My entire life is an underappreciated piece of performance art.

Sound implausible? Perhaps that's because calling something "art" should not be sufficient for making it art. The art world seems to have been given over entirely to the subjective, so that the vast majority of people consequently view most so-called artists (especially of this sort) with disdain.

To say, as Noen does, that "what an artist produces is art" simply begs the question: who counts as an artist? Am I an artist if I say I am? If that's the case, people should be throwing money at me whenever I interact with them because they've got a front row seat for a fantastic piece of avant garde performance art.

Another possibility: is being an artist merely a matter of convention, i.e., of what other people think (and are willing to pay for)? In that case, any conman who can convince pretentious elites to spend millions on the shit he produces (in some cases, quite literally) becomes an artist.

Many criteria of art could be offered, but it seems to me that the problem with art today is that there are no agreed-upon standards (except, perhaps, that whatever can be found in a museum counts as art, although this leaves out a lot too).

I'm a philosopher, but I almost entirely avoid aesthetics/philosophy of art largely because it seems to take on one of two forms: a relativistic, postmodern free-for-all; or an unapologetically political endeavor, concerned more about changing society (usually by implementing some questionable leftist program) than about beauty and taste.

Nevertheless, while I would not call what Isaacs does art, I agree with those commentators who say this is not relevant to the issue of legality. I'm not necessarily entirely opposed to obscenity regulations (for instance, it seems reasonable to forbid certain potentially offensive displays in public areas that people can't avoid), but I would prefer they be extremely limited in scope.

Isaacs certainly does not deserve jail time, despite how much of a tasteless hack he may be.

I love drugs. I don't discriminate between legal and illegal--I'm just more careful about my use of the latter. While not everyone needs to use drugs, I think for many people navigating through life successfully requires finding just the right personal drug cocktail. (For me, right now, it's a mix of 2 complimentary antidepressants, caffeine, marijuana, and occasionally alcohol or other drugs if they're available; cocaine is a nice occasional treat; I've been considering adding Ritalin to the mix to help me get more work done.)

Human beings are fraught with what you might call "design flaws": evolution, acting unintelligently, produced a highly complex organic system that works for the most part, but which is highly variable and susceptible to many problems, particularly in the peculiar cultural environments that we now occupy. Drugs are currently the best tools we have for improving on some of these flaws. (Toward this end, I'm all for genetic manipulation, direct brain stimulation, medical nanobots floating free in our blood streams, or whatever enhancement technologies they come up with next if reasonably safe and effective.)

There are safety issues, of course, including interaction issues. Sure, some substances only produce beneficial effects in the short term (most street drugs but also many legit pharmaceuticals), but I would prefer to leave it to individuals to decide for themselves what substances to ingest, armed with the best information available.

I'm even a bit wary of the whole prescription system--patients, not doctors, should have the final say about what drugs to take after being educated of the effects and risks involved. If a client can always overrule his attorney, even to the point where it could cost him his life, why should not the same apply to patients and doctors?

As for those who pride themselves on not using any drugs: good for you! You won the genetic lottery and don't need foreign substances to be functional and/or happy. I just hope you'll allow us inferior sorts to try to compensate for the deficiencies that we've been saddled with. (And FYI, your self-righteousness can be really f*cking annoying.)

Concerning the book itself: judging from the preview, it does seem poorly written. I like the idea, though, and would consider buying one for my pot-smoking parents... :-)

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the term "natural". Many people use it unthinkingly to falsely vault across the fact/value divide.

I'm not going to pretend "natural" has only one correct meaning--I'm not a language policeman. However, I am wary when it's used simultaneously to mean: part of the physical world (something that exists, an entity) AND something good or desirable (an ideal or value). This is a dangerous conflation that has been used to justify the demonization of many things, from homosexuality and miscegenation to stem cell research and food additives.

The problem is that calling something "unnatural" is not an argument. In one sense of the word--the sense that physicists use, let's say--everything that exists is natural. (This is also how Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, uses the term.) There are many other uses that divide existing things into "natural" and "unnatural", but unless you simply equate "immoral" and "unnatural" (begging the question, in other words), you can't give a single definition of "unnatural" that consistently justifies moral disapprobation.

For instance, if by "unnatural" one means "artificial", that is, directly produced by humans, then it makes the entirety of culture and civilization immoral, from clothing and agriculture to writing and art.

If "unnatural" is used in the sense of something that only humans do (i.e., animals always act "naturally"), then many activities commonly regarded that way are falsified by studies in primatology and other sciences. (Nonhuman primates and other animals use simple tools, have social bonds, communicate in proto-languages, kill each other for supposedly no reason, have sex for pleasure rather than reproduction, are homosexual, etc.)

I could go on, but I'm already exhausting the narrow attention spans of Boing Boing readers. But let me just say this: the knee-jerk reaction against the products of food science, including such (usually) relatively harmless things as genetically-modified organisms, is a regrettable manifestation of Luddism, and is especially surprising coming from someone who seems otherwise to be a technoprogressive.

