SteveWolfer

What part of that is physical? Are you reporting on this understanding of "logic" from empirically demonstrated, falsifiable research? Is this "hard science"?

How were you able to decipher my words? How do you empirically justify logic? In what part of a post do you find truth? And what parts of Popper's argument in favor of falsifiability do we find falsifiability? How can you justify, empirically, that nothing exists that isn't physical (by some sort of theory or set of beliefs that are themselves physical?) In what part of an argument do you find logic?

In the past there have been good reasons for having racial discussions - there were real race problems. From slavery to Jim Crow and segregation to removing the last vestiges of racism from public institutions. But now, where there once was a conflict built on real ideologies of race, we have gone to made-up racism as a political issue. The use of race in identity politics. The left's talking points, and stirring up the base, have been amplified into war drums by far-left racist black organizations. Race baiters and politicians ride the hate like parasites. And with liberal-biased media giving sanction, we have significant portions of the people who are black and/or who live in the predominately black communities actually believe the worst of the rhetoric. I assume it is a kind of self-delusion that lets progressives push this racist view of the police in order to seek nationalization of law enforcement. And one progressive was saying that the two separate incidents that happened days ago where a white cop shot a black man was proof that we need tighter gun control. Disarm the cops? He should at least put his brain in gear a moment or so before opening his mouth. I don't see race relations getting better any time soon. I liked that guide to interpreting media in the aftermath of big events. :-)

In what part of the electron do you find spin? In what part of the apple do you find gravity? In what part of a post do you find truth? And what parts of Popper's argument in favor of falsifiability do we find falsifiability? How can you justify, empirically, that nothing exists that isn't physical (by some sort of theory or set of beliefs that are themselves physical?) In what part of an argument do you find logic?

I don't know for sure about Anirudh, but that is the paper I had in mind. I didn't see the section where he went into detail on his measurement method... maybe I got that from another source. But it makes me as angry today as when I first read it. Here are some tidbits I picked out of it: Note that "egotism" is equated with "favorable self-appraisals" and then they are both throw in with self-esteem. How sloppy can you get? As the paper unfolds, he wants to make high self-esteem a root cause for domestic violence, wars, terrorism, and crime. To him "favorable self-appraisals" are synonymous with high self-esteem. If some dodo answers a researchers questions about how does he view himself in a way that indicates he views himself favorably there is no question asked about whether or not the guy is stupid and mistaken, delusional, or deceptive - and that is bad enough. But to not question whether the population being examined might have a bias for false statements is just bad research. And worst of all, to mistake these answers as measures of self-esteem just shows that the very subject of the paper isn't understood. What I know about high-self esteem is that it contributes to mental/emotional stability and it isn't, in itself unstable - there is a persistence in one's level of self-esteem. It changes slowly, when it changes. Again, it all goes back to really bad research design that is built around ignorance of the subject which makes possible a totally faulty measurement. Most psychologist wouldn't use the term "psychopath" in a clinical paper or research paper. It has too shallow of a meaning and is more a term in use among laypeople. Sociopath is the term associated with a clinical diagnosis of someone prone to violence. And it has long been held that a sociopath's failure to empathize with others as humans is either a deep-rooted and early acquired defense or the product of some kind of conceptual function that might even have genetic roots (this is the least popular view). Again, we see the completely muddled conflation of self-reported highly favorable opinions of self with self-esteem and in this case completely mixed up with the very diagnostic nature of sociopathy. Add to that, the correlation of violence that is often part of sociopath behavior with the favorable self-opinions as if the correlation were causation. Wow! If Branden had only known! Baumeister reveals that the path to high self-esteem only requires getting plastered. So, all you have to do to come up with his conclusion is to ignore any definition of high self-esteem that isn't subjective, inflated, arrogant, narcissistic, superficial, or left undefined (like confidence or self-respect).

