Our Great Sin - by Devin Coldewey

I just came across this today. It's fabulous. Have no idea who Devin Coldewey is, but i like him immediately. sj

Our Great Sin
Devin Coldewey
Feb 1, 2011

I recently watched, like many of our readers, the interview (1, 2) with Mike Daisey regarding the conditions under which Apple products are made in China. And at the risk of fomenting conflict with Mr. Daisey, I would like to editorialize on the topic in slightly broader and harsher terms.

Actually, it’s not that I disagree with the man, exactly. It’s that he doesn’t go far enough, and in doing so conveniently avoids requiring himself or anyone else from doing anything but being concerned. If you’re going to take on ideas like globalism, corporate responsibility, and cross-cultural morality, you don’t get off that easy. You can’t establish a predicate like “the way our lifestyle is made possible is immoral” and somehow avoid unpleasant conclusions.

The “great sin” isn’t Apple’s, or any one of the other major international corporations that use Foxconn or similar megafactories. And it isn’t Foxconn’s either. It’s clearly, inescapably, ours.

Now, I’m not going to get all Das Kapital on you. The idea here is simpler and closer to home than some grand idea of political and economic metatheory. The basic fact is this: an “ethical” iPhone would be too expensive. That’s literally all there is to it (replace iPhone with your device of choice). Everything follows from our own unwillingness to pay for the true cost of a device. People want a better world, but they don’t want to pay for it. Nothing new there, really.


To pretend otherwise is plain hypocrisy. The question is whether we are willing to take responsibility for our own immorality? We’re too cheap to care where our goods come from. Admitting to anything less is ridiculous.

There are three primary responses when confronted with incontrovertible proof of your own immorality:

Claim moral status and adjust actions
Claim moral status and justify actions
Claim no moral status and continue actions

There are precious few who will take door number one. It means giving up nearly everything that makes up the life of a first-world citizen. Very little in the way of consumer electronics, cars, and other status symbols is manufactured ethically. Door number one is abandoning the pleasant inequality inherent to the modern world. Can we be expected to do that? I guess it depends entirely on what we expect from ourselves, so I’m going to guess that no, we won’t be doing it.

Door number two is where you’ll find most people. I’m not sure how one does it, but you can apparently take the moral high ground while continuing the actions you condemn. Politicians have no trouble doing this, but their airport-bathroom dealings aren’t usually public (public information, rather). And millions of people will buy bottled water while deploring the state of the third world, and not feel the hypocrisy leaking from every pore. Last year everyone made a lot of noise over the supposed iPhone 4 suicide. The outrage was quickly forgotten and everyone became angry instead at Apple for a design flaw in the device. Easy come, easy go.

click HERE to see original piece and finish reading article (including the link to video interviews Devin is responding to). you'll be glad you did.

ethics be damned: Pill could help you forget bad memories

you can't stop progress....sj


Findings could lead to better treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder
By Irene Klotz
Discovery Channel

Bad date last night? Take this pill and forget all about it.

In a bid to stem the harmful effects of fear triggered by haunting memories, psychologists have come up with a concoction that prevents the brain from reliving the bad experiences.

The findings may have implications for understanding and treating people suffering emotional disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, said University of Amsterdam psychologist Merel Kindt, the lead author of a paper in this week's issue of Nature Neuroscience.

Kindt and colleagues devised a test to see if the cycle of fear could be eased by interrupting the brain's ability to recreate a memory of a traumatic event.

Sixty volunteers were shown pictures of spiders and given a mild electrical shock to create bad memories. The next day, they saw the pictures again but half were given the drug propranolol, a beta-blocker commonly used to treat heart disease. The other half took a placebo pill.

The participants returned a third day and were shown the pictures again. The researchers found that people given propranolol had a much lower emotional response — measured by a startle reflex — to the images.

"The procedure did really eliminate a simple fear response, which is a promising basis for future treatments," Kindt wrote in an e-mail to Discovery News. "This was not possible before."

Psychologists typically try to treat memory-triggered stress disorders by teaching patents to modify their response to fear, but the technique is ineffective for many people.

"This method focuses on erasing the fear response," Kindt said.

Additional studies are planned to see if the results are long-lasting.

Daniel Sokol, who lectures on medical ethics at St. George's, University of London, cautioned that wiping out the effects of a bad memory may have unintentional consequences.

"I joined a chess club and lost to an eight-year girl," Sokol told Discovery News. "That was absolutely humiliating. I made a blunder, and I tell myself that I'll never make that mistake again. If you eradicate the memory, will the lesson still remain?

"A lot of our memories seem to be interconnected," he added. "I wonder if after the intervention if you could end up terribly confused, unable to understand why you're feeling a particular way. In essence, you might end up with some sort of dementia."