Where is the right common carotid artery located in relation…
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Where is the right cоmmоn cаrоtid аrtery locаted in relation to the thyroid isthmus?
Mоntаigne "On Cаnnibаls" -- Cоntinued Abоve all they are happy: they only desire as much as nature requires, and anything beyond this it is unnecessary: they generally call each other brothers, and the old men are fathers to them all….If their neighbors cross the mountains for war, the victors only earn the glory of having proved themselves on the field of battle. They leave the possessions of the conquered undisturbed and return home to enjoy the victory. They demand no ransom of their captives other than admission of defeat: but there is not one man amongst them who will not prefer to die than make such a confession, and neither in word nor action would ever recoil form the grandeur of this invincible courage. Each and every man of this nation would rather be killed and eaten, then beg and plead for their life. They treat them with all generosity and freedom but do frequently try to frighten them with threats of their approaching death, the torments they will suffer, the mangling their limbs, and the feast that is to be made, where their carcass is to be the only dish. All of this they do to no other end than to extort some submissive words from them, or to frighten them so as to make them run away; the goal is simply to try to terrify them and shake their resolve. Indeed, it must be fairly said that a fear such as this is what consists of a true victory: No victory is complete, which the conquered do not admit to be so. Claudius, De Sexto Consulatu Honorii, v. 248.The Hungarians, a warlike people, fought only to to reduce the enemy to surrender; for having forced an admission of defeat, they let them go without injury or ransom. They insisted only that they swear never to bear arms against them again…The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the will: there his true honor lies. Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of our horse or our arms but in our own. The man who, even fearing of imminent death, gives nothing of his assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate... But to return to my story: these prisoners are so far from showing the least weakness, even amidst all the terrors that are shown to them, that, during the two or three months they are kept, they always appear with a cheerful countenance; implore their masters to make haste to bring them to the test, defy, rail at them, and reproach them with cowardice, and the number of battles they have lost against those of their country. I have a song made by one of these prisoners, wherein he bids them "come all, and dine upon him, and welcome, for they shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has served to feed and nourish him. These muscles," says he, "this flesh and these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think that the substance of your ancestors' limbs is here yet; notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:" in which song there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes of the barbarian. Question: this amounts to a certain kind of ‘trash talk’ between the captors and captives, the kind of like you see in sports sometimes. What purpose if there of this, in your mind? Those that paint these people dying after this manner, represent the prisoner spitting in the faces of his executioners and making faces at them. And it is most certain, that to their very last breath, they never cease to brave and defy them both in word and gesture. In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for there is a vast difference between their manners and ours. Question: who does Montaigne think is ‘really’ more savage? The cannibals or the Europeans, and why? The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how much they have the greater reputation for valor…And I do not wish on to suppose that all this is done by a simple and servile obligation to their common practice, or by any authoritative impression of their ancient custom, which is to say without judgment or reasoning. I must here give you some touches of their quality of intelligence. Besides what I repeated to you before, which was one of their songs of war, I have another, a love-song, that begins thus: “Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved, by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales shall for ever be preferred before all other serpents.” I have studied enough poetry to know that not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly lyrical and fits the patterns established by the Greeks. To which it may be added, that their language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the Greek pronunciation as well. Question: What is Montaigne’s point here? Three of these so-called savages, not foreseeing how the corruptions of our part of the world will one day cost their happiness and repose…were at Rouen at the time that the late King Charles IX was there. The king himself talked to them for a good while, and they observed our fashion, our courtly rituals, and they walked one of our great cities. After all of this, someone asked them what they found most to be admired? They said, that in the first place they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well-armed, who were about the king (likely they meant the Swiss Guard) would take orders from a child, and why they didn’t simply choose one of themselves to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses. Question: do you see these two things in America today? If so, where? BE SPECIFIC. I talked to one of them a long time but my interpreter did not well understand their language and had difficulties translating my questions. But I asked him what benefits he got from having a higher social standing amongst his people (for he was a captain, and our mariners called him king). To which he answered me only to march at the head of them to war. When I asked how many men followed him, he showed me a space of ground, to signify as many as could march in such a compass, which might be four or five thousand men; and putting the question to him whether or no his authority expired with the war, he told me this remained. Finally, he said that when he went to visit the villages that composed his army, they carved for him paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his ease. All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches. Question: what is leadership like amongst the Brazilians? Return to the question of art and how art mixes with nature, do we still see something analogous to these leadership practices today, but “dressed up” and more fancy? BE SPECIFIC.
