A friend of ours has beginning Alzheimer’s and entered a care home for alternate weeks at the beginning of March. Then came the Chinese virus. He happened to be in the home when Sweden banned all visits by relatives because of the pandemic. His wife lives only 3 km away but she has not been able to see him since then.
I wrote this a few years ago.
When all your email is only spam
This started out as an explanation of the difference in usage between just and fair, but has ended up as a journey from fair to just to justness to justice and thence to justice systems.
Just and fair are often conflated. But justness and fairness are different things and justice is something else again. The qualities of justness and fairness give rise to being just and fair respectively, but the corresponding action deriving from the quality of justice is doing justice.
- fair/unfair, from fairness/unfairness,
- just/unjust, from justness/injustice1,
- justice/injustice2
are all quite distinct and different. The antonym for justness I take to be injustice1, which is not quite the same thing as the opposite of justice (injustice2).
What both fair and just have in common is that they cannot exist except as reactions to the prior conceptions of unjust and unfair. These must come first. .Just and fair both then represent, but separately, states of balance in human interactions. The abstract quality of being fair is fairness and that of being just is justness. Justice is, however, something else and not necessarily fair or just. But justice too follows from a conception of injustice2 which must come first.
A justice system is something else again.
A just universe?
In the physical universe, the concepts of just and fair are undefined and have no meaning. The natural laws are neither fair nor just; they merely are. It is human cognition together with human interactions which give rise to the need for these concepts to exist. In the physical world, the closest analogy to the concepts of just and fair are equilibrium and balance. The universe came into being, (whether by accident or by design), following an initiating impulse which created the Great Imbalance. All events since then are in pursuit of balance; of seeking a state of equilibrium. All change is a result of some imbalance. Once equilibrium is achieved nothing happens. Nothing can happen. All of physics and chemistry and biology are about changes brought about by non-equilibrium states followed by events which are always in the pursuit of balance. We derive the natural laws from observations of change around us. They are all about events caused by imbalances, which seek to reduce the causing imbalance. Without imbalance there would be no motion, no vibration, no radiation and no change of any kind. They all cease with equilibrium. Even the very existence of matter is due to disturbances (imbalances) in fields. All existence is a chain of succeeding imbalances, a transience. All life is transient. Change pursuant to one imbalance leads to further imbalances, which lead to further changes, and so on ad infinitum. There is no certainty that the chain of changes will, or must, converge. Attaining a final, universal equilibrium may not happen very quickly (and possibly may never happen). Whether time emerges from change, or time causes change, the flow of time is itself a manifestation of some, as yet unknown, imbalance. The universe – while it exists – is in a “permanently” transient state. All science is about understanding the state of the universe and its patterns of change, while human engineering and technology are about harnessing the transients as the natural forces pursue equilibrium. Change is impossible without imbalance. If, and when, all the imbalances are removed, even atoms will cease to vibrate and the universe will come to an end. All would be in equilibrium; motionless; unchanging; timeless. It would be the ultimate stasis.
The universe just is, but just it is not.
Fair/Fairness
Fair is meaningless without a conception of unfair. Any definition of fair must first go through defining what it is not. Fairness is about a qualitative balance assessed between positions along the benefit – harm value scale, as perceived by an individual. Fairness is about the balance and not about the level of harm or the position along the value scale. Strict equivalence is not a requirement. However while fair describes a balance anywhere along the scale, unfair is always accompanied by a greater level of perceived harm on one side of the imbalance.
It is nearly always about people. It is always about balance though a comparison with a standard or norm may be implied. It is thought that the concept of fairness may even be hard-wired into our brains. (Fairness and equality are sometimes interchanged but they are also quite different things and equal is not necessarily just or fair). For an individual, the assessment of fairness can often seem to emanate from “gut” emotions. It is, however, a composite cognitive assessment; an application of reason, even if sometimes made to some extent in the sub-conscious. The assessment is along a harm-benefit value scale which is itself a composite scale. It is subjective and specific to every individual. Fairness includes assessments for, among many other values, equity, wealth, proportion, beauty, worth, privilege, ability, performance, reward and penalty. (Actions causing harm such as discrimination, cheating, favoritism and the like are usually unfair, except when they are overridden by political correctness). The assessed balance may apply
(There are other meanings of fair – a market fair, fair weather, fair skin, etc. – but these are not considered here). Strict equivalence is not a requirement for a balance to be considered fair. Sometimes, but rarely, the comparison may be relative to some expected standard rather than between people.