I happen to prefer processed foods and think the hype over "organic" and "natural" is a bunch of hooey. I don't much care for big agrobusiness, but aside from that factor, I think it quite an accomplishment to be able to make food that tastes and looks the same way every time, and to create chemicals in the lab that help to preserve food, mimic "natural" flavors and colors, and so forth.

There are indeed arguments (safety and environmental sustainability concerns, for instance) that might compel opposition, but they don't apply to "unnatural" substances generally. Show me some empirical evidence that these chemicals are damaging to human health or the ecosystem before just denigrating them as "toxic".

(Disclosure: I'm an Obama supporter, but not an Obamaniac. What I say below is meant to make a more general point, but I don't pretend I can hide my biases.)

What will things be like when the MySpace generation starts running for president? They've all got at least one of the following online somewhere: 1) incriminating photos or videos of them drinking underage, flashing the camera, doing drugs, or some such; 2) blog posts/journal entries full of curse words, highly controversial opinions, accounts of morally questionable activities, etc.; 3) unflattering descriptions, unsavory rumors, etc., posted by friends; and so forth.

Face it people: this focus on inanities is simply retarded. None of us are perfect and we all make decisions (do things, says things) that we later regret. If we continue to hew to the standards that the media would impose, only the most boring, preternaturally "wholesome" people would qualify for the presidency.

Similarly, we should not judge people by what their relatives and friends say and do. That's just guilt by association. Why should I have to end relationships or "distance" myself from other people whenever they do things I don't agree with? Only in the most extreme cases would this even be relevant.

(With respect to Rev. Wright, a lot of the problem here is a gap between white and black culture. The views he expresses are not nearly so shocking in the context of an urban African American community as they are in white suburbia. Asking Obama to sever his ties from his church is, as many have argued better than I, unreasonable.)

What should matter when one runs for president or any other elected office are things like experience, judgment, policy positions, and the like. The problem with "character" is that, while it is important, it's not something that we get an accurate sense of in the media frenzy surrounding an election. Judging by their actions in the last 8 years, Al Gore is a much more principled, decent human being than Dubya could ever be, but that was not how he was portrayed prior to November 2000.

Presidential politics is far from my favorite aspect of American government. As the founders well knew, the executive is not the most democratic of the three branches--there's a reason that Congress comes first in the Constitution. It's a shame that Americans seem to get worked up about politics only once every four years. Democracy requires more of its citizens if it is to sustained...

I think the negative responses she received are a fascinating indication of how relative safety/security breeds fear.

There are many people in this country--and unfortunately I count myself among them--who have not experienced significant hardships in their lives, who have become too comfortable, and who consequently lack confidence in their ability to deal with adversity. It is not surprising that this feeling would be extended to one's children.

I think it would be an interesting empirical question to see if these overprotective parents have as much fear with respect to their own lives. Are they the people who worry about terrorists when they fly or who don't live in cities because they're terrified of crimes happening to them? Similarly, were they also raised by overly cautious parents? (Are these the people who end up voting Republican when reminded of their own mortality, as some psychological studies have shown?)

I've worked several summers at an academic camp for gifted students, which each year became more and more onerous to work for because less and less freedom was allowed to the children. The parents of "gifted" children are probably the worst. I mean, it really got ridiculous. We were supposed to even follow students to the restroom, but I refused to do that.

I remember when I tried to object to certain authoritarian policies, almost invariably my coworkers--most of whom were in their 20s or early 30s--would defend them and say stuff like, so many other workplaces have more restrictions, you should feel lucky, it's not a big deal: just do what you're told. These were people who were happy to dress in "countercultural" ways, who took on the airs of being rebellious, and some of who even espoused radical revolutionary politics--yet they were some of the biggest tools I'd ever met.

Now, that said, I know how powerful fear can be and I'm somewhat sympathetic to those who are gripped by it. (However, I want to resist making them into victims made that way by a fearful society, because this is the kind of thinking that only perpetuates a negative mentality denying responsibility to individuals.) My feeling, though, is that these people themselves need to do a certain kind of growing up. Overgrown children probably don't make the best parents.

Whether or not software patents stifle or promote innovation seems to me to be an empirical question. If innovation is the actual concern (and not simply another case of corporate greed), then we should test it by implementing a trial period of no patents. Say, a year or two or five.

If at the end of the trial, things are significantly worse (or if a crisis erupts in the software industry before it finishes), then we should implement a reformed patent program. Otherwise, we are better off in not trying to treat ideas as property.

(One of the advantages of federalism seemingly forgotten in our age of increasing centralization is the way that individual states can serve as laboratories for economic and social policies. Instead of letting ideology/rhetoric and wealth/influence decide these important matters, we should use experimental methods and scientific reasoning. Unfortunately, due to the nature of intellectual property, in this case I don't think an experiment would be possible except on a national level.)

Velocity girl:

I took a look at the links you provided, but I must say I don't find them overly compelling. I don't dispute that many of the examples of privilege are true (although some of them I think have changed over time, and some have even been partly reversed because of affirmative action programs, norms of political correctness, and the embrace of multiculturalism and "diversity" in academia).

