overtone

"As far as why so many US middle and upper class white men are so gullible when dazzled by rich' date=' confident men like Romney, Reagan, and W, there's a subtext: if you look at the voting patterns in the US you'll notice after a while that these are not just any white men, but tend to be from a particular area: the Confederacy and Slave Territories of the US."

This is a strange point to make here, IMO, since Romney was born and raised in Michigan... a state which was neither confederate nor a slave territory. I appreciate that perhaps many former presidents fit into this characterization, but Romney really doesn't. [/quote'] ? The characterization was not of the candidates, but their voting base. It doesn't matter where the candidate is from. Reagan was from California, home of the much mocked ultra liberal Hollywood. W was third generation East Coast money and Ivy League education from Kennebunkport.

 

There is no integrity here. We are not talking about candidates who honestly represent their home town folks and native childhood culture.

 

The key national Republican voting base is the white man living in the old Confederacy, and has been ever since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was devised to win the KKK vote from the Democrats in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's civil rights initiatives. That's the hate radio crowd, the Fox News crowd, the people who responded like Pavlov's test subjects to Reagan's dog whistle rhetoric ( welfare queens driving Cadillacs, etc), the Tea Party folks who put their father's hood in the back of the closet and contented themselves with parading pictures of Obama wearing a bone in his nose etc. As Lee Atwater, Republican strategist extraordinaire and father to Karl Rove et al, put it: in modern times you can't just say "nigger nigger nigger" any more. You have to be subtle, higher class, less obviously ugly and damaging. You talk about Kenya and birth certificates and madrassas, about whether Obama's real father was a Black Panther and Obama a secret Muslim, and also about Obama's tutelage under Protestant Christian Reverend Wright with sound clips of scary black church preaching. (There's no contradiction there, because they both mean the same thing - Obama is a nigger). You talk about "redistribution", and your target audience knows who is being robbed, and who is getting free money for doing nothing but smoke crack and make welfare babies. (They don't for a second take this as threatening their own government handouts.) You keep constantly alert for any sign of anger from Obama - which would kill his chances of election immediately, as an angry black man is completely different from the heroically angry white men who represent the real Tea Party Americans.

 

And of course anyone who even hints that there might be a sort of, y'know, possibly, in a way, racial component to all this is immediately pilloried, mocked as ridiculous - that's like saying cheerleaders at Texas football games have something to do with sex. "Where's your proof"?

 

Romney/Ryan have nothing going for them, on any reasonable and honest grounds. They have no sound policies, no attractive record of doings, no cogent critiques of Obama's administration. The consequences of alliance between predatory capitalism and Randite ideology litter the landscapes of five continents. So how can they be in the running?

Although' date=' the point of it was that we currently have no/little knowledge of the benefits of homosexual behavior in humans. [/quote'] No, what I argue against was not that we have little evidence. What I argued against was the presumption in the OP - used as an assumption and the basis of an argument - that homosexuality has no reproductive benefits and in particular a net reproductive cost. I pointed out that all the evidence we have points to the opposite - if you don't want to make any assumptions at all, fine, but don't make the one the evidence counters, eh?

 

You are using observational evidence to suggest that it should be standard to presume that homosexuality traits confer reproductive benefits' date=' this does not need to be disproven as it can be trashed quite easily by simply asking you to provide real evidence for it [/quote'] As observed above by me, and kindly buttressed by you (you have been insisting all along that we have direct evidence for a significant genetic component to homosexual orientation, thank you), my "suggestion" is not subject to "disproof" in that manner. It is the counter proposal that is rendered dubious by the many factors listed above, the genetic component not least among them, and a simple application of Darwinian theory that would pass without question in almost any other context. You have not argued against the evidence by describing it as "observational", and you are not dealing with the argument by claiming it is based on nothing but "observational" evidence.

 

You are simply eliminating possibilities using weak evidence' date=' but what if homosexuality has largely risen in frequency due to it being a neutral trait? would you say that the hitchiker's thumb must be at it's prevalence today because of a survival/reproductive advantage? same question can be applied to anticlockwise hair whirl, ear wax, (insert any neutral trait). Did you know that neutral traits can rise in frequency too? if so, why is the possibility ignored. [/quote'] I don't ignore it, I deal with it directly - starting with the OP claim that homosexuality imposes a direct and visible reproductive cost. It is possible for homosexual geese, penguins, or people, to reproduce, but not to the extent they devote their time and resources to homosexual behavior - and so a larger percentage of homosexuals do not, and the rest do less, on average.