At this point they are saying that he was the only shooter. Initially, they thought there were several, and then they said that he must have, at least, had someone who brought him downtown - a driver. How he got downtown from his apartment is still unanswered (as far as I know). They had some suspects in for questioning on being in a car leaving the area, but they have been cleared and released. Some people are saying that he is a lone-wolf who is crazy. I heard another fellow, a former DOJ lawyer say that the shooter is (or was) in the Houston chapter of the New Black Panthers and that his name is on their membership roles. That info may have come from a local black community activist. The shooter appears to have "Liked" the Facebook pages of a number of radical black activist organizations - including one (the African American Defense League) whose leader openly advocates shooting police. They are reporting that he fired an SKS carbine. They are a older soviet designed long gun that was replaced by the their AK-47 in the 1950s. Variants were manufactured in the Soviet Union, Eastern-bloc countries, China, N. Korea, etc. It is semi-automatic, looks a bit more like a hunting rifle than a military weapon. It has a 10 shot, fixed magazine (needs to be manually reloaded after the 10th shot - that makes me wonder about how he shot 12 people unless there was a short period of time for him to reload (it can be reloaded rapidly). He had a pistol, but I haven't heard anything about what kind. The SKS takes the 7.62 cartridge which is a significant increase in power over the AR-15. The SKS is very cheap and popular in the civilian market - used for both hunting and target shooting. It sure is hard to sort of the nonsense from the facts, and it is hard to get good facts when you have no idea what is NOT being reported.

I completely and totally disagree with you. What you are saying reminds me of when Obama was pushing ObamaCare and accused doctors of cutting people's feet off to make a buck. Your view is very warped and certainly doesn't represent the reality of psychiatry.

Hi Stephen, I agree. It has to be some kind of judicial act that embodies the protections of representation, due process, confront the accuser, etc. We still have, in most or all states, 36 hour holds, or 72 hour holds, where a person is examined to see if they are a danger to themselves or others, but I don't think they are used that often, and a follow-up commitment proceeding has been hampered by changes in the law to prevent whisking the homeless out of sight under those proceedings. This may be one of those problems that isn't solvable in today's context. Long term, the best answer towards reducing this kind of thing is a robust economy and free schools... but I won't go into my reasoning on how those would help with this problem. I haven't heard yet what rifle the Dallas shooter was using, or what ammo. If it was the AR-15, it does have a light kick. But with practice people can fire other semi-automatics just as rapidly and just as accurately. The Dallas shooter was military trained, and would have been familiar with M-16 which is the military version of the AR-15. The big advantage to the AR-15 is the relatively flat trajectory and high level of accuracy at fairly long distances. In the military they want to severely wound rather than kill because it uses up more of the enemies resources to care for wounded and because of that they use a full metal jacket on the lead slug (which is fairly small). For civilian defense people get hollow points or some kind of ammo that is intended to be much more disruptive when it hits. I'd have gone home as well. In Arizona I sometimes see people carrying pistols openly in holsters - it isn't that unusual. As for concealed carry, I think the number is much higher than people would suspect. I was in the grocery store parking lot, walking towards the store and a fellow was sitting on his motorcycle, wearing biker-type cloths, with a gun on his hip. But the look on his face wasn't threatening. I said Hi, he was friendly, and I asked him about his gun and we talked for a minute. There seem to be a lot of different gun-oriented subcultures. I hope you are right. The human ingenuity that we see people exercise to find a way out of a problem when it looks hopeless is in some way multiplied over an entire large economy. Recessions are cured by all the different players modifying their actions, cutting costs, converting unproductive assets to cash, and so forth. But that ingenuity eventually isn't enough to overcome the size of burden of government when that burden continues to grow - generation after generation. It feeds on the what would have been amazing booms following major technical revolutions. Anyway, I first found myself in a panic over the "coming collapse" in about 1971 after reading Harry Browne's book that explained how the economy was going to collapse. But, like you said, the level of debt (and I'd add the level of regulation) will eventually tip the balance. But the big collapse that I fret over is not necessarily coming from economic malfeasance by the government, but by intellectual malfeasance coming from the philosophers. How long can a culture run on bad premises? It is bad premises that have torn up most of the middle East. To the degree bad premises are acted upon, weaknesses are built into systems and there is a degree to which it is cumulative. Common sense, the good side of mixed premises, human ingenuity - these help stave off sudden disaster, but in the end I believe society unravels if it can't get the majority of cultural change to flow from good premises. There are vastly different rates of decline for varying regions of the world with different levels of economic stability, stable traditions, stable political systems, predominate philosophies, etc. I also suspect that a graph of a long-term collapse or unraveling of a culture would be exponential in that towards the beginning the rate of change would be so slight that we would not tend to notice it as a persistent trend. And towards the end the rate of acceleration would be near vertical - that is, when things start going bad, it can suddenly lead to violent chaos and panic. But, I've been wrong on predictions of the future far more often than right. Yes. But there are changes that have spread through the culture that we would never have predicted. When we project into the future it is too easy to think of major political items like free speech being gone, but in reality, the move towards suppressing free speech would have to be more subtle. Changes in FCC rulings that intimidate broadcasters, restricting some kinds of speech on a campus to a "free speech area," conservative speakers being shouted down at universities till they no longer accept those gigs, IRS targeting conservative organizations, political correctness used like a social club to shift speech, and on and on and on. Like an incoming tide it slowly creeps up the beach getting this and that area just a little wet to start with.

