overtone

No, once again you exhibit symptoms instead of engaging in argument. You have far more, and deeper, connections and allegiances with the US type crazy, and your continual habit of splitting the political discourse in the US into "liberal" and "conservative" camps, and assigning other posters their identities in those "camps" (getting "impressions" from the "get go" that are profoundly wrongheaded, say), stretches back for years now. For starters, it is not you as a person, but US brand "political conservatism" that is being labeled crazy. For very good reason. You join with the crazy, in that limited sense, to the extent you join with the expounders of US brand political conservatism, and repeat their whacko bullshit on cue. Which you do, to an inescapable and continually obstructive degree. This is not (necessarily, or by my presumption) an inevitable consequence of some kind of mental disorder afflicting persons in general. My presumption is that this is voluntary and alterable behavior.

Dunno about Canada, but anybody in the US who frames the US political situation as divided into Liberal and Conservative camps is among the group whose political conservatism is being described as apparently mildly insane. That's one of the characteristic field marks of the crazy - the "both sides" and "two camps" and "liberals vs conservatives" frame to which every political discussion is nailed. This feature of their political efforts has had enormous influence, coming to dominate official and public discourse throughout the media and most of the country. But it's not sane.

Of course not. Those are sane approaches to political influence. There is nothing inherently crazy or wrong in holding to Conservative principles. But the topic of the thread was the nature of "political conservatism" in the US, and as has been pointed out repeatedly by many one of its characteristics is a remarkable absence of actually held principles or any other coherent organization of ideology, consistency of political action, or integrity of response and justification. In addition, they seem to forget what they did or said from one week to the next. And they believe bizarre nonsense. To rehash:

Since you are directing your vote based on principles - actual principles - in the US you of course would not have voted for a Republican candidate for national office in more than thirty years. Since no partisan Republican since 1980 would, or even could, represent governance according to principle, and there is always (nationally) another candidate available who can represent conservative or liberal principle (if Democrat, probably conservative, if Green or the like possibly liberal), your US vote would have been directed accordingly. The question is what language to use for those US voters who vote directly and obviously and flagrantly against their publicly claimed principles, watch it blow up in their face, and then deny that they voted against their principles and that it blew up in their face - repeatedly. For years on end. And justify the entire rolling and repetitive disaster with claims and assertions completely fictional - assertions of historical circumstance that did not exist, denial of historical circumstance that they recognized at the time, claims of physical fact that are contradicted by simple observation, ascriptions of motive and opinion not held and never held to other people, misorderings of sequences of event whose order is not in dispute, an entire fantasy world built of stuff that doesn't match what's right in front of them even as they speak. Because that's the situation with "political conservatives" in the US right now. "Conservatives" in the US are on record - officially - as asserting the nonexistence of significant racial discrimination either personal or institutional in American life. They are on record as stating, officially, that large sums of money given to political candidates by the corporations their office is responsible for overseeing are instances of protected free speech by persons as Constitutionally defined, and there is no reason to think they might be otherwise influential. They are on record as believing - to this day - that Saddam Hussein had large WMD programs and stockpiles nuclear, chemical, and possibly biological, which he was about to attack Israel with or give to Al Qaida in support of Islamic jihad. They are on record as ascribing the failure of FEMA to handle Katrina's aftermath to the incompetence of the mayor of New Orleans. They are on record - you can look it up on their websites right now - as claiming the Federal budget deficit for the year 2008 was less than 450 billion instead of the 1.2 trillion actually borrowed that year, and that the 1.3+ trillion deficit for the year 2009 was the consequence of the Obama administration's budgeting. Every single one of their viable candidates for national office has publicly claimed significant doubts concerning Darwinian evolutionary theory, and disbelief in the basic thermodynamics of greenhouse gas accumulation, and reservations about the accuracy of the biological description of human fertilization and embryogenesis as well as sexual behavior. They are on record, officially, as believing - to this day, thirty years after that goofy nonsense received a full scale national trial in the early 1980s - that cutting the personal income taxes of rich people will induce them to "create jobs" and decrease the Federal deficit. They are on record as claiming, simultaneously, that the current President is a Muslim, a Communist, a Kenyan, an acolyte of Reverend James Wright, a Leftwing liberal, an anti-White racial bigot, and a political fellow traveler of '60s SDS radicals. They start two major land wars in Asia while cutting taxes on the rich, and then blame the budget deficit on "liberals". And so forth. Dozens of examples and more all the time, multiplying and expanding and repeating every day every week every month every time one turns on the radio or picks up a newspaper or fatfingers the remote and blips by one of their TV programs. They are fruit loops, batbelfry, whacko, whatever term you select from the panoply of applicable adjectives. They are not making sense, and they are nevertheless talking - loudly and continuously and in everyone's face. If they were doing this at a bus stop, instead of on the radio or from a podium in Congress or out of a TV screen on an ostensibly respectable pundit show, you would have no trouble labeling them appropriately. Why demur now?

