SteveWolfer

They can complain that there was no one worth voting for and that for four years they will have to put up with someone who wasn't worth voting for.

Baal, We agree that a nation needs an army and that it should be provided by the government and, yes, that means taxes. I, like Ayn Rand, separate force and choice. Humans operate by making choices. Freedom is that state where we are as free of initiated force as possible - a state that maximizes our opportunity to choose. (If you still don't want to acknowledge 'choice' think of it as 'options' open to a given individual at a given moment.) The proper purpose for a government is to protect that environment of maximized options. Proper government maintains a military to protect us from force directed from outside of the nation and police to protect against criminal force, and civil courts to allow us to settle differences without resorting to force. Our beloved internet's distant ancestor was created by funding provided by a branch of the military - doing research - but Arpanet was actually used more for communications between the universities doing research. I don't think it ever reached the stage of actual day-to-day military use. And it was not even remotely like our modern internet. Computing devices have been a desire of the business world since thousands of years before Christ. Counting tools, like the abacus. My understanding is that the first electromechanical computers were the design of Hollerith (of punched card fame), and it was government funding - but not the military. It was to speed up the calculation of the census. That was 1880 and was used for the 1890 census and Hollerith formed a company now known as IBM. The computer development that you mention for shipboard artillery was developed in England and first deployed about Russian ships and not till WWI. The developer, Arthur Dreyer, was a private contractor to the Admiralty. But, I agree that doing what research is needed to increase the delivery of force over distance is a proper military function. The first patent for a radar device was to a private citizen in Germany in 1904. Many different nations were working like crazy, in secret, just before WWII to come up with functional shipboard radar (or land-based for early warning of approaching air craft). It was being done by and for the military, and again, a very proper military function. The first general purpose computing machine was created almost 100 years before Alan Turing - Babbage's analytic machine. Turing's theoretical design was done before he worked for the military, before WWII - his paper came out in 1936 while he was still working on his PhD - he didn't start working with the military at Bletchley Park till 1938. WWII and the military need for encryption and decryption poured a lot of money into computing. And again, that is a completely proper use for a military budget. The pattern appears to be similar. Again and again some private individual has an idea. That idea is sometime picked up and put into practice in the private market. Other times it is ahead of its time either due to the state of technology it needs or due to market conditions... and the idea languishes. And then during times of war, the military pours money into developing those ideas that might otherwise have remained undeveloped for a while longer. I see no reason in this to change the basic moral/political rule that military be restricted to that which is needed for national defense and that private contractors will most likely do the best research and that no funding be taken out of the private sector under any other conditions. I maintain that having government, whether it is the military or some other arm of the government, doing research for any other reason will be both immoral, uneconomic, and impractical.

Yeah, these is a lot of "blank-out" going around. But one of the most prevalent errors I see in looking at politics is mistaken something for binary when it isn't. There may only be a tiny fraction of the 'faithful' that believe those leaks, but there will be a decrease in enthusiasm, blank-out or not, and as a result some will stay home. Too often people argue a point back and forth, like will former Bernie fans go to Trump or will they go to Hillary. I'd say that some will stay home - politics isn't all binary.

This was my reply "LightYearsAway" or whatever his handle was about the government creating the internet.... And I second Wolf's reference to private contractors.

Jon, you are quite right. These discussions tend to go that direction. But I think that they do because of an error in the context. Altruism (or egoism) shouldn't be measured by comparing the objective values achieved or lost in some transaction to see if it was "an act for self" or not. Nor is their emotional state at the time a key issue. The issue has to stay in the area of morality - which is what altruism is - a moral code. Was the act taken because it is considered moral to make a sacrifice. Or if force was involved, was the force justified by saying it was a moral act of sacrificing one person's values to another (claimed to be a greater good). I look at the moral context, the moral intentions, the explicit or implicit moral principle, and not some measuring of the resulting status after an act. Someone can say that John Doe gave away some money because it made him feel good and therefore it wasn't an act of sacrifice. I don't think that's the right approach. The question is, "Did he feel that he has a moral duty to engage in sacrifice?" Some people who deeply believe in sacrifice are, at times, happy in the doing... doesn't make it the right morality for life on earth.