 

That is common observation, one made by every frustrated sheep breeder who found himself feeding a ram that wasn't doing its job with the ewes, every wannabe grandmother who watched the years pass with the attractive but unmarried son and no grandchildren arriving. If you really want to claim that homosexuality is reproductively neutral, like a hair whorl's direction, (but not like a hitchhiker's thumb or ear wax), I think you need the evidence and the argument, not me.

 

Currently' date=' we know of no benefits that homosexuality might confer to humans now or in the past. It isn't terribly logical to presume there are. [/quote'] Well, until you can come up with some kind of argument or evidence, you are asserting stuff that makes little sense. As argued above, in my posts, given the reality of homosexual behavior in mammals and birds and people, given the genetic component, it is in fact logical to presume that there are, unless and until we have evidence definitely demonstrating the contrary.

 

Such a presumption is a standard, right down the center line, Darwinian theory motivated approach. One of the great contributions of that theory is its capability of suggesting lines of research into counter-intuitive or overlooked reproductive benefits, in situations like this, beginning with the observation that there almost have to be some.

Romney hasn't created jobs in China' date=' but as I understand it, Obama has. [/quote'] Backwards. Romney has made a career out of moving money and jobs out of the US - to China, the Caymans, Indonesia, Mexico, all over.

 

My point was: "WOMEN can and will be able to hold jobs once Romney is elected" and buy their own birth conyrol pills' date=' if they want.[/quote'] Romney currently supports fellow Republicans and their policies - such as "life begins at conception" - that would ban birth control pills.

 

Meanwhile, Romney's rhetoric is essentially identical to Reagan's and W's - the two least effective job creating Presidents since Hoover.

 

As far as why so many US middle and upper class white men are so gullible when dazzled by rich, confident men like Romney, Reagan, and W, there's a subtext: if you look at the voting patterns in the US you'll notice after a while that these are not just any white men, but tend to be from a particular area: the Confederacy and Slave Territories of the US.

 

Overlay a map of the slavery regions in the US circa 1863, the Confederacy and allied Territories, and it will match almost perfectly the states that voted for W in 2004.

 

Not even the colossal mess created by W, let alone Reagan's treasonous foulups and mental"disengagement" (the White House press spokesman's term) was enough to bring pause or self-analysis to their vote.

But then we'd have to replace the lost natural gas with the much dirtier coal or additional imports of crude from enemy nations.

Even paying extra for imported natural gas.

Even dealing with the horrible unAmerican inconvenience of solar.

Even making drilling companies do their basic research in advance, not lie to everybody about what they're up to, and pay for their damages.

Radical notions, true - but these are unusual times.

I dunno about faster, but on snow and ice I definitely prefer manual - it allows me to feed and let off power to the traction wheels precisely, run in whatever gear works best, etc.

All else being equal, a solid mechanical connection will transfer more power than the fluid-mediated connection of an automatic - but that presumes absolutely perfect shifting and so forth by the driver, to match a perfectly set up automatic, which is unlikely. On the freeway for long distances, where shifting skill is not involved, manual's small weight and transfer of power advantages will get you a small gain in gas mileage and/or top end speed.

One of the handiest speed advantages of a manual is that it slows down most car thieves.

The notion that the "fracking itself" is not usually the major problem seems a distinction without a difference. If true - and it will be years before we know - so what?

The discovery that shallower aquifers do have natural connections with deeper formations in the area, is not evidence for the safety of fracking.

And the fact that they didn't know this years before they fracked the first well in the area is proof,

(if any were needed after we were informed a few months ago that for the first time they were actually going to collect baseline data on the water supply of the affected area before drilling)

that this whole operation was launched without due diligence, without the slightest consideration for the integrity of the aquifers or the welfare of the residents or the health of the environment in the region.

Shut it down until after the preliminary research, at least, is done.

Anyways, resistance isn't the worst thing in the world, it just makes the product useless.

