>A few sites to help you get your head round the debates as they stand thus far:
>If you’re at all interested in the things on thebigqs then you’re sure to have been labelled a geek in some point in your life. So if we are geeks then what do we have in common? What are geeks? What’s the opposite to being a geek? And why is that opposite commonly seen as being preferrable?
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Was the release of information by Wikileaks a good thing or an ignorant effort by amateurs that has endangered lives of Iraqi civilians and coalition troops ?
If it was a good thing, does it highlight the feebleness of the international media in causing so little previous consternation for the Pentagon during the war ? If so what is the point of the current media if they can not bring the truth to the people ?
On the other hand, have the established media been just and considered in their reporting of the war and used only credible and verified reports for their stories, rather than illegally sourced materials ?
Finally, was the information Wikileaks published really that significant ? All it seems to have done is said that a few more thousand people were killed than had previously been acknowledged.
As per Abu Ghraib, these seem minor trivialities compared to the perversion of democracy in the first place that led to the US led invasion. Should Wikileaks not spend it’s time hacking into the UN servers to discover who the ring leaders for the war were ?
Also, in the bigger picture, where does this leave freedom of speech ? The pentagon classified the information as sensitive but Wikileaks say that the truth needs to be heard. Should Wikileaks be allowed to report whatever it likes ?
>Etienne de Durand of the French Institute of International Relations said in this last week that cooperation between the UK and France in defence was about “being sex buddies rather than marriage.” I just picked this example because it was to hand, yet there’s a vast amount of modern literature that uses words like “fuck buddies” (the more common term).
My question to you is do you see this kind of liberalisation of speech continuing, and perhaps as something that people are more likely to read in even academic works in the future? Or does seeing such vocabulary on an academic site make you squirm? Is there a right and wrong to discuss here or not? Is it simply a product of the times?
>Think about the situation where keeping a terminal patient alive costs more with each day. The last month some patients are alive costs millions and millions, which some people would argue would be better spent on people we know are going to live. Yet think from the other perspective; imagine that terminal patient was your spouse. Now I imagine the price you’d be willing to pay to keep them alive that little bit longer just went up a hell of a lot.
A book was recently published on the subject, in which a husband had to spend his life savings on keeping his wife alive as a terminal patient. In the end he went into masses of debt and had to stop paying.
What does this make you think? Can we put a price on life? Does a point come when you say you’d rather keep the money rather than keeping someone alive an extra day?
>Hillel Steiner, a political philosopher, wrote about how he spotted several teenagers in his local supermarket with t-shirts saying “Sell your body”. As it turns out they were selling advertising space, but Steiner used the point to note approvingly that the right of self-ownership, which he saw as implied in the slogan, is one of the key human rights. Under this logic we should have the right to sell our bodies, as well as the right to refuse to do so.
Steiner hits upon a subject that often comes up in everyday language. Ever heard the phrase “it’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it”? This is not necessarily what people who say this mean, but it implies a division between mind and body. It implies that the real us is our mind, and that our body is our property, to do with as we wish.
The two most obvious views to the contrary come from religion, and from Marxism. In one of St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians he tells them that their body is “a temple of the holy spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own.” Opinions within other major religions like Islam and Judaism are similar. Yet there are many other objections to the idea of treating the body as a marketable commodity. Marxism implies that to think of your body thus is the ultimate in capitulation to Capitalism. Indeed Marxist thinker George Lukács took it as the final stage in self alienation.
What do you think? Should we have the right to sell bits of our bodies as we please? Should our bodies be treated as property? Should they even be treated as ours?
>Look at every intelligent species in our planet’s history, from the dinosaurs to elephants and apes today. Most intelligent species grow in number, live a while, and then die off. Whereas less intelligent species like bacteria and viruses thrive, no matter what’s thrown at them.
The key reason is that intelligence requires complexity, and complexity means slower evolution. Single celled organisms evolve incredibly fast, because they reproduce very fast, and because they’re very simple so it’s easy for them to change. So in other words as we continue to evolve we’ll get more intelligent, but we’ll also become more complicated, or so the theory goes, and we’ll therefore evolve less quickly.
Two interesting questions arise out of this:
>Do selfless deeds exist? Can we pursue them? If so why would we?
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This question is in the context of why is the media serving us certain dishes over and over.
Do you think that there is any basis for the newsworthiness of a border dispute between two countries that are not European, not economically strong, and not culturally significant to Europe, to be constantly on our TV news ?
Once or twice I could understand, in the same way some African dispute may make the headlines initially. But these African disputes are very quickly consigned to the newsman’s dustbin if there has been no resolution or progress within a short space of time.
On the other hand, the Israeli conflict has been stagnating for decades, and yet almost every night it is on our television as though it was breaking news !
I expect that more than 90 % of the BBC’s viewers do not care for anymore news about Israel, so why do you think British viewers are constantly subjugated to having to hear about it ?
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