa who admits that small breasts are as capable as big breasts when comes to offspring feeding. Super, we all know that breast size does not affect lactation, as this is luteotropic hormonally driven, and not size driven. If dissected, the breast is composed 90% of fat, tissue and mammary glands.

If men like big breasts, they like fat. If fat is present on the breasts, it is definitely present somewhere else, like hips, tummy or thighs. Women with big breasts and small hips are naturally rare because fat tends to be equally distributed (but than again, with liposuction and silicon implants we can artificially remediate that and lie to men).

Kanazawa insists that men could tell women’s age more accurately if they had larger breasts and that would be why men find women with large breasts more attractive (as they are evolutionary conditioned).

Yet, men prefer big breasted women, even if they (know they) are lied. Kanazawa bases his hypothesis on 1990 Frank Marlowe’s theory who said that big breasts are a woman’s real ID. In the '90s breast augmentation was not that fashionable, so Marlowe’s hypothesis made sense. But Kanazawa should know better in 2010. So, since a man cannot ask for a driver’s license or birth certificate on a first date, he has to rely his estimates of a woman’s age based on the (excuse my language gentlemen, and sorry for ruining your sexual appetite tonight) sagginess of her breasts. Meaning, a woman with small breasts can be 50 years old and her cup size can lie, implying she is, ahem, 35 years old, let’s say (maybe small size resonates with young age in men’s head).

While, if she has big breasts, you know for sure, based on the sagginess factor that she is 40 or 50. Or 60 (where I come from it is called gravitational law: what goes up, must come down). Hence, since men prefer the truth, they prefer the big breasts. But, for men’s info only: the 90-60-90 size actually means hip-waist-UNDER the bust- measure. Oh, and one more thing for those who evolutionary assess a woman’s bust by her size, eight out of ten women wear the wrong size bra (that is when they do not have breasts implants).

Now, a group of Yale scientists, led by Stephen Stearns (a Swiss evolutionary biologist), claim that the future woman will be shorter and plumper, but will have a healthier heart and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving. Stearns believes that differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, but differences in reproduction still can. The study was made on 14,000 individuals since 1948 and concluded that in 400 years women will be shorter, fatter, more fertile and will have healthier hearts. If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, "the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimeters shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today".

Super, let’s make this calculation: women will be 2 cm shorter and 1 kg heavier in 400 years. That means they might be 0, 05 mm shorter and 2, 5 g heavier already next year. In less than 10.000 years, women will be 50 cm shorter and 25 kg heavier on average, while men will probably develop in accordance with historical evolution by gaining an average height of 2, 20 m by then.

To our indignation, cohorts of die hard dieters, science insinuates that the future belongs to the rotund women and not to us, who shred our knees in gym clubs and eat an orange a day (that is not me, but I sympathize with my always-on-a-diet coworkers- by the way, women spend ten years of their lives on a diet, to no avail I might add).

According to this study, shorter and heavier women tend to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Yet, Kanazawa claims small-waisted women are to be priced. The good news is that such strong proportional breaches will definitely not encourage too much reproduction on the long term. Men will be forced to kneel down to the ground each time they feel like hugging their lady, hoping their arms will be long enough to make it all the way round. So meet the future woman: kneel, gentlemen!

Say it loud, say it proud!

2010-05-06T16:21:00.005+03:00

Becky was a kind, nail biting, big-breasted, gravy loving, southerner blonde. She loved Baby Jesus and her husband, who used to cut carton stars and planets for her and stick them on the ceiling. For some curious reason (foreigners lost in Beirut) we ended up friends, with very little in common. My wide views on sensitive issues like euthanasia, abortion and atheism made her feel uncomfortable around me. At times, I was spicing up my socio- political diatribes with swears, trying to emphasize the importance of the subject and making sure the quality of my character stands out. My slang seemed to bother her the most and she sadly told me that “Baby Jesus hates it when a nice, pretty, sweet lady like you, Daieeena, curses like thaaaat”. Since I perceive cursing and swearing as a mandatory part of my squabbled speech, Becky and Baby Jesus stopped loving me.

So, what makes us curse and swear? When it is appropriate to use a sexual reference curse (fuck) of just a blasphemous one (goddamn, bloody hell, fucking heavens)? When is it acceptable to use a sordid miasma one (oh, shit! holy crap!) or just a simple yet effective stereotyping slam (faggot)? Do we always curse when we are upset or angry? (eg: bloody bastard!) Or to simply express joy and happiness? (Fuck, I won the lottery!). Do we use it to express trouble and release anxiety? (I am fucked!) or to simply show consternation? (Fuck it!). Is it a natural form of human curiosity to hungry grasp the world’s knowledge (what the fuck is that?) or just a way to show repulsion and contempt? (fuck off!).

Among the curse words the sexual “fuck” seems to be the most versatile. It can express a whole palette of emotions depending on the context. It is used to express pain, pleasure, joy or anger. It is also used equally and indiscriminately by individuals with low or high SES. I personally know a couple of cognitive psychology professors that “f this and f that” every other Freud phrase (obviously as a sign of non-appreciation for an obsolete cigar smoker, and not necessarily to release frustration or anger). Or maybe…

Fuck, as a word, not deed, is obviously considered profane and gives a mouthful of satisfaction to the user. It can be said in various ways (snapping the teeth off of the lower lip to give the word emphasis or a powerfully rendered click of the CK in the back of the throat - as advised by psychologist Lawrence Rubin) and used in various contexts. It can stand alone or be inserted in the middle of other words (eg: absofuckinglutely! or infuckingcredible!, neurofuckingscientist)

Etymologically speaking, its origins are highly controversial and while some linguists claim it was recorded in English since the 15th century, with cognates in other Germanic languages (Middle Dutch fokken “to thrust, copulate with"; ) others say it is of Latin origin (futuere). M.E. Buck cites proper name John le Fucker from 1278. The word apparently is hinted in the poem "Flen flyys," written in Latinum vulgare: “Non sunt in celi/quia fuccant uuiuys of heli” (The monks are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely). Johnson excluded the word, and fuck wasn't in any English language dictionary from 1795 to 1965. Once The Penguin Dictionary officially defined it in 1966, all the fucking hell broke lose.

Now, some psychologists claim that polluted language is a sign of aggression which can lead to violent acts. Hence, the repeated beeps we can all hear in “The Sopranos”. The moralists persist that tainted words show a decline in civility and an erosion of moral values. So, what the fuck is morality?

Philosophy steps in for this particular definition of morality and describes it as a system of conduct that is righteous. Now, morality itself can hold three ethical nuances: moral standards (with regard to behavior); moral responsibility (with regard to conscience) and moral identity (capacity for right or wrong action).

Modern psychology and neurocognitive scientists in particular reckon that capacity to recognize what another individual is undergoing is a progress in understand morality (the mirror neurons that fire in imitation when another person is observed doing a certain action are thought to have a role in empathy or other conducts believed to be exclusively moral). So empathy and, by extension, morality could have a biological basis.

Others even go further and claim that swearing is a way to relieve anger and frustration in a nonphysical way. According to De Klerk (1991), the use of expletives by men may be related to the assertion of power, while Daly, Holmes, Newton and Stubbe (2004) claimed that the word fuck has a complex sociopragmatic functions and is rather related to solidarity and friendship. A more recent study at Keele University found that cursing may actually relieve the perception of physical pain and when swearing, the volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer. Now, the curses would seem less powerful with a decreased linguistic resonance if they were used repeatedly (prolonged subjection) in order to habituate the potential undesirable effects of the words (what psychologists call desensitization or inurement).

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the debate concerning the harmful effect of the (fetid) words is going on. Some say that those who curse are in fact verbal abusers. To counter act on the potential harmful effect of foul language, some restrict the speech within legal frames (calumny and insult are punishable by law in most countries and rely on the psychological aspect that words are harmful). However, since speech is emblematic, how problematic can it be?