If the product was instrumental in the creation of an economic dependency - as is clearly the strategy in the international marketing of GM crops, which are proprietary and used to drive out competitive agricultural practices and infrastructure - when it becomes useless one of the possible consequences is hardship among those deprived of the benefits but still shouldering the costs and without good alternatives.

As noted above, herbicide resistance to glyphosphate alone, in weeds, is not the end of the resistance concerns: there is also antibiotic resistance in the human gut and general environment (from the marker genetics used in the engineering), generalized herbicide and antibiotic resistance via small modifications of the engineered complex, and so forth.

Homosexual behavior, whether genetic, environmental, or cultural is of no particular benefit and simply exists because the mechanism for procreation is not flawless.

We have quite a bit of evidence against that presumption -

The historical, geographical, and cultural ubiquity of human homosexual orientation argues against a purely cultural origin and the lack of cultural benefit, both (there are some arguments out there for a predominant role in the founding of cities, trade empires, etc, for example).

The historical, geographical, and cultural ubiquity argues against a purely environmental origin - besides, environmental factors are culturally and genetically mediated, filtered.

The appearance of homosexual orientation during development in humans, the widespread occurrence of homosexual orientation among all known human populations, and its documented prevalence among many of the higher mammals and more social, long-lived, and intelligent birds, argues strongly for some genetic influence. That also indicates the likelihood - the presumption, unless disproven - of serious reproductive benefit inherent in whatever that genetic influence is. That would be basic Darwinian principle - features (including behavioral tendencies) that vary genetically between individuals and influence reproduction are under selection pressure, for or against.

Maybe the author's same point can be made about English grammar as well' date=' but I think he'd have a much harder time convincing schools to drop their grammar and spelling programs than dropping a lot of the current mathematics teaching.[/quote']

 

I also feel that the problem is much wider than just mathematics. Having watched three kids go though school I felt nothing but sympathy for the utterly brain-dead manner in which most subjects are presented.

 

I am in more or less complete sympathy with Bignose's demurrals concerning the OP, but I fear he may be too optimistic regarding the teaching of grammar and spelling. They have in fact, in realistic assessment, been dropped from serious consideration in many American high schools.

 

And the manner of their dismissal bears on the issue here, and the second quote above: they have been relegated to specialty sections, isolated drill and kill rote memorization stretches of brief duration, no grounding or connection to anything else (such as reasoning, philosophy, historical development of the language, rhetorical influence, anything), no subsequent repetition or application. They are taught, if they are, as technicalities of no relevance to the "content" of one's writing.

 

Whatever students write for history, "social studies", art, philosophy, science, even English other than specifically grammar and spelling class, is not evaluated or corrected or considered for its grammar and spelling. That is for grammar class. In real life, it is apparently assumed (often explicitly), the "word processing" program will fix all that anyway. The intellectual development of the child is presumed to proceed unaffected, or perhaps even freed and abetted, by removing such inherently minor technical obstacles and delays from work of more important "content".

 

The parallels here, with multiplication tables and algebra and the like, seem clear to me.

 

No normal human being can learn grammar and spelling that way, any more than algebra. And as we see, they don't. But the best response is probably not to abandon grammar, or even spelling, and focus on the art and beauty and larger brighter world of literature.

Don't confuse fact with fantasy John. At present Romney leads in all categories except women voters' date=' and once they realize a decent paying job will buy them oodles of goodies, Obama hasn't a chance. [/quote'] Even Romney winning in a landslide of all voters would not make an obviously and consistently rightwing politician like Obama a "socialist". Only actual socialist policies and proposals would do that.

 

The overlooked factor is how bizarrely fantasy-driven and unreal Romney's meager hints of definable policy would be in practice. They boil down to one thing and one thing only: tax cuts for rich people. Since when do tax cuts favoring the already cash-heavy rich create jobs? That's never happened and never will - it goes against even rudimentary, basic economic theory. You might as well sacrifice chickens under a full moon, and bury their innards under the local employment agancy's front steps.

 

As with any potential President: ever mind what he says, look at what he does. Romney has, all his life, used power granted him by others to move in on troubled, confused, debt-ridden organizations and sell them on his ability to turn them around if given control; whereupon he breaks them up to increase his cadre's profits, sells the pieces for more money yet, moves remnant operations to low cost areas and takes a cut of the savings, saddles the remains with heavy debt while pocketing the equity, and decamps.