My main criticism is a strategic one: what is an unduly privileged individual supposed to do in response to the recognition of privilege? Should I feel bad all the time whenever things go smoothly for me (and in my own case, how do I know whether it is my straightness, whiteness, or maleness which I should feel bad about it)? Many aspects of privilege are effects of culture, which I feel are beyond my power to do much about it (at least as an individual).

Now I happen to be somewhat sympathetic to this project (of eliminating relations of oppression or domination), but how would many white, Southern, working-class men feel, for example? Many of them are sick of being assumed to be racist (by Northeast and West Coast intellectuals) just because they are Southerners. They feel resentment because they are being held responsible for something they did not do (while at the same time undergoing disadvantages themselves in virtue of socioeconomic class). As I've had to live in the South the last several years, I've come to appreciate more their situation.

For purely strategic purposes, I think it much more sound to focus on bringing oppressed groups up, out of oppression, without emphasizing bringing down groups who are privileged. Accusations of unconscious racism or sexism can be extremely counterproductive, unless very carefully phrased in such a way as not to seem beyond the powers of an individual to change. "If I'm going to be called a sexist no matter how I treat women, then why I should I put so much effort into treating them as equals in the first place?"--might be one response.

Moving beyond rhetorical effectiveness though, I'd argue that many aspects of privilege, perhaps even the most important ones, are not zero-sum games. All individuals should be treated with respect and dignity, but these are not limited quantities. Moreover, I am not going to give up the notion of "merit" (as the first article seemed to suggest) simply because in the past it has been used to justify white/male/straight/etc. privilege. This is an abuse of the concept rather than evidence of its intrinsic disvalue.

As MLK so wisely urged us, we should judge people not by the color of their skin (or by any other superficial feature), but by the content of their character. Let's not forget that last part. Some judgments are morally acceptable if they are made on the basis of morally relevant characteristics. There is worth to the idea of merit, if for no other reason than the way it motivates people to work hard and to treat other people decently. The radical equality that a postmodern relativism entails is simply for most people a non-starter.

(We've come a far way from nipple-less wrestlers--sorry, moderator--but I still see this as a response to the use of "heteronormative gaze" in the article above. In any case, I would argue this is an important issue worth discussing.)

RRSafety:

While the apologists have not been as blatant on this particular thread, they have often appeared on other BB threads (here, for instance), but I was also startled by some of the posters at Barry's site and how often he has had to defend individual borrowers. Hence my mention of the "web" generally.

Second, I specifically denounced the "evil bank president" meme as silliness. The problem is not evil corporations or CEOs. It has to do with the complex system you find so "interesting to comment on" which, unfortunately, is not so interesting for the individuals who have lost their homes as victims of predatory lending practices (which were allowed to flourish because of a lack of oversight).

In response to chronophobe & jamesgyre:

I was just discussing a set of related issues the other day with some friends. The difficulty that is posed to feminists (as well as critical race theorists, queer theorists, and others) is to find a balance between calling attention to real (and unnoticed) cases of discrimination or oppression and alienating people who don't think of themselves as sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever.

(Incidentally, I thought Obama's recent speech on race was just about the best case I've ever encountered of finding a mean between these extremes, although I will grant that the motivation for the speech was at least originally a matter of political strategy.)

Pomo babble annoys me as much as anyone (especially since I encounter it quite regularly) and I think it's a strong indication of the insularity of academia. I also tend to fall on the side of those who are cautious about ascribing bigoted motivations to people (not all cases of perceived sexism are authentic).

Nevertheless, as a white guy, I know that I don't notice these kinds of things as often. In this particular case of the airbrushed nipples, I think too much is being read into it, but there are plenty of other situations where prejudices are clearly at work. The larger issues here are truly thorny ones, and I've learned (often, the hard way) to tread cautiously.

It boggles my mind how many apologists for these large banking institutions exist on the web.

Now, I think it's good to be a critical, reasonably skeptical reader--something reported on the Internet should not be assumed to be true just because it supports your political or other beliefs--but the way that some people go out of their way to blame the victim is pathological. Strictly speaking, borrowers share some responsibility as contractees, but it pales in comparison to that of the entity with vastly more power and information.

I'm not saying corporations are inherently evil--that's just silliness. However, since they are institutions which exist for the sake of maximizing profit, and are also large bureaucratic organizations in which it is easy to displace blame, many employees will find themselves in situations where they find it easy to make unethical decisions because they are more profitable. That the higher-ups should "unofficially" encourage such behavior is not surprising (they, too, can pass off the blame).

As I've said before on this site, the problems are systemic. If we want corporations to act more ethically, we need to design regulations that give them incentives to do so (and disincentives for not doing so). I would say the same goes for individual citizens as well. This is why we have laws that assign punishments and rewards in the first place.