What is fair then depends upon each individual’s own set of values. Different values or sets of values give differing assessments of fairness. Giving different weights to different values would change the assessment of fairness. What appears fair to me today may not seem fair to a different observer or even to me at a different time. The ability to assess fairness is clearly a function of cognition. Sometimes we do extend the quality of fairness in our descriptions of the animal world. But in the animal world, it seems that only some of the primates (chimpanzees for example) may have some vague notion of the concept of fairness. Whenever there is a collective human assessment of what is fair, it is built up from developing some form of consensus from the various individual assessments of fairness. But the assessments by individuals must come first.
Fairness, at its core, emanates from individual cognition and an individual’s set of values and the application of those values to a comparison and an assessment of balance. Unfair may contribute to wrongness but is not necessarily improper or illegal or immoral.
Just/Justness
Just and justness, on the other hand, only emerge in a societal context. They too are defined through their antonyms. They always involve a judgement by, or with reference to, some authority. A judgement necessarily requires speaking from authority, but it may be explicit or implicit. While an individual can have an assessment of fairness without necessarily referring to a society, an individual’s perception of unjust needs reference to a surrounding society. The value scale is now of a formal wrongness where some societal authority defines the just-unjust value scale which, in turn is, a composite of various aspects of wrongness. The scale is open at the unjust end but cannot exceed beyond just. (A reference to more just is not an excess of justness but actually about less unjust).
The authority may be explicit, emanating from a prevailing power in a society (setting laws, rules, regulations, instructions, ..), or implicit, when the judgement is based on moral or religious or societal authority (correctness, morality, conscience, convention, ..). Correct, or proper, or moral, or legal, or deserved are all judgements made from a position of authority. Justness is still about balance, but a balance against a measure of wrongness based on societal rules originating from some authority (governments, religions, gods, …). It also begins by first having a concept of what what just is not. To be assessed as unjust must always include this element of formal wrongness. Wrongness is a composite judgement which includes one or more of being incorrect, improper, unfair, illegal, immoral or undeserved. These assessments are not compared, in the first instance, between humans but against societal norms as decreed by authority. The weight given to different aspects of wrongness determines the position on the just-unjust scale. At least one component of wrongness is necessary but may not be sufficient for being unjust. Thus (unfair + deserved) may be just while (fair + illegal) may be unjust. It is not implausible, for example, that an action which is improper, incorrect, immoral and unfair, but which is compliant with law, escapes being labeled as unjust. Unfair is silent about wrongness and becomes unjust only if it is also adjudged to be sufficiently negative on the wrongness scale. Unjust is not necessarily harmful or unfair.
It is doubtful if any other species we know of makes the leap from fair to just. I make the distinction between justness and fairness primarily by differentiating between the individual and the collective (society) and on the different value scales in play. Fairness is a judgement of balance while justness is a measure of formal wrongness. I can judge what is fair, but some authority within society must be called upon to determine what is just.
Fair = balanced along the harm-benefit value scale as perceived by an individual’s set of values
Just = not negative along the just-unjust, wrongness scale as determined by some societal authority
Justice/Injustice
The primary meaning of the word justice as a noun is: “the achieving or maintenance of what is just”. However the word also has other meanings such as a judge, the maintenance of law, the quality of being just (justness), correctness or a justice system. I take only the primary meaning here: “the achieving or maintenance of what is just”. (I have more to say about justice systems later).
The philosophical concept of justice arises only because injustice is first perceived to exist as an imbalance in human relations within a society. A society without any perception of injustice could not, from nothingness, dream up a concept of justice. Just as a creature without vision could not dream up the concept of red. Human societies pride themselves on having a sense of justice and on their institutionalized systems of justice. Most would claim the objective of striving for a just world. But in a completely just world the concept of justice vanishes, just as in a universe at equilibrium, change – and therefore the universe – vanish. Justice cannot exist without injustice first being perceived as an imbalance within a society. A paradox lies in that while the pursuit of justice is a cherished part of the human identity, in a perfectly just world, the concept of justice could not emerge. It follows that a perfectly just world could only contain a humanity which had no conception of injustice.
The Justinian definition that justice is “the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due” is 1,500 years old, but is still valid and as good a theoretical description of justice (as the maintenance of what is just), as any. “To each his due” requires a judgement from an authority competent to decide what is due. “To each” also implies everybody. Theoretically, justice should then be the pursuit of a state of justness where everybody gets their due – good, bad or indifferent. As a synonym for justness, justice ought to be as much about due reward as it is about due penalty. In practice, however, justice is predominantly about what is due for wrongness rather than what may be due for rightness. In common usage, justice is about the righting of undue wrongs, and very seldom about rendering of due rewards. When reward does engage justice, it is more often as an injustice consequent to a reward denied. It is sometimes seen as a property of the law. But that doesn’t really work since not everything compliant with law is necessarily just. Law specifies the wrongness scale but is not, actually, about the quality of wrongness. Whereas justness should be equally about due punishment and due reward, justice is predominantly about what is due for that wrongness which is adjudged sufficiently wrong to be labeled unjust.