So, why is swearing considered immoral? Well, let’s see. The making of moral right and wrong judgments links to activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, while as the intuitive reactions to situations containing implicit moral issues activates the temporoparietal junction area. And this is not where the language (even the foul one) happens. The language happens in the left hemispheric cortex in most adults (from childhood until about age 25, language capacity in right-handers grows stronger in the left hemisphere of the brain) and there are three precise regions involved in speech production, reading and naming. Now, swearing and cursing are rather learnt processes that mostly involves the naming (hence name calling) rather than original production or reading. Corollary, there is an evolution of swearing that grows with age. A ten year old cannot fully grasp the depths of “fuck the fucking fuckers” with the same wisdom and comprehension of an adult. Similarly, the higher the SES, the more sophisticated and complex and maybe innovative, the swearing.

However, I would like to point out the evident double standard aspect perpetuated by people who think that while swearing is immoral, capital punishment is not. Sadly, history shows that the punishment is not always directly proportional with the dimension of the crime and one can be excessively punished by death for robbery or by detention, suspension, and expulsion for cursing in school. Is punishment effective when came to swearing on educational premises? Not really, 94% of college students continued to curse throughout adult life even if they had vibrant memories when came to curse punishment.

Nonetheless, we cannot bring “morality” into discussion without mentioning the moral codes, moral behavior and religion. In general, a religious person is considered to be a morally predictable person. This, of course, can vary from culture to culture and from cult to cult. Apostasy in Islam, for instance, is punishable by death; therefore we cannot claim that religion implies morality since death punishment is foreseen by that particular religion. Under no circumstances, an action can or has to be above the price of human life. Christians, as well, have instituted the punishment of death for apostasy with the help of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (the very first law of the Corpus Juris Civilis). An instigation to murder as punishment for cursing is also found in The Bible, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death” (Matthew 15:1-9; Exodus 21:17).

However, if swearing erodes the moral values and moral values are acts that are judged within their context instead of by categorical principles, how can swearing do that? It can not, of course. So since there's no evidence that a word in and of itself has a negative effect on anyone, say it loud, say it proud! Fuck that!

No more “I’m sorrys”

2010-04-23T14:01:00.003+03:00

Terry M. Helvey, an American sailor, confessed to stomping to death Allen Schindler, a homosexual shipmate. He later on apologized at the court-martial for brutally beating Schindler: "I can't apologize enough for my actions. I am not trying to make any excuses for what happened that night. It was horrible, but I am not a horrible person."

Plato's Apology of Socrates was a self-defense of someone "who corrupted the young, refused to worship the gods, and created new deities". And that would have been a very effective apology, if it was sincere. But, was Socrates sorry for not worshiping the gods? I really doubt that. Socrates apology helped him have the last word in an argument he won on the long term, but momentarily lost along with his life.

So what makes an apology effective enough to make us forgive such deeds? Some studies claim that an effective apology should imply an understanding of the offence, assuming responsibility, acknowledging the pain you created, self-judging the offence you did, showing remorse, and intentions.

Interestingly enough, the word apology derives from the Greek apologia meaning 'a speaking in defense'. The word defense itself can be: a) an euphemism for war or the military, b) a psychological defense mechanism, c) survival techniques against large predators and d) a pleading practice defined to be the denial of the truth or validity of the complaint, and which does not signify a justification.

The bottom line is that, apologies basically mean the act of defending against attack, danger, or injury. When we apologize we rather downplay a new and potential debate/conflict/quarrel. In the animal world, a male monkey that upset the alpha male of the group, apologizes by bending over and showing his bottom in order to divert the alpha male’s aggression and covert it into sexual energy. I know a few people that do this regularly.

Since childhood we are inculcated a set of norms which are supposed to help us fit better. Sometimes, these precious social teachings come in handy. Some other times, they just won’t do. The communication process is such a set of norms. Yet, it is outrageously pretentious to claim that this is universally valid. In spite of the multitude of cross cultural studies with yet local findings, some say apologies are the gluing element of broken relations by restoring the trust.

However, apologies don’t matter much. Quantum Physics claims that the act of observing something changes that very thing. Communication is such a two-way observing process which is defined by an exchange and progression of thoughts, feelings, gestures (kiss, slap, punch, stab- sure murder is an extreme way of communicating to someone you don’t like them) or ideas towards a mutually accepted goal. Communication, pretty much like death, is irreversible. We can't take anything back: not a word, not a gesture and definitely not a feeling. Something changed within us: an idea, a bunch of thoughts, and a gallon of emotions. Sometimes the process goes wrong and one of the parties feels/is hurt. During communication there are several processes that are enacted and the act of apologizing should re-align the good self of the wrong doer with the person she/he has offended with the violated norm (Goffman, 1973).

When we apologize, we speak in defense of a cause, beliefs or actions, trying to justify (explain, find a reason) for our deeds, thus contradicting the very purpose of the apology, which should be the admittance of an erroneous act. Self-defense doesn’t necessarily imply the admittance of a mistaken, error, crime, and offense. Consequently, apologies have no particular importance but they do carry some meaning.

The underlying reason for an apology is not the remorse itself but the forgiveness part. If you think that “the wronged don't distinguish between coerced apologies and spontaneous ones” why apologize anyway? The wronged one doesn’t make the difference and the wrong doer doesn’t mean it.

Forgiveness comes in as many hues as the degrees of hurt – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual (am not even coming close to how and if we should forgive societal atrocities, murder, wars). For that, no apology is accepted. Germany’s apology for the Holocaust doesn’t even come close to being worthy and it is just a diplomatic trick that is worth pretty much nothing. Well, close to nothing as in 1965, Germany signed a treaty agreeing to pay for the Holocaust victims and has paid out over 63.2 billion Euros -including 1.5 billion Euros in direct payments to the Israeli government. Yet, can we say Israelis forgave the Germans? I doubt that. No words or money are good enough. Apologies do not really matter when your family is incinerated in an oven.

Now, medically speaking, forgiveness comes with a nice plate of lower blood pressure and heart rate, a better immune system and a longer life, among others. However, when comes to different kind of traumas, forgiveness is a long life process and might not be the most recommended approach. It comes with an assortment of other dishes: reconciliation, confession, repentance, and penalty. Added to recognition and assuming responsibility, plus material payment it might come close to working.

Nonetheless, a premature forgiveness will lead to the opposite outcome. Some say that if done correctly, an apology can heal humiliation and generate forgiveness. And that a successful apology requires empathy and the security and strength to admit fault, failure, and weakness. So, it is not enough to know how to properly apologize but you also count on the AQ (apology quotient) of the apology receiver.

Anyway, if I err, I apologize.

Panem et circenses

2010-04-20T15:26:00.001+03:00

Across the ocean, in the USA, a judge ruled that The National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. Judge Barbara Crabb motivated her decision by saying that “In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual's decision whether and when to pray”.

The same day, across the other side of the world (literarily) two Romanian MPs have proposed a National Day of Prayer based on other reasons than religious. Senator Gheorghe David and Mircea Lubanovici have asked for the amendment of the Labor Code, in order to fit the new proposal. Obviously, having a day off in order to pray for more money from I.M.F., decrease of the national debt, unemployment skyrocketing rate seems like a reasonable thing to do. Only a super natural power might save this country from disaster and generalized corruption.

We are not here to discuss the benefits of the prayer itself, as regardless of religion many think that some sort of organized incantation or invocation of a supreme power can be uplifting and increase morale (subject expectancy effect). Yet, this should not be done nationally and supported legally and each individual should be theoretically free to choose the time and place to do it.

Although a day off is nice and the procrastinator in me would normally welcome it, I am, however, too outraged to let this one go. The folk wisdom says, if you are not outraged you are not paying enough attention. So here is the deal. The new legal proposal basically relies on the same anti-constitutionality framework that made the American judge declare it as unconstitutional (please see Article 9, Law 489/2006 which states that “There is no state religion in Romania; the State is therefore neutral of any religious belief or atheistic ideology; 2) The Cults are equal before the law and the public authorities. The State and its authorities will not promote or favor or create discriminations towards any particular cult.