Which thesis? Please pick one that you support and then tell me about the facts. Your comment seems like it is in opposition to my post, but doesn't give me a clue as to what you object to, or what position of Wilson's you support.

We have seen evidence of Trump ignoring advice when it comes to launching verbal attacks. We'll have to hope that doesn't apply to military attacks. One problem we have right now is that Trump supporters are too often willing say what they think he really means, or what they think he would do, when the fact is that we simply don't know and are guessing.

Wilson is a big fan of "group selection" which most evolutionary biologist don't agree with. He sees our emotions as products of primitive instincts and our hope for becoming better stewards of the planet come from letting group selection take us deeper into being highly altruistic social animals. "To qualify as eusocial ['eusocial' = Truly Social - an accolade in Wilson's world], in Wilson’s definition, animals must live in multigenerational communities, practice division of labor and behave altruistically, ready to sacrifice 'at least some of their personal interests to that of the group.' It’s tough to be a eusocialist." Wilson is determinist. “The integrative powers of the brain ... come from handling objects...” Wilson is a collectivist who sees our problems associated with individualism. "Wilson also traces what he considers the tragedy of the human condition to the private struggle of us versus me." "It appears our individually selected traits are older and more primal, harder to constrain, the ones we traditionally label vices: greed, sloth and lust, the way we covet our neighbor’s life and paper over our failings with pride. Our eusocial inclinations are evolutionarily newer and more fragile and must be vociferously promoted by the group if the group is to survive."

That was funny. I loved watching the media turn and run off... all that was missing was a "No Comment" from the reporter. On a similar theme.... I just saw the Dinesh D'Souza movie, "Hillary's America" - it was a very hard hitting indictment of the Democrat Party, and Hillary. The focus on the democrats and slavery, democrats and segregation, democrats and the horrors of the major big city ghettos... devastating. It was fascinating to watch as they locked up D'Souza - put him in prison - just after his movie on Obama. Given an unprecedented sentence for making a campaign contribution to the campaign of a friend, a contribution that was larger than was allowed. An American political prisoner. The cameras show him court being sentenced, then show him in the lock up, then it goes on to talk about gangs and stealing and the democratic part as the largest most powerful of gangs. Given Dinesh's background it is from more of conservative than libertarian perspective, not deeply intellectual, and too much flag-waving for me, but I'd recommend it, especially to anyone not familiar with the history of progressivism. Cast of characters includes Jackson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Margret Sanger, FDR, LBJ, Saul Alinsky, etc.

Jon, we'll just disagree on this aspect of Trump's personality. Cruz is history and I don't care about him. He is no longer a player. I do care about Trump's personality. But, we'll just disagree on that. We do agree that he is great for smashing political correctness, and that is something we desperately needed. We also agree that the sweep-it-under-the-rug Washington standard is way past its sell-by date. We also agree that institutions of justice aren't. And I suspect that we also would agree that making serious headway against progressivisms many generations of entrenched crap will take really bold actions. I like you, but your being reassured doesn't do anything for me and what is needed is the knowledge that this man is going to be stable in important ways, and that he isn't just lying like everyone else that wants to make Washington their next power base. Those two things: 1.) Is his narcissism not so severe that it will be a danger, and 2.) can we trust that he will take on most of the big things he promises, or are they just his own brand of hot air. (Please don't try to convince me on these two things. With due respect to your powers of persuasion, only time is going to give me those answers - and that is if he wins. If he doesn't, he will become no more of a future player than Ted is.)

Well said. I have the same worries.

Is there anyone - ANYONE - who believes that Ted Cruz is a threat to Donald Trump at this point? Seriously! What's he going to do - say bad things? Stick out his tongue? Maybe all the Trumpers should start launching a pre-emptive attack on John Kasich or Bush - who knows, they might be big threats as well (using the same lack of logic). Doesn't anyone get what I'm saying? I think that it is obvious that Trump has a weird preoccupation with attacking people who do NOT need to be attacked and it doesn't make him look good. Hell, I'm hardly the only person to notice this - as a personal quirk it isn't even news.