In current practice, justice is no longer about what is due to everyone and is restricted to be what is due to every wrongdoer. Justice is now just a sub-set of justness. Justinian’s definition has effectively been modified.
justice = “the constant and perpetual will to render to each wrongdoer his due”
Justice Systems
Justice systems are always societal constructs made or maintained by the prevailing power. They are made up of institutions and procedures in a society, established by law, and concerned solely with the enforcement of law. Whether it is a system established by a sporting club (discipline committee), or a company (grievance process) or the full-blown paraphernalia of a state (Justice System), it does not deal, except as a corollary, with fairness or justness or even justice. It is only concerned with a portion of that fraction of unjust or injustice which is illegal. To the extent that law is imperfect and not all laws are just or fair, it also deals with just or fair acts which happen to be illegal. Justice and The Law are shrouded in a halo of sanctity which is a mirage. There is nothing absolute or fundamental or divine about the justice pursued by justice systems. It emerges in the context of a society and varies with time, society and the prevailing power. A justice system is not so much about attaining a state of justness as it is about being seen to be addressing some of those who have done harm and have created societal imbalances. It is a highly pragmatic, societal construct for the visible disbursement of future harm to a select few formally adjudged to have done something illegal which has caused harm.
One could hope that a justice system would promote a general state of justness in society but that would be entirely delusional. One might think, more practically, that a justice system existed to promote a Justinian form of justice in a society, where everybody got their due, but even that would be hopelessly naive. The UK Ministry of Justice “definition” reads like a corporate mission statement written by a PR hack: “The purpose of the Criminal Justice System… is to deliver justice for all, by convicting and punishing the guilty and helping them to stop offending, while protecting the innocent”.
Consider first how limited the scope of application of any justice system actually is.
These are just guesstimates but it is apparent that no justice system can address and “render their due” to more than about 2% of all illegal events (or 0.1% of all events which create a “due”). It would seem that the societal exercise of justice is satisfied by addressing just this tiny fraction of events that could be addressed. That is not to say that justice systems don’t serve a critical purpose for all societies. But the primary purpose cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be to achieve a state of justness for all, or even justice for all, in the society concerned.
The bottom line is that justice systems decree and implement harm for those convicted. In fact it is the only recourse available to justice systems. The past cannot be changed and the only tool available is future harm. This is not restricted to criminal justice. Even in civil justice suits when perceived harm is brought to the courts, the recourse of the justice system to redressing balance (if imbalance is adjudged to exist and be illegal), is to decree future harm for the “wrongdoer”.
What, then, is actually achieved by justice systems?
In practice, every justice system is concerned only with a tiny fraction of all illegalities. It
The reality is that every justice system (including its prevailing laws and institutions) is built on the core assumption that societies, for the smooth functioning of that society, must be seen to be pursuing justice. What justice or justness is actually achieved in the society at large is entirely incidental.
Doing harm to others is “bad”, except when it is just or decreed by a justice system.
Related: Laws are made to be broken
Without laws there are no law breakers. It is not only that law breakers are created by human laws, human laws need law breakers. Laws are established in the first place to prevent some human behaviors which society judges to be undesirable. But if everyone follows a law then that law is unnecessary, and if no one follows that law it is worthless. One could well say that law breakers perform a fundamental and necessary service for society. They keep laws alive. Without law breakers, there would be no need for laws or legislators or lawyers.
In the blinkered world of the politically correct, “cultural appropriation” has now become a very “bad” thing.
One would reasonably think that cultural appropriation is when elements of a culture are so highly valued that they are adopted by other cultures. It is how cultures change and evolve. Static cultures stagnate and die. Peoples whose culture stagnates, but who themselves adapt, survive by merging into a dominating culture. When a culture is not viable its practitioners gradually disappear as an identifiable, ethnic, cluster of people. And so it should be. It is cultures and peoples with the ability to adapt, to absorb and appropriate from others, which survive. Contemporaneous cultures are always in competition and, that too, is an essential part of how they evolve. Ridicule is a common expression of such competition. Cultures which cannot stand the heat of appropriation and assimilation of elements of their culture by other cultures, do die out – as they should. Appropriation by others is a very good indicator of the value of a cultural element. Cultural elements not worth appropriating by others are often just being continued because of inertia and should probably be discarded by the originating culture. A culture or cultural element not robust enough to withstand ridicule does not need to be kept alive on artificial support.
