I suppose a diary about masturbation would be inappropriate ? ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

Sven Triloqvist:

What is not cool is, as you point out with a large cudgel, interference in what adults can think and do in the comfort of their own homes.

So - how are Jerome's neighbours?

Aside from burning houses down, smoking and alcohol abuse are staggeringly expensive, and they divert health care funds that could be used to keep people alive who are just plain unlucky rather than addicted.

Most domestic violence happens because either or both people are drunk or high. A&E on a Saturday night won't have a lot of sober people visiting.

The financial industry, in all of its addictive insanity, couldn't exist without its coke habits. Nor could advertising.

There's a lot more evidence of mind contraction through substance abuse than mind expansion.

My opium fantasy is that a law is passed allowing undertakers to open opium dens up front, all nice, plants, comfortable, beds, the whole thing, out up to the street....over 60's only, maybe, but with a dispensation for other family members or those with medical conditions....a puff maybe and a lie down, ease out the strain as the body ages...and maybe then a person might find the pain strong and maybe they don't have a supportive family, but they could ease into that opium den, head towards the back where it's dark and calm and kind and...of course...at the very back...the undertakers.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

I'd vote for pictures of slaughtered baby gorillas.

but [DoDo] will be happy!"

Charitable, no? And pious somehow, given literal, if contradictory, tenets of Christian doctrine. The golden rule is: Do unto others as they would do unto you. As is agape, though "love" is not a well-defined affect or reliable factor of obtaining one's true desire.

Microeconomists at the University of Chicago have applied themselves to describing agape by compiling survey evidence anyway. I read this piece published by the National Opinion Research Center (2006). The hypothesis is a little creepy, considering the research bears no relation to subject matter in biology or notorious B.I.G. self-interest of economic actors: "Altruism and Empathy in America: Trends and Correlates" (2006). Then again the paper may not be the product of a Serious Person, rather the culmination some divinity student's 15-year-old dissertation.

Throughout the arts and sciences from philosophy to seuroscience altruistic behaviors and values have been widely studied. Just within the social sciences there have been very diverse research traditions within economics, psychology, political science, sociology, and related disciplines (Batson, 1991; Batson, 1998; Eisenberg, 1986; Kangas, 1997; Penner, 1995; Piliavin and Charng, 1990; Rose-Acerman, 1996; Sawyer, 1966; Staub, et al., 1984; Underwood, 2002; Wispe, 1978; Wrightsman, 1974). One of the main limitations of social-science research on altruism is that most research has been based on very restricted, small, non-representative, convenience samples, mostly of undergraduate students. ¹ While work with student, convenience samples can be ver useful, especially when experimental designs are utilized, they suffer from serious, external-validity problems and do not tell social scientists and others about the extent of behaviors and values in society-at-large. To expand knowledge aout the level, nature, and associates of empathy and altruism in American society, measures of these constructs were placed on a national, full probability sample of adult Americans.

Four aspects of altruism were examined: altruistic love, altruistic values, altruistic behaviors, and empathy. Altruism is thought of as dealing with both values/preferences [cf. Consumer Preference theories] and behaviors "motivated mainly out of a consideration for another's needs rather than one's own" (Piliavin and Charng, 1990; p. 30) and that altruism "provides benefits to its recipients but also provides no benefits to the actors and even incurs some costs" (Howard and Piliavin, 2000, p. 114). Empathy was examined in addition to the direct altruism measures because as Batson (1998, p. 300) has noted, "the most frequently proposed source of altruistic motivation has been an other-oriented emotional response congruent with the perceived welfare of another person -- today usually called empathy. [emphasis added]

"Usually called," yes, with the same sensitivy to diction as is used with the words "productivity," "spirituality," "gender," or "epithet" which is to mean, commonly, a "slur," or more precisely a stereotypical insult. Some social scientists are so shrewd!

The principal hypotheses examined are that empathy and altruism will be greater among:

1. those who are socially and civicly engaged.
   
2. those who see interpersonal, social obligations between people.
   
3. the religious rather than the non-religious and that among the religious empathy and altruism will rise with level of involvement. ...