Psychiatry is a mix of medical science and psychology. Psychiatrists prescribe medications (and in some states psychologists do as well). As a medical science the efficacy of medications is examined with double blind tests after a long period of biomedical studies that don't involve humans. The definition of psychology: the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context. That is the way they are described. But humans are part of reality, thoughts and emotions are part of reality. And the disciplines of logic and reason that are used to understand reality aren't hard science. Nor is philosophy, yet our thoughts and emotions and logic and reason and beliefs and values are, to my mind, every bit as important to understand as any hard science. I'm biased of course, but I find the condescension one often sees directed towards psychology as laughable. As a therapist I've seen how small mental shifts can change a good life into a state of misery, and a bad time into a depression, a traumatic event into lasting anxiety. And I've seen people brought from the edge of suicidal despair to having a happy life. Psychology might be as primitive today as medicine was 100 years ago, but it isn't unimportant. If a person's purpose in life includes being happy, then whatever you want to call that area of knowledge to which happiness belongs, it should be of seen as a discipline of some importance.

Me too. He was a great political analyst and provided clear expositions, but I'd watch his show and the minute he'd start getting religious, it was time to shut the tube down. I knew that his political vision was going to be limited by his religiosity - you can only partion off a section of the mind so much. And after a while, his religious view were so much a part of what he was doing that it wasn't worth watching. The only other thing I'd say about Van Jones is that we find nothing in the record anywhere in the last 6 or 7 years that shows either a sudden transformation in his thinking, or a gradual ideological evolution. What we see is a striking change in style. What might have happened is that he got past some personal issues - angers, rages - and that he matured some on the emotional level. And he may have had a very likeable self inside all the time and now it serves him well, and he probably enjoys being liked. That would be natural. And none of that would not mean that in a hard interview session he'd find himself having to say things that would change your mind instantly, or he might say things that would make your BS meter hit high numbers. I have to retain my belief in who he is, but if that weren't the case, I'd prefer to think well of him - he come across as a likeable person. In that sense, I hope you're right. In either case, it isn't important in the scheme of things.

Great video... so free of race and accusations and ugly partisan politics and so full of heart.