It was a government agency, and the people employed by it were paid by the US government. Yes. Demand side stimulus, in the form of wages paid directly by the government to the poor and unemployed. Poor people got the money, directly from the government agency that employed them, and their demand for goods and services provided opportunities for businessmen and investors and so forth in private industry. Classic Keynesian economic policy. It worked. Reagan ran against that, loudly and explicitly, and partly succeeded: in some arenas he replaced Keynesian policy (demand side stimulus) with Reaganomic policy (supply side stimulus) - tax breaks and government handouts to rich people. If you recall, Reagan was praised for this by the entire US "conservative" punditry - they all celebrated his rejection of the supposedly failed policies of the New Deal, his reversal of course and dramatically different policies. "Morning In America". His agenda continued after his terms, slowed but not stopped under Clinton, and then W took the bit in his teeth and crashed the US economy in the service of the rich and powerful. One of the differences was that the Republicans succeeded in much of what they wanted to accomplish, which was give big tax breaks and other favors to the rich, launch wars for corporate benefit, etc, partly because they had effective and monolithic control of the entire Federal government, and the Democrats failed at much of what they wanted to accomplish, which was repair some of the damage done by the Republican incompetence, negligence, looting, and vandalism, partly because they did not have enough power or unity and were not able to overcome the united Republican opposition. The Reps largely succeeded at trashing the place, and the Dems have partly failed at cleaning up the mess. So there's some of the differences. Trying and failing to restore reason and sound governance to a badly abused community of people is not crazy. Neither is abusing a community of people for one's own personal gain, necessarily - it's wrong and bad, but it makes a certain shallow and childish sense. But supporting an abuser against one's own kith and kin, living in a world of fantasy and false memory and transparently manipulative bs from said abuser - that's kind of crazy.

Why yes, I do. Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration It was rich people's money being taxed away from them and re-distrtibuted to poor people. That is not the same thing as "the people's own money". It was obtained by levying heavy taxes on rich people's incomes, and it was distributed in the form of government paid wages to poor people for work performed on government funded projects. That is ideal, classic, Keynesian "demand side" economic policy for responding to recession. It is the opposite of Reaganomic "supply side" economic policy for responding to recession. You stated that FDR did not raise taxes on rich people, and instead handed them large sums of money to use in hiring people to work for them on their projects. You stated that such supply side government policy was what got the US out of the Depression. That is fantasy. It never happened. The opposite happened. You'd have to be seventy years old for that. The Republican Party in the US has been representing the same people and the same values since 1968, and employing the same rhetoric in the service of the same legislative agenda since 1980. W's rhetoric, agenda, and legislative efforts were identical to Reagan's. McCain's and Romney's campaigns, as well as the entire Republican Congressional delegation's, were standard model post-Reagan Republican political efforts. There's been no substantial change in the Republican Party in decades. The surge of "Independents" we've seen - which has been tailing off since Obama won re-election and the memory of W faded - came not from Republican voters listening to their representatives actually listening to Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bush&Quayle, W&Cheney, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Fox News, Sarah Palin, David Duke, Ted Haggard, Paul Wolfowitz, Ronald Reagan, Louie Gomert, Bobbie Jindal, Strom Thurmond, Bob Dole, Ben Carson, Helen Chenoweth, Michelle Bachmann, or any of the rest of the menagerie, any of the dozens upon dozens of spewers of racial bigotry, economic juvenilia, vicious religious fanaticism, crackpot conspiracy, baroque political delusion, military adolescent fantasy, and dingbat science denial that has been the undifferentiated and interchangeable Republican contribution to the national political discourse since 1968 and deciding that that fountain of garbage did not represent them. That didn't happen. All these "Independents" were fine with that representation of their values for decades. There was no surge of "Independents" when Gingrich took over the US House and the Republican Party shut down the government and set out to impeach a President for no good reason. What happened was this: they won the whole thing. Reagan and Gingrich and Limbaugh and Scalia got a solid foothold, and then W&Co took control - the Reagan Republican Party had all three branches of government And then the consequences of actually letting those people run their country finally came around and bit so hard even a Republican tool felt the tooth. Katrina. Abu Ghraib. "Mission Accomplished". "The army you have". Jeff Gannon. Ted Haggard. Halliburton. Blackwater. The most corrupt war America has ever fought. An even bigger banking fiasco than Reagan's. So the choices became: pretend it hadn't happened; rewrite history and blame others; admit you were wrong and the liberals were right the whole time; deny history and disown your former allegiances. Options 1, 2, and 4 have proven popular (1 and 2 maintain the crazy, 4 is more sane albeit ethically compromised). Option 3 is vanishingly rare.