Elements of culture are absorbed, (or appropriated or copied or improved) by others because they are advantageous or desirable. The Romans followed the Greeks and appropriated large, desirable chunks of Greek culture. Including the chiton. What was not desirable was rejected. Fortunately, we are not doomed to all wearing the chiton. Trousers were invented, at least 3,000 years ago, by the hordes of Central Asia for riding horses, and not primarily as a fashion statement. But while, through Greek and Roman times, trousers were known, they were confined to the uncultured masses. In the present day, sagging trousers are used by the great unwashed, as a cultural and tribal symbol. Cultures are established, they live and some die. They are subject to evolution as all languages also are. Elements of doomed cultures survive if they are worth adopting. Minority cultures – like communities – can try to remain separate and isolated and pure – and gradually wither away. But useful, desirable elements of any culture, if adopted, appropriated or assimilated by others, can survive for ever.
Trousers for example.
A culture with nothing worth appropriating has little value and should be allowed to die quietly.
A culture unable to appropriate from, or allow appropriation by, other cultures deserves to die out.
“Cultural appropriation”, as a term, has now been hijacked by the politically correct as fuel for the manufactured indignation they cannot live without. They have defined a special subset of “cultural appropriation” which is considered evil and a fundamental sin. It is declared unacceptable and morally reprehensible when elements of a subordinate (minority) culture are adopted by members of a dominant (majority) culture. It is especially evil when this happens for economic gain. Subordinate cultures, inevitably, are sometimes those of minorities who have been oppressed. Adopting elements of such a culture (food, symbols, clothing, language, music ….) is apparently, in the world of political correctness, to participate in oppression. The argument is illogical, contrived and makes no sense but rationality is not the point of being politically correct. Members of minority cultures may, however, freely adopt elements of the majority culture provided they have not been coerced to do so. Furthermore, the same argument continues, a member of a disadvantaged minority culture adopting some element of a majority culture is, in itself, proof of coercion. All the people from former colonies who now continue using English or Spanish or French are thus keeping their own oppression alive and are – often unknowingly – morally degenerate. A minority culture appropriating elements from another minority culture can be politically acceptable only if both minorities are equally disadvantaged. Thus, poor Asians in black-face are less reprehensible than rich Asians in dreadlocks. Black Africans wearing a Hindu bindi (which is a quasi-religious statement of marital status) are considered less immoral than when white Europeans use the bindi as a fashion statement.
This incoherent indignation is rich in self-righteousness and borders on idiocy. Sometimes, they manage to hear the nonsense in their own babble and then the fall-back, defensive position is that while cultural exchange is acceptable, cultural appropriation is not. (Five words of your language for five words of mine? or your trousers for my chiton?) One accusation is that elements of a culture are used by members of other cultures for purposes not intended by the original culture. They find it sinful that non-aborigines create art purporting to be of cultural significance for Aborigines. Especially if it is for monetary gain. Just as Andy Warhol must have sinned with his Campbell soup cans. For the Washington Redskins to use the head of a “Native American” (Red Indian) chief as their symbol is now tantamount to approving of genocide.
(The efforts at the UN to make cultural appropriation illegal only demonstrate how stupid humans can be. But stupid is also part of the diversity of humans. It is worth noting that the sanctimonious attempts by the politically correct to “protect indigenous peoples” are inherently racist. They perpetuate racism. In the name of protecting indigenous peoples, the UN has effectively enshrined them as racially different groups, imprisoned them in their backwardness and have created zoo animals of them).
k2p: Keeping backward tribes isolated to “preserve” their cultures and freezing them into backwardness (by preventing them from merging or being absorbed by the world) is immoral.
What especially fuels the indignation of the sanctimonious is if “offenders” make money from the use of the element of appropriated culture. The list of such morally reprehensible, “cultural appropriations” is very long – and very muddled.
The primary drivers for the movement against “cultural appropriation” would seem to be envy and a need to stoke the fires of its own indignation.
Related: Extinction is normal
Living things evolve, dead things can be remembered but extinction is normal.
I have no objection to expressions of regret, but I find the hand-wringing and sanctimonious claptrap about the extinction of species, languages and cultures illogical and without thought. I don’t miss the dodo or any of the dinosaurs. I don’t miss Latin or Sanskrit (even though I had to sit through boring lessons in both). It is only a natural course of development that isolated Amazonian tribes have disappeared as their members have joined the rest of the world. I don’t miss the cannibalistic cultures which have disappeared.