 

I think he will continue to do as he has done. There's not reason for him to do any different.

I'm sure many safeguards have been built into these voting machines since they come out some years back,

Some states have imposed safeguards in the procedures of use, the most important of which is establishing an independent paper trail of the votes so there is some way to audit the machine vote, but the machines themselves remain inherently insecure.

The most telling detail is the vigorous opposition of the makers to publishing the operating code - the software that counts and tabulates the actual votes. That should be routine, a no-brainer.

I'm certain others remember the "hanging chad" controversy in the Bush Gore Presidential election of 2000. Hopefully no more states are still using paper ballots.

Besides: The ability to audit the vote was the problem with the chads - not the chads themselves.

And the whole thing was a consequence of vote rigging by the Florida Republican Party - the malfunctioning machines and misprinted ballots were both assigned to heavily Democratic districts.

Again,where is the evidence of foul play?

Wiki overviews:

http://en.wikipedia....g_controversies

http://en.wikipedia....ser:Pedant/Vote

• Exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 actually showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states' date=' including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry's victory in the Electoral College.[*']The exit polls covered both the Presidential and Senate races. The votes reported by voting machines for the Senate races were in line with the exit polls for the Senate race, however the votes reported by the same voting machines for the Presidency often significant disagreed with the exit polls for the Presidency.

And so forth. Not proof, of course - but plenty of reason to require better safeguards than allowing obviously partisan voting machine execs to monopolize vote counting with secret software and proprietary technology.

Here's some links re 2004: http://mediastudy.com/election.html#papers

http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/issue-16-autumn-2006/joel-bleifuss-and-steven-f-freeman-us-electoral-fraud-ldquocritical

and a quote from a statistical analyst:

"As much as we can say in social science that something is

 

impossible' date=' it is impossible that the discrepancies between [/color']

 

predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground

 

states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could

 

have been due to chance or random error... The likelihood of any two

 

of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of

 

one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are

 

250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that

 

something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies

 

between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical

 

battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to

 

chance or random error."

The neonicotinoid pesticides that are implicated as the cause have the same basic toxicity as the nicotine they are named after.

Organic farming was ordinary farming for many decades, with no recorded harm to bees. So the use of nicotine as a pesticide is no reason to avoid organic farming or its produce. And the avoidance of neonicotinoids, GM incorporated toxins, industrial habitat destruction, and so forth, are some ancillary benefits of organic techniques, for bees.

I don't understand why this presumption should be made, please explain

Would you say that all genetic disease alleles have reached the frequency they are at today because they confer selective advantage, by automatic presumption because they can result in survival/reproductive hits and so should have been eradicated long ago?

Sickle cell is the famous one, but there are a few others. None as prevalent or directly influential (as the OP feels needs explanation) as homosexual orientation, but that level of indication is unnecessary - overkill.

Obama is actually closer to Eisenhower (and even Bush I) than many Republicans want to admit.

That's the part that's hard to "admit", I think.

If things are close in my State, I'll vote for Obama - Romney, like W and Reagan, is one of those obvious disasters that middle aged white guys somehow never see coming. Otherwise, some likely looking 3rd party.

Whether or not benefits do or don't exist is not the important question.

We have a body of posts and posters apparently presuming that there are no significant Darwinian benefits to whatever the genetic component of homosexuality is eventually found to be. I am pointing out that the presumption should be otherwise, given our current state of knowledge.

In my opinion, the argument should not go beyond how likely it is that homosexual behanvioural traits confer selective advantages as there is no/very little evidence suggesting that there is or isnt. Assuming either possibility isn't appropriate as it is an open question whether there are or are not selective advantages.

to the extent that homosexuality has a genetic component - and its presence among all known human societies in recorded history argues for a least some factor not dependent on purely cultural factors alone - the OP claims this as a mystery, an odd and inexplicable circumstance contrary to Darwinian theory.

My posts have been in response to the OP, and the following discussion. If you wish the discussion to have been different, one in which no one is making such claims, then you have my sympathy. In this discussion, the observation that the indicated presumption about the Darwinian effects of homosexuality in intelligent, social mammals and birds (including humans) should be that there are some, and that they are significant, is perfectly appropriate,

and so far unaddressed by you, btw. This, for example, overlooks the major factors in the assessment:

When you say that you are not talking about a leftover from former times' date=' that is assuming that there is very high penetrance [/quote'] And that is the presumption I claim should be made - if any are made, and without them the whole thread evaporates - based on the ubiquity of homosexuality throughout recorded history.

and that a genetic component that contributes to homosexual behaviour cannot be found in an individual that reproduces.