Of course he wanted to dominate the news cycle. He always does. But I don't think that had anything to do with his attack on Cruz. Lots of ways he could have dominated the news cycle that would have helped him. You only go after Errol Flynn style coverage when you can't get positive coverage, or at the least coverage that attacks your opponents. Trump is sadly mistaken to hold Cruz in mind as still being an opponent. To even mention Cruz at this point elevates him as if Cruz still had any power. I don't think he can help himself.

I just saw, for the first time, the full post-convention remarks that Trump made about Cruz. I couldn't believe it. He starts by calling Cruz a liar, and he says that Cruz deviated from the speech he submitted which is a way of lying - but people with copies of the speech released before hand, show that he never deviated at all. Why does Trump making himself into a liar when there is absolutely no need to? Really stupid. When he really needs women to vote for him, he renews his attack on Heidi Cruz. When he needs people to think that he is NOT a loose cannon and wing-nut, he renews his claim that Cruz's father was associated with the Kennedy assassination. When he wants more GOP unity, but he reopens wounds of the former Cruz supporters.

I wasn't aware of that and shouldn't have gone running my mouth of without having looked up those stats. I knew that Jordan had taken in quite a few refugees, especially in relation to the size of its own population and GDP but I was wholly ignorant of the others. Thanks.

Michael, that statement is colorful as a description, and maybe it's metaphorical, but it says nothing about volitional behavior. If we try to take it literally we can't find 'alpha male' or volition in neurophysiology and we can't look at alternatives in political tactics. The concept of 'alpha male' is interesting in that it points us to what appear to be differences between males and encourages us to look and see what is behind this difference (assuming we can first identify the differences in a more objective fashion). But to just talk about 'alpha males' as if we already understood the neurophysiology/psychology is to pretend that this category has lots more meaning than 'Capricorns.' Rock therapists would go hungry, as would any therapist who tried to work with flesh and blood or neural pathways as opposed to moods, emotions, thoughts and volitional behaviors. I don't know who you are disagreeing with. I didn't call for dismissing the entire field. But I pointed out some major flaws. I've said before, with a great many of the over 400 theoretical orientations there are kernels of truth - some discovery or technique that is valuable, but which often was not properly situated over a sound philosophy of psychology, and which was not essential enough to human nature as to warrant an entire theoretical orientation. Evolutionary psychology is like that. It starts with the exciting ideas of Darwin's Natural Selection - which has animated, and remade biology in general. But it goes off track and gets fragmented and it is deterministic because it doesn't accept volition. And it appears to have accepted the bias of behaviorists, who very much needed a new home, because at least some of them want to treat "reason" as an icky concept.

If it was a fake coup then I suspect Obama would by now know that. Yet, if that is so, he has said nothing that isn't accepting of the current leaders harsh grip on power. (This is hardly a ringing condemnation of the imprisonment of thousands: "We hope that there won't be some kind of overreaction that might lead to weakening of legitimate opposition - but we certainly understand how scary this must have been.") In some countries, a military coup is actually an unstated form of maintaining constitutional limits. I don't know much about Turkey's history, but I've heard that this has been the case in the past. I know that Thailand has periodic military coups for the purpose of removing elected officials who have gone far beyond constitutional limits. The military holds power for a year or so and then restores power to the civilians. Not the best approach if one has the alternative of some kind of checks and balances that doesn't involve putting tanks in the streets. But better than having all liberties disappear. I fear that Turkey is rapidly going in the direction of an Islamic Theocracy. Obama seems to be okay with that, or has some strange reason for not mentioning it.

I feel exactly the same way.

I'm sure that they know more than our leaders know (that probably isn't difficult), and that they know things our leader do know but won't mention (no surprise).... but it is also simple national self-interest - they might just be looking at this and saying, "Why would we want any of those people?" And it might have to do with a way of looking at things. In Western culture we look for a solution and we tend to take a benevolent, positive outlook as natural. When things go awry, we look for how to put them right. The Arab culture might see things as naturally screwed up and not getting better and not fixable. They might not be taking in refugees, in part, because they don't see any solution to the problems that generate refugees. There is also the difference in the way altruism is pushed in Christian countries... making it 'moral' to sacrifice your nation's safety and well-being on behalf of these refugees.