….. Species evolve to survive or they go extinct. Languages evolve and they die when they are of no use to anyone anymore. Cultures evolve and merge with other cultures or they try to remain separate as a distinct, (often racial) identity by isolation and inevitably they die out. The cultures that disappear don’t survive because they are not viable in the world they live in. Regret is one thing, but trying to artificially protect non-viable species, languages or cultures or peoples by putting them in a “zoo” is mawkish and irrational and, ultimately, unethical. Keeping backward tribes isolated to “preserve” their cultures and freezing them into backwardness (by preventing them from merging or being absorbed by the world) is immoral. Freezing individuals from unfit species in a zoo, and neither helping them to evolve nor allowing the species to go extinct, is immoral. Preserving dead languages is of academic interest and does not prevent the extinction of languages which no longer serve a useful purpose.
To the best of our knowledge there are about 7,000 languages recognised today. Depending upon when language began (between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago) between 90 and 99% of all languages are now extinct. Written languages are much younger of course. An extinct language is a matter of history. Some languages evolved and produced versions still in use today. Others did not. We know about some of these because they developed writing and left some records which have survived. Languages die a natural death when they stop being used. Of course there is nothing wrong in speakers of dying languages trying to revitalise them. Governments have sometimes tried to promote particular languages (French, Hindi), and sometimes to suppress some (Welsh, Sami). Languages have been invented (Esperanto or Klingon). Most of these attempts of artificially creating, protecting or suppressing language are futile. The ultimate arbiter of language (and of grammar and of spelling) is usage. The real question should not be whether a language is “endangered” and should be protected but whether a language serves any useful purpose. If it does, it will survive. If it does not, it should not survive. Endangered languages should be recorded for history and allowed to die in peace.
…..
Reblogging this article from https://milindwatve.home.blog/
Both interesting and a refreshing change from the usual.
Covid 19: We need neither vaccine nor herd immunity
Posted on
I had said in an earlier blog article that the SARS Cov-2 virus responsible for the current pandemic is likely to evolve rapidly towards reduced virulence. The reason why I expect this is that on the one hand, almost all countries are implementing strict quarantine measures for all detected positive cases. But on the other hand, we cannot afford to do mass testing, leading to many undetected asymptomatic cases roaming around and spreading the virus. The virus reaches huge populations and also has a high mutation rate, so all possible variants will keep on arising. A virulent strain is most likely to cause severe infection which will invite testing and ultimately quarantine. A mild variant, on the other hand is more likely to lead to asymptomatic or mild symptomatic infections which are more likely to escape screening followed by quarantine and therefore keep on spreading. In several generations of the virus, which is a short time for us, natural selection will favour the mild variants.
While all research on the virus is engaged in developing vaccine, studying pathogenic mechanisms or suggesting treatments, nobody seems to talk about evolution of the virus. This is for two reasons. One is that people in medicine are never trained to think of evolution. The other is that virulence is difficult to quantify. It is easier to sequence the virus, study its proteins, look for antibodies in the host etc. Researchers typically do what is easy to do rather than what is scientifically more relevant. Since one cannot measure a change in virulence easily, nobody will even talk about any hypothesis related to it. This is what I call “evidence bias” in science. If it is difficult to find evidence to either falsify or support a hypothesis, people will avoid talking about the hypothesis because it cannot make a paper. Whether the hypothesis is relevant to public health is not an important issue, whether you can publish a paper is.
But in the epidemiological trend at the global as well as the Indian scene, there are definite signs of reduction in virulence. Although the infection is growing, the death rate is consistently reducing with time. Look at the patterns. From mid-April, although the total number of new cases per day has been increasing, the total reported deaths per day is decreasing.
The same is happening in India too. In fact, the case fatality rate in India was always low and it is decreasing further, although the absolute number of deaths per day has not started decreasing yet.
Data from: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
I plotted the time trend in the ratio of daily reported positive cases to daily reported deaths starting from the day the new death count exceeded 50. Although there are expected daily chance fluctuations, there is a clear decreasing trend.
Data from https://www.covid19india.org
Now if we make a simplistic assumption that the linear trend continues, then we can come out with a prediction that in India in about 35 days, Covid 19 will remain only as dangerous as any seasonal flu. The assumption of linearity is of course an oversimplification, the slope may not remain the same throughout. The second caveat is that case fatality rate cannot be exactly equated to mortality rate. In a growing epidemic, case fatality rate is an underestimate or mortality. But that need not affect the trend. The estimate of 35 days might be too optimistic. It may take somewhat longer. But the direction is assuring. Anecdotally I heard from some of my clinician friends that the proportion of patients needing critical care is already low.