So, what is particularly wrong with this proposal let aside it is anti-legal? Well, for starters the prayer itself is the expression of a religious belief, and the religious belief is a personal choice. To offer a national day off would show clear favor to a religious majority. If that is the case, then it should equally be offered the opportunities for days off like: the Coca Cola Abstinence Day, The Non Spitting on the Sidewalk Day, The Picking the Feces after your Dog Day, Mourning Day when the soccer team loses, Grape Picking Day, and Non-Thinking Day. Similarly, there should be a day off to celebrate a Free-Thinking Day, in which people should not pray based on the same egalitarian principles of state neutrality.

Let us be clear about it. The believers in Romania should be and are free to go to any church of choice as long as they do that in their spare time, not interfering with other people’s beliefs or non-beliefs for a fact.

This is not an anti-religious plea or even a secular versus religious debate as their dispute stopped being a dialog about primum casus, fallacies, and fissures in both theories and became a generalized ad hominem venomous stoning in the agora.

This is not a debate about god or church. This is a debate about freedom.

If you disagree with the project, you can personally email Gheorghe David and Mircea Lubanovici:
gheorghe.david@senat.ro si mircea.lubanovici@cdep.ro

Not all women are dumb, but all men are men

2010-04-20T11:12:00.003+03:00

The debate
The boob liberty parade started long controversies that gathered around the debating table modern philosophers, real doctors or just PhDs, religious people, ethic and moral experts, outraged feminists and men with an obvious Freudian fixation.

Although regarded by many as a sign of promiscuity and libertinage, topless sunbathing was eased into the modern culture by a misunderstood feminism brought to extremes. Some advance even the idea that is good for your breasts to be tanned. That would be true if overall tanning would be beneficial for the health. However, medical researches claim that from the moment when topless tanning became popular breast cancer rate increased.

I am not here to point fingers or to make the apologetic of naked bodies, as we all know what a convoluted and controversial concept that is. Some say that even if the 60’s frenzy is gone, the perils of this earth-shattering period are still present and leading to a mass fury of boob flashing. Most topless addicts claim that partial or total nudity is a symbol of a newly gained freedom, while more prude and cautious critics state that, in fact, the loss of shame equals to loss of civilization. We started naked some 60,000,000 years ago and we end up naked. What is the benefit of development and civilization if we return to the rudiments of our censorless behavior?

Reductio ad ridiculum
Is lack of "shame" a sign of civilization? Moreover, should nudity coincide with being ashamed? What did we gain and what did we lose in the process of evolution? Is covering up a sign of modernism? Are clothes or their lack off a standard of civilization? Well, for starters, the lack of clothes is not a symbol of civilization, and aborigines in various corners of the world stand as living proof. Similarly, the excessive cloth covering is also not a representation of the level of civilization, modernity or emancipation (just consider the Taliban women).

The question that rises is whether shame should be identified with nudity or not. Shame is an emotion, and affect and a condition which is usually defined as a painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous done by oneself or another. Now, if we think of nudity as dishonorable, improper or ridiculous, obviously we will feel ashamed.

The next question in our train of thought is whether nudity is ridiculous or not. What is being ridiculous? In rhetorics and argumentation there is a logical fallacy called reductio ad ridiculum (appeal to ridicule), which presents the interlocutor's argument in a way that appears ridiculous, or laughable about. Example: as the theory of evolution is true, that would mean that all the apes wouldn't be here any more, since they all would have evolved into humans!

Etymologically speaking, the word ridiculous, from Latin ridiculosis (laughter) came to mean by extension, pathetic, scornful and inspiring pity. Now, is human nudity pathetic? Are our new born babies pathetic and ridiculous? Maybe they are but we are too blinded by oxytocin to see that. It should be no exception. We cannot have double standards and appreciate only the infant nudity while rejecting the adult one. A couple of extra pubic hairs shouldn’t make nudity less attractive, au contraire. It all comes down to the value scale of a certain society who gives more importance to nudity than to flogging or beheading.

Those inglorious flogging basterds
You might wonder how can I mix nudity and flogging in the same context. Very simple, really. A society that insinuates that nudity is a crime, will end up flogging an individual for doing so, not thinking that the collective shame of performing a dishonorable deed (such as flogging) of the society itself when expressing a level of civilization, by physically punishing an individual, should be higher than seeing the nudity of that individual. That was a long phrase and I hardly made sense of it. Logically and ethically makes no sense, if we break down the definition of shame vs nudity. The flogging itself diminishes the level of civilization and increases the shame given by the lack off or banning of nudity.

Breast Appreciation Academy
Let me get your attention back, so let’s revert to breasts. The breast itself is not a nice organ to look at, if dissected: it is composed 90% of fat, tissue and some mammary glands. Looked at from the outside, it is a stretch of skin over the same fat and mammary glands, that has a dark, brown, pink areola, with protruding or inverted nipples, pear, melon, cantaloupe, apple or other fruits shaped. Some innovative genuine breast lovers, who seemed to have studied at Breast Appreciation Academy, forward these genial alternative names for the same organs: assets, baps, bazookas, boobs, boobies, cans, hooters, jugs, knockers, rack, tits, titties, bee stings, mosquito bites, puppies, honkers, twins, jublies, gunzagas, milk depot, airbags, bangers, norks, fun bags, tata tots, twin peaks, fun bubbles, boulders, sin cushions, bouncers, bongos, balloons, snuggle pups, bumpers, yummies, udders and my favourite of them all, chesticles.

We cannot go on with our peroration about topless without mentioning that the anatomical functionality of breasts is to mainly feed the offspring. However, what feminists seem to forget is that in order to reach to the offspring feeding part, a woman needs to procreate and she would procreate if she previously had sex, and she would get to have sex if she aroused the male by flashing her boobs. Therefore, we might logically conclude that breasts’ anatomical primary and foremost role is to arouse the man, so the female can insure the perpetuation of the species. Jokingly or not, this assessment is nevertheless true. There are tons of books written about the sociology of breasts, and men’s obsession of this particular body organ. Some women, including me, felt very offended when men declared turned off by the presence of nutrition (milk that is) within the breasts and jumped right up, declaring very Simone de Beauvoirish that breasts, you misogynists and chauvinist pigs, are made to feed our infants and not used to make fast car advertorials and commercials.

"I have a dream"
OK, here is the thing; if an organ whose primordial role is to produce milk manages to sell fast cars and kitchen furniture to men, so much for the better. The overall economy will get better, and us as individuals will live in more decent conditions. Use it for your benefit. Who knows, maybe in time, naked breasts pictures will prevent some economic crisis or even bring world peace. A study actually claimed (who pays for this kind of studies, goddamn it!) that “ten minute ogle at women’s breasts is as healthy as half an hour in the gym”. Imagine a world full of happy and relaxed men, with no desire to start wars or invade territories, or who go to work to support their wives extravagant standards of living, while driving the car they bought after they stared at a fast-car-naked-boob-subliminal message ad. We all know what popular wisdom is saying “not all women are dumb, but all men are men”.

Altruism, from Yeast to Amnesty International

2010-04-14T18:23:00.001+03:00

During Kant’s days, altruism was distinguished from duty and loyalty. It still is today. It comes to no surprise that for evolutionary theorists, altruism is at least biologically impossible, and anyway, even if an organism shows signs of altruism that is well masked selfishness. The evolutionary scientists say that if altruistic organisms emerge, they would lose the competition for survival and they would become extinct. From this point view, this trait is a chimera as there are only two ways that an organism engages in altruistic behavior: help one's own offspring, and/or other close kin. So much for altruism.

Let alone the acute sensation that we are becoming the victims of a fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, the problem is either vaster or in fact, way simpler than we thought it was (once again, Occam’s razor could be applicable - entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity). Now, the problem could become more facile, as soon as we agree on how: 1) we define altruism and 2) if consciousness is required when comes to it. In fact, there might be no problem whatsoever, just various options that, in the end, do not even contradict each other, just complete. However, the rigidness of the biological-evolutionary based view just falls short under the fallacy of the general rule, where all chairs have four legs, failing to bring into discussion the rocking chairs, for instance (I know for a fact that my grandfather had three legged chairs).

