Rightwing personality traits

[xssve]

I had not even noticed Kanazawa's name attached to that article. The man is nutso, an evo-fundamentalist. Here read his blog-- notice that he does not allow comments...

To be sure, this:

For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. With a goal of spreading genes, early men had multiple mates. Since women had to spend nine months being pregnant, and additional years caring for very young children, it made sense for them to want a steady mate to provide them resources.

- is a qualified truth at best, it's only an unqualified truth if you are stumping for r over K reproductive strategies - and K strategies are more likely to result in more intelligent children.

 

[xssve]

At the same time, you might want to read this article: Slimy Monogamy, which offers a an endorsement/justification for "poly", while stressing beneficial symbiotic externalities other than genetic diversity, based on the roughly the same argument.

Our ancestors were commies, apparently.

 

[LaRocha]

To be sure, this:

- is a qualified truth at best, it's only an unqualified truth if you are stumping for r over K reproductive strategies - and K strategies are more likely to result in more intelligent children.

As you may have mentioned in an earlier post, early man is a proto-communist. Individual men probably aren't putting additional time into their own sons, definitely not daughters, in even the strictest, monogamous hunter-gatherer or early agricultural settings. Boys and girls are part of the group as soon as they can separate themselves from their mother's breast. The father-son bond isn't mythologized until well after you get highly organized agricultural settlements.

There is a definite trend into monogamy before agriculture. There aren't many solid arguments why ritualized marriage and monogamy happen within the proto-communist egalitarian framework, when the poly- would in theory be more in line with the organization of such societies. Monogamy is certainly a reproductive strategy, there's just no good explanation for why human beings have consistently chosen it within every type of cultural organization we can describe. The female is likely the one choosing one partner, but having her only choose one partner for consistency of food and protection is a weak argument due to the nature of early societies.

Oh yeah, God chose monogamy for human beings, my mistake.

 

[Pure]

note to james

//What's interesting to me is in the modern US our rightwingers have shifted away from Authoritarian submission, at least in the case of Doctors and scientists. There's a strong anti-intellectual strain in the right that hates us "eggheads" telling them what is correct and factually true, especially if it conflicts with one interpretation of a 4000 year old religious text.//


i don't agree here. the rightwinger submits to an Authority, the more arbitrary, the better. it could be Ayn Rand, or Rush, or The Commander in Chief. the other normal 'authorities' don't count, esp. 'intellectuals [like college profs]. what i particularly appreciate these days, is the lying and cheating on behalf of 'the cause'. total 'means end' thinking. if it advances 'the Cause' or smites the enemy, it's done. it's noble. i'm convinced that lots of 'birthers' know its a lost cause, if not a fabricated one, yet they continue. the 'bill ayers' thing, or the campaign against eric holder.
all very deadly. whatever works. indeed the not so subtle calls for assassination are another example: the NRA bulletin that had a picture of obama, and a rifle in the adjacent picture, pointed at his head.

 

[xssve]

As you may have mentioned in an earlier post, early man is a proto-communist. Individual men probably aren't putting additional time into their own sons, definitely not daughters, in even the strictest, monogamous hunter-gatherer or early agricultural settings. Boys and girls are part of the group as soon as they can separate themselves from their mother's breast. The father-son bond isn't mythologized until well after you get highly organized agricultural settlements.

There is a definite trend into monogamy before agriculture. There aren't many solid arguments why ritualized marriage and monogamy happen within the proto-communist egalitarian framework, when the poly- would in theory be more in line with the organization of such societies. Monogamy is certainly a reproductive strategy, there's just no good explanation for why human beings have consistently chosen it within every type of cultural organization we can describe. The female is likely the one choosing one partner, but having her only choose one partner for consistency of food and protection is a weak argument due to the nature of early societies.

Oh yeah, God chose monogamy for human beings, my mistake.