I have no sympathy for the branch of feminism that views anything sex-related as inherently oppressive to women. As a philosophy student, I have actually had to read a fair amount of feminist thought, and I can fairly say that not all of it is created equal (I'm actually quite fond of Donna Haraway's science-friendly "Cyborg Manifesto" feminism), but it's this particular type which gives "feminists" a bad name in some circles.

I also happen to be a vegetarian, and I would much rather be associated with the Suicide Girls than with those humorless feminists who believe that any woman who would choose to go into some kind of sex work must be laboring under some kind of false consciousness.

I honestly think this tactic, often employed by intellectuals overly enamored of Marx or Freud, is grossly unfair to individuals. Claiming to know a person better than she knows herself is precisely the kind of disrespectful treatment that women have been subjected to for ages and which (other) feminists rightly decry.

Now, I'm not a libertarian so I recognize that "choice" is not as unproblematic as it is often made out to be. Women who end up in sex work would often rather not be there. Nevertheless, not all sex work is the same, and some of it is far less exploitative than others.

The "Ink not Mink" program seems very low on the exploitation scale; here a woman could sensibly choose to use her body in a way that promotes a cause she strongly believes in. Far from being duped by the "White Capitalist Patriarchy", such women are acting intelligently and their choices ought to be respected.

Being able to have a casual attitude about sex and viewing sex work as any other kind of work is, I would argue, an ideal not unlike viewing race as unimportant and aiming for a 'color-blind' way of life. While not pretending that there aren't problem of race, gender, class, and so forth in the world, one can still recognize that these problems don't necessarily manifest in every sphere of life. Some progress has certainly been made.

A smarter feminism would do a better job of picking its battles. Otherwise feminists end up creating the kind of resentment that only hinders their cause.

If this doesn't constitute proof for an intelligent designer, I don't know what would...

Let me try to keep this brief, and respond to this claim of Zuzu's based on a paper by Hayek:

[T]he "market" is just emergent spontaneous order from when people interact with each other.

Let me grant the basic point that the decentralized nature of markets gives it epistemic advantages over centralized planning institutions like government bureaucracies. I think there's evidence for this based on how badly command economies have historically performed.

However, this only gives us a prima facie reason for letting markets do their things. In deciding upon what regulations are appropriate, there may be other considerations beyond the epistemic which matter (fairness, the value of having genuine common goods, conservation of the environment, public health, etc.).

One type of regulation which preserves many of the goods of the market but which has the added benefit of potentially promoting other goods is the incentivization of certain types of behavior. A relatively uncontroversial example would be having the state (not the market) punish individuals who don't "play by the rules".

Slightly more controversial examples are attaching a financial penalty to heavy polluters or imposing a tax on goods like cigarettes which consumers may want but which endanger their health (the attention to human psychology that behavioral economics emphasizes reminds us that economic agents are not purely rational).

Measures like these keep choice in tact, but modify the values of the different options to influence economic agents (both producers and consumers) to promote other goods which a democratic state deems valuable. Various financial disincentives provide a source of revenue for the state which can then be used to fund incentives for other behaviors.

Assuming that the incentive system is based on values which are decided upon democratically, I don't see how one could object to this general schema. It can be a tremendously powerful tool that fosters closer ties between self-interest and common goods without eliminating choice.

The future is gonna be so awesome. Robots shall be our new gods!

The problem is not that any individual or corporation is evil, it's that there are inherent problems in our economic system. That doesn't mean we should eliminate capitalism, but that we shouldn't view regulation of the market as though it were some sort of profanation of the sacred order of things.

If we want to be able to continue to benefit from all the pluses of markets, then we need to establish the right kinds of incentives through regulation, so that self-interest coincides more with the common good.

If people are rewarded by being assholes, like this guy, then there is something fundamentally wrong with our social order. This is no case of "a few bad apples", because under the current system, the only people who can succeed are those willing to be unscrupulous.

How hard is it to see that there's something fundamentally wrong with that? In the end, none of us benefit in this arrangement. Since wealth, power, and prestige are the kinds of goods that depend on being better off than others, we're dealing with a zero-sum game not worth playing as a society.

Furthermore, money does not make us happy, because we constantly strive for more and more and are never satisfied. It's a case of the hedonic treadmill: no matter how much one acquires, one always has to move forward just to remain in the same place. (I'm not making this stuff up; it's based on empirical observations in positive psychology. See, e.g., Jon Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis for a nice overview of research on human well being.)

"Free choice"? Gimme a break. There are so many unquestioned presuppositions in that formulation. What is it that makes a choice possible? There are a lot of complex social relationships (many of which are not matters of "choice") that must occur for us to be able to make the kinds of decisions as consumers that we do.

Why suspect that freedom is always valuable? Isn't it possible to have so many choices that you feel disempowered? (That's how I feel whenever I try to buy toothpaste.)

Moreover, why do we want the things that we do? Those desires that constitute the basis of our choices don't come out of nowhere. The ubiquity of advertising by marketers who are guided by extensive knowledge of human psychology produces results that we are seldom directly aware of. Desires are manufactured even more extensively than shoddy consumer goods. We would probably be much better off having fewer desires with fewer possibilities of being dissatisfied if we don't obtain things that we don't actually need and which often do us little real good.