For biologists, an organism behaves altruistically if the behavior reduces its own fitness while increasing the fitness of one or more other organisms. From this perspective we can count a few organisms, like yeast, a monocellular organism, which exhibits altruistic behavior. Margaret Jack (2007, Harvard Science Review) showed the origin of a gene for altruism in the budding yeast where each cell secretes the enzyme that is then shared by the whole population.

However, cellular altruism is not always accurate, let alone true. A study made by Sohei Kondo (1998, International Journal of Radiation Biology) claims that cell suicide, programmed death and apoptosis are terms used for the same type of active cell death. Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death that may occur in multicellular organism and which confers advantages during an organism's life cycle. For instance, apoptosis is responsible for killing infected cells, cancerous cells and cells that are in the wrong place during development. C. Gourley (2006, Molecular Microbiology) claimed that apoptosis has been observed as a kind of altruistic suicide in colonies of yeast under stress. In animals, radiation hormesis (the stimulating effect of small doses of substances which in larger doses are inhibitory) results from altruistic cell death and this hypothesis can explain the hormetic effect of low doses of radiation on the immune system in mice. In contrast, in plants, radiation hormesis seems to be mainly due to non-altruistic cell death.

From this perspective, an organism can be altruistic without possessing consciousness. But that is rather simplistic, isn’t it? However, the generalization from yeast to human psyche is a bit cherry pickinglish, as it rather points at individual cases that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a momentous slice of related cases that may contradict that position.

Now, altruism apparently leads to helping behavior and it is biologically possible for organisms to have the ultimate desires to help their kin, and to help non-kin with whom they engage in reciprocal altruism. Yet, in the case of yeast, the concept of “desire”- the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state- or even “close kin benefit” is out of the question. So, at which point can we transpose the issue of altruism from “biology” to “psychology”? J.P. Rushton (2007) demonstrated that altruism is a heritable trait in a study that showed that identical twins had a higher correlation of altruism than fraternal twins. Additionally, if aggressiveness, depression and jealousy can be accepted as genetically necessary because it helped humans survive, so can altruism, which ultimately is not simply a socialized behavior based on an individual’s guilt or a masked form of selfishness close kin, but a genetic trait.

C. Sripada (apud John Doris, 2002) has emphasized that the ultimate desire for the welfare of others could spring from another direction than kin selection or reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I scratch yours, in a 50% ratio). Similarly, Daniel Batson rather defines altruism as the creation of an emotional response (empathy) to the distress of another person. Some even push the theory further claiming that we help others but not to avoid another person’s distress (imagine when you interfere if you see a woman getting raped) but to avoid your own distress for being a silent witness to such mishap. So ultimately, when a Good Samaritan does interfere to prevent a crime, he does so as a coping mechanism of further personal distress (more so to get the Helper’s High).

In folk mentality, altruism is synonymous to: sympathy, compassion, tenderness, empathy and manages to escape the narrowness of the biological definition, where altruism is just an instinctive behavior that is detrimental to the individual but favors the survival or spread of that individual's genes.

Rather, we would replace it with how it was originally coined by Auguste Comte as amity, compassion, generosity, goodwill, humanity, kindheartedness, kindness, sympathy, beneficence, benevolence, charity, magnanimity, philanthropy, selflessness, self-sacrifice, and unselfishness. Etymologically speaking the word comes from the old French “autrui” meaning “other people” and is an unselfish regard for the welfare of others; and if evolutionists want to prove altruism is another form of selfishness, they might just have to coin a term of their own.

Now, the question that rises is this: do those Amnesty International and Greenpeace volunteers exhibit altruistic behavior to avoid personal distress, to preserve their genes, or they coldly calculate the zero-sum relations before allowing themselves to be killed (see the case of Rainbow Warrior or those who sign letters for Freedom of Speech on behalf other people, who live in countries where this right is banned)? I am aware that is a twisted egoistic possibility, which is rather based on self protection of one’s sensibility rather than the protection of an outsider not at all close to kin.

Now, another aspect of the altruism would be the morality of the deed itself. If I prevent a crime from being done, and I altruistically interfere (not thinking to offspring or next to kin or reciprocity), I might do so out of a self-punishment motivation or a self-reward? So my snap decision is a selfish not wanting to live with the guilt one, which leads to what an outsider might perceive an altruistic action. So what does ultimately give value to altruism: self-perception or the collective perception? In one of the philosophy tales, when speaking of Kant’s morality, it is said that a shopkeeper had the opportunity to give the wrong change to a customer (to cheat on him). Yet, he gives the right change instead. Now, the motivation for which he gave back the right change was the fear that gossip about his manners as a businessman would be spread in the market and he might lose his business. Fearing bankruptcy, he instead acts moral. Now, the value of his act is not moral, as his motivation was not moral. Rather, the shopkeeper gave the right change out of anxiety and self-punishment more than moral inclination.

Morally speaking, a person that commits an altruist fact based on the decision that on a long term they might suffer from remorse, anxiety and regret gives no genuine altruistic value to the deed. In the end, altruism should not only be a talk about gene replicating easiness, close to kin reciprocity, empathy, helper’s high or remorse, even if the organism that shows traits of altruism is metazoan or not. Altruism cannot be brought into discussion, unless we speak of an ulterior motive which has to be intrinsically conscious, so we can make it morally worthy. Self-awareness is a condition to be entitled to your own merkwelt and the thalamo-cortical physiological support for awareness is not sufficient to call ourselves "aware". If merkwelt involves thoughts, perceptions, emotions and ultimately motivation, it is rather obvious that altruism depends on our particular consciousness, more than our desire to simply perpetuate in a zero-sum exchange system.

You gelotologist!

2010-04-09T13:06:00.007+03:00

So what happens when a therapist and a hooker spend the night together? In the morning they both say: "120 dollars, please."

Bored scientists came up with quite a handful of researches which emphasize the importance of humor. Is there a humor center in the brain? What are we laughing about? Why do we appreciate humor? Well, let’s spend some funds and see why we are laughing at Seinfeld’s jokes. Yada yada yada.

Medically speaking, Dean K. Shibata, of the University of Rochester Medical Center, claims that the appreciation of jokes and cartoons is related to the ventromedial frontal lobe, an area with little activity in patients with depression and in which lesions may alter the person’s sense of humor. Now, if you are not laughing while watching Tony Blair bashing atheists as the new terrorist threat within, you just could have a ventromedial frontal lobe issue. Or the man could be a plain idiot.

However, researchers know that a number of brain structures, including the prefrontal cortex (responsible for language processing and memory), are involved in humor appreciation. Shibata advised neurosurgeons to avoid such areas of the brain during surgery. We wouldn’t like a healthy humorless patient, would we? What would be the irony if the patient loses his sense of humor when he sees the bill and sues the hospital? After all, this is why the psychiatrists used to administer shock therapy to the patients: to prepare them for the bill. Get it? If you didn’t, not to worry. Genders seem to respond differently when comes to appreciation of humor.

A study made by Allan Reiss, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, discovered that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a "greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, as they used more analytical machinery when deciphering humorous material". So, in case you ever wanted to know what's the difference between a psychologist and a magician here is the answer: a psychologist pulls habits out of rats! If you laughed at this joke, you might be a man, or a psychologist. Or both.

Now, anatomically speaking, laughter is caused by the epiglottis constricting the larynx and its study is called gelotology. Consequently a person that dedicates his life to studying laughter is called a gelotologist. If he studies laughter in old people that would make him a gerontologist gelotologist. Now, let’s see what we are laughing about. Contrary to popular belief, we do not laugh about humor only; we laugh at people and mainly how they relate. You don’t need a killer punch line to make someone laugh. “Oh, gee, here’s comes Sarah Palin” might as well do. A successful joke thus depends on several factors: gender, level of education, level of a healthy mind (a damaged brain person might not get it), race and age. Apart from relations we also laugh at slapsticks, common experiences and situations, families, marriages, embarrassing situations and slip-ups, work, idiots, bosses, intellectual snobs and psychologists. Oh, in passing, do you know how many psychologists it takes to change a light-bulb? Just one, but the light-bulb has to want to change.