Monogamy is common whenever and whenever resource distribution becomes an issue, and it usually does in some manner - the hunters aren't going to want to go out hunting while some lazy guy stays back at the village and impregnates all the bored women, and conceivably, even the women might have a problem with a guy like that, and thus you'll get a basic value structure that favors some traits and roles more than others, because otherwise, it leads to an uneven distribution of resources, even in what may be a relatively resource rich environment.

By the same token, the most successful hunter is going to attract more women, who may also be the better gatherers, and if this is somebody like ami, he may decide he's a fool to share the wealth and tell everybody to fuck off - this isn't going to sit well with everybody else, instead of being celebrated as a successful and heroic hunter he's going to be derided as a selfish son of a bitch, and he'll probably have to leave the community and start his own, where he's the king, etc., because otherwise all the males who can't get mates are gonna off him, and one possible result is he'll sit and complain bitterly because those who didn't appreciate his natural superiority are also disinclined to allow him exclusive access to the best hunting and forage.

Take the Pacific islanders: it's entirely possible that the original settlers of these islands were heavily slanted towards males, it involves long and dangerous sea voyages, possibly things fewer women were willing to endure - in fact they may have been the disenfranchised males of a polygynous societies, and once they arrived, looser social arrangements prevented social friction. As the male to female ratios evened out over the course of generations, they might evolve back to more monogamous patterns - a great deal of the social benefit of monogamy is that it reduces strife, one man to a woman, everybody responsible for their own household.

This is sort of how those value hierarchies form, and they may persist beyond the point of necessity, being enshrined as cultural "norms" - my favorite example being the fate of the Pitcairn Islanders where a clash between monogamous and poly cultures led to disastrous results that continue to reverberate to this day.

I don't believe there is any real "norm", when it comes to sexual behavior, it's purely a cultural construct: are thre really any purely monogamous cultures? Supposedly, Judeo-Christian European culture is one, but this culture has a long history of cheating, swinging, orgying, wife swapping, prostitution, all forms of poly that that society has never been able to make so much as a dent in, despite the most Draconian efforts.

I think historically, it's more like a continuum: if we accept the "bottleneck" for the purposes of argument, presumably, with the entire human population reduced to mere thousands, and resources scarce, share and share alike becomes a critical survival strategy, much like the Pacific Islanders, even if we accept that to some degree, monogamy is "natural", i.e., people tend to pair bond with compatible mates, not necessarily the first one that comes along - i.e., people are not completely interchangeable, socially or genetically - one study suggests we can smell immune systems and we tend to choose partners who immune profiles are the most dissimilar to our own, thereby ensuring that our children will inherit a broader immunity profile themselves.

Maybe why we give them flowers, it's a sort of camouflage, as social considerations become more important than biological compatibilities.

Otherwise, as resources become more abundant, it becomes more of a qualitative than a quantitative issue: the best hunting areas, the best forage, etc., and so a certain degree of aggression and territorial urges create incremental advantages - even in an egalitarian culture, there is some ranking in terms of who gets the best cuts of meat, the best vegetables, etc., often it's a sign of respect and a reflection of status, however that might be determined.

Over time, those getting more and better food will tend to be stronger, smarter, and more energetic - taken to it's logical extreme, you get the aristocracy, who eat better food, and are thus stronger and more active, greater activity means more attention which stimulates cerebral development - it's a fairly well understood phenomena, Richard Restak outlines it in detail in The Brain, which is out of print, but should be required reading.

For instance in a study done by a Scottish Doctor, all of the differences between the between the wealthy aristocracy and their poorer "subjects" could be explained by nutrition alone - malnourished children are listless, and tend to be left alone, whereas the energetic child is always getting into stuff and asking awkward questions, i.e., they tend to get a lot more social interaction and social enrichment - it has virtually nothing to do with genetics, contrary to popular wisdom, but the better nutrition stems from a cultural value system in which some distant ancestor secured some status advantage or other for which he was rewarded with better food.

