Another Bush; another Iraq War, another Clinton; another War in Kosovo?

Yesterday I ate too many honey-coated cashews and had that hypoglycemic reaction which causes fuzzy-mindedness for the day; hopefully this'll be the last time I have so much sugar at once (I probably should have just bought plain cashews instead).

I mother just bought a bunch of breakfast food and told me I could choose what I like -- but it was all eggs, cheese, bacon, bagels, etc. -- when will she learn that I don't like to eat that stuff? I hate disappointing her by not eating though, so it always makes me seem ruder than I want to be when I refuse foods I know to be harmful.

And I know this is subject to selection bias, but lately I've been noticing that all the most (for lack of a better word, I don't mean to imply a supernatural) spiritually developed people I know are also those that have the best diets. Whereas all the ones caught up in abstractions and religions and ideologies and empty concepts have terrible diets. There's likely causation both ways rather than one causing the other though.

Harlock recently has been worried that rights don't exist, and argued with me that they don't, and by coincidence the topic came up in a LJ community, so this is my argument for rights as a biological instinct, copied and pasted.

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I think there is only one right: the right not to have force used upon you. Secondarily, as a consequence, there's the right to use retaliatory force back if it's used upon you. All other rights (including the ones you name [in the original post]) derive from that; the bill of rights for example (free speech, protection against unwarranted search and seizure and so on) are some different ways in which force cannot be used on people by the government, but they are all essentially protections from the initiation of force.

The idea of natural rights is that they are a) not cultural, b) still exist even if they aren't defended. [R]ights are biological, part of our species, just as real and stable as fins on a fish or echolocation in bats or the different roles of the different ants among ants. So if that is true, different cultures might differ in how they understand rights, but not in what they are.

The origin of that [non-initiation of force] right is the structure of homo sapiens as a species, in particular its social organizations, which is essentially biological in nature, not cultural or religious. In particular, imagine a human civilization or tribe in which there was rampant initiation of force. I don't mean between them, but within them. That civilization or tribe could not long survive, and would soon go extinct.

Rights evolved to keep that from happening; people have a natural aversion to murder and a natural sense of fairness which comes into play very early and is similar across all cultures.

But to be clear, a right is not 'what one ought to respect', it's not a 'should', it's an 'is' -- people can make their own choices about whether to respect them or not, and it's sometimes moral not to respect the rights of another person, but even when they don't [respect rights], people have a natural feeling that it's unfair to murder or steal or rape.

Also it may sound strange to say that something as abstract or ephemeral as rights is biological or evolved, but it's really no different from other instincts we have, such as the maternal instinct, or any other instinct we have.

In the case of slavery and war, there's one interesting thing about how we evolved rights: if you see another people not as people, but as animals or subhumans, you can get around the instinct of feeling any respect for their rights. That's why Japanese were trained to see Chinese as pigs, not as humans, during WWII -- and why ancient Romans or ancient Chinese saw anyone not of their kind as a subhuman barbarian. The instinct of rights is less forceful when someone doesn't look like you or speak the same language unfortunately.

http://www.giantmicrobes.com/

Stuffed "animals" shaped in the shapes of microbes. There's E. coli, the flu, the cold -- and they're all cute! I like sites like that.

EDIT: Brain cell!

"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?" - Jared Diamond (pdf file)