The kind of atomic individualism that so much of contemporary social science (including economics) depends upon is so fraught with difficulties because of its reductionistic oversimplification. We are not isolated beings operating in some kind of social vacuum, and the more time passes, the more we become interconnected and dependent on other people all over the world.

Freedom of choice is not real freedom. It is an illusion that perpetuates the status quo of unjust, unequal power relations.

I certainly don't have all the answers of how we might better live together in the world, but it is a mistake to view the current arrangement of society as somehow "natural" or "necessary".

(The reason I make the move to AI is because I think we need a dramatic restructuring of social relations and superhuman artificial intelligence is perhaps the only force powerful enough to effect such change, and to have any hope of doing so in a way that doesn't just make things worse. But, really, this is almost a religious view for me, and certainly one that is unrealistic now. I believe it largely for the sake of generating some hope about the future.)

Wow, so regulating the market is both fascist and communist? That's doubly un-American!

In seriousness, I simply don't understand why some people trust "the market" to solve all of our problems. This quote particularly got me:

"You can't expect bureaucrats to know better than the market itself."

This market fundamentalism in which any economic woes are blamed on attempts to regulate and interfere with the economy is as unfalsifiable a position as the that of Marxists who maintained that the Soviet Union and other Communist nations weren't _really_ Communist, because a _true_ Communist nation would be successful. As though we didn't already see the fallout of total laissez-faire in the 19th Century.

I take your point about the problems of bureaucracy and I definitely think that market processes which are response to things like supply and demand have their benefits. I don't want to see the elimination of markets by any means.

But we need to put constraints on markets, establish certain kinds of incentives that exercise a general direction for how things will go. What I really don't like about unchecked markets is the way that they destroy common goods. Self-interest is not the only viable human motive.

Now, I'll admit that I'm not an economist but a simple philosopher, so I don't understand all your technical language and I won't be able to argue on that level. But for me, the most compelling part of that video was the analogy about the Asians and the Americans on that island.

Talk all day if you like about corrections to the market and make all the predictions you care to about inflation and deflation or whatever, but the fact of the matter remains that there is something ethically _wrong_ about the way economic activity is organized in this world.

I benefit from it as much as you or the next person and don't want to live uncomfortably--and I may in fact move to Asia someday, who knows?--but isn't it insane that we have the means to address issues like poverty and inequality but we don't?

My alternative proposal is not yet feasible, but I want to see economies run by smarter-than-human artificial intelligences that can overcome many of the problems of bureaucracies while still insuring that some degree of fairness (I'm not talking enforced mediocrity or absolute equality; I'm a big fan of merit and the motivating power of being able to enhance one's status) is operative.

Right now, this plan is a fantasy and grossly oversimplifies the complexity of the problem. But a more realistic policy I think is to find a balance between free markets and other forms of social organization. Efficiency is not the only form that rationality might take.

My plan to move to Japan is looking pretty good after all...

I enjoyed your video, Arman. Just about all of the points you make I recall seeing cited in other publications, so it seems totally legit. And I laughed out loud with the "ooh"ing and "aah"ing you did for the woman's voice. Nice touch. You must have a progressive teacher.

I remember back in high school (only about a decade ago), I called myself a Marxist, but I never ended up reading Marx until my junior year in college. And it wasn't until I read some interesting post-Marxist critiques of its economic determinism and standpoint epistemology (i.e., the proletariat as a class has a privileged perspective in understanding the world) a couple years ago that I finally gave up the label. Is "Marxist" as dirty a word in Canada as it is here in the States?

I think there are good reasons to try to transcend the Marxist label (and to be fair, you did say you align yourself w/ Marxist philosophy, not that you yourself were a Marxist), but hey, you're young and it's a heck of a lot better than those kids who read a little *shudder* Ayn Rand and start calling themselves "objectivists". A more appropriate epithet for most Randroids would be "selfish prick".

I don't mean to compare you to those people directly, because you seem a lot more on the ball (and Rand unlike Marx is no philosopher, despite her unfortunate inclusion under that heading in most bookstores). I'm just being nostalgic for a more innocent time in my life...

I wanted to respond to this comment by "lessreal" (I also hope that my note above gave some examples of ID crisis issues that Kevin may have neglected to include):

"It seems like the claims of an identity crisis are built upon the notion that we will reach some point where our built-in sense of self-awareness just "breaks" and can no longer handle all the extensions that we've added on."

You're right that people have adapted to changes over time. The problem, I think, is that the accelerating rate of major changes produced by technology is not going to give people enough time to adapt. A lot of futurists have written on this and while many of their claims are far-fetched, there is a trend of major new technologies arising and being integrated into society at a faster rate (telephones, cars, televisions, air travel, computers, Internet, cell phones, etc.--each took up less time).