Typo?

Proove the high penetrance or take back the statement.

I am not asserting high penetrance. I am asserting that it should be the presumption, in the OP of a thread like this, based on the evidence we have. The opposite, at least, should not be presumed, since it is highly unlikely given the facts at hand.

It is your perception that a homosexuality trait should in theory be wiped out from the gene pool very fast, but that might not be the case in reality.

My term was "apparent", duly qualified.

 

And: Maybe not, but such extreme unlikelihoods, such long shots, are not to be presumed for argument.

 

And: It is the case in theory, given the presumptions of the OP and the theory we have. If in reality it is not so, then we have something in need of explanation - in particular a correction in the OP, and new relevant facts, that show us where this standard but underinformed application of Darwinian theory has let us down.

 

Meanwhile, my point stands: if as seems likely (cultural, geographical, and historical ubiquity, cross cultural ineradicablity, physical and developmental occurrence ) homosexual behavior has an underlying genetic component; if as asserted it imposes at least some significant visible reproductive penalty; then: any presumption that this genetic component delivers no reproductive benefit capable of countering the asserted penalty is manifestly unlikely on Darwinian grounds. The presumption should be that it does, and that evidence and argument are required before presuming that it does not.

 

And has noted, we have no such evidence or argument.

You do know that your explanation for why the appendix is here can apply to homosexuality?

1) Unlike with the appendix, no formerly valuable and ubiquitous but currently missing function of the characteristic has ever even been suggested. If it used to have a role it no longer has, something that would explain its Darwinian emergence in the past but not apply to current circumstances, no one can think of what it might have been - there aren't even any plausible guesses out there AFAIK. The farther back in evolutionary times we consider, the less likely the evolutionary emergence of such a huge and direct reproductive hit seems to be.

2) Most people don't feature the characteristic. So there is a large population of non-expressers to select for, and a much smaller population of expressers to select against, and no apparent reason that Darwinian mechanism would not be in rapid and decisive force.

There is no such population of appendix-free people, enjoying the reproductive advantages of invulnerability to appendicitis (a major cause of pre-reproductive death and disability until very recently), so the failure of Darwinian mechanism to select for them is easily explained.

3) Rather than being a holdover from a distant evolutionary past, say with examples in extant older branches of evolutionary trees (as with the appendix), homosexual behavior seems to characterize especially the very most recently evolved entities - the intelligent and socially complex mammals and birds.

Also it could have evolved as a side effect of other traits. Being multigenic, in all likelihood, it wasn’t even selected for, but rather was the result of a specific mix of alleles being present in an individual resulting in the trait.

In your own words you claim that adult discourse with "this faction" is not only wasted' date=' but dangerous [/quote'] No. My words are that the effort to elicit such discourse from that faction is wasted and dangerous.

 

To the extent you can engage in reasonable dialogue, you are meeting independence and rejection of that faction. That should be encouraged, respected, etc.

 

That's an observation, from thirty years of experience. If you have a counterexample, from the recent political history of the US, let's see it.

You are quite literally warning that it is dangerous to have a dialogue with them - that it's dangerous to acknowledge and respect them as human beings and citizens within our nation.

Dialogue is fine - just don't expect adult political discourse from them' date=' and most importantly don't pretend they are engaging in it when they are not. And don't erode your own country's political world by treating what you do get as respectable politics - they're human beings, fine, they get all the rights of citizens etc, but they don't get respect for political views and public behaviors that are infantile, violent, corrosive, ignorant, vile, and corrupt fantasies inculcated by a massive propaganda campaign in the service of the wealthy and powerful corporate elite.

 

You are quite literally warning that it is dangerous to have a dialogue with them - that it's dangerous to acknowledge and respect them as human beings and citizens within our nation.

Acknowledging and respecting them as human beings is not the issue. The issue is granting respect to political views and behaviors that one cannot respect if they wish to maintain honest and reasonable political institutions.

 

You know full well that you are using every dirty trick to paint a very diverse group of people with a single dirty brush.