Chic Murray, a Scottish comedian, thinks we also laugh at guns: I drew a gun. He drew a gun. I drew another gun. Soon we were surrounded by lovely drawings of guns. Billy Connolly doesn’t even tell jokes but he does make a lot of physical manifestations on the behavior. And swearing. Bloody hell. On a poll made by E! Television, Seinfeld was the only comedy series that made the ’90s rule. Seinfeld’s humor has a sort of superficial conflict and characters with odd dispositions, but none with deep emotions. A character’s death (architect and marine biologist wannabe George’s fiancée, Susan) got no genuine emotion of regret from anyone in the show. As Wesley Hurd said, in his Postmodernism: a new model of reality, the characters were “thirty-something singles with no roots, vague identities, and conscious indifference to morals” and that made us laugh for almost ten years.

Evolutionary speaking, Robert Provine, professor at the University of Maryland, believes that laughter evolved from the panting behavior of our ancient primate ancestors. “If we tickle chimps or gorillas, they don’t laugh “ha ha ha” but exhibit a panting sound. That’s the sound of ape laughter. And it’s the root of human laughter. When we laugh, we’re often communicating playful intent. So laughter has a bonding function within individuals in a group. It’s often positive, but it can be negative too. There’s a difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” People who laugh at others may be trying to force them to conform or casting them out of the group.”

However, the effectiveness of humor as a communication device remains uncertain as humor has proven to be very elusive, although the attention-attracting ability of humor has also been demonstrated in education research (Powell and Andresen 1985; Zillmann et al. 1980).

Sigmund Freud believed that laughter releases tension and "psychic energy" and it’s basically a coping mechanism and maybe this is why the psychoanalysis is a lot quicker for a man than for a woman. Because when it's time to go back to childhood, a man is already there.

More recent studies claimed that men make women laugh as they want to get them in bed. A laughing woman opens her mouth, exposes her teeth and throat, makes the “hahahaha” sounds, tilts her head back and that by itself is foreplay. But, while women appear to prefer a man who makes them laugh (82% of women consistently rank humor as one of the top 3 qualities of men they want to date) the same does not hold true when the sexes are reversed - and men are not more attracted to funny girls. Humor is a quality that gets women in bed, and which seems to only be appreciated by women, required in men. So yes, it is a no brainer that laughter leads to sex, unless of course the laughter is about sex, at which point the laughter ensures that there will be no more sex. After all, what does a behaviorist tell to another after lovemaking: “Darling, that was wonderful for you. How was it for me?"

Just click on "share"

2010-02-23T14:17:00.008+02:00

Share this

What is this new trend of file sharing compulsion? Why do we suddenly feel the need to share via a status update or a re-post on our Superwall what we are doing at the moment? Who cares if your purse got stolen in a crowded bus, if the weather in the part of your world sucks, or if a plane just crashed into a building near you? Moreover, why do we feel to necessarily share with others what we read, see, listen or hear? Well, the answer is simple: as we need sympathy, approval, acceptance and kinship support. It is only human.

Peter Senge thought that “Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes”.

Like him, I thought that the road to knowledge is via sharing and trying to obtain the others interest and make them resonate with you. This is how we affiliate, based on likeness, and not on variety. I will never make friends with a person who belongs to a Facebook group that “Impales Golden Retrievers in their spare time” or thinks “Hitler was an amazing person”. However, I will try to make friends with someone who has an interest in psychology, journalism, social quantum change, and thinks Burroughs’ Naked Lunch should be studied in school.

Each time we click on a “share” button (which now is a mandatory technical presence all over the internet media) we require the others to give us their attention, to stop what they are doing and for the next few minutes to read or listen what we are writing/reading or listen. Surely, there is always the option not to do that, but how many real life relations have not been broken over virtual misunderstandings?

My real question is how mentally healthy it is when we come across internet buttons at the end of each piece and compulsion is just one click away? Can the share impulse be defined as “compulsion”? Does it have all attributes? According to the textbooks, the compulsion is a repetitive, excessive, meaningless activity or mental exercise that a person performs in an attempt to avoid distress or worry. How stress relieving is when I repeatedly share articles from Scientific American Mind or Psychology Today? If sharing becomes a compulsion, its performance will relieve distress but only temporarily and on the long term the sharing obsessed person will have to seek some other relievers like compulsively checking their email account or cell phone inbox every other minute.

Sigmund Freud used the German word Zwang to describe compulsion, a word which derived from the Latin compulsio, and originally meant "constraint”. Yet, are we constrained to share? Does the internet condition us? Is Facebook or Twitter sharing act dominated by inevitable destiny or hopeless determinism? No, it isn’t, as the internet or social networks are not insurmountable in the drive, and we can certainly avoid that.

If you were my (Facebook) friend

OK, let’s take this real life conversation: “I have mentioned this issue in my last blog post and I have shared it on Facebook. If you paid attention, you knew what I was talking about. I won’t repeat it again now”. What is wrong with this particular (let alone absurd) reproach?

Oh, well, a new feeling of guilt is created as if you cared about your friends, you would have taken the time to read their posts- so they claim. Obviously, this last statement is not true. None of your friends are obliged to read your creations and none should feel guilty if they don’t. When you took the decision to advertise your product (be it a piece of literature, a song you wrote, some design you came up with) you should have taken into consideration the potential market response: some want it, some don’t. You need to assume the responsibility and emotional maturity of potential rejection. This is how we grow and develop, forged by failures and basking in success. If non-acceptance makes you feel sad, rejected, misunderstood, lonely, it is entirely up to you and solely your issue, not the others.

Similarly, the whole idea of friendship got a new dimension over social network sites. We affiliate with people we don’t know and yet we consider friends. I myself have asked people to accept my friend request hoping they are Facebook active and they regularly post interesting and new things (mostly pieces on psychology) on their “walls”. Those who failed to do that were deleted after a trial period, either being well-known names in the field or not. I hoped that my action would go unnoticed or worse case scenario, forgiven.

However, a few Facebook acquaintances decided to do the same. They have deleted me off their buddies list, without prior mishap. And that was fine. Facebook is just a virtual agora and we are not exactly friends. So no feelings were seriously hurt in the process. One of them told me he felt assaulted not necessarily by my frequent psychology articles sharing compulsion, which he found somehow interesting, but by the numerous comments my other friends posted on my wall.

He asked to be re-added. I will not however tell you what I did. Virtual deletion, as any action we perform, has a deeper meaning. We want to become oblivious of something, we want to delete, remove, and wipe out something or someone. Needless to say, such virtual act has real consequences. A deletion is a deletion. Like a word you said, it cannot be taken back. Some relationships are meant to subside. Others will flourish.

Social networking anxiety disorder

People who are more sensitive or unstable even get a sort of anxiety which started to have been recognized lately as a serious and real disorder: a social networking anxiety disorder.

While social anxiety disorder implies fear of being closely watched, judged, and criticized by others, the social networking anxiety disorder might actually combat the SAD by allowing its users to present themselves in a more favorable light: pictures that make the person look better than in reality; selected profile info; creamed up internet postings that make the others think that the re-poster is smarter than he actually is; name dropping or name affiliation by re-posting some articles that “buddies” on the friend list write. All in all, social networks make us look and seem better, prettier, and smarter.

Worse case scenario, if you have any social network weaknesses, you can simply “remove” an impulsive status update which might embarrass you later on, which is definitely not something you could do in real life without counting on collective oblivion.