Here's where I suspect one real problem to be: think about how annoying it is to have to upgrade computers, cell phones, iPods, and our other fun toys every couple of years. What happens when we start having to do that for the technologies we integrate into our bodies? In order to compete with other people, we'll constantly be needing to upgrade ourselves. (It's like the steroids problem in baseball... on steroids.) More than just an annoyance, it means a fundamentally different way of understanding what we are.

And, if as I imagine likely, the EU and the US ban a lot of these technologies, SE Asia will not. For some reason, countries like India, S. Korea, Thailand, and Japan are much friendlier to things like designer babies and humanoid robots being integrated into society. (Not 100% sure about Chinese views, but I suspect it's similar there.) I predict that this will accelerate the rise of that part of the world over the West. If the 20th was "the American Century", the 21st will be "the Asian" or perhaps "the Chinese Century", and for more reasons than most expect.

Ah, now this is something I know a thing or two about! (Unlike the other BS I spout on other topics.) This is my academic specialty. I happen to be, in real life, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, and I teach a course on this very question, "Technology and Human Identity".

A lot of my background is in the history of philosophy, and these identity questions go back a long time. I begin my class with a survey of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and others who write on the question of what is human in two ways: one is an ethical approach (what is an ideal life for a human being? how much does this differ between people? what is our purpose? is it just the ones we give ourselves or is there something larger? how do we distinguish persons, i.e., those deserving full moral and legal rights, from non-persons? should individuals be defined by the groups they are members of? etc.).

The other is a descriptive or metaphysical approach, which seems to be what Kevin emphasizes in his post (what is the self? what is consciousness? how do we know if other beings have it? do human beings possess free will even as it seems their actions are determined by natural laws? when does a person come into being, e.g., conception, birth, the age of reason, and end, e.g., death, senility, a vegetative state?).

What's interesting about issues of human identity is how they underlie so many of the most controversial issues today: abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, animal rights, race/gender/identity politics, human evolution (or design), the status of mental illness (real disease, social construct, or something else?), and above all concerns about the permissibility of enhancement technologies.

This last question is my particular focus, and coupled with issues about artificial intelligence, I imagine it to be the biggest philosophical and practical issue of the 21st century. Should people be allowed to take psychopharmoceuticals (Prozac and other SSRIs, beta-blockers, Ritalin and other ADHD drugs, etc.) when they're not diagnosed with a mental disorder? Should we be able to choose the genes of our children? Should artificial intelligences be granted rights? Should people be allowed to have sex with robots? (The last is one of my favorite to discuss in class. :-) )

It's all very exciting and there's much more to it than I could write in a single comment. If anyone would like to learn more, I'd be happy to share some of my sources or general thoughts on the matter.

"You don't really believe Bush makes any decisions do you?"

You're clearly forgetting that he's "The Decider".

In the very least he made the decision to pick Cheney while Dick probably started to take over from there, I'm sure he at least played a major role in choosing members of cabinet, etc. And while Cheney is clearly not stupid, the fact that the administration shows no flexibility in who it picks as advisers indicates that he's not smart enough--or not modest enough--to realize that he might be wrong sometimes.

Even if Bush's cabinet and other advisers are all intelligent, knowledgeable people, the fact that the conversation that they have does not seriously take into account opposing views totally skews the way decisions get made. Look at all the brilliant neocon intellectuals who got us into Iraq. They painted a beautiful picture on paper of what Iraq would become with a unilateral US invasion, but for some reason it didn't turn out that way.

Also, there are a number of things Bush seems really passionate about that he probably overrules even Cheney over, like stem cell research. I mean, his stance on that is so retarded that it must be his own ("Let's allow thousands of frozen, unused embryos to just sit in freezers rather than direct federal money to research that uses them for some good!").

Lastly, when has Bush ever changed his mind about anything? He's a "strong leader" apparently because he's so damn stubborn that no facts will get in his way of going with what his gut tells him to do. That an administration of this character should have such poor judgment is a reflection of all of these factors.

Andre Gide once wrote, "Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it." I'm an Obama supporter in large part because he seems much more like a truth-seeker than an ideologue who claims to know the Truth. He's someone who is willing to change his mind on an issue, to let his position evolve in light of recent developments (this is the case with his stance on Iraq). So while he's not perfect, I trust his judgment more than that of the other candidates.

You know, it's really quite tragic. Short term interests--of members of congress to get re-elected, of corporations to maximize profit, of citizens to feel safe--have trumped any consideration for the long term and the big picture. We are all worse off as a result. Unfortunately the people at the top don't feel it as much and by the time that their lives are impacted, things will likely be so bad as to be irreparable.

I have some hope that maybe things could start to move in the right direction with Obama: he doesn't employ the idiotic tactic of only keeping advisers who agree with him, but actually seeks out people with differing opinions. Similarly, he's much more open to diplomacy rather than the Bush model of "we won't talk to you unless you agree to all our demands first".

There's a reason why it's a good idea to have a smart person as president. Foresight, inquisitiveness, and sound judgment are necessary to ensure we make important socioeconomic and foreign policy decisions as well as possible. Any of the three viable candidates remaining are better in this respect than Bush, but things would likely be better, in many respects, with a Democratic-controlled congress with a Democratic President. They could make some major changes if they didn't have to worry about overriding vetoes. At least, it would be worth giving them a shot.