The implication that Philando Castile was shot because the officer was white and that he shot the man because the man was black is premature and therefore terribly unwarranted. This is the kind of unsubstantiated claim that makes young black men more fearful than they should be. It can lead some of them to resist lawful instructions and lead to violence that wouldn't otherwise have happened. The belief by young black men that they are being hunted by white police can cause white cops to feel more tense and even jittery. If it turns out that the cop acted out of racism, that still isn't the same as branding law enforcement itself as racist. But that is what is happening. The 99.9% of non-racist cops are being branded in a way that will destroy their ability keep us a nation of laws. When racist accusations are thrown around when there is no justification it divides us along racial lines. It is divisive. It is how a race war gets started. The NRA is an organization that defends the right of citizens to own guns. There is nothing that gives the government a right to discriminate between using a gun for hunting, target practice, collecting, or self-defense. I've never seen anything that would support the claim that the NRA is racist. I too grew up in a house with rifles and shotguns. In Wyoming most families back then hunted. I left Wyoming many decades ago and no longer owned a gun. But I now advocate that everyone acquire a handgun and take classes on how to use it for defense. Not to defend against governments, not because of current racial strife, and not because of crime levels, and not because of terrorism, but because society is starting to unravel and we don't know what will happen next. We don't know if it will unravel so as to leave everyone at danger of violence. Civilization can be a pretty thin veneer when sudden and severe political or economic disruptions happen. I've seen individual acts of savagery by thugs - first hand, but only as the exception and not the usual - I can tell you, I don't ever want to see that shift where it becomes common, even is for a short time.

Why did it take thousands of years for astrology to be replaced with astronomy? Why are some people still using math in fortunetelling (Numerology)? As far as human history goes, science as we know it today is very new. Popper wasn't publishing till about 1930. What Popper and others who study the philosophy of science know is that it is a process and in some areas we seem to be far along and others we have hardly started. We have mental/emotional natures and we should study that. (If you are saying we don't... well, then I guess I'm exchanging posts with some kind of AI software and not a human). The difficulty of studying what mediates our mind's activities using our minds might be difficult, but not impossible.

They know more about neurology and there is a great advantage to working in a field whose content isn't as directly linked to human choices, as is history, sociology, economics, philosophy, political science, psychology, etc. But because those fields that attempt to understand the principles at work in human domains shouldn't be thrown out. My point was that they don't know as much about psychology as some people think they do. Both psychiatry and psychology are historically still in a period where they don't have a settled theoretical base. Different schools of thought still contend with each other as to who's theoretical orientation best represents reality. In the hard sciences, this only exists, now a days, at the leading edge of the science where a new theory conflicts with an older theory. Progress will come out of the experimentation and exploration that decides for one over the others... and so on. But many of the assertions made in psychiatry and psychology can be framed as a falsifiable hypothesis... Is there some other way of looking at these fields such that, by your lights, they can't participate in Popper's standards? And "pseudo-science"... Really? There is no substance to that designation.