I was right when I pointed out that FDR dramatically raised taxes on rich people, and used the money to have the government hire and pay wages to hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who worked for the government on government projects, as well as hire contractors to do work for the government on government projects. The economy is jolted or stimulated from the bottom up, as the demand created by the wage money in poor people's pockets motivates the launching of private business ventures and subsequent prosperity. That is the opposite of Supply Side economic policy. In Supply Side policy, also known as Reaganomics, Voodoo Economics, and Bullshit, the government in a recession dramatically lowers taxes on rich people, these rich people than use the extra money to launch business ventures and hire people to work on these private business projects. The government hires nobody itself, and does not provide government projects for people or businesses to work on. The economy is jolted or stimulated from the top down, as the supply of money in rich people's pockets motivates the launching of private business ventures and subsequent prosperity. No, it means that his job was to manage an operation he inherited, mandated by law. His approval of the thing was no more relevant than his approval of the Iraq War - another mess that W&Co set up so Obama would be stuck with the hassle and the bill (remember how necessary emergency appropriations for financing the Iraq War were deliberately postponed from when they were due in November '08 until January '09, so that one of Obama's first actions as President would have to be throwing billions of dollars from his budget into W's Folly? ) It's the observation behind the entire thread, the thread topic. You, like most conservatives, apparently live in a world of fantasy. The events, facts, and physical circumstances you argue from are slapstick fictions, bizarre and inherently comical inversions of event and sequence and standard vocabulary and physical fact and simple logic. The topic is whether acting crazy like that implies that you are crazy, in some mild fashion. The notion that FDR's New Deal and WWII financing were examples of supply side economics in application, for example, is crazy. It's not just wrong, it's nutso. FDR's New Deal was what Reagan was explicitly attacking when his administration proposed adopting Supply Side measures instead. Reaganomics was explicitly invented and argued for and employed in opposition to and rejection of FDR's economic policies and Keynesian economics in general. And it's not an aberration: a couple of years ago you guys were arguing that FDR's horrible Keynesian economic policies what made the Great Depression so bad - remember? That was goofy too - bad enough in itself. They're both goofy in themselves. But what makes the current batch of US "conservatives" special is their flipping from one to another of these mutually contradictory delusions without the slightest sign of cognitive dissonance. We could fill a bookshelf with this stuff. We could start with a few books extolling the capitalist economic policies of Mussolini and Hitler for "making the trains run on time" and other superior efficiencies (invented facts, their trains did not run on time etc), followed by a few books telling us all that the Nazis were a leftwing political faction whose evils can be laid to their Socialist economic policies (invented policies, the Third Reich ran on private capitalist industry). We could go on to shelve the multiple reversals in paranoia from Big Government Black Helicopters Oppressive Surveillance to Terrorists With Nukes We Need Homeland Security and back again, I count something like 6 of these flips since Carter. And so forth. What is going on, behind this display of intellectual farce? If "stupid is as stupid does" (Forrest Gump's mother), can we say that "crazy is as crazy talks"?