Some even go further and re-post mass media clippings that they do not even read themselves but have interesting, funny, outrageous or intellectually posh titles enough to transmit to the others “hey, I am an interesting, funny, outrageous and intellectually posh person since I am reading this”. Thus, we collect a handful of first impressions, never getting to the bottom of second or third ones. Our virtual acquaintances are perfect and meet our natural necessity to socialize. We are accepted and admired. What else do we need? Well, for starters, a reality check. See how many people you can delete without them noticing this. Try to see how close the ones remaining are to you. Try to contact them and know them better, they are, after all, “your friends”. See how many accept and share your views on life. Or death. Not many, are there? Ideally, the number should be below 150. And that is a good thing.

Is euthanasia an extreme act of love?

2010-02-16T23:09:00.008+02:00

How far would you go to take the life of a dear one? Undoubtedly, people are ready to go incredible lengths to preserve the lives of their kin or dear ones. Sometimes, they would even kill some to save some. Wars have been always justified in a similar way for thousands of years. My tribe's safety justifies me murdering you. Is crime, even in self-defense, justifiable? A crime is a crime. But, can we honestly be strict about it? What if your child was in danger? Would you not pull the trigger? Are you absolutely sure you would not eat the weakest member of a group if that would be the sole alternative to survive on some deserted island? Are you ready to say "no" to euthanasia if you find out you or a dear one have a degenerative fatal illness? Isn’t euthanasia a type of extreme love, after all?

An article written by self-titled scientific fundamentalist Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, claims that “Dropping atomic bombs on Japan was an act of utmost compassion” and that “100 million people killed by bullets, one at a time, over weeks and months, is much, much worse, by any account, than 200,000 people killed in a flash of a second by atomic bombs”. I know, it sounds shocking to claim that Hiroshima was an act of mercy and some of the sensitive readers are appalled by this daring statement. If we can justify and excuse Hiroshima as an act of mass euthanasia, can we justify the Holocaust? If we create the precedent and come up with some decent retroactive reasoning, why not? But, is there any decent reasoning for mass murder? No, it is not.

However, Kanazawa justifies his reasoning “They would never have surrendered had we not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would have necessitated ground invasion of mainland Japan by the American forces, which would have led to many, many more Japanese to be killed, up to 100 million. You are equally dead whether you are killed by a bullet or an atomic bomb.” From this standpoint, Kanazawa, an utilitarian, used effortless calculus to justify a military action which killed, in the end, a quarter million people. Stalin was definitely not an idiot when he said that when one person dies is a tragedy, when millions die is just statistics. Kanazawa (whom I actually like in general) relies his argumentation on historic context and mentality of Japanese (very stereotyping and generalizing), claiming they would have died anyway in the name of the emperor and actually the US army just cut their tragedy short. Well, maybe the Jews exterminated during Holocaust would have died of cancer anyway, so Hitler just curbed their sufferance. Maybe Palestinians are meant to blow themselves up anyway, so why not bomb them? Maybe women have a tendency towards depression and suicide so why not put them on medication anyway? Maybe Blacks are meant to become gangsters and thieves so why not imprison them from early childhood? Maybe Italians will become drug dealers anyway, so why not ostracize them?

"What if" retroactive clauses are highly speculative and do not serve as a pretext for past actions. Moreover, human lives are not commensurable. We need to go down to the individual when dealing with lives. From a social perspective they are just collateral victims and we can find soothing words for each act: collateral victims, friendly-fire etc. Whatever keeps us psychologically comfortable. Justifying the H-Bomb by saying they would have committed suicide anyway is not an excuse. Not to mention the H-Bomb did not only kill 200,000 people, it killed them on a long term, created malformations, and made out of Hiroshima a spot of shame for the US. So much for excusing mass euthanasia.

What about individual euthanasia? Ramon Sampedro was a Spaniard who fought to be allowed to die for almost 28 years. He was quadriplegic, meaning he was paralyzed from his neck down, “a living head in a dead body”, as he said. He was immobilized in bed and was fed, washed, and tended by another adult. For any responsible person, emotionally and physically developed, being taken care of like that might lead to a feeling of discomfort, if not desperation, as it reminds us of childhood helplessness residues. While some might enjoy their regression state, most of us do not. Ramon was such a person. He wanted to be an adult and he thought that living a life where he depended entirely of someone else was humiliating. Moreover, a life where he could watch the nature just from the angle of his bed, was not a life (he had previously been a sea diver).

Yet, the society interfered with his choice of living his life with dignity and banned him not only to die, but banned him from living it with dignity. His basic rights of living with dignity were denied under some higher purpose and the feeble excuse that “god has given, god will take it away”. What if there is no God? Shall we deny the right of someone very palpable in the name of something indefinable? Can we deny people their basic right of owning their own life or the right to die? If it is our life, we are entitled to do whatever we please with it, live it or end it whenever we decide. This is about pro-freedom above all. And this freedom includes the liberty to end our lives, not only to live it with dignity or pay taxes or move freely. Assisted-suicide (and suicide in general) is a personal choice and we need to respect that. Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which most countries (including those which deny the right to die) subscribed to, decrees: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Obviously, those deciding on other people’s behalf (doctors, relatives) face a moral dilemma which leads to a psychological discomfort and, in time, if left unattended, to a certain imbalance. By definition, a dilemma implies two equally conclusive alternatives and most of the times equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive. A dilemma is what we wish we had in theory and never face. Yet, most of us, struggle with various ethical concepts (Philippa Foot’s “shall we save five people but kill one?” trolley problem) for which we have no definite answers, just speculations. Morals and ethics are not precise and exact sciences, unfortunately.

So, what makes a crime abominable? The number of victims? The lack of consent? Is a self-defense crime less of a crime? Is euthanasia a crime? Then what is life? Is breathing through machines a sufficient condition to be considered alive? Does consent make it morally correct? If not, why not, if we are equals in rights and dignity?

Ultimately, morality is not situated only in the upshot of a deed (death in this case) but also in rights. And it is our basic fundamental right to live with dignity. Or die with it.

Membership number 1,607,525

2010-02-10T14:32:00.000+02:00

Herbert von Karajan, a prominent orchestra conductor, and son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family, originally Aromanian, was undoubtedly a musical genius. At the age of only 27 he was appointed Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor and was a guest conductor in Bucharest (that would be Romania, not Hungary), Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris. He was known as the most popular orchestra conductor of all times, and he sold over 200 million copies.

Yet in this wunderkinder’s perfect biography there is a glitch. Karajan was a member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party on 8 April 1933; his membership number was 1,607,525.

Should his political appurtenance and youth credo in Sozialismus shade his creative talent? Does it say anything about his character as a human being? About his morality? It certainly does. Can we have double standards and separate our enjoyment for music, art and literature from the man that created it? Isn't this hypocrisy and indirect endorsement of their personal life choices?

Pope Benedict XVI was also a member of Hitler Youth party. At the time it was mandatory. It is no secret about the coercive methods of authoritarian regimes: if you were not with them, you were against them.

Some however joined out of sheer belief in a new era. They believed in change, even if the course of history got out of hand and change proved to be atrocious. They thought that evolution meant revolution. I do, too.

“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted the substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all were committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals to be a comparatively moral man. Such was my life for ten years”. These were the words of Tolstoy.

Like so many others, Tolstoy remained in the collective conscience as a great writer and philosopher. His private life and the allegations of rape of an underage girl remain forgotten, just brought up any now and then by some exasperate literature teacher to awake the interest of vexed 15 year olds who are busy sending text messages about 50 Cent and Pittbull. Like this teacher totally sucks, y’all, but that Tolstoy dude was like totally awesome. I am like totally floored. Word, sweet!

Michael Jackson has died. Like all obituaries, such hearsay makes us reflect about what immortality really is.

Because one of our contemporary brilliant minds (Milan Kundera that is) has a novel with a similar name, I tried to look up for synonyms of endless life and I came across this one: athanasia, a lovely female name, of Greek origin, also meaning immortal, deathless. As opposed to its twin, euthanasia, which implies a good death, athanasia gave birth to a Christian creed in the 15th century and claims, in spite of all church’s documents and decrees, that thanatos can be conquered and incarnation, recte immortality, is possible.

You might honestly wonder how I can mix up Karajan, the Pope, Michael Jackson, Tolstoy and Church in the same literary pot. It is rather easy, believe me, as the main theme here is immortality and ways to achieve it.