But this is the awful thing about American politics. Let's say the Dems screw up as badly as the Repubs have. What choice does that leave you with? You can try to promote more progressive candidates in congressional contests, but you're always left with these two institutional juggernauts, both of whom have some very comfy relations with corporations.

I'm not of the view that corporate America or the GOP are "evil". In fact, one of the reasons I would never vote Republican (unless some major reversals took place) is because they are so wedded to a tribal us/them mentality.

What I think is problematic about the deregulation of the marketplace--which is really, I think, what the Republican party consistently delivers--is that it's extremely short-sighted. Not every sphere of human life necessarily works well with profit as the guiding motivation.

Take healthcare: if the main point of insurance is to pool risk, then universality should be a precondition before letting the markets intervene and letting profit-maximization take over. Otherwise, you get huge wastes of money spent on trying to pass the buck and only giving healthcare to the relatively healthy who don't really need it. This is part of the reason the US spends so much more per capita on medicine than anywhere else in the world. I honestly don't think you can significantly reduce costs without changing the nature of the motivations that drive healthcare decisions.

Similarly, consider the non-profit-driven ideals of university education (unfortunately being run more and more like a business), social infrastructure (roads, bridges, public transportation, utilities, broadband internet, etc.), and the "marketplace" of ideas (an awful metaphor since it leads to absurd notions like "intellectual property"; why should people be allowed to have exclusive control over certain ideas or images?).

With the police state, you do have a different motive operating other than greed: fear. People want to achieve a sense of security that is simply not realistic for the volatile world we live in. We must learn to live with an acceptable degree of risk; otherwise, we will start to slide toward the dystopian scenarios of Orwell and other authors.

Greed, ambition, and fear are more than just emotions: they are powerful political forces. Hope, intellectual curiosity, reason, and other positive human sentiments are hard-pressed to match their might but, unless you are resigned to apathy and despair, they are the only alternative.

It's clearly (not actually "clearly" since it's such low quality video) just some dude crouching and ambling about sideways.

Try it yourself: it's actually not that hard to move around like that, and certainly not for the like 2 seconds that were taped. With bad lighting conditions, it makes for a creepy profile, but it's just some kid mostly hunched over.

I'm perhaps as atheistic as they come (I used to be an evangelical Dawkins-style atheist even), but after a few years of rabid anti-Christianity when I reached the age of reason and rejected my religious upbringing, I've come to have a more nuanced view of the matter. I think religion is on the whole, like most human institutions, a mixed bag.

Yes, it's suppressed knowledge and progress and resulted in tons of needless suffering and death, but it also motivates millions of individuals to be happy and act kindly towards others. It's also not the only major offender when it comes to crimes against humanity since there are plenty of (more or less) secular regimes guilty of genocide, wide-scale persecution, thought control and other nasty things.

I'm a far bigger fan of reason than faith (I happen to be a philosopher by trade), but it is probably true that most of the beliefs that most people have are not adequately supported by evidence, and that most of reasoning is rationalization anyway.

My point: let's not paint religion, organized or otherwise, in broad brushstrokes, calling it hopelessly evil or what-have-you, especially if we disapprove of it for reasons like its simplistic black-and-white thinking and its hypocrisy.

(That said, I do think the Catholic Church as an institution is extremely blameworthy for its stance on birth control, which likely causes far more suffering than those more sensationalist pedophilia cases. Conversely, though, it deserves credit for opposing the unjust distribution of resources when many Protestant Churches, for example, are nervously looking the other way on that one.)

I teach a class at a university in Nashville on issues involving technology and human identity, focusing primarily on issues of so-called "human enhancement" such as are talked about here. I think a major reason why enhancement is so problematic is that it helps to shatter the egalitarian myth ("All [people] are created equal...") that underlies so much of popular thought in America and other democratic nations.

The problem, though, is that this is indeed a myth (if taken factually, rather than as an ideal). Not only are all people not born with equal capacities, it is not the case that people's strengths and weaknesses "balance out". No one is perfect, sure, but some people are extremely lucky in having many strengths and few significant weaknesses, while others are extremely unlucky for the opposite reason.

Instead of trying to deny this and pretend that competition is fair if people stick with what they're born with, a true egalitarian might well advocate research into enhancement technologies along with public subsidies to allow individuals who want to compete not to have to be winners in the genetic lottery. I am of course oversimplifying here, but my point is that it is by no means clear that advocates of HE technologies are necessarily elitist or undemocratic.

I am convinced that this will be one of the foremost ethical problems of the 21st century (which is why I study it). Our unquestioned assumptions about what counts as "human" or as "natural" are in for a bumpy ride, particularly as the biological and brain sciences (not to mention the possibility of cybernetic or nano-enhancements) become more refined and produce safer and more effective tools to increase human abilities.