W bailed the banks out, in October 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008 Obama did not bail the banks out. He didn't even get to set up the administration of the bailout, as he did with W's bailout of General Motors, so it was set up without the strings or accountability that GM was saddled with. Say what!? FDR rejected such voodoo, and adopted what we now term Keynesian economic tactics. The poor were not federally taxed much in the first place, and the rich were taxed much more heavily - Roosevelt dramatically increased marginal income tax rates on the rich. The government provided jobs directly to hundreds of thousands of common people, and paid them directly. It also contracted with private companies for massive government projects - not trickle down, actual work. That is not supply side economics, but Keynesian. Conservatives live in a fantasy, a rewritten history and fictionalized description of the political and physical world. They never have their facts straight. And there is something crazy about that.

We have some evidence that it is compulsive, certainly on Fox News. They can't stop themselves. There's a mainstream Left wing? Rephrased: the Center and Center-Right factions don't tell as many lies and hawk as much bullshit as the mainstream Right wing does. The actual Left, of course, is in class by itself these days in agreement with physical reality - but they pay the price: they don't get any media time. So we aren't talking about a wide political range here - we are talking about a very densely or numerously populated but otherwise narrowly restricted political characterization. These folks have a lot in common with each other, mentally.

Perhaps you are thinking of a SE Asian Macaque, such as a crab-eating macaque? Japanese macaques don't do much swimming and diving, and most humans are much better at it than they are. Meanwhile, the best swimming macaques (some populations of Indonesian crabeating macaques) spend much of their lives foraging for food in the living oceans and rivers, eventually to match the performance of a citified and physically inept human on vacation who last went swimming in a hotel hot tub five years ago. They do not begin to approach the competence of an ordinary human child with anything like equivalent experience. Those aren't counterpoints. Are you sure you know what the basic hypothesis is?

We do, actually, even as children - certainly compared with any other primate, and most savannah mammals, and so forth. We have special air control setups in our throats - one of the reasons we can talk and chimps cannot. Even an inexperienced, city-dwelling, physically substandard homo sapiens can "lock down" their breath and free dive to ten meters. If you ever get in a fight with a chimp, try to take them into water and dive - you can drown them. And that's your only chance - they'll tear you apart, on land. There are nature movies frequently rotated on cable in which various prey animals escape predators by jumping into water; the wild dogs, leopards, cheetahs, lions, wolves, chimps, hyenas, and so forth, are stymied - they wait on the bank, or give up. A tiger or jaguar may risk shallower water, a bear (with their human-llike plantigrade foot and fat layer etc) may go deeper. For a pack of human hunters in a warm climate, that's game over - prey is caught. A single human being, desperate enough to go for it, can kill a moose with his bare hands if he catches it in deep enough water. But probably the single most significant observation regarding the beach ape hypothesis is that for a couple of major human traits the alternative hypotheses so far available are borderline just so stories, without plausible mechanism or timeline agreement. Of these, bipedalism ranks at the top - the timeline fits like a glove, the mechanism is obvious, the sequence of events completely plausible and easily matched with the known results. So while as short of evidence as we are, as unknown as the field is, it's no mystery that the beach ape hypothesis is not simply taken for granted or accepted without critique, still the preference of so many in the scientific community for comparatively implausible, evidence-free, mechanism-free, timeline inconsistent, poorly reasoned alternatives for major features such as bipedalism is striking. Odd.

I think you are underestimating the human capacity for self-deception. I don't think "conservatives" are aware any longer, if they ever were, of the original motives behind their sequential adoption of the latest rhetoric and talking points of their media sources. They are perfectly sincere in their denials of racism, for example. They can at the same time assert Obama is a secret Muslim from Kenya in thrall simultaneously to Reverend Wright, his African Muslim heritage, and radical Chicago ghetto politics, while possibly being the bastard offspring of a Black Power founding member, in addition to having rested his academic achievements on affirmative action favoritism, and claim to be free of racial bias in their political assessments, without the smallest awareness of any cognitive discord.