I use no tricks. None. And no one who is "diverse"' date=' who doesn't fit my description, is being painted by my brush - it's an explicit brush.

It doesn't give you the right to make up your own version of reality.

Find an example of my "version" that is not simply and physically accurate, first. Then instruct me on my rights.

You are the one who said it's dangerous to discuss their political views and goals in a democratic setting.

No. I said it's dangerous to grant them respect' date=' or pretend to be engaging in adult political discourse with their adherents. I'm in favor of discussing them - honestly, openly, in full and explicit recognition of what they are.

If I read you right - you are saying we don't have to worry that "honest, old school liberals and the like" will follow your advice for bullying and deriding and ostracizing these people because they wouldn't do that to them..

This will be the third time that I have been forced to point out to you that I said no such thing. I recommended that this faction be ostracized, laughed at, treated with contempt, by everyone - not just "liberals", but anyone with a sense of decency and adult political responsibility. What I said liberals would not do is deny civil rights, deny free speech, disenfranchise and abuse and oppress in the manner you pulled out of your ass to put into my posts.

 

So you think you can bully these people into abandoning their beliefs? You must if you think this strategy will "shrink their core" but you give absolutely no basis for this belief. All you have given is anecdotes as to why it's not worth treating them with the same respect other citizens deserve' date=' which all depend on guilt by association. [/quote'] No, as I have made clear all along I think expecting these people to abandon their beliefs, for any reason, is a waste of time. They never have, they never will. The fascist we have always with us, unto the end of the age. What we should do, in my opinion, is keep these beliefs from dominating the political arena and influencing policy any crowding out civil and reasonable discourse. We do that by denying them respect, consideration, repetition room on the airwaves, etc. We mock, shame, and sequester.

 

And I think it would shrink the core, yes - based on the observation that the opposite has expanded the core noticeably, within the past couple of decades.

 

If you are going to advocate stripping people of their political power by means other than respectful democratic discourse you better have an answer as to how you are going to do it without merely succumbing to mob mentality.

I am advocating enforcing respectful democratic political discourse, maintaining it, defending it from its enemies.

 

Allowing these people to take over the airwaves, by the pretense of respectful democratic discourse with people who are interested in no such thing, is succumbing to mob mentality - it's happened. That's what Fox News is, that's what the hate radio is, that's what's happened to the "news" analysis programs that run the likes of David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter out on stage week after week after week.

 

What is most maddening is you genuinely recognize that these tactics are wrong and unhealthy for a democracy - you actually and correctly criticize them for using these tactics - yet you advocate their use in this case. When you are asked to defend the intellectual integrity of this strategy you just list all the reasons why these people are scary.

Nothing you have posted resembles a request for - or an example of - intellectual integrity.

 

I do not, for example, "recognize" that the tactics I actually recommend - please quote, in the future, if listing them - are wrong or unhealthy for a democracy. I think they are absolutely necessary, and always have been.

 

This continual bait and switch you are running, between what I recommend - social pressure, shaming and ostracizing, recognizing the contemptible honestly and treating it as it should be treated by sane adults - and your accusatory nonsense about denying civil rights, denying free speech, treating the neo-Confederates as they treat foreigners they despise, has run long enough.

There's no requirement for an advantage to a trait for it to be selected, the appendix is a great example of this,

It was selected for its advantages, at one time, by presumption (and several plausible functions have been suggested). That is the normal presumption for such features. That would be the normal presumption for any genetic component of homosexuality. Any other presumption would require strong evidence and solid argument.

There is, apparently, a clear and visible path to evolutionary reduction and long term removal of whatever the genetic component of homosexual behavior is - through the obvious reproductive hit incurred in a population of non-breeders. So we are not talking about a leftover from former times of advantage - the advantage has to be available now, to explain the apparent situation. Homosexuality is not disappearing, from any human population known.

This is a very dire warning here, do you mind if I ask... based on what?

How do you propose we effectively disenfranchise them then?

Is there a magic number where I get to abandon my responsibilities and concerns for what happens when a large segment of the population is ostracized and disenfranchised?