Monogamy also has to do with inheritance, you see, its a way of passing on your advantages to your offspring, which requires Two conditions: you have to know who your offspring are, and you have to have something pass on to them - Pacific islanders can fish year round, whereas in colder climes, food has to be stored against winter, the old Ant vs. Grasshopper analogy - now there is some advantage to hoarding, a hoard represents wealth, and advantages can be maintained, alliances formed, through monogamy.

And I'll have to dispute your assertion about the father/son bond - babies tend to more closely resemble their fathers, as male mammals are more likely to kill infants to whom they are not directly related - I don't know if you want to call that a bond, necessarily, but it's not exactly catch as catch can.

It's interesting that human males form bonds at all - I don't know that many mammals do, outside the formation of political alliances and alpha hierarchies - the only reason to do that really is to either share females or trust other males to be alone with your woman. Ironically, of course, statistically, if you woman cheats, it's most likely going to be with your best friend - plenty of room to argue about what kind of subconscious motivations are going on in how you choose your friends,

Anyway, in short, it offers a lot of very convenient political and social advantages, enough so that it reduces the whole genetic diversity approach to a covert, opportunistic one, that then of course generates it's own set of externalities and complexities - the aforementioned prostitution, cheating, swinging, and social monogamy, etc., up to and including, the right of Seigneurial privilege often claimed by the aristocracy - basically socially sanctioned rape, since biological advantages: whatever physical and psychological advantages are traditionally ascribed to "blood" or genetics, rather than nutrition, are thereby ostensibly being spread - "improving the breed", which is more akin to a pastoral value system than an agrarian one.

The point being, it doesn't just go away, norm or no, just as I suspect, even in poly cultures, people may prefer to spend more time with one person than another.

There is no "norm" there is really only environment and adaptation - which, conceivably, over time, might lead to the selection of particular traits in the fat middle of the herd, but there's always going to diversification going on at the fringes, the narrow ends of the curve, including r strategies most common, not surprisingly, equally among the elite at one end and the "outcasts" on the other.

 

[xssve]

In fact, that whole aristocratic value system it the heart of the current liberal v. conservative debate, and as usual, it has to do with how resources are apportioned: i.e., are they something that belongs to the community (communism) or do they belong to those strong enough to take them (feudalism) - it all has to do with primitive capital formation.

Take ami's bitterness for example: he feels that he is entitled to trudge off into the wilderness and cut down enough trees to make his little cabin, and live like a free man - trouble is, them tree's is owned by Weyerhaeuser, and those other ones are on public land (probably leased by Weyerhaeuser), and from this stems his psychological neurosis, the whold schizophrenic split in his identity: Weyerhaeuser simultaneously represents the very industry he mythologizes and reveres, and simultaneously, they are a committee of faceless parasites who have monopolized all these trees by making a deal with another bunch of faceless parasites, a hated elite, who represent the equally hated masses, none of whom appear inclined to recognize, much less respect, his innate and natural superiority.

So half the time he's looking for anybody who sympathizes with him (safety in numbers), and the other half of the time calling them names (competition).

That's one typical rightwing neurosis, stemming from the fact that the whole pioneer mythology of lone man carving an empire out of the wilderness requires some unclaimed wilderness to carve an empire out of, and and that is in short supply, because as we all know, we were put on this earth in order to overpopulate it, be fruitful and multiply - trouble is, real estate, and all forms of primitive capital, are finite by nature, whereas human ambition is bottomless.

This means that as primitive capital, i.e., natural resources, become increasingly scarce, new ways of apportioning them are developed, most of the time involving conspiracies, graft and corruption, theft and murder, etc., because there is no fair way of doing it through which certain people can grab more than their fair share, to the degree to which they feel entitled to do so.

So, Conservatives are working hard to simultaneously grab as much as they can whole the grabbins' are good, and keep anybody else from grabbin' that to which they feel entitled by heaven, because their revered ancestors were clever enough to grab it from the Native Americans, after some other White people grabbed everything away from their even more distant ancestors.

