CapitalistImperialistPig

... you are too deficient too know, or (it would appear) even to care, what "conservatives" think....... William Connolley, addressing your (no doubt insufficiently) humble correspondent. Well, yes, Mr. , er, Dr., Connolley has managed to irk me.  Fair enough, I suppose, since I suppose I have done the same by abusing some of his sacred bovines.  A couple of his changes of subject later, he further accuses me of ignorance of the conservative position.  Of course that was never the subject of my post - I was talking about mutual opinions of conservatives and liberals, and, more importantly, their neural substrates.  However, WC is rarely guilty of either that foolish consistency that Emerson called the hobgoblin of little minds or any other kind of logical consistency. Of course it's true that I don't know what conservatives think, though I think the functional MRI brain studies provide some strong hints.  So, I imagine, are the actual words of those selfsa...

There is a certain type of schoolyard bully whose stock in trade is standing around pointing out other people's actual or possible defects: "Mary Jane is Fat," "Bart is stupid," "Your Dad's a religious nut." I always picture him as Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons , complete with " Ha , Ha" laugh. Perhaps it's just my bad memory, but I think I remember a time when PZ Myers wrote an interesting blog about evolution and development. Now, though, it seems to be all religion bashing, all the time. Now I understand a bit about obsession - I personally have been driven into shrill unholy madness by Republican mendacity and criminality - but enough is enough. I will try to resist speculating on what childhood trauma or oedipal conflict pushed PZ into whackjobhood, but he got there somehow, and it's a nasty, mean-spirited whackjobhood at that. It does seem successful as a blogging tactic though. Every bully seems to attract a crowd of...

Congress is now more unpopular than the President. This is bizarre but perhaps inevitable. People are impatient that Congress hasn't been able to do anything about the war, and uninterested in the investigation of Bush's crimes. It's a pity our citizens are so ignorant and unintelligent. It's also a shame that most of them don't care about our rights or our constitution. Of course I'm pretty annoyed myself.

Humans, especially but not only civilized humans, are all engaged in various cooperative, collaborative, and collective enterprises. These various types of corporations, as they are sometimes called in economics, present some challenges to classical economic theory, due to the fact that they inhibit perfect capitalistic competition. They are also uncongenial to the various libertarian and Randian ideologues, since they don't comport well with their fantasy universes. Yes, you guessed it. I am a bit provoked by a bit of libertarian snark in the comments. Collectivism is their nastiest curse word I suppose. There is some historical provocation. Some of the worst communist crimes were committed in the establishment of various so-called "collective" enterprises - really enslavement by the state. If you want to equate all forms of enforced cooperation with the worst evils of communism, you are making an unreasonable extrapolation. On the other hand, if you want to pret...