If these were "choices" decreed by the limbic center and not accessible or modifiable by the frontal cortex, then you're arguing a kind of determinism. Narcissism is a defense mode and as such its impulses can always, to some degree, be overridden by conscious awareness and will - which means that a man as accomplished as Trump can be advised, and can learn, and can choose to make better political choices. For him, it would have been no problem to feed some "alpha male" red meat to the base at the very time that he said nice words about Cruz. My point was that he chose to go with the narcissistic impulse. Evolutionary biology, strictly speaking, does not deal with psychology. There is evolutionary psychology, but much of it is in a bit of muddle, doesn't work well with any form of volition, isn't clearly defined, and often takes what it sees as a pattern of behavior in front of us and find a way to describe our past in evolutionary terms that would account for that behavior, much of what is put forth as science isn't falsifiable, and yet it is an attempt to stuff psychology into biology and thereby make it more scientific. Evolutionary psychology discards ideas like a faculty for reason and adopts the view that we are evolutionarily programmed robots who engage in neurological computations. It is a form of genetic reductionism and genetic determinism. A lot of 'alpha male' and 'follower' patterns of behavior can be better understood as normal manipulations that relate to the parent-child authority model which is part of how nearly all of us grew up. A good therapist can easily detect the mode in which a person is operating and choose to meet that mode in ways that coincide with it, or that encourage a shift in the person during an interaction. Lots of politicians and lots of CEOs make good use of this psychology whether they have any awareness of it or not. Note that this way of looking at it, doesn't take away from volition, or deny the capacity to reason.

Where are the open floor fights? You're right... all coronations. Seems a lot like a herd instinct at work. Quickly pick the new leader, kill the failed contenders, bow low and start the foot kissing. Get all worked up to fight the other tribe.

Looks like they are in a bad spot. As a culture they've had to live down their immediate ancestor's behavior regarding boxcars. In that not so distant past they were whipsawed between the horrors of Nazism and occupation by the Communists. They had their country ravaged by war and torn in half, and now they are one country again, but have adopted partial socialism under the sodden blanket of the EU. Things are not going to get better without strong action. I hope they get it right this time.

Well said!

This is the kind of thing that Trump needs to stop. It makes him look small, thin-skinned, and focused on stabbing someone because they don't love him, and doing so when it doesn't help Trump, when he doesn't need to, and when it doesn't have any effect on where he is going next. A bigger man would just ignore it. Or, even better, say something nice about Cruz, which would have softened some of the negative feelings among the Cruz supporters. He could have said, "Things get said in the heat of the campaign and it can leave bad feelings. I have great respect for Ted Cruz." And moved on. This is narcissism getting in Trump's way. Three steps forward - then shoot himself in the foot. And, on Cruz's part, I can see why he wouldn't endorse Trump, but he could have not endorsed him but still made a real convention-rousing speech. He could have said, "Things get said in the heat of the campaign and it can leave bad feelings. And two people can find that they have insurmountable difference in political opinions. But make no mistake. I'll be campaigning as hard as I ever have in my life to ensure that we never have to endure a Hillary Clinton Presidency." That would have gotten the job done, and not stepped on his future political ambitions as hard. At later press conferences, he could have said, "No, I'm still not able to endorse Mr. Trump. That pledge fell to the wayside when we grew apart as far as we did. But I'll work hard to elect everyone who is running on those principles I share."

I believe they have revenues of around 1/2 billion a year, and they also make things like bicycles, hand-cuffs, foot-wear, knives, etc. They have manufacturing centers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Missouri. Springfield, MA is the big firearm center, but if they were to orchestrate a move to a state like Texas, it would make a lot of sense. Cheaper wages, lower regulations in many instances - not just firearms. Like you said, tax breaks up the wazoo. They could probably get a great incentive package from Texas. If they worked with the NRA to make it a very public move it would help to discourage other states from letting their AGs behave like idiots which would be good for all fire-arm companies in the future. I'm always in favor of letting there be consequences and letting those consequences be seen by those who think they can avoid any consequences.