Naturally, this creates certain obstacles to rational debate, since in the end, them that have will have, and them that don't won't, whether the process though which this apportionment was decided was rational or not.

 

[xssve]

To return briefly to the monogamy semi-threadjack (it has been made a definitive left vs. right political issue), the scenario is the woman who is forced to choose between the hardbody beefcake and the wealthy milquetoast - why is it she has to make a choice, when she effectively has an endless supply of pussy? Guys don't strain themselves over having a babymaker at home and a hottie that can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch on the side if they can arrange it do they?

There's a infinite world of complexity in the answer to that.

I have no opinion on Lyme disease, so back to liberals vs. conservatives.

 

[LaRocha]

It's sort of a stretch saying that because there is cheating, swinging etc. our culture isn't or hasn't been one based on pure monogamy, whether serial or lifelong. The East has been as consistently monogamous, I don't think it has much to do with religion. The majority, the working class and poor class don't have the luxury to break monogamy. There exists polygamist cultures, there probably always has in certain places, but up until about 50-100 years ago resources were never actually plentiful anywhere at any time. The resource angle just doesn't explain very much, there has been limited resources for generations under H/G and agricultural societies, and monogamy has been a standard practice throughout.

It might be that monogamy wasn't selected for or against, that there is no real answer why females prefer one mate to many. And if you look at who has had many wives in almost every society, including the few h/g societies that still dot our planet, it's the ruling class that has more than one wife. It could be a universal behavior, since as far as recorded history is concerned most reproduction occurs within the confines of a monogamous relationship. And you can take the next step and say most reproduction has occurred within the confines of a ritualized monogamous relationship. We wouldn't say Egyptian society was incestuously endogamous because it was common for the most elite to marry their sisters and daughters, right?

Political, whether authoritarian or libertarian personalities are often mismatched in marriage. As far as I can tell political affiliation is one of the least important traits taken into consideration when choosing a mate. Communal and individualist groups have both existed and accomplished the same tasks. Food, shelter, protection, get that next generation of age to reproduce.

Our joint capitalist, half-communist, socialized everywhere world culture has the ability to form any type of organization we want because of the vast resources we're able to pull together. Authoritarianism won't go away no matter what type of new amalgamation we fight or negotiate for, because any system that organizes more than a couple dozen people needs the fist over the necks of the citizenry, the Panoptic Eye and its swift penalties.

 

[WRJames]

Everyone has seen that information on breast cancer. If twenty percent of early detected tumors might possibly go into remission, eighty percent don't. There's no way to predict which will go into remission, like I've said over and over, which you don't quite comprehend. There's no way to not treat cancer by routinely assuming this or that cancer will go into remission. You may put your wife and mother and auntie in danger by not getting them treated for breast cancer when a tumor is detected, but I sure won't..

I disagree. We are overtreating a lot of diseases -- this being only one instance. Thyroid cancer is another striking example. An enormous percentante of thryroids are removed for no reason. Many cancers, like thryroid or prostate, even if present, very rarely cause a health problem.

The last time I went for a physical I was asked if I even wanted to bother with a PSA test because it has become so controversial. Yet many men have gone through a lot of suffereing because of it.

I only bring these up as examples of a "never mind" which scientists issue rather routinely.

We're done with the Lyme disease discussion as far as I'm concerned. Sorry your family is stricken with Lyme disease, but it really has no bearing on the almost universal effectiveness of the vaccine when it was used those few years in our country, and its current effectiveness in Canada and Europe..

The vaccine did not work. In any case, you brought it into the discussion as a red herring. My initial comment was on the way the IDSA is persecuting physicians who are attempting to treat chronic Lyme.

You really don't listen. As I've said a number of times, YOU must put forth a theistic argument for an atheistic argument to occur, that's why atheism is only a reaction to theism. An atheist is only sure so far as the theist is unable to put forth any sound argument for their belief. Yes, an atheist has a belief regarding the beliefs of theists. The theist believes they know God exists, and the burden of proof is on the one positing existence.