Michael, respectfully, I'd invite you to start trashing him again. I disagree with standard of crying at the funerals because I strongly suspect that Van Jones is playing an inside game. He is working to continue the push for nationalizing law enforcement while not harming the meme that young black men are being hunted by white cops. I see him as treating as morally equal, and culturally relative, the shootings of a black man by a white cop which has not yet been examined to see if it was justified or to see if it was racially motivated with the known racially motivated shooting of cops, not as part of an interaction with an encounter with a given cop, but as a goal by the shooter to kill many cops as long as they are white. If we can't separate out the false claim that white cops are hunting down and killing young black men from the fact that there are blacks who are purposefully choosing to find and kill white cops, then our society is in real trouble. This is how a race war gets started. ------------ I saw Van Jones on video a few years ago saying that he was NOT abandoning his old beliefs, but rather changing how he pursues them. I believe he has decided to change the structure from the inside. I think he has abandoned the angry yelling of the radical for the smooth talk of progressivism. Here is text from an interview in 2005 with Van Jones: "Before, we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.... I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs." He stayed a Marxist, but adopted the tactics of Saul Alinsky. On 9/11 he denounced the United States as having brought the disaster on itself, and he expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans and those who are "victims of U.S. imperialism around the world." In a speech in 2008, Jones said: "The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don’t have a racial justice framework." In a speech in 2009 where Van Jones called for the 'incremental socialization, by stealth, of the U.S. economy,' he said: "Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether ... until [the green economy] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society." In 2012 at Occupy Wall Street kind of rally, he denounced libertarians specifically. Damning "their principle of economic liberty," saying: “They’ve taken their despicable ideology and used it a wrecking ball, that they have painted red, white and blue, to smash down every good thing in America.” He portrayed libertarians as racists, saying, "They say they’re Patriots but they hate everybody in America who looks like us. They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya’ll.... You can’t be an anti-immigrant bigot and a Patriot at the same time.” Personally, I think he has learned a great deal from Obama. They are both black men in politics, both progressives, both came from the Black Liberation theology background, both are graduates of Ivy league schools with degrees in law. I think Van Jones looked at Obama becoming president and being far more successful in pushing his progressive agendas than Van Jones had been... and he decided to emulate his style, his personableness, his likeability (the old Van Jones wore combat boots, got in people's faces and called people assholes). ------------ Newt is correct that it is more dangerous to be black in America, but there are several reasons for that. Black on black crime is rampant and the number of blacks killed by blacks is huge. There are blacks who are killed by cops because they are involved in violent crimes which put them on a collision course with cops to a degree that is far out of proportion to their percentage in the population. And, this ugly and false meme or white cops are hunting young black men to kill them is causing not just angry reactions but outright resistance during an interaction. If I had bought into the idea that cops would kill me, I'd he hesitant to go along with their orders to put my hands up. And the increasing number of blacks who are shooting cops is making white cops more jittery. ------------- Van Jones made an excellent point asking what if we could experience what it was like to be in another's shoes. And he acknowledged that 'we' get points for driving the sides apart, and not for bringing us together. But I still maintain that he is coming from progressive's identity politics and this is just some kumbaya rhetoric and his pushes for legislation or policy or memes to be adopted will still be about wedge issues, centralized control, people divided into the proper progressive politics identity groups, gin up the base, etc. ------------- Neither Van Jones nor Newt should discuss Black Lives Matters without starting and ending that conversation by condemning their advocacy of cop killing. All the rest has to be tossed out. You don't do anything to legitimize, excuse or in the tiniest way sanctions for killing people. ------------- Van Jones is very polished at this point in time, but he has always viewed politics from a Marxist and from a racial view point. He has always been active in some form against the criminal justice system and again, that has always taken a racial view point. Even when he was deep into environmental issues, he wanted government contracts for green manufacturing to go to prisons. Van Jones has always been deep in progressive territory with his work with MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, American Dream Movement, Apollo Alliance, Demos, etc. ------------- I sometimes think the world has totally lost touch with what MLK said... it is about character, and not this tribalism and racism. All of this focus on race is toxic, has been toxic, will continue to be toxic. And it doesn't matter whether any given focus is benign and an attempt to be helpful - if it is a distinction based on race it is wrong.

One day in the future we will be able to see and understand the parallels between neurophysiology and psychology but today the neurophysiologist think they know more than they do... they are still along ways from being able to map mental/emotional events to electro-chemical events in a meaningful way. Today, it is like a society of say 100 years ago, taking apart an iPhone and scientifically examining each of its bits and pieces to understand how an app can transcribe spoken words into text. If the hard determinists among the neuro people and the hard behaviorists on the psych side continue to deny any volition or even speak of concepts they won't go anywhere worth being.