The vaccine trial and mass production is going to take many months and may not immediately become available or affordable to the masses. For the huge population of India, acquiring herd immunity is a huge task and will not happen for a year or two. But much before either of the two becomes useful for public health, evolution would have taken care of the deadliness of the virus. We need to continue quarantine and good medical care of symptomatic cases, but not be fussy about the asymptomatic ones. Because they are going to be the saviours. Let us wait for a couple of months to see whether the prophecy turns out to be true qualitatively or quantitatively. If it does, it has a long term lesson for medicine. Virulence management strategies should become an integral part of public health planning. This is not the last time that a new virus arises. This will keep on happening. Understanding of evolutionary dynamics is certainly required to manage public health.
Going offline for a while.
Update:
I check the email for this site (ktwop.info@gmail.com) very irregularly and just found a few mails asking if I would accept guest posts.
In principle, yes.
But
this is my site and I take responsibility for what is “published” here.
Therefore guest posts would be accepted or rejected or edited for publication entirely at my discretion.
The only thing I would not do would be to (intentionally) plagiarize any text that was submitted.
Submissions to the email above. Submission itself will be taken as acceptance of my editing, publication or rejection entirely at my discretion.
No guarantee as to how long I may take to respond.
The coronavirus pandemic brings the delusion of human equality into stark relief.
There is a myth that institutions, from the UN to countries and NGO’s, like to propagate. This is the fantasy that humans are born equal and that their lives are of equal value. All across the world we now see that the infection carriers are mainly younger and asymptomatic. The dead are mainly among the old and the weak. Everyone is now seeking “herd immunity”, but a herd is always on the move. Its security lies in leaving behind and sacrificing the old and the infirm to satisfy the predators. The coronavirus is predatory. It is the younger and stronger who can get the economies to start up again. And the old and the infirm are being left behind.
It has happened in Spain and Italy and the UK as well but I take Sweden as an example where the myth that human lives have equal value is particularly strong. It has become exceedingly clear that the lives of those who may place a greater burden on the nationalised health services are worth less than of those who won’t. Almost 90% of all deaths attributed to the coronavirus in Sweden, (actually 87% currently), are of those over 70 years of age. Many of these were because the infection entered the care homes where the elderly were trapped, mainly through asymptomatic care workers. Unions have then blocked care workers from providing care in some infected care homes. Government institutions have even formally promoted the downgrading of the value of the lives of the elderly. The Swedish Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) has explicitly lowered the priority to be given to those with a lower “expected remaining life”. It is not just coincidence that some Stockholm hospitals have rejected some of the elderly from available intensive care places, in case younger patients with a greater chance of survival might have need of them. (Expressen 23rd April)
There is nothing right or wrong with the reality that humans are not equal. Far better to openly accept the reality than hide behind a delusion.
Humans are not born equal, nor do they live equally and they do not die equal.
Humans are born genetically unique. In one estimate by the FBI for identifications in court, the chance of a DNA profile being matched by another person is much less than 1 in 260 billion. All the humans who have ever lived over 200,000 years as “anatomically modern humans” number about 110 billion. No two have ever been genetically alike or have had identical DNA profiles.
Humans are not born “equal” in their genes. The capability envelope – physical, mental and behavioural – for any individual is already set at birth (actually soon after conception). Nurture then determines what an individual can actually achieve within the capability envelope. But, no amount of nurture (nourishment, upbringing, training, learning or experience) can enable an individual to break out of the predetermined envelope of capability. Nurture may have enabled me to run faster than I can, but no amount of nurture would have made it possible for me to run as fast as Usain Bolt.
Humans are not equal either in the nurture they receive. The reality is that all humans are born naked, with no resources, no debts, no liabilities and with only those privileges as may be granted, or liabilities that may be imposed, by the surrounding human society. They are born utterly dependent upon surrounding humans for their survival. Nourishment and upbringing are determined by the far from equal capabilities of parents. Education and learning and experience vary according to the means of the parents and the surrounding society. The vastly varying levels of support they receive from others, at birth and through their upbringing, further emphasizes that they are not equal. They differ in nourishment, upbringing, training, learning and experience. They differ in what they contribute to, or receive from, their surroundings.
Humans do not behave equally. From birth and through their lifetimes, they differ in their actions and behaviour and interactions with others. They differ in the people they interact with. They behave differently from each other, to each other and differently through their lives.
Human lives are not lived equally. The value any creature places on its own life is entirely subjective and not something that can be estimated by others. Presumably this value is at the maximum possible for the individual concerned. The value of any human life within its own society varies with manifested behaviour and over time. The value to its own surrounding society is also a subjective judgement. However, it varies across societies, from one human to the next and over the life of that human. It is neither static nor a constant. The value of an undistinguished human life may be priceless to friends and relatives, but quite low in its immediate society and may approach zero to a distant society. The value of a distinguished life may extend far beyond the boundaries of the local society and long after that life is over.