Nobody is talking about disenfranchisement except you - and the Tea Party folks, of course, who are not only talking, but doing (vote suppression, etc). Ostracizing is the normal and expected, respectable, adult response to their kind of behavior. The magic number for such response is one, in the case of (for example) inviting Ann Coulter on to national TV and presenting her as some sort of respectable pundit or acceptable commentator. Are you advocating we all pretend that situation does not exist?

If that's the case, why do you want to apply that policy to the Americans that scare you?

As horrifying as the idea of a "Tea Party White House" is' date=' your capacity for dramatic hyperbole actually distracts from the genuine threats TP policies would result in. [/quote'] Nothing I posted was hyperbole of any kind. It was a simple, dispassionate recounting of some uncontroversial physical facts relevant to how the faction currently calling itself the Tea Party would be viewed, and responded to, by reasonable people with some sense of political consequence and societal self-preservation. That such a simple, undramatic recounting is somehow mistaken for drama and hyperbole points to a major problem we have in dealing with our little Taliban here - they ride on other people's courtesy, parasitise on customs of politeness and denial that they use to fog their nature and agenda.

Thanks for the assurance (I hate worrying) but I have no idea what "because they are the ones who would react like that to such a label" means... can you clarify that statement please?

Please. That kind of playing dumb is a waste of everyone's time.

 

Liberals and the like, decent Americans in the old school sense, do not deliberately and openly treat people as you described. So you don't have to worry about the bad effects of accurately labeling and describing the neo-Confederates in the US - the ones who would abuse them and revoke their rights and so forth in that fashion are they themselves.

After Obama won it, I think it lost a lot of credibility. Now it has just become meaningless in my mind. The EU have done nothing to create peace in Europe.

Just look at the situation in Greece, Spain, Germany, Italy, etc.

For this new situation of peace, a prize is not completely out of line. Although my own preference would be that such awards go to individual people.

As far as its value since Obama's award (which was deserved perhaps a bit more than those within the US news bubble can really appreciate), it would be greater than its value immediately after its award to Henry "carpet bomb Hanoi on Christmas to show them you're crazy" Kissinger. Obama represented an upgrade of credibility - although we must remember, as Gore Vidal put it, to never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor.

I agree it's more or less apt, but I also think it's counter-productive and can only lead to further isolation and radicalization of these people.

How many abortion clinics do you need to see firebombed, doctors assassinated, by Tea Party political supporters and allies? How many homosexual people run out of jobs and homes, shot, beaten to death, hung on barb wire fences? How many Tea Party spokesmen do you need to hear say - in public, on the official record - that we should restore the death penalty for political crimes, so that "liberals know they can be killed" (Ann Coulter)?

The Tea Party faction is violent, and always has been, to whatever extent they can get away with. There is nothing new here - this is the latest incarnation of the faction that once found its political representation in the Klu Klux Klan, and before that the Confederacy. Read the letters and manifestos of the intellectual supporters of Jefferson Davis's political movement, and you will find rhetoric and analysis that could be lifted almost verbatim and pasted into Tea Party rhetorical efforts today. They are a fact of American political life.

The Taliban isn't just a group of people who are wrong, they are a group who are so wrong that (according to contemporary foreign policy) they deserve no concessions, no due process, no negotiations, no civil rights, and no presumption of innocence if there's any suspicion of guilt even by association.

You aren't going to "shame them" into seeing how horrible they are by applying such labels, you'll only reinforce their view of how much liberals blindly hate all things wholesome and American and Godly and how utterly shameless they are, and how all the "super church pastors" etc were right all along about how liberals want them isolated, reeducated or eradicated.

Why not 29 or 31 or 35? Is there like a logical reason for 30 or was it just decided upon by somebody?

Just an anecdote. It was presented as a lesson from experience in that particular field, to guide the rookie when planning a research program and uncertain of the number of repetitions or data collection events or whatever would be likely to yield the magic 95% confidence level for the answers to normal questions.

That kind of estimate was important for budgeting money, time, effort, etc. When we collected census data for tree species distribution across a series of islands and nearby mainlands in our research area, for example, we planned census visits to 29 islands and nearest mainlands. That turned out to be a small overkill - around 25 or 26 we had it - but impressively close - saved us from wasting a lot of work on too few, without costing us much extra effort.

Do you have any PubMed citations, or other good sources on that info?