I'm sorry to hear about South Africa's decline. As news, it hasn't made the American mass-media. In America we may be going into one of those long, hot political summers where the high level of political factionalism with its attendant anger is topped by racial anger. Decades of political correctness has made it possible for racism to grow and fester in black subcultures with protected black against white animus in the nation's campuses. Here in the states I see a close joining of the psychological and the political in racism. First, the political: The progressives, in the media, in the entertainment world, in the schools, and as politicians and their spokespeople, have engaged in rhetoric and teachings that create a 'safe space' for a blacks to complain about unfair treatment based upon race, while making it politically incorrect and 'racist' for a white person to do so. Concepts like 'White privilege' and 'institutional racism' and the tiniest 'evidence' of racism becomes a political talking point that is sought after by progressives. Identity politics leaves entire races to be milked for the votes that lead to power, money, prestige and political successes. The left searches statements from their opponents for racist "code words" and "dog whistles." Gone is the message of Martin Luther King that we need to judge one another on character, not skin color. The old white against black racism has just turned around the colors and stayed racism. The core message to black America is that the history of slavery and then segregation have left damages that still need to be repaired and that racism is still damaging the lives of black Americans. Black Americans are told that they are being held down, mistreated, oppressed, suffer economically and politically, and all because of the color of their skin. That the criminal justice system is racist. They are told that white cops are actually hunting down and killing young black men. This message in different forms is coming from nearly every venue... university classrooms, the movies, TV serials and documentaries, the news, politicians and their spokespeople, professional race baiters, Black Liberation theologists, organized racial groups like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, the New Black Panthers, prominent black politicians and leaders, church pulpits. People living in the inner cities of America who are not radical and not political, are coming to believe this message - even the most radical extreme part about white cops hunting down young black men. People are actively falsifying statistics to make claims to purposefully generate more hate. For a number of reasons the black population in the states is suffering more from the economic downturn of this last decade than any other race. It can be traced back in parts to educational disparity, lack of a supporting family structure, but more than anything, a set of subcultural beliefs that are self-destructive. But the point I want to make is that there are a lot of black people who are feeling bad about the state of their lives these days. Now, for the psychological part: It is real simple. Take someone who feels miserable or at least unhappy, and immerse them in a culture that for decades constantly says it isn't your fault, it's the fault of whites who have rigged the system, who oppress you because of the color of your skin, who are racist. A sizeable number of people in this situation will begin to shift from unhappiness to anger. Instead of looking, as an individual, for actions to take that will improve their lives, they feel angry or helpless and lose their motivation to engage in productive activities. The most extreme of the black organizations and black activists are calling for the killing of white people. And it is happening. The leading edge of the "kill white people" movement is aimed explicitly at law enforcement officers - at cops. And it is happening. The progressives don't recognize or don't want to recognize the degree to which they have harbored, encouraged and sanctioned the underlying sentiments in their drive to nationalize law enforcement (as a specific policy) and to stimulate their identity politics base in an election year (a drive for votes and power). The progressives are like someone who tilled the soil, planted a seed, watered and fertilized, and then appear horrified that anyone would accuse them of having anything to do with the plant that appears. ----------------------- By the way, our Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer in the country, in talking about a terrorist attack, made statements about the need to love... implied that if only we love people more will we cease to be targets of terrorism.