Like Tolstoy, Michael Jackson was accused and acquitted of child sexual abuse, although at the time the media were unfriendly to him and tended to give moral credit to the child, whose name will, as well, remain immortal. We are not here to judge whether Karajan was a Nazi, Jackson was a pedophile, Tolstoy was a rapist, Schopenhauer a violent manic-depressive with his oddities and anxieties and his gun hidden under the pillow, and his lawsuits for battering older women, Nietzsche was a drug addict, whose writings were heavily chloral hydrated or Rimbaud an alcoholic addicted to absinthe.

We should not judge the men, but their legacy. But can we separate them?

What is immortality? Does being morally virtuous insure one a place in the history book? No, it certainly doesn’t. Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Oppenheimer, Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper are spending their eternity in the same room with Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus or Prophet Mohammad. For those who are dying to believe in a postmortem justice, such as heaven and hell, things are quite obvious: to the right go Gandhi, Jesus & co., and to the left go Adolf, Oswald and Jack.

Where do Michael Jackson and Karajan go? They won fair and square their right to immortality and their moral innocence wasn’t proven to have been defiled. Their admirers’ blind and unconditional love saved them a place in the Book of the Dead. Is the love of others the answer for our absolution? Wasn’t self redemption that did that?

No matter how dubious their personal lives were, in the end what stays with us, the ordinary populace, is their legacy, and the emotions they created.

For it is true, we will forget what they said and will forget what they did, but we will never forget how they made us feel: happy, angry, sad, scared, surprised, disgusted or just disappointed.

The lonely wolves

2010-01-20T19:00:00.003+02:00

Have you ever wondered what animal resides inside you? That after so many years of soul searching and spiritual vagabondage, you might have ended up as wolves, lambs, worms or horseshoe crabs?

In 1927, Herman Hesse wrote a book, called the Steppenwolf, in which he spoke of the struggle and the split between our humanity and our wolf like aggression. Apparently, Hesse re-discovered the wheel and what the ancient Greeks kept on preaching about our dualist nature. A concept that was taken over by Plato and Aristotle, but dates all the way back to Zarathustra, the Persian prophet from 18th century BC.

Octavian Paler, a Romanian contemporary writer, a lonely wolf himself, thought that the other wolves would tear us apart, if they knew that our howl is, in fact, weeping. Painful.

Funny, how many of us identify with lonely wolves, while wolves live in fact in packs. Are we naturally born to live alone yet meant to mingle with the crowds?

Outside the animal regna, in social terms, a lone wolf is someone who commits violent acts in support of an ideology, but does so alone, outside of any command structure. From this point of view, a lone wolf is a terrorist. It is admirable to have an ideology, but even within the terrorist organizations you need to obey the rules. Even terrorists need order, discipline and structure. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, to me too. Not much of a difference, is there?

Hesse said in the Steppenwolf and later on developed in Narcissus and Goldmund, that as humans, we have two natures - a spiritual and elevated one, and a low, and animalistic one.

From this point of view, we were naturally born schizophrenics and our ancestral unhappiness might result from a permanent and irresolvable struggle between the two.

Thus, to obtain peace of mind, we need to come to terms and make peace with the animal inside us. Simpler said, than done. If the animal inside us would be a docile poodle, that should not be hard. Make peace with the animal inside you. Have you tried to come to terms or resonate with a wolf? What about a lemming, a tarantula, a Black Widow or a scorpion?

On an unrelated yet converging to the point topic, Cartesian dualism underlined rather a physical versus mental dual nature. Some 500 years later, Freud picked up on the idea and came up with the unconscious concept, which at Herman Hesse- a contemporary of Freud- was the wolf part. At Freud, the unconscious was the place where we repress the slaps we would like to give, the curses would wish to shout, the punches we would so generously share and the sexual orgies we dream about. Freud himself was not an original. And no, I am not picking up on Freud because I am anti-Semitic or puritan. I just think he was not original. He was courageous, true, but not original.

Man’s greatest chimera is not the achievement of happiness but the idea that he owns original thoughts. What is original? The virtue of introducing new ideas? The power of being unconventional? Since when being unconventional come to mean original and not anarchic? Is then anarchy original? There is nothing out there that is original, not even nature. Not even our genetic evolution is original. It is said that chimps share about 98% of their DNA with humans. Isn’t obvious that chimps have actually gone through more genetic change than us? Any human venture to discover or invent something new is pure rubbish. There is nothing original in life except the moment one creates and shares with another one. That is our uniqueness. How we relate to people, how we vulgarly and sentimentally display our emotions, weaknesses and flaws. It is not our strength that makes us unique, it is our weakness. So can we blame Freud for not being original?

Much later on, in 1966, Bannister described like no one else the human nature, which in my humble opinion, is the most accurate definition that someone adventured to give: Man is basically a battlefield ... a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are for ever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk.

True, we are all humans, as defined by biology: biped position, major usage of the frontal lobe, hairless and clawless, altruistic and irrational. Some say, we are dual by nature. Others say dualism cannot coexist with causal interaction, and they are certainly and irremediably divorced. In fact, they were never married. How are the memories concerning consciousness created if consciousness can exist autonomously of reality? One easy way out of this futile dilemma is to apply the Franciscan Friar 's razor (Ockham). It seems to always work when dealing with more choices. Reduce the number of choices to as few as possible. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate. Do not assume the existence of more entities more than it is necessary.

Leaving the boring theory aside, and sticking with our fable, at a closer look, you will notice that some of us are indeed dogs-which throw themselves on the master’s coffin, loyal, dependent, clingy, immature, naïve, aggressive, not very smart; others are cats- nonchalant, self-sufficient, independent, insensitive; others are bulls- good for hard work, thick necks, low IQ, usually being given extra tasks by the smaller but smarter cats; others are foxes-witty, slick, sly, scruple less, they lie, cheat or steal while looking straight into your eyes; others are doves-innocent, clean, pure, untouched by world’s evilness, that most of the times choose to seclude themselves far from the mad crowd in a desperate attempt to preserve their spiritual cleanliness; my favorites, the brainless but highly decorative peacocks-which they display their colorful plumage and flip their wings to get attention but this is pretty much all they know; the birds of pray- which hunt you down to China town and eat your corpse; the monkeys- usually found in the offices, working for peanuts; the sheep- regularly seen in large groups during election days, fake revolutions, coup d’états, civil wars, religious skirmishes; the sharks- lawyers, policy makers, aficionados.

And this is OK. As long as we know to which category we and the others belong to and we don’t mix races, in order not to risk to be eaten alive, is fine. Pretty much like in the animal regnum, sheep don’t mix with wolves, doves don’t mix with foxes, and monkeys don’t show their back to the bigger and more sexually frustrated gorillas.

Sure my story is very farfetched and I made no point. I have shed no light upon dualism, Freud or Hesse, or even personality typologies. What I humbly did, was to raise more questions. Yes, I considered that are not enough. So, what animal resides inside you?

Not emotionally intelligent, just sentimental fools

2010-01-09T21:05:00.004+02:00

Pigeons are not very smart birds. However, they are praised for their messaging qualities. Some times are given as example for their orientation and navigation skills. It seems they always find their way home. During summer, some pigeons mistake their own image reflected in the glass window for other birds (of a feather that flock together) and smash into the buildings. Tragic, how a creature, which can find its way home after such a long road, can die out of foolishness or vanity. The real explanation is because pigeons have monocular vision rather than binocular one so they bob their heads as they cannot perceive depth. We all have pigeon moments, when we are not able to perceive depth. The depth of a concept, of an emotion, of a feeling, of another human.
In such moments we become emotionally crippled.

Kaput, finished, defunct, wrecked, sensitively ruined, out of use, outdated, invalid, handicapped, non-operational, obsolete.

Quantum Physics claims that the act of observing something changes it, hence the moment we start observing love, we commence deteriorating it. Death begins when we are born. Love starts dying when we fall in love. We are the moral assassins and gravediggers of our own love. It’s not Quantum Physics that killed love. We did.

We should not pretend to be someone who is ‘fashionable sensitive but too cool to care’ or some circumstantially oriented positivist, just to make it through the modern world.
We are what we are, but moreover we are what we can become: old fashioned and conventional romantics defined by conservative tragedy. Not emotionally intelligent, just sentimental fools.
Drama queens with an extra touch of bitter-sweetness, which comes attached to our hearts, like an extra DNA line to the genetic zigzag. We are the masters of heartily calamity. Our heart map is ruled by the Milky Way of personal dramas. We take everything seriously, including ourselves.

It is not once, twice or thrice, but a million of times we tried to speak of love, hoping that if we desiccate it, like one would dissect a skinned frog in a biology laboratory, we would eventually manage to strip off its semi-divine halo. We took love in the lab instead of taking it into our hearts.

We encouraged and inflated the sarcastic in us, cowardly cloaking our sentiments and authentic beliefs behind an ironic and iron like barricade.

Let us cover ourselves with ashes and spiritually self-flogging in the agora. Let us be apologetic for not being tough, arduous, brutal or malevolent.
For being weak, impressionable, major weepers, incurable romantics, emotionally adventurous and unstable.

We truthfully hoped this denying and agnostic attitude would cure us or our quench and insane desire of finding what love is: the chemical mixture, the misattributed emotion, the trick of Mother Nature, a word invented by men to get free sex. It didn’t.
Our hearts are still deficiently patched-up by our amateur psychological pseudo-skills of pretentious love experts.

To be able to conceal ourselves better, we allowed the agnostic in us to surface. We needed to be bad, to suffocate what we really thought of love, so we could be righteous again. What have we thought of love before we fMRI-ed it? Are we happier now that we know is a mixture of adrenaline, dopamine, phenyl ethylamine, endorphin and oxytocin?

We had to defile love, so we can purify it again. We had to be sick, so we could healthy. We had to hate, so we could love. We had to fall, so we could rise.

We have no problem with haggling...

2010-01-03T13:35:00.005+02:00

I am one of those sorry souls that are subscribed to a gazillion of e-newsletters, which fill my Inbox with the nonchalance of a beautiful woman who dresses in see-through clothes in a hot summer day. I gladly and willingly want my Inbox full of silly spam. Oh, don’t be so Freudians. I said spam.

Among the emails that I am subscribed to are the Ching, what happened today in the history, Zen and Buddhist prayers, Evolutionary Psychology newsletter, today’s words of wisdom; but also the latest updates in the high-tech world, the most amazing gadgets and coolest websites, super reviews of the latest cell phones on the market, “I cannot conceive my life without a laptop” newsletter, the most modern LTE and 4G technologies, and of course Calvin Klein men underwear-oh, oh, oh, Victoria’s Secret-of yeah, oh yeah-and how else, recipes about duck breast with orange, and dark chocolate and bitter orange mousse. Boring still very instructive, pretty much like all the knowledge we accumulate in our lifetime and we end up vomit in pseudo-erudite torrents at some corporate party, just for the fun of breaking the ice.

However, one of these emails that occupy a part of my daily life was about money (ka-ching) and got me thinking of the reproach most men these days make to women, almost accusing them of “being materialistic and money lovers and forgetting all about good ol’ luv”. Ahem.

Hold on, hold on. Don't get all uncomfortable in the chair. Why do we feel uneasy every time we speak of money? A cognitive scientist was saying that he found it difficult to negotiate the price with a shopkeeper in Tunisia and he advised the travelers to think about their own social behavior. "If you are the kind of person who is cooperative in conversation and who does not like to feel as though you have insulted others, find a negotiation partner. Bring along someone else who will drag you out of the store or shop before you spend too much. That is, fight social pressure of one kind with social pressure of another”.

With this particular thought in mind we might as well hire permanently a "negotiation" partner every time we go for a job interview and we haggle about our ulterior paychecks. Normally, our cooperativeness in conversation should suffice to help us obtain what we want: either we pay the price we have in mind, without giving in to the salesman’s persistent looks, or we leave the shop with no remorse. The short term interaction we have with the shopkeeper is not enough to make us have behavioral remorse or post decisional stress once we leave the shop. Now, if we negotiate with a dear one and we are in the middle of a tradeoff over who gets the Porsche and who gets the Poodle, a negotiating partner (or a lawyer) is an advisable company.

Reverting to the thorny money issue. That cool money email was saying “Money is not good or bad, it is neutral. It has the value that you or society attributes to it. It's a very easy to use exchange medium and if you are living in western society you cannot survive without it. If you have more money you have more choice in life and do not need to concern yourself with issues of survival. This leaves you room to pursue other issues such as your personal growth.

Don't fall into the trap of neglecting money matters on the pretense that money is not spiritual. People who have money are in a much better position than the rest of the population to help others. Just look at how much money some of the worlds richest people donate to charity.

If you think that you should abandon your possessions and money to somehow become better or to find your spiritual side, then let me tell you that's just a complete load of crap. To walk the spiritual path and move towards enlightenment you need to be detached from the emotions that link you to needing money and possessions”.

I couldn’t have said it better! I made no secret of my pragmatic-realistic oriented character which seemed to bring a specific amount of offense to my male and exclusively spiritually oriented readership and friends.

At a certain point, I reminded men that they should wake up and smell the coffee (a Mocha Star Bucks, if I recall correctly) motivating with an old but nevertheless wise proverb that love goes through the stomach.

Now, love lasts three years, said Beigbeder, and only two, said the scientists.

Love itself is overrated. So are: honesty (which sometimes kills our reputation), justice, truth, charity…

Many women these days are way too willing and way too hasty to assure men that the money is not important in a (desperate) attempt to:

1) Hook up, mate, match, pair, suppress solitude just to spite society, family, friends or statistics which mercilessly claim that globally, women are more numerous than men;

2) Lift some customary burden off modern men’s atrophied shoulders;

3) Foolishly hoping that love (or whatever they think love is) will compensate for: lack of material comfort, lack of muscles, lack of physically fitness or brains;

4) Also thinking that nowadays women can make enough/at least as much money as men, so the role reversal can be easily supported and accepted by the modern and weak man.

The naked truth is:

1) No matter how modern and open-minded the man, unless he is a depraved bumblebee, he will never accept to be deprived of the ancient custom of providing for the (potential) mother of his offspring.

2) If he does accept-due to the present temporary financial crisis- he will end up resenting the woman. Maybe will not explicitly express it but with the first occasion he will definitely blast out. It is mere psychology and we cannot defy Mother Nature.

3) The woman, no matter how strong and leader oriented, will end up despising and disrespecting the man as it is encoded in her DNA that the man needs to be capable to care, cater, nourish, feed, provide for, and most over PROTECT her and her (potential) offspring.

When women fall in love and fail to acknowledge the course of nature, a disaster is set on its course. However, what they don’t know is that Mother Nature makes us fall in love with a man and his status as well. Try to imagine the rich guy you fancy without a penny and let me know if you find him as attractive. Or, add a few tens of thousands of $ to some uglish guy and see if he doesn’t suddenly seem more handsome. It is OK, don’t worry. It’s your genes.

Money is ultimately freedom as long as you don’t make a purpose out of it, but use it as means to satisfy your needs. Some might give me as example the illuminated beggar monks, or the Indians that eat roots and live in ashrams in the Himalayas. Yeah, sure, whatever.

So whoever thinks loves goes through the stomach, it is probably right.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Money is awfully important as it gives you faster, easier and better access to:

a) superior education;

b) important and rare books;

c) better health conditions, medical services, latest vaccines and medications that can save the life of a dear one;

d) more opportunities to travel and meet people thus improving yourself spiritually;

e) giving more money to charitable projects since you are so willing to be a superior human and help mankind;

f) fund scholarships for bright children;

g) and basically fulfill your ultimate purpose of helping your fellow human beings.

Next time you say money it is not important and you have a dying relative that needs an urgent surgery that costs a quarter million bucks, think about it.