Here is a decent description of the mechanism of resistance, as it is currently understood: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165874/

And a quote from its abstract:

However, the RRS plants accumulate much higher levels of glyphosate than the sensitive line, and this is associated with enhanced cellular oxidation and specific enhancement of proteins associated with photorespiration.

This accumulation of glyphosate is what I was referring to, above – that it happens occasionally in unexpected (food) parts of some individual plants , can survive the stomach and reach the bacteria in the small intestine, and can be digested there, I leave to your own Googling (IIRC I ran across it in Science News several years ago).

It was just an example. Here are some more from casual web search hits, from the first page of my efforts (I'm lazy), actually more threatening:

Stuff about the gene transfer problem in the gut , and the extra spraying accumulation, and the auxiliary chemicals employed in real life, and so forth, with traceable sources :

Intro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/authorisation/docs/soybean_40_3_2_public_comments_en.pdf

http://natureinstitute.org/nontarget/reports/soybean_006.php

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_geneticfood24.htm

the assessment that it is safe comes from research like this: http://cera-gmc.org/docs/articles/09-215-002.pdf

and this is the best case I can find for the assessment of safety of glyphosate (pardon my earlier mental spasms spelling) resistant GM crops. http://www.kehoe.org/owen/soybean/

Notice the description: the expressed modified protein (and therefore all – all, always – of the effects of the introduced genetics) is naturally present only in chloroplasts, and therefore never – never, at all – found in the soybeans harvested for food. The enzymes and so forth likewise introduced (and their genetics) do one thing and one thing only, after which they are cleaved perfectly and their parts completely disassembled by cellular machinery, in each and every plant modified, without exception and without side effects. Auxiliary chemicals and genetics and so forth are largely ignored, however necessary or unavoidable in real life. The fate of the glyphosphate that is incompletely bound by ESPS is ignored.

By this description, bacterial uptake of active (culturable) resistance genetics in the human small intestine would be extremely unlikely. The genetic string is squelched, the transfer and insertion enzyme(s) is not present, there is no glysphosate to defend from and no threat from the herbicide anyway, digestion would cleave the genetics at random rather than in complete and active chunks, and so forth.

These are some of the presumptions underlying the assessment of safety by the industry regulators.

Here is a pretty decent description indicating the tech complexity of the procedure. Read critically and with a paranoid eye, some of the holes are visible. http://www.biotech-info.net/felsot1.html

Here are 5 lies by Joe B in one sentence: http://i.imgur.com/JgiFM.jpg

 

*edit: ok maybe not 5 individual lies, but the point is made.

what point was it?

I'm a little surprised about all this talk about lies. We are talking about politicians and they were opening their mouths.

If you notice, the general assertion (with various particulars) that:

all politicians are continual and habitual liars, it makes no difference what they say or have said, and there is no difference between them in what they will do once elected;

is a Republican campaign and rightwing faction talking point, heard from pundits favoring them and agents of that agenda. That might seem strange, but the reason is simple: they more than anyone else have to deny what they've said and done, to win elections, and they have to do that without looking like unusually blatant and odious liars who will continue to do damage if elected, in comparison with their opponents.

Since even on US media they own they can't completely avoid looking like blatant and odious liars who have done serious damage to the country over the past generation, they need to put some effort into the part about "in comparison with their opponents" - it's what they have to work with. Like a drunk who has smashed his car into the side of a school bus talking about how everybody drinks beer, look at how much beer bus drivers drink.

Fortunately the main side effect - general voter discouragement and political apathy - also benefits them, in that their important source of political power ( corporate wealth) is immune. When the fight is a power struggle between people and money, discouraging everyone is one way for the money to win.

straight men are just as capable as gay men at all those tasks, so I don’t see how it could be a selective advantage for the gay gene.

The major evidence we have is all against such an assumption: homosexual behavior is universal and pervasive among humans, common and robust many other evolved and evolving animals and birds - especially, we note, the more intelligent and socially complex ones.

The direct reproductive penalty is obvious, so the automatic presumption would naturally be - under the precepts of Darwinian theory - that to the extent homosexual behavior is genetically influenced there is some serious reproductive benefit to those genetic influences. Otherwise, as several people have noted, these alleles or whatever would have vanished long ago, from the gene pools of all those animals and birds as well as humans.

Any claims otherwise would require thorough research, overwhelming evidence, and excellent argument.