And when a human, no matter how distinguished or productive earlier, is committed for life to a care home or a hospice, the reality is that the current value of that human life, to that society, has dwindled to not very much.
Humans are not born equal, nor do they live equally and they do not die equal.
There is nothing right or wrong with that. It just is. Far better to openly accept the reality than hide behind a delusion.
“Globalism” is meaningless sanctimony without nations first taking care of themselves. In this Covid-19 crisis, there is no “globalised” solution and every nation is having to find its own way of handling the problem. There is a great deal of bilateral and even international cooperation, but every nation is then taking its own decisions for its own people. To be truly international, nations must first take care of themselves.
I have been waiting for the UN Security Council to pass a resolution banning the coronavirus. However such a resolution might well attract a veto from China.
The WHO preferred not to listen to warnings from Taiwan because they follow the Chinese line that Taiwan does not exist.
FT: The criticism by the World Medical Association … accusing it of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus”. The WMA said the WHO’s failure to heed Taiwan’s early warnings resulted in “errors that led to the world paying a high price” in the 2003 Sars outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic. …. Taiwan has accused the WHO of dismissing its early efforts to raise the red flag that the virus might spread among humans because of the organisation’s pro-China bias. It has been excluded from having “observer status” at the UN body’s annual meeting of decision makers since 2018.
Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, was among those to call for an investigation into the WHO once the pandemic was under control. ….. Health officials in Taiwan said they alerted the WHO in late December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.
The EU is another organisation which promotes the “globalist” religion (provided the EU is first among equals). The reality is that the EU cannot take care of any member state which cannot take care of itself. The EU has proved itself impotent in time of crisis.
Forbes: Mauro Ferrari, head of the European Union’s top scientific research body, … resigned on Tuesday, effective immediately, citing a “political thunderstorm” in the European Commission in response to his plans to address the pandemic. ….. “I moved that the European Research Council should establish a special program directed at combating COVID-19,” he wrote, but that the plan was outright rejected by the European Commission, ……..
Ferrari said, in a two-page statement, printed in the Financial Times: “I have been extremely disappointed by the European response to COVID-19, for what pertains to the complete absence of coordination of health care policies among member states, the recurrent opposition to cohesive financial support initiatives, the pervasive one-sided border closures, and the marginal scale of synergistic scientific initiatives.”
However, the EU did express solidarity with Italy and Spain but had to apologise for being incapable of providing any help.
Guardian: ….. when Italy pleaded for fellow countries to send it medical equipment such as masks, France and Germany not only failed to respond, they placed export bans (since lifted) on the export of the kit Italian hospitals were crying out for.
….. Another problem for Italy is that ….. it has to pay a higher rate of interest on the money the government borrows than is the case for Germany and, when the hospitals in the cities of Lombardy started to fill up with Covid-19 cases, this gap – or spread – started to widen. It was therefore deeply unhelpful for Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, to say that it was not the job of her institution to “close bond spreads”. …….. Last week’s virtual meeting of EU leaders was supposed to come up with a joint approach to the crisis but was instead a complete car crash.
Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said at the weekend: “If Europe does not rise to this unprecedented challenge, the whole European structure loses its raison d’être to the people. We are at a critical point in European history.”
The “Marshall plan” for the EU has been under discussion for over a month but the Commission cannot take their hands out of their pockets for fear of the virus.
Freedom of travel has been suspended in the EU. The EU regulations for reimbursements from airlines for cancelled flights are largely being ignored by EU member countries and their hard-hit airlines.
Of course, following Brexit, the EU has little sympathy to share with the UK.
India and other SE Asian countries have learnt to be very selective in listening to the WHO.
Some 40 million years ago there was a primate which was the common ancestor of all the current great apes. The primates were established first in Africa and Asia and then some found their way, somehow, across the ocean to South and Central America. They were restricted to forest areas and were not to be found in northern climes (Europe, N America, Asia). Great deserts and mountain ranges were a major barrier to their spread. They did not reach Australia even though the body of water to be traversed was shorter than that to S America.
Non-human primate range
The appearance of new species of apes was not something that happened across the entire range of the primates. In South and Central America, apes did not evolve. Gibbons and orangutans only appeared in South-East Asia. Gorillas, chimpanzees and the precursors of humans appeared only in Africa.
