Otto Kretschmer

The oft cited figure is that 50% of personality is due to genetics and 50% due to environment - but this is the number for society as a whole. Individuals can vary. By personality I mean the Big Five personality traits which is the personality model with the most empirical backing as of now.

Which part of my previous reply is a "sermon" and what precisely do you disagree with?

Social Democracy (which is what most people mean by "left wing" or "progressive" politics) is a symptomatic treatment. It elimiantes the symptoms of unequality to some degree but not the root causes - the capitalists still posess massive material advantage over the working class and (even more crucially), their material interests are still opposite to material interests of the workers. So even if Social Democracy can bring benefits in the short term, in the long term the capitalists will do everything they can to undermine it and roll back all the elaborate social safety nets - for the US bourgeoisie even Keynesism was too much to swallow. Thus, the working class would constantly need to fight for the things they already have. Not to mention the fact that the whole western "welfare state" is enabled by massive exploitation of labor and natural resources in the Global South (the Unequal Exchange).

Sometimes one cannot expect things to work right away or work on the first try - US constitution (with all it's amazing personal liberties) was adopted in 1787 and the US did not even have universal male suffrage until 1867 and women's suffrage until 1919. That is longer than the existence of the USSR. And even western historians admit that the October Revolution was a major reason why things like the New Deal and European Social Democracy came into power.

The future is unknown as they say. 😼 If you rolled the clock back to 1875 AD USA (150 years ago), the fruits of liberal democracy wouldn't exactly make you smile - wealth inequality that would make today's US blush with envy, majority of the population working 12 hours per day for poverty wages, no pensions, public healthcare, sick leaves or vacations, minimal workplace safety regulations, child labor. Women with no right to vote, pursue higher education and with few employment opportunities. Private companies running their own towns and Pinkertons dispersing labor demonstrations. And that was at a time when US had already been a democracy for 100 years and UK for 200.

Another crucial difference is that all Fascism is reactionary, i.e. it attempts to not just freeze the socioeconomic order that exists, but to actually roll it back to an earlier stage... you know, those good ol' days when men were real men, women knew their real place and so on. It's difficult to claim popular mandate when Olaf Scholz had an approval rating of 15% with the entire German government hovering around 25%. The issue is that even in liberal democracies, the government almost never represents some abstract people - very rarely does any party get above 45% of votes and usually it's significantly less. In order to form a government, parties need to form coalitions and the resulting compromise-based program usually ends up having less support than even the 50% of votes it supposedly represents.

Communism has nothing to do with Fascism. They aim to achieve completely different goals (a highly egalitarian society versus an extremely elitist one) and they have completely different philosophical underpinnings. You're conflating Fascism with authoritarianism/one party rule which you shouldn't be doing (the phrase "left wing Fascist" comes from this misunderstanding of Fascism)

The right wing government in my country (Poland) that was in power 2015-23:banned abortion and several women died because of this. It also stopped funding IVF which resulted in 50,000 fewer children being born.

What time was that? Speaking as a Marxist, other than Stalin's suppression of genetics and promotion of Lamarckism, I don't find any examples of the left being terribly irrational. Perhaps I don't know enough despite being a history buff. :)

Scientists and left wing people both score high on Openness to Experience, one of the dimensions in the Big Five personality model (the personality model with scientific backing behind it, unlike the crap MBTI). The smae personality tendencies that make people more likely to be interested in science also make them more likely to be open to new/alternative value systems.

@exchemist This subforum is for discussing religion. There is no practical difference between discussing Biblical literalism and discussing other aspects of religion.

The story of Noah's Ark says that Noah took either 2 or 7 of each kind of animal in the world on the ark. Even when we don't take the utter logistical absurdity of such an endevour, that's not the end of the problem. The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates - yet in our ecosystem there are also plants, fungi bacteria and viruses - and a few others. How do literalists explain this? Did Noah also have a massive seed bank on the Ark and petri dishes with smallpox and bubonic plague?

@studiot Vague questions allow for a much broader scope of discussion. Folks are free to ask and answer more specific questions.

@swansont @iNow used Singapore as an example which is wrong because Singapore has private property (i.e private ownership of the means of production, not to be confused with personal property, commies don't want to take away anyone's toothbrush)

@iNow (Replying to your first post) Centrally planned economy is not when government does stuff. It's a strictly defined economic system in which the means of production are owned by the state.

@iNow There was actually a Soviet project (called OGAS) to automate the planning and resource allocation process but it was cancelled in 1970 largely for political reasons.

The most common criticisms of centrally planned economy is that it stiffs innovation and that (due to lack of price signals) it cannot detect and respond to shortages or overproduction as fast as market economy. Are these valid criticisms? Does planned economy by necessity need to be less efficient?

Anyone here who is into it? I am not doing it personally but in middle school I used to be a huge fan of the Bear Grylls TV show as well as the one of Les Stroud which is now available on YT:

NdGT is a good scientist and an excellent science popularizer but he doesn't know more about politics than an average guy off the street. Not a good fit for a POTUS.

It just occured to me that the perceived superiority of US higher education might have something to do with it's nature US universities are not free and in fact it costs a whole lot to study at the bedt ones. Which means that the best private US universities have a ton of money just from student tuition fees. Which in turn means they have the money to hire the best researchers and buy the best research equipment qvailable. Seems logical to me.

I haven't read the book but I do know that is makes an argument that Muhammad suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as well as Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Are there some specific evolutionary advantages to religiosity or did it simply evolve as a byproduct of the higher cognitive functions? I'm asking because all premodern societies (and a significant portion of modern ones) were religious in one way or another.

By any chance, has any of you read Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's Prophet by Ali Sina?

It's at least a very important part of it. (I've updated the OP BTW)

I think yes Many scientists used to be religious especially in the past. Religion and science are not incompatible... well, at least most of science. Isaac Newton spent as much time studying the Bible as he did studying physics.