I love drugs

So, I am in the Netherlands, the oft claimed home of drugs and hookers, and was sitting in my room, reading this article from the UK Times about 'love shyness'. In essence, this is supposedly an emergent phenomenon (very very weak epistemological emergence, if you could even call it emergence) whereby a bunch of lonely adult males piss and moan about the fact that they were ten years old when had their last girlfriend. Observe:

John has been in love. “Probably just the once. When I was 10 there was this girl I really liked. She was younger than me, so when I went to secondary school I lost contact with her and never saw her again.” He has an enduring memory of playing outside with the girl, and of the sun slowly going down, and never feeling happier. In fantasy he often takes the memory further and, imagining himself as a child again, he kisses her.

Now, this is clearly indicative of some deep seated emotional abnormality, and I don't mean to be cold hearted and lacking empathy when thinking about this - clearly I read this article for a reason, and if I am in a culture renowned for its liberal approach social norms yet sitting inside and reading newspaper articles, I think it safe to say that I am not the most successful pants-man who strode the earth. But then I read this section, and my humour and cynicism and bitterness returned:

Seb says the first step to getting better is recognising that something is wrong and the label helps with that. “I believe LS can be overcome,” he says, “but it’s a long, hard road.”

There are drugs to treat shyness, mainstream antidepressants such as Paxil. But the many possible side-effects include sweating, nausea, lowered libido and suicidal tendencies

Nice. You want to treat a problem that has depression and sexual relations central to it, by application of medications known to lower libido and increase suicidal tendencies? And make the people sweaty and nauseous while on dates? Nice thinking, arse-clown. Maybe just force these guys to smoke Ice and give them a handgun. Might solve their problems, sure it might also have some negative side effects, but hey, as long as we're helping these people, who cares what happens to them.

Which brings me to the vague point of these ramblings - that labelling of socially non-standard behaviour dances easily to the music of medicalization, which as i'm sure we all know is perhaps not the best solution to a given set of problems: I'm lonely, cold inside and my last girlfriend was an eight year-old, twenty-two years ago. Clearly I need drugs to find love.

The words 'parasite' and 'exploitation' seem to bounce around in my head for some strange reason.

Economic Rationalism And Smoking

In what is perhaps the greatest news story/public policy on the face of the planet, read the following excerpt from an article in today's Age titled Chinese Ordered To Smoke Until They Drop:

LOCAL government officials in China have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packets of cigarettes to boost the local economy during the global financial crisis.

The edict, issued by officials in Hubei Province, in central China, threatens to fine officials who "fail to meet their targets" or are caught smoking rival brands manufactured in neighbouring provinces.

Even local schools have been given a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to buy 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials.

This is part genius and part rational. While the absurd(ist) moron in me is giggling with excitement about this, I find it hard to see how this is very much different from Rudd's cash-splash. Spend, dammit, spend. Don't save, don't invest in the future, spend now. Even if it means putting a shotgun to a child's head and screaming at them to start smoking, (slight exaggeration here), we must support the economy at all costs.

In fact, if you expand this out a little, this is the very argument put forward by the Australian coal lobby et al. that we can't afford to impose hefty carbon debts on high polluting industries. Jobs (as an abstract economic quantifier) are for more important than the health or well being of the people inhabiting those jobs, their families or those in their community. So smoke up, kiddoes, because Jobs are jesus, and the Economy is god.

Best Book Review Ever

I've always admired AC Grayling, but this book review of his takes the cake.

Some choice excerpts:

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

And in the next paragraph:

[...] at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to “realise its full potential in the public debate” – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.

It just gets better from there.

Of course, it gets particularly interesting when Steve Fuller responds.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

And then Grayling has the last word:

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

...OR IS IT?






(Thanks to OTF Wank for drawing my attention to this.)

The apocalypse

Hello.

I read in the paper today about a robot controlled by brain cells.

"A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons."

Looks like humans are soon to be outdated. I for one hail our new robo-rat cyborgs as gods and masters, and renounce all humans as egotistical meat-bags.

Huzah!

One final postscript: The scientists used rat neurons on this one. Perhaps to prevent our imminent collapse, in the future they could use puppy neurons?

Death's the disease, I'm the cure

yes. To perhaps be paraphrasing that greatest of philosophers, John Rambo, death is now a disease that can be treated with patentable pharmaceuticals. Whew, finally.

A 'small' pharma company has been bought out by Glaxo-SmithKline one the strength of two pharmaceuticals used to prolong life (or to treat death). These pharmaceuticals are still in the clinical trials stage, and despite their potential to supress fertility in subjects (which may even be potential targets for new patents) are said to potentially increase life expectancy by 5 - 10%. And then you drop dead. Aaaah, life. And how do they do this? One pharmaceutical activates the body's sirtuins. Why?

"The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. There is no Food and Drug Administration category for longevity drugs, so if the company is to submit a drug for approval, it needs to be for a specific disease."

So here we have the crux of it. Instead of eating healthy, and exercising the body, reducing pollution and exercising mind (all often linked to decreasing diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's) we have drugs, patentable drugs, to do this for us.

Forgive my cynicism, but now that death is a disease that is treatable by patentable pharmaceuticals, one has to wonder what (the) good life is.

What is a good person? + Nature/nurture debate

After a couple of interesting talks at the AAP conference this week, I stumbled across this BBC article on goodness of character and the nature/nurture debate, both subjects of which I attended talks about throughout the week.

Luke Russell first off talked about what made an evil person, deciding that our intuitions were a good basis for this, but that current models of evil weren't quite up to the task, and Paul Griffiths today talked about the nature/nurture debate, and how you can't really separate nurture from nature (his example from the animal kingdom was the development of rats and their gene expression based on how much grooming they received from their mother (among other examples)), and that the idea of "human nature" is not just explicable by our DNA (or by our environment).

Anyway I'm a little tipsy right now after the AAP conference dinner so I'll leave it at that for now, IMO the BBC is a little behind in the most recent thinking on these debates! ;)

E Coli is going to need a labour union...

So we've finally made itty bitty bacterium start to pull their weight. Scientists have recently discovered how to turn on and off certain switches in the RNA of Escherichia coli, enabling it too chase the pesticide atrazine. The artcile in Nature, released last week, relays the views of the scientists on a couple of possibilities associated with this technology. I'm sure, even as an unlearned non-biologist, that finding pesticides and programming bacterium to move things around are just the start.

I mean, the life sciences community has made bacteria able to create biological sensors to find Uranium in Water (for a less technical explanation, I refer you to this handy comic), and the ability to program bacterium to selectively bind to chemicals is old hat by now. Soon we could be using bacterium to do the grunt work in environmental renewal operations. And with the advances we've had in physical chemistry, recently, such as the leaps and bounds we've taken in Uranium Metallurgy, these are exciting times indeed.

The question that any ethicist working with dual-use or risk assessment will pose, of course, is one enquiring into the risks of creating these novel bacterium to do our (at times, quite literally) dirty work for us. What if these bacterium were to breed uncontrollably and start their own biological-disaster-party? My view? I'm skeptical as to the likelihood of this nightmare ever occurring. The study that prompted this post illustrated the problems associated with taking these things out of the lab: the poor likkle bacteria just can't compete with the rest of nature. plus, I hear it's not that hard these days to effectively 'neuter' bacteria. I agree that genetic mutation is a concern we should look at, and certainly more work needs to be done, not just technically but to see how these things react with natural systems. But such new technologies have the power to clean up a world that is badly in need of some cleaning. And when you have rivers like the Ganges bestowing bathers, washers, drinkers and worshipers with hearty doses of poisonous heavy metals, I think the benefits seriously outweigh the risks.