Skepticism аnd Hаppiness Often referred tо аs Pyrrhоnist skepticism because the first skeptic is usually cоnsidered to be Pyrro of Elis, in Greece, ancient skepticism advocated for a different approach to individual happiness than the Stoics. To the skeptics, happiness is found in the suspension of judgment or ataraxia, and it is a result of letting go of the belief in a ‘right’ answer. It is a kind of mental tranquility in which we view no truth to be absolute, and neither hold nor deny any statement of value. But tranquility is not a goal the way self-mastery is with Stoics, rather it’s a natural response to what happens when one releases the predetermined views of the world. To them, attachment to dogma (as in the Stoic dogma of self-mastery) is the root of unhappiness, because we are trying to make the complexity of the real world fit our simple and inflexible ideas. The main technique of argumentation to reach the suspension of judgment was simply to list arguments on both sides of a question—what can be called a “clash of perspectives”—with the result that the practitioner would see that arguments on both sides are equally strong or, at least, strong enough that holding one to be more right and another to be more wrong would itself be a mistake. They also had certain short-hand sayings, almost like affirmations, that could be repeated when necessary. “Everything is indeterminate”, “perhaps, it is possible, maybe”, “to every argument an equal argument is opposed” and, in the words of Montaigne, riffing on Socrates’ saying that “the only true knowledge is you know nothing”, simply asked “What do I know?” To the skeptics then, it is not attachment to material things or social relationships that are the problem as much as our attachment to viewing these things in very pre-determined ways, or in other words, dogmatically. This approach to happiness doesn’t force an individual to rise above the world the way the Stoics do, rather it emphasizes flexibility in changing circumstances by fundamentally accepting things as they are, without getting hung up on our value judgments. In today’s America, we have some similar short-hand statements we use sometimes, such as “well, it’s a free country” or “everyone has the right to their own opinion” which capture some of the same ideas of the suspension of judgment (even if in our own heads, we are still judging them!). To be happy, Pyrrhonist skeptics advise the following activities: Avoid dogmatism by remembering you only see appearances of things, not things as they actually are. Therefore, do not get too attached to your beliefs and opinions of how things should be. List arguments on all sides to recognize the equal weight of different answers. Following custom is good, but remember that custom itself is arbitrary and itself will change with time. Ataraxia (tranquility of mind) will result in being free from anxiety and fear which are caused by our own attachment to our preconceived and dogmatic ideas. One of the biggest objections to Pyrrhonism is that it leaves us not knowing what to do: if everything is uncertain, what the heck am I supposed to do? Does it matter what actions I take? Is there no right and wrong? We’ll call the nihilist objection: is there no right and wrong? Skeptics have different answers to these questions. Sometimes, it does seem like they do advocate for inaction and simply “staying out of it”. If the central political and moral issues of the day are messy, and there is truth on different sides, perhaps the smartest thing to do is to not get involved. On the other hand, there are some serious weaknesses with this position. Some things really are just wrong (indiscriminate killing of innocents, for example). If faced with genocide, irrational mass shootings, etc., the skeptic needs a way to separate out things that are not particularly doubtful from things that are. It is said that Pryyo’s friends were constantly having to pull him out of the way of horse-carts on the street, because he could neither affirm nor deny that he would be hit. While this anecdote is certainly untrue, it is nonetheless a humorous way to present this important criticism of skeptical philosophy. Secondly, one of the biggest criticisms of skepticism (and Montaigne’s particular version of it as well) is that it doesn’t leave much room for the realm of scientific advancement that has brought so much technological progress. Because Montaigne lived before the Scientific Revolution (indeed, his powerful skepticism was a challenge to early scientists, who wanted to refute the absolute skepticism and complete doubt they saw in him), he doesn’t truly consider the possibility to quantify doubt or base knowledge on observation the way modern science does. This doesn’t mean his political theory is wrong or useless, not at all in fact, and many scientists share similar beliefs about the natural world as Montaigne. It does mean that while the problem of truth remains a powerful reminder of the limits of human reason, we should have tools for separating out what we know with high certainty from things that are very uncertain and doubtful.