The atheist reacts to the proof, undermines the unsound argument of the theist and is safe in believing there is no God based on lack of any sort of proof, evidence, argument for the existence of God. The unicorn argument isn't just some joke. If I posit that a unicorn exists you don't have to prove that it doesn't, you just have to undermine my argument. If I don't make an argument you've every right to be sure unicorns don't exist. If every statement someone made had to be disproved by non-believers there'd be no science or math. The easiest theistic ploy is in trying to trick the atheist into coming up with premises for theism by which they can merely say, "Nope, that's not a premise for God's existence, try again, because God exists." Try again.

Well, what a very quaint world view. Really, you should have been a monk in the Middle Ages. The existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with your ability to refute an argument. Your belief in that existence or non existence may be based on that -- but if so you are terribly self deceived.

The idea that one can arrive at truth through pure reason is somewhat dated. It went out of fashion almost a hundred years ago.

 

[Loring2]

True ... true

You really need to get over the RWA that afflicts you....It's really prevalent among bubbleheads which would explain your problem with an uppity nigra......

Barak Hossein Obama is the President of the United States of America and also the Commander in Chief......put that in your panties...................

... but don't forget ... it's a temperory job, although he seems to appropaching it from another aspect

 

[voluptuary_manque]

... but don't forget ... it's a temperory job, although he seems to appropaching it from another aspect

What? Given all the grief the poor man is getting I have a feeling that it will be more temporary than his party originally hoped. Still, the opposition hasn't a single figure with the 'presence' to defeat him, yet.

 

[LaRocha]

...

Well, what a very quaint world view. Really, you should have been a monk in the Middle Ages. The existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with your ability to refute an argument. Your belief in that existence or non existence may be based on that -- but if so you are terribly self deceived.

The idea that one can arrive at truth through pure reason is somewhat dated. It went out of fashion almost a hundred years ago.

The existence or non-existence of anything has everything to do with the one positing existence. Do you know why Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas spent so much time trying to prove the existence of God? Because human beings have a fundamental disbelief in what can't be experienced or proven in any way we know of proving or experiencing things. If the theist puts forth no argument, there is no argument to refute.

If the theist puts forth an argument based on miracles and nonsense, the argument isn't disproved via 'pure reason' it's refuted in the vein that the evidence is presented. If a theist is going to play pretend scientist, their evidence is going to have to stand up to the rigor of science. I'm not out disproving the claims of Creation Science aka Intelligent Design on pure reason, I'm looking at what they present as 'science' and disassembling their evidence and methods under the purview of scientific method. It's not my problem Creation Scientists don't know what science is, bring a better argument.

As sort of a history lesson (pure reason) Analytic Philosophy came into its own a hundred years ago. These guys wanted to solve all the questions of philosophy by means of the pure analytic power of formal logic. One of them thought he had and retired from philosophy to be a gardener in a monastery. Turns out he was wrong, he was shown that he was wrong by a couple of economists. He returned to philosophy and pretty much set in motion modern linguistics and cognitive science.

 

[rgraham666]

Logic is nice and often useful but it has a major problem.

Logic doesn't care.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Logic is nice and often useful but it has a major problem.

Logic doesn't care.

Yup. Logic is but a tool, not the be-all and end-all of existence. Aquinas was, IMO, completely on the wrong track. He was attempting to apply Greek thought to a mystic concept. That, as has been said about many things, isn't even wrong. God is the Great Mystery. Anything you think you can say about Him is nothing but babbling. Unknown and Unknowable. Either you believe or you don't. Does He care? We can't know. Trying to get all mathematical about this is silly.

 

[Loring2]

Many pols can do

I see this all the time from the hate-fest on the right: He's arrogant! He has no experience! He's a lousy leader! He can't run anything!