Knowledge about evolution has exploded in the last century especially now as genetic analysis is getting into its stride. But the common feature with the growth of knowledge is that the questions, too, grow. Why did the ancestors of all apes break away from the parent primate line? What survival advantage led to the gibbons separating from the ancestral ape line to become a separate species? The survival advantages then that caused the speciation of the gorilla ancestors are probably no longer valid now. When a species evolves and a new species appears, the parent species may become extinct, or may well continue down other, separate evolutionary paths. But not all these many paths can be successful. At any given time many of the ongoing evolutionary paths being followed will – and must – be dead-ends leading eventually to the extinction of the dead-end branches. The appearance of every new species must have been because some non-standard individuals, in that place, at that time, exhibited some survival or reproductive advantage over their more “standard” relatives. Clearly the pressures and conditions that caused orangutans and gibbons to appear in SE Asia were not of significance in South and Central America. Neither were the conditions and pressures which caused gorillas and chimpanzees and the species homo to appear in Africa of significance in other parts of the world. Equally the conditions in Africa did not give rise to gibbons or orangutans.
What then were the advantages of being a gorilla – when gorillas evolved – that are now of very little benefit?
The reasons for the splits at A, B, C, D and E are still more a matter of speculation rather than of knowledge.
The current status of a species can only be measured by its numbers. Dinosaurs may once have been of high status and were clearly successful for a long time but – as with every other extinct species – they are all, now, failed species. (Since birds do originate from the dinosaurs then they, at least, represent some very successful current species). If we consider just the surviving ape species (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans), there is a striking difference in their current status as species.
We have to go back about 40 million years to find a common ancestor. The most striking difference is that which separates humans from all other species – the control of fire. It makes the “fire and cooked meat” theory of human brain development seem very plausible.
Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
I find watching gorillas (on film) compulsive. When I have seen them in zoos, they are magnificent but deeply tragic figures. They radiate a benign strength which is more than impressive. They are quite intelligent. It is claimed they have an IQ around 40 -50, though applying human IQ tests on them is largely meaningless. Their motor skills develop faster than with human infants and even if some have learned the meaning of some human words, gorillas do not have language. Gorillas are a dying species and, as such, are a failing species. “Conservation” is concerned with the survival and protection of individuals and groups. Though laudable, these efforts only freeze the species within the shrinking habitat they are comfortable with and in the unsuccessful form they have reached.
The gorilla as a species has reached an evolutionary dead-end. I don’t want gorillas to disappear, but to keep them in their frozen, unsuccessful, evolutionary state in zoos or reserves or protected habitats does not seem right either. The conservation practiced today, which makes no provision for the further development of a species, is both unethical and immoral. Other species which adapt and find a role to play in the world of today are not threatened. It is not necessary for a species to find that role within human society as livestock and household pets do. But the survival of livestock and pets is as slaves to humans. Birds and insects remain free of human control but have adapted to varying degrees and continue together with humans. Fish and sea-creatures don’t compete for habitat with humans but do constitute prey. Foxes and rodents and even urban leopards are adapting to continue in freedom and in parallel with humans. It is more difficult for primates. The challenge is to find a way for a species to develop and move forward in the reality of a world dominated by humans. When conservation denies reality and merely tries to go back to some scenario from the past it does no service to any species.
How then can we find a free and meaningful, role for gorillas (or tigers) in a world dominated by humans but which is not an evolutionary cul-de-sac?
As countries now begin to, or plan to, relax their lockdowns and struggle to restart their economies, I have a niggling suspicion at the back of my brain that the world reaction may have involved more of panic and less of rationality. That the world may have overreacted in a fearful chain reaction may be understandable but was the chosen solution actually worse than the problem?
” ….. the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it”.
This is from Prof Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University, Chairman of the National Council for Research and Development and Head of Israel’s Space Agency.
A case perhaps of a kind of Mass hysteria?
A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.
Prof Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, told Israel’s Channel 12 (Hebrew) Monday night that research he conducted with a fellow professor, analyzing the growth and decline of new cases in countries around the world, showed repeatedly that “there’s a set pattern” and “the numbers speak for themselves.”
……..
Asked to explain the phenomenon, Ben-Israel, who also heads Israel’s Space Agency, later said: “I have no explanation. There are all kinds of speculations. Maybe it’s related to climate, or the virus has a life-span of its own.” He said the policy of lockdowns and closures was a case of “mass hysteria.” Simple social distancing would be sufficient, he said. If the lockdowns instituted in Israel and elsewhere were not causing such immense economic havoc, there wouldn’t be a problem with them, he said. “But you shouldn’t be closing down the entire country when most of the population is not at high risk.”
Asked to explain why the virus had caused such a high death toll in countries such as Italy, he said the Italian health service was already overwhelmed. “It collapsed in 2017 because of the flu,” he said.
The k2p blog 