My Masters was in Clinical Psychology, I studied under Nathaniel Branden (the expert on self-esteem) for many years while going through California's licensing for psychotherapists. And I've watched, with great sadness, what has been done to the concept of 'self-esteem' since the late 60s. I've read that research paper you refer to. It was commissioned by the APA and the psychologist who carried it out, Roy Baumeister, (who was associated with the APA in the past), 'measured' self-esteem with a Likert scale drawn from answers to a set of 5 questions given prison inmates. Questions like "Do you think you have high self-esteem?" Or, "Do you like yourself?" He did an almost identical study where the same asinine measurement technique was used to rate the self-esteem of bullies in elementary school. The conclusion was that high self-esteem leads to bullying. This particular psychologist has done a number of what I'd call anti-self-esteem 'studies.' He has some strange, negative ideas about self-esteem. Roy Baumeister is a "social psychologist" who has done a great deal of research, written or edited about 20 books, and is respected in the field (which says a lot to me about the state of psychology as a discipline). Much of his work has been about what he has posits as the "need to belong" which is at the heart of his theoretical orientation. He has written that “the defining thrust of human psychological evolution was selection in favor of cultural capability" by which he means a socializing capability, and in his view the major capacities that we exercise are all used to help us act in pro-social means. He describes free will as an evolutionary advanced mechanism that helps us act in more pro-social ways. The misunderstandings about what self-esteem really is have been increasing with time. About 15 years ago I edited the self-esteem page in Wikipedia... or at least I tried. It was a mess and I wasn't able to make enough head-way to continue. I just took a look at the page and it has grown worse. The current set of editors believe that "Self-esteem is attractive as a social psychological construct because researchers have conceptualized it as an influential predictor of certain outcomes..." Modern psychology is more about research (much of which is ill-conceived and shoddily conducted) while a kind of political correctness drives theoretical orientation, goals and purposes. Like every other soft science it has become about society, about social constructs, about cultural relativity, and subjectivity.

I quoted that part of Professor Smith's article because it gave me a big grin. I enjoyed the article immensely. Thank you. (Now I'm off to read the two essays before this one in the series.)

Moderate liberals are emotionally pained over racial slights and support Affirmative Action and make it clear that they want society to move towards a seamless racial integration. At the far end of this very same spectrum of left-wing racial politics there are the more extreme Black Lives Matter and New Black Panther positions of kill white people. Isn't that extraordinary? - this extreme divergence in political calls that run along the same vein of left-wing politics? From racial kumbaya to racial hatred. Too often we see some form of violence, or a call for violence in the name of race and the progressive talking heads discount it as if it is totally unrelated to their base view of seeing things through a racial lens. It is reminiscent of the way academic socialists discount the Soviet Union as not being a proper or pure exposition of their principles. Or of the way that the left says that the Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists should not be named as such because they do not represent Islam - the religion of peace. These all a form of blanking out the cause-effect of principles. Regarding race, Martin Luther King and Ayn Rand had it right... judge people on their character. What happens when you don't? When progressives took the rhetorical power of class-warfare and transformed it into identity politics, they began to use the horror of racism as a motivational power for gathering votes. They wove narratives designed to fragment society with political correctness in the racial arena, with concepts like "White Privilege," and they have pushed and pushed this and In doing so, they are becoming the father and mother of a race war. From the news: "During negotiations with police following the shootout in Dallas, [the suspect] 'said he was upset about Black Lives Matter', Dallas police chief David Brown told the media. 'The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.' "

It is sad that this has happened... that our educational system has deteriorated so badly, and that this decline started so long ago and has gone on, and on, and on, without causing the alarm it should have. Now, from where we are, it is such a long road back and there is no sign that it is even starting to go in the right direction. When I think of what the educational system could be in a free market with today's technology it is enough to make a grown man cry.

Not entirely. I often go off on a tangent from a thread... following a thought that is related to this or that post, but not always expanding on the theme of the thread. You were staying attuned to the thread.

Absolutely! Yes! Every class should be in the form of some particular content in service of 'how to think critically.'

Where did I say that "Let's make a deal" was part of logistics? I don't understand how you could understand what I wrote in that way.

You also mentioned gamblers and card sharps, and politicians... and threw in business negotiators. I think this is an emotional categorization and not a reasoned one. The degree of specialization we see in a very developed and mature free market becomes astounding. I usually don't turn to Atlas Shrugged for examples, but look at the business deals that Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon made. They didn't just involve production of his steel but also logistics and finance. And running a railroad is about producing a service which is an endless number of related business negotiations. "Real hard intellect deals in terms of fact and strict logic... but those are found in all worthwhile areas of human endeavor. I hope to see those traits at work in social sciences and business decisions, not just hard sciences.