Not at all. The man's reasoning is being displayed in his own words, and (gently) mocked - not his character. I made no reference to any irrelevant personal attributes of John Jay, nor do I know anything about the guy other than his writings on the subject of rightwing and leftwing authoritarianism. On the subject of authoritarianism and rightwing beliefs and "conservatism", yes. As did I, in the post you labeled an ad hominem. Are you claiming the man's personal inability to correctly identify the basic categories of authoritarian political regime is irrelevant to our assessments of his research in authoritarian political beliefs? The fact that posting a link to the man's own website and his own writings on exactly the topic under discussion is seen - by a rightwing "conservative" - as an attempt to discredit his research in that subject, is noted. The claim for Jay's research into authoritarian, rightwing, and conservative belief systems is that his questionnaires and interpretations are politically "unbiased". Given the ridiculously flagrant levels of political bias and associated gross errors of relevant taxonomy presented to us in John Jay's writings, what was the basis of the claim that his research questionnaires were unbiased? The Tea Party "movement" was a marketing organization's (rightwing think tank, Murdoch media) renaming of the base of the national Republican Party, as cobbled together by Nixon (iirc it was under the name "Silent Majority", then, which was wishful thinking in every sense). Its brand representatives include the all major mass media intellectual figures of importance in that Party (Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Lilmbaugh, Rand Paul, the talking heads of Fox and Murdoch media generally, and so forth) and its brand identity continues to dominate that Party's political workings and governing behavior, as the faction so rebranded has since Nixon invited the Kamel into the tent. The familiar and repetitive need of American self-labeled "conservatives" to put some distance between themselves and the consequences of their political behavior is going to lead to another renaming in the near future - just as a similar need led to the creation of the Tea Party brand name in the first place. The thing about crazy is that it doesn't work - reality is the stuff that continues to bang your shins whether you can see it or not. More to the point, it bangs your kids's heads - and nobody wants to take the blame for that. The recurrent presentation of claims for the existence of a large majority of sensible, non-loony, and now recently non-Tea Party affiliated (that is, non-Republican), "conservatives" (meaning people who agree with the views of the speaking "conservative") is one of the reality disconnects we identify with rightwing authoritarians in the US, btw. Nobody else can see this large majority of sensible "conservatives", and there is no evidence of their existence in voting records, polls, or physical measures of any kind.

To get an idea of what an American "conservative" regards as a "politically unbiased manner", take a look at John Ray's musings on the topic of authoritarianism and politics here: http://ray-dox.blogspot.com I was especially impressed with his praise of the liberating and freedom-providing Pinochet regime (which unfortunately had to use some Leftist tactics), and the description of the German Nazi Party in WWII as "Leftist". So we look forward to analysis in which the governments of Pinochet and Hitler are at opposite ends of Jay's political spectrum. This will be evidence of the sanity of US political "conservatism". One wonders, naturally, how someone who declares the entire Left to be "inherently authoritarian", with no libertarian membership, can hope to design a questionnaire capable of separating the authoritarian from the non-authoritarian Right - but we are assured by our local righties of the true "scientific" nature of his approach, so his operating from a private semantical world might not be the deal breaker it would normally be: all we would need to do is relabel his findings to allow communication with the outside world of dictionaries, etc.

Not based on - correlated with. What the correlation is based on remains to be discussed. And we remind ourselves that our political vocabulary is corrupted, here: we have no usable definition of "liberal", only a self-identification criterion for "conservative", and ongoing confusion about right/left labeling that often gets mixed up with authoritarian/libertarian labeling. So we need to take things easy, scientifically speaking. In post 185 you were handed a list of reality disconnections, simple and obvious delusions or hallucinations or bizarrely unreal perceptions common in the US - including, here, failures of very simple, basic reasoning in people clearly and demonstrably far more capable of intellectual rigor than such failures indicate. That is physical evidence, the basis of the beginning of a scientific inquiry or discussion, of mental disorder of some kind (I don't feel comfortable with "insanity" - something more on the lines of what one would call a phobia or other inexplicable irrationality that specifically cripples a persons ability to reason and act in certain narrowly defined contexts). It appears to be peculiarly focused or severe among the authoritarian rightwing - so much so as to almost identify membership in that faction, in agreement with the self-identification as "conservative" that normally accompanies such ideology. ( It also seems to cover the bulk of the self-described libertarian rightwing as well, but the accuracy of that self-identification seems questionable, and the self-label "conservative" can be taken reasonably to mean authoritarian rightwing in the US, in practice. Not, of course, "conservative" in any intellectual sense). So we have had a basis for a reasonably scientific discussion, if any such thing were sincerely desired. In the sense of reasoning from evidence, like. We could also use the OP study, which despite its flaws seems to carry useful information.

