Touchy Subjects

The Consequences of Zombification // Our Health Suffers

It should be surprising that the way we understand reality itself can be disputed. I happen to think that there is a universally accepted account of reality, one articulated and promoted by Socrates and adopted by intellectual and practical leaders since.  My argument is with this generally accepted account. I think it has overwhelming problems both theoretically and for practical purposes. There are, of course, reasons why deep thinkers have adopted the view pushed by Socrates. Those reasons have to do with the advantages to the powerful that Socrates account of our ends and means, as well as his Mission Statement’s enabling clause, the account of reason as a matter of logical argument.

There are several attacks on the Socratic position. One of them is the argument that if we follow Socrates we will be taking the side of the Antichrist against God. I find this argument the most surprising and interesting argument made by the Teacher, who we should understand as the great antagonist to Socratic philosophy. Another argument made by the Teacher has to do with the consequences of any general adoption of the Socratic view. According to the Teacher, adoption of the Socratic view would inevitably lead to the self destruction of anyone so committed and the destruction of everyone and everything loved by them. The Teacher used the word “apocalypse” and the “apocalyptic” to make this argument.

My argument has been that another way to understand the Socratic view is to see that it makes us understand ourselves as zombies. I call the adoption of Socratic principles “zombification.”  That is, adopting Socratic principles makes us zombies, will-less creatures driven by our insatiable hungers or the commands of our voodoo masters. The problem with zombies and people who think of themselves as zombies is that they cannot take care of their health. They cannot understand how to protect themselves because of the confusions created by our perverted understanding of our lives and what, on Socrates’ view, is important in our lives.

Whereas Socrates claims our goal must be to survive, he promotes a strategy involving the use of force and its cognates which makes looking after our health impossible.

One example of this has to do with the problems people have with diabetes mellitus. There is the question whether a diabetic’s diet causes their problems and if so, whether a change in diet might cure it. In the following article the writers claim that a vegetarian diet can cure many diabetics problem. There are others who dispute this claim saying that meat and dairy products need not be avoided in a diabetic diet.

The question I have is about why there has not been definitive research done on this question which would answer this question.  The influence of the meat and dairy producers may have put pressure on  the government to not fund research which could help us understand this issue.One can remember that the tobacco industry put pressure on government to never fund research on the health concerns of  smoking tobacco.

So, what is the argument here about diabetics and their diets? Can the dispute about what to do about this disease be resolved by some simple scientific study?  Or,  will people continue to suffer from this disease, even if there is a n adequate understanding of what causes and cures it, because powerful interests make money doing things that, unfortunately, lead to the endangerment and sickening of millions of people?

So, what do they say?

There Is a Way to Help Avoid Heart Disease and Diabetes: You Are What You Eat!

By Kathy Freston, AlterNet. Posted October 31, 2009.

A plant-based diet is both preventative and healing, whereas a diet high in animal protein is destructive to our health.

 

"If the truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist and if it does exist it need never, ever progress."

So says Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who was a researcher and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic for over 35 years. In 1991, Dr. Esselstyn served as the president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, and organized the 1st National Conference on the Elimination and Prevention of Heart Disease. In 2005, he became the 1st recipient of the Benjamin Spock Award for Compassion in Medicine. Dr. Esselstyn is also an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, and he was awarded the Bronze Star as an army surgeon in Vietnam.

In this series of interviews I've conducted with extraordinary nutritional researchers and medical doctors, I've sought to understand the link between diet and the most common and dreaded diseases that are prevalent in our culture. What I'm hearing over and over is that a plant-based diet is both preventative and healing, whereas a diet high in animal protein is destructive to our health - this is the case with cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

The great news is that there is very real hope in shifting the course of our health. What is becoming very apparent through various peer reviewed studies is that by changing our diet - eliminating that which causes havoc in the body (animal protein) and adding in plant based proteins and eating lots of vegetables, legumes, beans, and whole grains, we can not only prevent disease, but also heal from it once it is already in motion. Following is a fascinating conversation I had on diet and heart health.

Obama and his Critics // If No Justice, then No Peace

There is something about the visuals and the audios that make an impact that the written words sometimes cannot reproduce. So, in trying to make the point that justice is very important, the  videos here show us what people are concerned about. It shows the pictures of what is happening to the troops. It shows what we are doing to the Iraqis, to the Afghans, and as importantly, to ourselves.

Stop the War in Vietnam…because if you don’t, we said back then,  we will keep invading  other places, with equal violence and injustice.

Stop the wars in Asia because we are not building a better world there. We are just ruining things.

Why is our government wanting to justify torture?

I imagine one of the reasons my Dad enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor was that the other side was evil.  The upcoming war between the United States and its allies against the Japanese, Germans, and their allies was not just a dispute between competitors. If you have a football rivalry, you can talk about going all out to beat the other side. But, you don’t go out and actually start killing people. You don’t go to the homes of members of the “hated rivals” and set it ablaze and shoot anyone who should try to escape. No, at the end of the season, the Beavers and the Ducks get jobs in the same companies, have beers at the same sports bars, and if they have kids, they are born in the same hospital rooms.