I suspect that there will be many bans implemented in the EU and US, but public opinion in SE Asia is much friendlier to genetic, neurological, and other enhancements. This may well contribute to the rise of China and its neighbors over a declining West which will simply not be able to compete in our global economy.

One thing is for sure: this issue is not going away anytime soon.

All the comments here show us something any of us should be willing to admit: the situation is more complex than it at first seems. To tackle just one thread of this complexity, consider the nature of the harm, terrorism, that TSA's policies are supposedly designed to protect us against (leaving aside for now whatever other motives individual agents or the institution as a whole might have).

Terrorist attacks are low probability but high impact. There's a lot of psychological research on biases in human reasoning that show that thinking about events like these is especially prone to error, because of the strong emotions invoked by the imagination of catastrophic events. This is why the issue is so contentious. It's extremely difficult to offer an accurate assessment of what the real risks are and of what measures will be effective in decreasing those risks.

I think the reasonable response, though, is to recognize that no terrorism-prevention strategy is fool-proof. Instead of letting someone's wildest imaginations dictate what we do or not allow, we should use reason and scientific investigation to assess the effectiveness of policies, to the best of our ability. (That is to say, while assessing risks accurately is difficult, we can still achieve some degree of success.)

Consistency, to ensure fairness, and flexibility, to accommodate the unforeseeable details of specific cases, must be balanced. Perhaps experimentation on a local basis is worthwhile: if a trial provision eliminates a certain risk without constituting too much of a hassle, it might be adopted on a larger scale. Similarly, certain existing regulations might be suspended temporarily and the effects assessed.

It's difficult to think reasonably about these things because of how great the potential costs are, but it is the best chance we have for making things tolerable, both for would-be victims of terrorists and of TSA agents. No one wants to live in a police state, but neither do we want to have to fear for our lives due to inadequate security measures.

To give just one concrete example, let's take the ban on liquids. First, we might ask what are the specific liquids which pose risks, and what are those risks? From what I recall hearing, the supposed liquid explosive which prompted this policy was one that was all but impossible to mix undetected on a plane (it required mixing chemicals which had to be controlled at certain temperatures, which would be next to impossible without the right equipment, equipment which would be easily detected in carry-on baggage).

Now, maybe there are other risks that liquids pose, but if investigation reveals no significant ones, the liquid ban should be eliminated. (Perhaps some new threat will emerge in the future that would justify a ban, but this could be said about just about anything; we should deal with such threats if and when they are discovered; again, you can't prevent everything potentially disastrous.)

We desire certainty when our lives are at stake, but this is never achievable. We need to learn to live with a degree of risk that is reasonably mitigated by soundly-established regulations. I think this is the only way to reach a compromise that will actually address the concerns of everyone involved.

I don't know what's more despicable, the actions of the TSA or the apologists trying to excuse them in this forum?

Oh, I'm sorry, please forgive my "hyperbole"!

It's people like you that allow this sh|t to go on. Since when did America become the land of making up excuses for abusers of power? It's amazing and sad how easy it is to use the language of "choice" to actually disempower individuals. (Of course, this is what corporate America has been doing for decades...)

Does the status quo really treat you so well that you must defend it at all costs? Shame on you. I expect better from people on the Internet (heh).

That article is something else; worth reading in full. It makes me wonder how anyone can continue to support this war or this president. Are people really that easily manipulated?

The fact that McCain wants to keep us in Iraq for 100 more years or however long should be sufficient to make his candidacy a laughingstock. And yet the election will still probably be close.

(For the record, I'm a supporter of Obama, but I think I support him for the wrong reasons. The man speaks in cliches, and yet I still find listening to him a moving experience. I honestly don't know if he'll do a decent job as president--I don't think anyone knows. It's rather insane that this is how one of the most powerful individuals in the world is determined.)

Quite frankly, it's facts like these that make me fundamentally skeptical of democracy. Imagine if we had experts like Stiglitz making important economic decisions rather than ideologically-blinded true believers who are unable to see the larger picture or, more generally, politicians whose only certain skill is being able to market themselves better than their competitors. (We already have something like this going on with Bernanke and the Fed; while that's a newer institution, the founders themselves recognized the need for more elitist institutions in areas where expertise, or at least competence, was vitally important.)

Yes, there is always the issue of determining who are really experts (doesn't it take an expert to know an expert?), as well as delimiting the scope of individual expertise (what decisions is an economist really qualified to make?), but in today's insanely complex world, it is not uncommon that only experts have any hope of regularly making sound decisions. When replaced by popularly chosen ideologues, we get results like Iraq which, all things considered, is relatively minor compared to what disasters we may face in the coming century.

Personally, I like the idea of rule by artificial intelligence (if well-programmed, they lack certain human foibles like ambition, political bias, and the various other passions which pervert human judgment). I mean, honestly, could they do any worse? Haven't we yet realized that human beings are incapable of ruling themselves? It's rather clear that we're incapable of something as simple as learning from experience (first Vietnam, now Iraq). Honestly, I don't know how mob rule became so popular in the first place... ;-)