Tell you what: If I ever feel the need to post my upcoming schedule of personal business and forum appearances to every jackass here, you'll be the first to hear from me. Meanwhile: all I did was repeat the main point, with a bit more evidence: American conservatives are fruit loops. Seriously. The entire Republican Party has gone right around the bend, and it's interfering with their ability to do simple, ordinary, how-do-I-tie-my-shoes reasoning from evidence - even in matters about which they are presumably fully informed, and invested in demonstrating reason and logic and sound views (check out some of the more directly scientific threads with political aspects, here). Yes. Some are gangstas, with the beliefs and traits common to gangstas, most aren't, for example. You posted that, and I agree. Gangstas, like "conservatives", are the crazy faction. They don't speak for the rest. Yep. That's the overwhelming bulk of the religious folks on this planet, anyway. Look around: where do you think most people get their religious affiliations - from school? Chance encounters at bus stops? The contention is that a set of people who like gangstas and jihadists do have a certain set of beliefs and character traits in common, by definition - self-described American "conservatives" - are noticeably crazy, visibly insane to some degree, in a manner directly correlated with the shared beliefs and viewpoints that they themselves use to define themselves as "conservative". here, I didn't come close to a complete list back there: http://prospect.org/article/why-irs-non-scandal-perfectly-represents-todays-gop http://www.salon.com/2014/05/05/gops_benghazi_addiction_why_conservatives_so_desperately_need_a_scandal http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/01/28/breitbart-brings-acorn-videos-lie-to-msnbc/159744 If something like that list could be compiled from "black people" it would be fine to say so, of course. In a different thread. Find one with a few conservatives in it - they have a lot of stuff like that to say about black people.

With the difference, relevant to this thread, that rightwing “extremism” as characterized thus has increasingly become a norm while dominating US political life and the associated factions vying for power, while left wing extremism as characterized thus (divorced from reality) has only a tiny role in US public discussion and essentially no political representation at the current time. This is an example of the weirdness surrounding conservative politics in the US these days. They consider themselves a different kind of human being – a category like a race or a religion that one is born into, unavoidably, as an ethnic or genetic inheritance. The generalization is exactly backwards. We aren’t labeling the blacks by their association with gangstas, the Muslims by their association with jihadists: we are labeling the gangstas and jihadists as the crazy faction of the blacks, Muslims, etc. The American “conservatives” are the gangstas, the jihadists, the crazy faction. And we can prove it – they harbor dozens of “beliefs” and opinions and apparently ineradicable presumptions that simply don’t match physical reality: they are in conflict with things like physics and logic and the order of established events in time. They argue and vote and act on the basis of delusion and falsehood – not just variant opinion, but hallucinatory nonsense. And they seemingly can’t remember what they said or did for five minutes running. It looks crazy, to an outsider. Why isn’t it? Looking at, say: the current public defense of State interrogation by torture, including publically defining waterboarding and stress position shackling as not torture; the three year uproar over Obama’s birth certificate; death panels in Obamacare; denial of the physics of carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere; the Book of Genesis as a text in high school science classes; denial of the risks of GMOs; denial of significant racial bigotry in the white people of the US; guiding US foreign policy by interpreting the Book of Revelations; black helicopters and FEMA concentration camps and gun confiscation and IRS tyranny and Benghazi and chemtrails and Muslim infiltration of the White House and Russian hurricane manipulation and gay rights hurricane invocation and communists/jihadists/drugs/jihadists/drugs/communists/jihadists fading in and out with Federal budget deficits are disastrous/ok/disastrous/ok/disastrous/ok like syncopated strobe lights of panic switching on/off every couple of years in a context of perfectly good information, easily available to well educated and freely acting people. Nobody’s putting a gun to their heads, censoring their potential sources of info. There’s no reason for this - actually, no good reason. Those who read history can trace the obvious heritage from the foundations of the country in plantation slavery through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the KKK era, and the plutocratic revolt against the New Deal finding its strategy in the "Southern strategy" and its tactics in their own marketing departments as well as the media professionals of Disneyland and Hollywood. If that isn’t mild insanity, what is it? "REPUBLICAN: "I think it would be wise for the US to control the flow of immigrants into our country, so that our welfare services can cope, and our industries can make the best use of their talents" You haven’t seen that very often, in the US public discussion, from a Republican. That would be a very liberal Democratic approach, usually, in the real world at the moment. Making a reasonable case for somebody else is a very liberal thing to do. (try to find an example, on this forum or anywhere, of a self-identified conservative with knowledge improving a liberal’s argument to set up their strongest case for debate). The actual Republican policies and most of the rhetoric supporting them are dog whistles for bigotry, designed to get votes for politicians who will allow the exploitation of labor and reduce the tax burden on the exploiters. No wisdom involved. Big walls and drones and military patrols on the Rio Grande enforcing deportation of five million people including a million children raised in the US, alternating with evocations of the memory of “Tear down this wall” Reagan – no sign of any mental conflict. They’re crazy.