Four items measure interpersonal, altruistic love or agape (Appendix A: 2). Agape is one of six types of love measured by the Love Attitudes Scale (Butler et al., 1995; Davies, 2001; Hendrick and Hendrick, 1986, 1987, 1991; Montgomery and Sorell, 1997, 1997; Murthy, Rotzien, and Vacha-Haase, 1996; Sorokin, 1960; Taraban and Hendrick, 1995; Yancey and Eastman, 1995). Based on analysis of past studies (Butler et al., 1995; Hendrick and Hendrick, 1986; Montgomery and Sorell; Yancey and Eastman, 1995) and a GSS pretest, four of seven original items were selected. As Table 3 shows, altruistic love is widely endorse. 90% agree that they would suffer theselves rather than let their loved one suffer, 81% agree that they usually put their loved one's wishes above their own, 79% agree they would "endure all things for the sake of the one I love," and 72% agree that they cannot be happy unless the place their loved one's happiness first.  The agape scale runs from 4 for someone who strongly disagreed with each statement (the lowest on altruistic love) to 20 for someone who strongly agreed with each (the highest on altruistic love). The mean for the total population is 16.6 and the sample size is 1316 (having been asked only in 2004)/ The inter-item correlations average .52 and Chronback's reliability coeficient is .81. [emphasis added]

According to this study, the likelihood that smoker loves you is significant. Conversely, that smoker probably does not love anyone else upon whose happiness his own does not depend.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

offices.  

The Fates are kind.

I've never understood cigarettes. I kind of understand that it's hard to stop because you're addicted. But you don't really get anything from the things in terms of pleasure, now do you?

At least a joint gets you high and a cigar can taste nice...

DrMarketTrustee died 7 Nov 2008. He is my best friend. I love him better than I love myself. I don't enjoy being a "survivor." Who does? There were moments these past weeks when I envied him.

Barely a day went by that he did not remind me, somehow, CHF would kill him. At the same age as his father almost to the day. He was uncanny or incommensurate, Catholic or Jewish, that way. I mean in his attitude toward living as he willed rather than as others would will him. I wanted him to fight death with every centilla of his being. More important, I wanted him to enjoy it. I wanted to know that every day, every hour, every minute.

Silly.

rg's essay reminds me how many and how few pleasures society --infinite other--  permits a body. Dressing continence in reasons. So many reasons minced and served from cradle to grave to induce perversity from jouissance in just one other ...

This made me laugh a little.

Law does not ignore the bed. Take, for example, the fine common law on which the practice of concubinage, which means to sleep together, is based. What I am going to do is begin with what remains veiled in law, namely, what we do in that bed -- squeeze each other tight (s'étreindre).. I begin with the limit, a limit with which one must indeed begin if one is to be serious, in other words, to establish the series of that which approaches it.

A word here to shed light on the relationship between law (droit) and jouissance. 'Usufruct' --that's a legal notion, isn't it?-- brings together in one word what I already mentioned in my seminar on ethics, namely, the difference between utility (l'utile) and jouissance. What purpose does utility serve? That has never been well defined owing to the prodigious respect speaking beings have, due to language, for means. 'Usufruct' means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir as long as you don't use up too much of it. That is clearly the essence of law -- to divide up, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.

What is jouissance? Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance (instance). Jouissance is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien).

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The basis of all addiction is disengagement. We couldn't have our current economic system if it wasn't systematically disengaged, so it's not a surprise that it runs on addictions, and runs addictions.

Saying that this is puritanical is actually an off-the-shelf right-wing talking point. Supposedly it's the opposite of 'personal freedom' - but as with all right wing talking points, that really just means the freedom to have your fix without having to consider other people, except on the days when you remember they're there.

'Growth addiction' is much, much more dangerous than chemical addiction, and a much bigger issue that hardly ever gets talked about in the mainstream.

In the US alcohol consumption has long been celebrated in paid, feel-good lifestyle adverts.  To that recently has been added all sorts of adverts for prescription drugs from ED drugs to dry eye drugs.  Both types of ads are important to cultivating and maintaining product sales.  Tobacco ads have been significantly curtailed but still exist in some forms.  To me the prescription drug ads are at least as pernicious as the alcohol and tobacco ads as they are a significant part of the means whereby Pharma extract money from the population, a large part of it funded out of Medicare.