In order to go to war, you have to imagine that the other side is something far different than just your football rival. You have to think that they are evil. You have to have evidence that they should be locked away in prison. You have to think that if you don’t go kill them, then eventually, if they get the chance, they will come to kill you.

But, it isn’t just that the enemy would kill you and your loved one’s if they had the chance, but,  they would steal from you, or enslave you and your kids, or torture you for no good reason, or to just find out where your family jewels might be hidden. There are many things which you might be afraid of that your enemies might do to you, if they have the chance. These desires and weaknesses are what makes your enemies evil. In addition, their insatiable desire for your valuables that cannot be reasoned with, that cannot be turned by a good argument,  is what makes war with their evilness  justified.

The laws against torture are not just legal formalities which we have no good reason for having or enforcing. The business of torture makes torturers evil and what justifies our using deadly force against them. We are justified in going to war with people who see no problem with torture.

This is why it is important to root out the torturers amongst us. We cannot allow torture within the community of our friends and acquaintances because their torture makes us evil. It  makes us evil if we have not done whatever we can do to eliminate it, to stamp it out, and to keep the thought that we should torture from becoming the deed.

The Bush administration said that it wasn’t torturing anybody. It was only doing “enhanced interrogation” of people who wanted to harm us. The business about the people “who wanted to harm us” justified to them the “enhanced” techniques. It is alright, they said, to do whatever we can to stop people from harming us, even if in some people’s eyes it looks like torture.

Some others said, “Fuck it, it’s torture, but we should torture those who are doing evil against us.”

The Obama administration wants to protect all the people who tortured others during the Bush administration. They would also want to protect those who torture during the Obama administration. The defense of the  justification for torture and all the torturers, according to Obama, is that we can’t go after each other when we face an out side enemy.

But, I’m sure this was what the Germans, the Japanese, and their allies all said when they tortured.

Here is a current discussion of Bush and his torturers,

 

It is not a new or particularly innovative move to want to do something, and then, if that desire is itself evil, construct legal arguments to cover it’s evil up so that people have no good reason to resist. The manufactured cover-story  that whatever Bush and Obama have been doing is not torture and so not immoral is supposed to blunt the drive and will to resist.

Obama and his Critics // An American Civil War in the 21st Century

I doubt that many people foresaw the American Civil War in the 19th century. People who were close to the political issues of the day may have thought that there were antagonisms brewing that, if left unresolved, could have lead to violence of some kind and to some degree. But, I doubt that the war between the states would have been anticipated on the scale that eventually erupted.

The reason I bring this up is that there are some on the right who, after Obama’s election, are now anticipating a second civil war, something that might break out soon. The basis for this speculation is not, apparently, because people think there is some animosity about race that people are ignoring. Granted, there do exist  great issues about race in the United States that are unacknowledged and left to fester. But, that is not why these people are speculating about warfare breaking out within our borders pitting Americans against each other.

From listening to them, the problem is represented by President Obama, but, it is not his race that is the problem.  For the right-wingers who worry about this, the President represents a vast and powerful left-wing effort to ruin the country for it’s own nefarious purposes.  Given the power that Obama and his leftish allies now wield, for these right-wingers, the only way to save the country is open violent revolt.

One might point out that the population at large is in no position to come to the aid of the country. The population itself is divided. The population would be no match, according to the right-wingers, for the military might that the left-wing could throw in against it.

The only saviors that stand ready to wrest the levers of power away from these left-wing  usurpers is the American military. The scenario, I suspect, would proceed much as recently occurred in Honduras where the elected President and his administration was escorted out of the country in order, so the coup leaders said, that the Honduran democracy would be preserved. Apparently, there were many powerful but frightened individuals in Honduras who thought that their freedoms were being endangered by their own left-wing conspiracy.

How do we solve the ‘Bully in the Playground’ scenario? // Step back from the problem and talk about Philosophy

I’ve been talking about Glenn Greenwald and his argument that in order for us to protect ourselves from the bully, or his fellow bullies, we should get everyone on the playground to act nicely to one another. In order to do that, according to Greenwald, we should set up rules of conduct and have everyone, including the bullies,  follow and abide by these rules. Greenwald has been complaining that people with power, i.e., those who own or work for corporations, our political leaders, many in the Media, Judges, and others, have been breaking these rules and promoting the idea that some people should be allowed to break these rules. One of their arguments to that effect is that we need to break these rules in order to keep Americans safe from terrorists and others who want to hurt us. Mr. Greenwald argues that our safety cannot be assured at all by allowing anyone, especially our bullies, to break these rules. His campaign to promote these rules is otherwise called ‘promoting the rule of law.’ He argues that no one should be allowed to break our laws, even if they argue that it is only by breaking certain laws that we can have safety or other desirable ends.

I have argued that Greenwald’s argument is futile. He is telling us that we can constrain the bully in our playground. He would allow that it will not be easy, but, we have to make  bullies obey the law. I argue, contrary to Greenwald, that you can’t make the bully do anything that the bully does not want to do.  They have the power to hire enforcers to get back at their critics. If the bully wants to steal valuables from us, as when he threatens us and takes our lunch-money, he will find ways of getting this done no matter how we try to constrain him. So, if we hire police to watch the bully and try to protect the kids from the bully, then, after awhile, the bully will bribe the police, or pose as police themselves, in order to keep anyone from effectively stopping their  profitable larceny.

Why should we think that the kids on the playground could make the bully play nicely with others? Do we imagine that the kids might gang up on the bully? Might some brave kid punch the bully in the nose and thereby teach the bully to stop picking on others?

I think it is fair to say that bullies are not going to start crying if some kids stands up for themselves. The Russian Revolution was an effort by some to stand up to the bullies in their playground. Eventually, at some point, the bullies took over the  new institutions of the Revolution and used the situation to again steal lunch money.

Yes, Greenwald makes good arguments in defense of his position. He tries to point out that some bullies have said they would obey the law, and yet, it can be shown that in particular ways they have not. He tries to shame these people into keeping their word, if not obeying the law. But, I have doubts that his strategy will win the war against the exploitation of  kids, even if he does win a few battles against the bullies.

Greenwald and Spinoza on playground bullies

We have some reason to think that we can summarize our situation by saying that, in this country, our playground, things are run by a bully, or bullies.

Isn’t legal reasoning, as well as moral, merely trying to constrain the bullies in our Playground?

What is Glenn Greenwald doing?

He’s wanting everyone to abide by the ‘rule of law.’  When someone robs a bank, that person is apprehended,  prosecuted, and punished by what the law allows. When GG argues that Bush or Obama have to abide by the ‘rule of law,’ because they haven’t been, he is pointing out that whereas the common person will be treated harshly by the criminal justice system, the powerful people in our country are not. The powerful  figure they are above the law.

In a recent post on his blog, GG made a case that Chris Todd, a political reporter for NBC news, was not only giving an account of what the Obama administration was doing about “torture” and whether they wanted to prosecute Bush administration officials for “torture,” but, he also seemed to be giving arguments justifying their viewpoint in his own voice. That is, Todd seemed to have been won over by the Obama position so that he was one of “them,” rather than being a critical outsider.

How ”Subjectivism” in American Life fulfills Prophecy

Yes, there is “subjectivism” in American life, and I want to point out two examples of it. Based on those examples, I believe we will be able to recognize innumerable others. And, Yes, there has been prophecy about this.

But first, the “subjectivism” part.

Bill Moyers recently interviewed an official from Cigna, a big health insurance company, who came to “see the light,” so to speak. He found his way after travelling to see a health fair in a nearby town,

…And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

Does our political debate about Honduras reflect an underlying philosophical conflict about how we should understand ourselves?

My question is, first, what is going on in Honduras? It’s one of those small central American countries that one would expect the United States to control in some significant way. I’d imagine they would give the military there all their funding, send the officers to ‘torture’ school, and subvert elections. As an American, and one who’s grown up here, I have a good idea what we’re about. But, I could be mistaken, maybe I have a few details wrong. I have to depend on journalists, in a a big way, to look into what the facts are and give me an explanation.

There’s a problem, though, with the journalists. They have the idea that they can’t tell me what’s going on. There are many reasons why they can’t look too closely into Honduras. One reason is that there aren’t that many journalists who know much about Honduras. It’s a poor country. The United States is behind most every political event there, and given how much the U.S. puts into subverting governments, that isn’t going to change. So, in many ways the stories about this country should write themselves.

Another problem is that journalists are vulnerable. They can be killed. They can have their children killed. They can be fired. There are many ways to put pressure on these people to keep them from revealing any ‘secrets’ that might rock the boat down there.

And, third, journalists are saddled with the idea that reasoning about things, things like what’s going on in Honduras, is a matter of logical argument. It has been my contention that this is the idea at the bottom of both Descartes’ idea that his being in his study writing is his own ‘point of view,’ and the journalist’s account of the Honduran President’s story is his ‘point of view.’ Descartes’ problem was that, yes he had reasons for thinking he was in his study writing, but, he has just as many and in many ways the same reasons for thinking he was actually in bed, asleep, dreaming he was in his study writing, he was in no position to decide one way or the other. He could not know what was going on.

Will we Destroy Iran because of Journalist’s Vile Philosophy?

If we look at what our journalists have been writing about Iran, we can see a distinction between what we might call the ‘mainstream’ on one side and certain elements of the ‘left’ on the other. The distinction I want to make here is about the displeasure over the Iranian election and the subsequent discord in the streets. The mainstream argues that the displeasure and discord  arose independently out of  the population’s  inherent desires  for democracy in their country.  The skeptical ‘left’ argues that the displeasure and discord has been created, funded,  and stoked by American spooks in order to bring about ‘regime change.’