Of course. To some degree. Questioned, that is. Honestly. Not dismissed out of hand, disparaged as a priori arrogant, etc, but analyzed and compared with other evidence. It's not as though that study were the only evidence or indication we have of the validity of its conclusions, after all.

Although I agree with you that some bias in the questions of that study is visible, the question itself is reasonable. In a society as vulnerable and targeted by sophisticated psychological manipulation as this one, the notion that half the population is afflicted with a definable and observable psychiatric disorder in consequence - "mildly insane" - is not arrogant or unreasonable in itself. One must make the case, is all. And frankly, never mind the study, there is plenty of evidence for that. Merely the posting of politically rightwing biological professionals in the GMO threads goes a fair ways toward making that case. Something is wrong with your mental workings. If you find that insulting, than that's regrettable - but is it really invisible to your rational mind? Look at this, from a simple and abstract pov: a GMO critic posts 1) incorporating significant extra glyphosate herbicide and related engineered genetics, never before ingested by humans, into the daily diet of millions of Americans - pregnant, infant, elderly, ill, all of them - carries risk, which has not been researched properly; and 2) since glyphosate is one of the most benign, least dangerous, and effective herbicides we have, destroying its usefulness by eliciting the rapid evolution of resistance to it through abusive employment (in standard Darwinian fashion no less) is harmful - that such consequence was an obvious risk beforehand, an easily predicted, all but inevitable, and significant, harm done by the deployers of glyphosate resistant GMOs afterwards; and the politically rightwing professionals, fully knowledgable in their field and college educated in their reasoning, respond in agreement thus: the critic is contradicting themselves, by first claiming glyphosate is dangerous, and then claiming it is safe. That is a symptom, not just a mistaken bit of reasoning. There is a visible mental disorder of some kind involved in that sequence. And it is not unique, around here - there are dozens of examples in the GMO threads alone.

Economics is central to the political "right" everywhere English is spoken, by definition. Conservatism is rightwing in places with a tradition of corporate capitalism and private ownership of the means of production. A conservative member of a traditionally communist or tribal community would be leftwing, ideologically, if transplanted into a modern industrial State.

And once again the other day, as every couple of weeks, we get a reminder that the modern Republican Party didn't just flip out recently after decades of responsible conservative governance: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/before-shooting-in-iraq-warning-on-blackwater.html?_r=0 The features of the US political landscape collected into the Republican Party around 1968 (by Nixon) and taking over around 1980 (Reagan) have been a pile of shit flavored Fruit Loops breeding vermin and disease and tragicomic incompetence for many years now - what we see is not its mind lost: this is its mind in normal operation. You can try ignoring the Republican Party (Coulter is still its career best-selling author and probably most representative public speaker whenever she has finished the Republican pundit amnesia break they all have to take once in a while, get paid by a "think tank" to mark time while their target public's mind clears itself of the reek of what they were saying before). but it will not go away. That thing grows in the dark.