I would suggest a tax on all such advertisements and disallowing them as business expenses.  It should be at least a tax of 100% of the cost of creating and running the ad, but some multiple if required so as to generate sufficient revenue to cover the cost of the consequences of the use of the product.  These are probably the greatest for alcohol, as lives are lost and/or mangled as a routine, collateral consequence of excessive use of alcohol.  Another benefit is that it might help sober up Joe Sixpack.  Unanesthesized, he or some of his cohort might find more to contemplate and correct and less to celebrate about their condition.  

Perhaps this is farfetched, but it is a dream of mine, and it is certainly more benign than raising revenue by legalizing lotteries and gambling.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Firstly, I must say I enjoyed your recent diary on computational simulation, given my own aesthetic and practical foundations of reasoning and despite my own limited, technical knowledge of computer programming to model complex physical laws ("truths").

Now, given your skepticism expresse therein, I must wonder why you accept the assumption ("costs") as if politically expediency and tyranny alone justified an expression of "costs" whose terms are either unknown or values indeterminant.

In countries where there is free health care, your unhealthy options have costs to others.

May we agree?: Cost is a financial metric, expenditure of currency; "Externality," or "spillover," is an economic metric, immeasurable, or not measured, consumption in financial terms, of a person, process, or thing ("asset") that contributes to money velocity (expenditures or profit (loss)). According to this ideology ("schema") being is simply put, that is foregoing various tenets of religous dogma, a social and societal asset. Being is a fundamental constituent of "society" and term in mathematical expressions of society (hohoho.pdf), a so-called national economy.

The "cost" of maintaining ("maintenance," a legal term therefore prosecutable fiduciary duty) one life of a "person" (human or tax entity) presupposes (1) life --not DEATH-- is an asset; (2) involuntary and voluntary applied mechanical processes and things that "capitalize" rents on life and death; (3) a person's desire to be.

Some persons do not desire to be. Some claim to renounce that desire, arguing before some tribunal --a "panel"-- either their fear of death or love of venality but never their pleasure ("addiction"). So society institutionalizes means to conserve and to exploit (dispense "incentives" to live, which is to train the living who "benefit" rather than the "dead man walking" who do not benefit) in dogmatic (financial or ecclesiastic) terms of being.

More bizarre, intellectually speaking, institutional agents in the US promote "full employment" among the living (another financial metric) as if BIRTH/DEATH rates of the LABOR FORCE --had no ratioinale or mathematical dependecy to obtaining real purchase power. Here no one imputes labor market conditions to profit sharing ("productivity").

Think about these ideological assumptions relate to voters' preferences in leadership.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Indeed, was it not Puritan General Condom who inadvertently bequeathed his name to the lambs-gut prophylactic that saved some of his pillaging inferiors from the ravages of syphilis?

We are all 'addicts', Ted, because we are behavioural. And behaviour is something learned by biochemical reinforcement.

To be hooked on marriage is a powerful addiction that will cost you a lot of money and maybe even give you a painful early death. At least it seems that way when you have teenage offspring ;-)

I have never met any person who was not hooked on something. It is not always obvious what they are hooked on, but their ony alternative is death.

You can't be me, I'm taken

it is perfecty possible to smoke without disturbing non-smokers. Why do you need to hate the non-smokers?

Why, seriously?

Just to give you an exemple: my wife smokes. She always does it in circumstances where it either won't bother me (she goes to the window, or joins our neighbor on his balcony) or where I won't complain (if we're at a terrace of a café - when I sit there I know people will smoke and thus I won't complain).

What you don't seem to understand is that what non-smokers (well, me at least) object to is smokers smoking where it is forbidden, or where it is needlessly invasive of others, careless or just rude.

Smokers are rude people, too often. If you complain that today's restrictions are too much, all I can say is: you got it coming by not making an effort when you could.

Who is lecturing who in this thread?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes