On The Shoulders Of Giants

This is a topic that I call “Universal Ethics”. I read up on Judaism, Christianity and Islam’s views on sins and distilled some sort of a common denominator. I came up with the following list. As of now, I think every moral wrong can be put into one of these categories. If you know of anything that doesn’t fit, please let me know and I will revise the list.

1. Destruction (murder, arson, dropping a bomb, cursing…)
2. Desertion (leaving somebody to drown,…)
3. Stealing (includes eavesdropping, trespassing,…)
4. Betrayal (breach of agreement)
5. Deception (lying, concealing truth, make belief,…)
Labeling which includes one aspect of racism is a form of deception.
6. Pandering (”You are an alcoholic? Let me sell you some alcohol.”)
7. Bribery (to buy or barter preferential favors)
8. Arrogance (to think one is intrinsically better than others)
9. Misjudgment (letting reason come second to another desire)
10. Negligence (providing the conditions for something bad to happen through carelessness)

The number, ten, is purely coincidental.

As Obama and McCain are warming up for the general election campaign, I see a sharp contrast in the economic theory of the two camps. As the old adage says, follow the money. As a background note, let me mention that I am talking within the capitalist paradigm and I am no Karl Marx.

I believe this is what this battle comes down to: more wealth (money, power and opportunity) concentrated in the hands of a minority on one side, and more wealth shared by more people on the other side. I call it the exclusivist and the inclusivist philosophies. As of now, the exclusivists are mostly the Republicans lead by George Bush and McCain and the inclusivists are mostly the Democrats led by Obama. The best defense that exclusivists have is that overall, it is better for everyone meaning that if we have richer billionaires and bigger corporations, the average Joe would be better off. This is the old battle between liberty versus fairness, and please don’t think Ayn Rand versus Lenin. Evidence shows that in a free-market capitalist system people are better off (think South Korea versus North Korea) but the question is where do we draw the line? Are we better off because Haliburton, Exxon Mobile, Blackwater and lobbyists are better off with George Bush in office? Or would we be better off living in a society where veterans would get a chance to go to college and more people would have access to health insurance? I don’t think we are any better off because of Republicans’ exclusiveness and I think the election in November will show that most Americans don’t think so either.

Proof video

I’m going to do something crazy and venture way out of my field, to say something that I have no business saying something about. Here it goes:

A disease is not necessarily identifiable by its symptoms. Several causes can lead to very similar symptoms and the treatment options could be completely different. In some cases, medicine (in the US, the FDA) understands that. That is why we have so many different anti-depressants because there are different kinds of depression. Depression is too broad of a term to uniquely identify the condition.

In some cases, medical authorities do not understand this very well. One example is most cancers. Many cancer drugs get developed that work very well on one group of patients and don’t harm the other patients who tried them but get voted down because they are not “effective enough” for the statistical sample.

The baskets we are using are too large to handle all possible treatments. We need to use smaller baskets and have a more utilitarian approach to medicine.

“You can’t use the police to attack your opponents,” Mr. Chamisa said. “This abuse of state institutions is totally unacceptable. Mugabe knows he has no message for the people and wants to make sure that the president doesn’t get his message to the people,” he said, referring to Mr. Tsvangirai, who the opposition believes had the votes to have won the first round outright.

On the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre:

China’s Grief, Unearthed

As Quake Draws Focus, China Keeps Tibet Under Thumb

China Lists Dos and Don’ts for Olympics-Bound Foreigners

Beijing Suspends Licenses of 2 Lawyers Who Offered to Defend Tibetans in Court

Chinese Stifle Grieving Parents’ Protest of Shoddy School Construction

I guess Desmond Tutu has joined the anti-Semites.

A glimpse into how the Iranians treated the Afghan refugees:

“…Many told how unscrupulous employers offered them the drug, telling them it would make their work seem easier - and how in the end they had been rounded up and thrown back across the border, some after brutal treatment in Iranian detention….”

FastCompany had an interesting piece written by Dan and Chip Heath about marketers’ exploitation of shame. I unsuccessfully tried to find a link to the article, so I just quote directly from the article:

…Marketers deliberately construct stigmas for the sake of selling you a solution to the ensuing embarrassment and disgust. They smack you on the head so they can sell you an aspirin for the headache. Why do we put up with this?

…A commercial in Visa’s Check Card campaign shows a deli where people move through the line with elaborate, precise choreography… until the moment when one misguided schlub pulls out some cash. Then everything comes to a crashing halt. No more dancing, no more delight. The cashier looks disgusted.
Yes, Visa and its ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, are trying to make you feel embarrassed for paying for your lunch with cash….

…Procter & Gamble, created the perception that dandruff - traditionally a non-issue for the Chinese - is a social stigma and offered a product (Head & Shoulder anti-dandruff shampoo) to ’solve’ the problem…

…stigma can have subtler effects. A depressed woman, for instance, who is aware of the negative perceptions of the mentally ill, may begin to act more cautiously for fear of the way others may respond to her. Stigmas breed self-censorship…

…That’s icky. Stigma should be reserved for people who violate community standards, like people who willfully park in the handicap spots. It shouldn’t be used as a too-cute-by-half way to peddle some dumb new product…

This came out of a discussion with a friend of mine:

For the sake of argument, let’s say
A) 90% of Middle Easterners are criminals.
Iman walks into a company as a job applicant. All we know about Iman is that B) Iman is from the Middle East.
The manager of the company goes through three stages:
1) Since she knows A, she instinctively assumes that C) with a probability of 90%, Iman is a criminal. The stage 1 is not a conscious thought.
2) She then reexamines her initial reaction and through conscious thought, she erases that assumption about Iman and thinks of him as a blank slate.
3) Based on 2, she acts without discrimination against Iman and treats him as she would treat any other candidate of any gender, race, nationality,….

The question is: has she discriminated against Iman? And if she has or she could have, in which of the three stages did the discrimination happen?

My response is that, no, she did not discriminate and if she would have discriminated, the discrimination would have begun in phase two, at the moment of conscious assumption. My friend argued that inferring C from A and B is logical and inevitable. Therefore even if she did assume something negative about Iman, that could only happen at the stage 3 and not at stage 2. I argued that applying a societal statistics to an individual at the level of assumption is indeed discrimination and everyone is entitled to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. In fact discrimination at the level of action (3) is so obvious, that we don’t even need to talk about it. What we do need to talk about is discrimination at the level of assumptions about individuals.

David Horowitz, the professional neo-con Muslim-basher, came to UCSB last night and gave a talk. As expected he called the majority of Muslims and Arabs either terrorists or supporters of terrorism. You can read a report of the event here and also watch a video of it. I sat in the audience and listened to this man for an hour. At the Q&A, I made the following comments: “My name is Iman Aghilian. I’m a graduate student at UCSB and I’m Iranian. Although I’m not a ……, I wanted to thank you for all your hard work, by coming to such hostile territories and giving all this free publicity to minorities. These people have been represented by their worst and they don’t have many allies. So I just wanted to thank you. And since you asked, yes, I do condemn all forms of terrorism: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Communist, you name it.”
I got some applause from the audience. Afterwards a reporter from the campus newspaper, Daily Nexus, came and talked to me and asked for my name. I gave him my name.
I went home and I wrote a response to some of the points that Mr. Horowitz brought up and I submitted it to the Daily Nexus. I don’t know if they are going to print it or not. If they did, I’ll just put a link here and if they didn’t I’ll just write my response here.