So are you agreeing with me, then? That's one. Now they are. When they started playing soccer they had a poverty stricken underclass, and that's who picked it up. No, you don't. That's not the problem, or the key expense. You do need leisure time and space for the long development of specific skills. Athletic ability is just the beginning, in baseball. Or reading entire books, or listening to works of music that last more than about four minutes - or formulating something like the infield fly rule. Things normally happen much faster in baseball than they do in soccer. Notice the contrasting roles and uses of slowmotion photography and "instant replay". Soccer is still in denial, partly because the extraordinary medical advances recently brought to bear on football are just beginning to be brought to bear on soccer. There are fringe Cassandras out there, and my guess here is that they will gradually get more attention. There is a movement to ban heading the ball in children's leagues in Minnesota, for example. btw: Almost nobody calls soccer "football" in any language. The more accurate English translation of "futbol" would be "kickball", for example. A minority of English speakers, in smaller English speaking countries, call it "football", but most (the bigger countries) don't. Football in the US inherited its name from its origins, when there was no passing and lots more kicking of the ball - these tactics are still legal in the sport, mostly, but seldom used. They are too slow for the modern game. There is still some punting, a remnant that is still useful. ADHD is not a "perspective" assessment. Neither is inability to read and write. But unless soemone wants me to make connections between poverty, ignorance, inability to pay attention to complex stuff, vulnerability to soccer, and modern Republican crazyjabber, this is going astray.

Yes. We're getting poorer of late, reduced in both space and leisure time, and separating on class lines - soccer is cheap, can be played very well by people malnourished as children (does not need height or great strength), and lends itself to 'hood identification. The brain injuries suffered by soccer players are going to be getting better known in the near future. The cheaper gear is of course a big factor at the school level in the US. We are also - imho - changing in some hard to define but easy to notice aspects of national character in ways that bode ill for baseball (the sport most vulnerable, as soccer takes its share of time and attention). An inability to hold still and focus, an acceptance of things like diving and emoting, a need for motion regardless of progress, an unfamiliarity with leverage and hand tools, and so forth. The parallels with the state of Republican politics - which was once a gentleman's game played by gentlemen and watched by intellectuals, and has become (famously like soccer) a gentleman's game played by thugs and watched by hooligans - are kind of interesting.

"Madness, Rack, and Honey" - a collection of talks, or lectures, delivered over the years by Mary Ruefle, in combination with "Surfaces and Essences", written by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, a rather different approach to what I suspect is the same matter of interest to me. From Ruefle, on the topic of "Theme": From Hofstadter/Sander, on the topic of "The Evocation of Words":

. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Symms , http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_Symms Example of Atwater's tools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Chenoweth-Hage The black helicopters are coming - there's long been Palins in that Party. http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ The only reason Bush didn't get a quote comedy book of his own, the way Reagan and W did, was this guy hogging the limelight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles" etc. " Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer. " Spiro T. Agnew Resigned as VP after getting caught taking envelopes of cash bribes across his official VP desk during ordinary business hours. Cheney at least had a safe in his office to hide them in. And then there's the incomparable, inimitable W. The point is: the Republican Party did not suddenly turn crazy and stupid when the black man put his hand on the Bible and swore the oath of office of the Presidency. They've been batshit ("voodoo economics", YEC, obliviously misogynist, bizarre sex stuff and financial crimes, fantasy versions of history and geography and physics and biology, hypnotized by military force and fancy weaponry, etc etc etc) for thirty years and more, on average, as a Party, as found in their leadership and standard bearers and the preponderance of their voting ranks. And to this day (Buchanan is still a media figure): That's what they think of themselves - not corrupt and crazy and treasonous, but possessed of political courage. When they shit the bed, when they wake up momentarily in the middle of some horrible stinking mess they have once again made out of some formerly decent part of the American dream, it's an "American tragedy" - nobody's fault, really. "Both sides" contributed to the inexplicable and completely unexpected misfortune. Because in this view "both sides" are dominated, led, organized, represented by, as well as stuffed full of, this kind of guy: "He surfaced from time to time in a new life of worldwide business travels and an apparently rich social life with Frank Sinatra and other influential figures in his new California circles. Making influential contacts was his specialty, Mr. Agnew once said. In one business undertaking, Mr. Agnew served as the intermediary in a complex $181 million deal by former Nixon aides to sell uniforms to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. His intermediary role was recommended by Mr. Nixon himself to the supplier of the uniforms, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose said." That was the guy who before h got caught was the third most admired political figure in America - behind Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.