To this I have two questions:

1. As compared to whom? Pick a current politician you'd think woud do a better job. WITH what Obama has faced this past year, starting with an economy stuck in the latrines, and continuing with a minority in a trech war, sabotaging process for even non contentious issues on the hill just to make his job more difficult. The cloture statistics is about as clear about that as it can possibly get.

2. If he can't run anything, he can't be turning America into a Stalinist utopia, now can he? That would require a wee bit of strong-arming. You can't have it both ways. he's either a strong leader, and you might have a right to worry about policies you don't like, or he's a weak leader, and can't do al that much damage so you just have to bide your time til the next election.

Liar, both of your arguments are non sequiturs in themselves. As to whether Obama is intelligent, of course he is but not nearly as intelligent as either he or his followers would have you believe. He is more than just a little bit of an ideologue and when he tries to extend his intellect beyond his ideology or his teleprompter he frequently finds himself stammering.

He does show signs of weakness in leadership and doesn't handle opinions opposed to his own very well. As a matter of fact, he's pedantic as hell. His way or the highway seems to be his attitude. As a matter of fact he has made that statement publicly. I doubt that this will get many votes. Hopefully he's an American first.

He's has been ineffective in that even with huge majorities in both houses of ccongress he has been unable to achieve any major goals or any goals for that matter.

As far as the matter of what he inherited from the previous administration; I have a major question and while I will admit that is wasn't a good,situation, it's his administration now and had been for a year, it has arguably become worse.

Sometime soon he's going to have 'fess up' and take responsibility and he's not doing that if you keep blaming someone else

 

[WRJames]

Yup. Logic is but a tool, not the be-all and end-all of existence. Aquinas was, IMO, completely on the wrong track. He was attempting to apply Greek thought to a mystic concept. That, as has been said about many things, isn't even wrong. God is the Great Mystery. Anything you think you can say about Him is nothing but babbling. Unknown and Unknowable. Either you believe or you don't. Does He care? We can't know. Trying to get all mathematical about this is silly.

Yes.

As for logic, Kurt Godel pretty much destroyed the notion that all truth can be attained through pure logic.

Beyond that, our logical powers are not as great as we assume. I began my professional life as a mathematician, but spent most of it as a programmer. The thing about programming is that you can test your logical powers pretty quickly -- and the results are not at all encouraging. It has made me wonder how shaky the foundations of mathematics are.

Two examples I am aware of. My junior year in college I was taking the first year graduate course with Serge Lang. Those of you of a certain age may have used his calculus book. Typical for Lang, who was a algebraist, he was learning real analysis, teaching us, and writing a text on the subject at the same time. Towards the beginning of the second term, most of the results were for locally compact Banach spaces -- and there were amazing things that could be proved. Then, a few weeks later, he came in somewhat ashen and annonced that it had just been shown that a locally compact Banach space was in fact finite dimensional, and the results were all trivial.

Another example is one of my wife's collegues, who had based her PhD thesis on a result in a paper by a very eminent mathematician, so trivial an extension of the rest of the theorems in the paper that it had been left as an exercise for the reader. It turned out it was false, and the thesis based on it was utterly worthless. The poor woman eventually left mathematics and went into academic administration.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Yes.

As for logic, Kurt Godel pretty much destroyed the notion that all truth can be attained through pure logic.

Beyond that, our logical powers are not as great as we assume. I began my professional life as a mathematician, but spent most of it as a programmer. The thing about programming is that you can test your logical powers pretty quickly -- and the results are not at all encouraging. It has made me wonder how shaky the foundations of mathematics are.

Two examples I am aware of. My junior year in college I was taking the first year graduate course with Serge Lang. Those of you of a certain age may have used his calculus book. Typical for Lang, who was a algebraist, he was learning real analysis, teaching us, and writing a text on the subject at the same time. Towards the beginning of the second term, most of the results were for locally compact Banach spaces -- and there were amazing things that could be proved. Then, a few weeks later, he came in somewhat ashen and annonced that it had just been shown that a locally compact Banach space was in fact finite dimensional, and the results were all trivial.

Another example is one of my wife's collegues, who had based her PhD thesis on a result in a paper by a very eminent mathematician, so trivial an extension of the rest of the theorems in the paper that it had been left as an exercise for the reader. It turned out it was false, and the thesis based on it was utterly worthless. The poor woman eventually left mathematics and went into academic administration.

And this, I think, begins to crack the theory that was put forth at the beginning of this thread. There is nothing right wing about a desperate need for certainty. Ask any Marxist. They will tell you that the beauty of Marxist theory is that it explains everything. What twaddle! And one of the major casualties of Godel's work was Bertrand Russell. The man burned out his brain attempting to write Principia Mathematica which was supposed to develop a perfect logical basis for all mathematics. Then, in a handful of pages, Godel demolishes the idea. Even mathematics is based on Faith. You just have to choose your God, that's all.

 

[rgraham666]

My goddess is Pallas Athena.

 

[Loring2]

A point

Or, that liberals fear to trust their own lives to less intelligent minds.

I know you to be flippant about a number of things and I assume that you are with the above but maybe not and very possibly you're right all the while keeping in mind that it's a moot and argumentive point as to whether liberals are more intelligent or merely think they are.

I've known and know many, many just plain stupid liberals as well as conservatives who haven't thought in 30 years. Ideology will do just fine thank you.

 

[Loring2]

Beware

And this, I think, begins to crack the theory that was put forth at the beginning of this thread. There is nothing right wing about a desperate need for certainty. Ask any Marxist. They will tell you that the beauty of Marxist theory is that it explains everything. What twaddle! And one of the major casualties of Godel's work was Bertrand Russell. The man burned out his brain attempting to write Principia Mathematica which was supposed to develop a perfect logical basis for all mathematics. Then, in a handful of pages, Godel demolishes the idea. Even mathematics is based on Faith. You just have to choose your God, that's all.[/QUOTE

Manque or should I call you Vol, be careful, not of me but LaRocha who tore my back to shreds in another string once. It was all about one Bertrand Russell whom I referred to a someone who spouted drivel or whatever word I may have used. I thought you were quoting me for just a few words. In other words we agree.

Not just about Russell either but about the "desparate need for certaintly" that people have. The 'need' is great Vol but the major problem is defining the word 'certainty'. Oh not so much for ourselves, it's when we try to define 'certainty' for other people where the trouble begins.

 

[Guest]

Liar, both of your arguments are non sequiturs in themselves. As to whether Obama is intelligent, of course he is but not nearly as intelligent as either he or his followers would have you believe. He is more than just a little bit of an ideologue and when he tries to extend his intellect beyond his ideology or his teleprompter he frequently finds himself stammering.

He does show signs of weakness in leadership and doesn't handle opinions opposed to his own very well. As a matter of fact, he's pedantic as hell. His way or the highway seems to be his attitude. As a matter of fact he has made that statement publicly. I doubt that this will get many votes. Hopefully he's an American first.

He's has been ineffective in that even with huge majorities in both houses of ccongress he has been unable to achieve any major goals or any goals for that matter.

As far as the matter of what he inherited from the previous administration; I have a major question and while I will admit that is wasn't a good,situation, it's his administration now and had been for a year, it has arguably become worse.

Sometime soon he's going to have 'fess up' and take responsibility and he's not doing that if you keep blaming someone else

Um - what?

 

[Huckleman2000]

Um - what?

Projection seems to be yet another Authoritarian trait.

 

[Guest]

Projection seems to be yet another Authoritarian trait.

Ahem.

Rum, anyone?

 

[The_Fool]

Ahem.

Rum, anyone?

Yep...

Where shall I rub it?

 

[Guest]

Yep...

Where shall I rub it?

You're too good to me.