Neo-conservatism blasted into the American political scene with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  However, its roots wind back through the U.S. political landscape to include Marxist social theory and the teachings of Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli.  Many of the individuals whose names have become household words today were introduced on the world-wide political stage during the Reagan/G.H.W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, "Scooter" Libby, and others.  This essay bares the core of neoconservative belief, contrasts those beliefs to statements written by this nation’s founders, and highlights the political spin neocons use when quoting documents from America’s past.            

I really don't know a damned thing about Kant. Something about reality, duality -- maybe.

Any kind of study on the functionality of individuals, society, and governments has to deal with the area of compassion. As we have learned over the past 70+ years of the New Deal, compassion is essential for governments, society, and individuals to function. Without it, people will have no stake even if Dennis Kucinich were running for office. Without it, people would be killing and being killed, and society would not function as people would be quarreling over little things. Without it, people cannot be happy in this life. Nietzsche himself said that people have to operate based on consequences, and the consequences in this case are clear enough.

Some of you here might know of me/my ideology, others not. In any event this diary has been a long time in formulation so I hope it makes some sense. People have been asking me for my thoughts on this topic and so I hope it does make some iota of sense.

I have given the issue a lot of thought.

What makes a conservative "different" from a "progressive" To me there is not one answer that could cover every and all situation since of course not all progressives nor are all conservatives the same. But I do think there might be an overarching theme, something that might cover the chasm of what separates the two groups.

Sure, some on the progressive side will say "Conservatives are evil, evil I tell you" that is how they differ from us... well those on the right will answer with "Progressives? They’re anti-American evil-doers" and be done with it. Case closed. Or is it? I do not think so. Even if everyone on one side thought everyone on the other was evil there has to be a reason for it.

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Continuing our full-fledged assault on Christian Fundamentalism (by which I mean the right-wing orthodoxy that has permeated the world), we make forays into some more of Nietzsche's work. First of all, we discuss his work, "Beyond Good and Evil."

Fundamentalism has codes of conduct that have served humanity for the last two centuries. But the problem is that in more cases than not, it has served as a restriction as to what we can and can't do and has prevented us from reaching our potential.

One of the distinctions I make in my research on interpersonal communication is distinguishing between what we call "representatives," and "expressives." A representative is the kind of speech act that has traditionally been the most salient concern of linguistic philosophers,* that is an assertion which can be assigned a truth value based on a method of verification available to a set of beings with requisite sensory apparatus, logical processing capability, and opportunity for observation -- normally meaning cognitively and sensorily normal humans. Formally, positivists say that the meaning of a statement is equivalent to the means by which it can be verified.

Nietzsche laid out a full-fledged assault on the basis of fundamentalism and called for the reevaluation of everything that we would think of as moral and right. And a similar reevaluation is totally called for thanks to eight years of abuse of power by the Bush administration, the cumulation of forces interested only in appropriating wealth and power to themselves at the expense of the common person.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

Warning:  Contains abstract, philosophical references that may cause boredom.

Several decades ago, as a young political science student, I was impressed by a little classic called The Logic of Collective Action, by Mancur Olson.  Olson explained why large groups of people who share a common interest in securing public goods often fail to act collectively to attain them.  For example, consumers may have a common interest in making sure that the automobiles they drive are safe, but for decades, Ralph Nader and a comparatively small group of people had to work very hard in order to mobilize enough public opinion to successfully impose stricter federal safety standards on the automobile industry.

I swore that when I had kids, I would NEVER give as an explanation because. My mother was famous for it. Me: Why??? Mom: Because. If she really wanted to make the point (and a power play), she'd say because I said so. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Well, I never had kids. But I did end up with a few step kids. At first, any interventions on my part were always accompanied by explanation. I was a quick study though. I realized they didn't care WHY. They'd ask and ask and whine and complain and ask WHY again a thousand times. But they never really wanted to know why. They were only interested in what they wanted and finding a way to actualize it. They used my explanations as an opportunity to stage never-ending debates, refuting all of my very sensible and very adult-correct thinking.

Mothers. They do know what they're doing. It just takes years to figure it out. There's not much after the old because I say so.

The following is a discussion of Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgements Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 November 13; 104(46): 17948–17953. Authored by Ballew II C, and Todorov A. and can be found full text here

...participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded.... Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s ...competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races ...The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

More below.

In the introduction to The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World, James Garvey, Secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (given that title you might expect him to be a white-haired old duffer, but in his photo he appears quite young, perhaps around 30] explains his motivation for writing it:

Science can give us a grip on the facts, but we need more than that if we want to act on the basis of those facts. The something more which is needed involves values. Climatologists can tell us what is happening to the planet and why it is happening, they can even say with some confidence what will happen in the years to come.  What we do about all of this, though, depends on what we think is right, what we value, what matters to us.  You can not find that sort of stuff in an ice core.  You have to think your way through it.

What I'm talkin' about is a game.  
A game that can't be won, only played.
^{from the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance}

Not everyone in the world is a citizen of the country that would issue a passport.

For example, there is no such thing as a British citizen.  Instead, they are subjects of the crown.

For the British, this is a distinction without a difference, but for example, people subject to the House of Saud, this does explain why their lot sucks with regard to their government.

Conservatives hate the concept of citizenship, which is why they support the idea of American as consumer, as opposed to citizen.
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I have been doing a lot of thinking about life lately and the world in which I find myself.

As you can tell from my handle, and/or previous diaries I've written (If you've read any) I am an experimental psychologist by trade but I have always loved politics.. discussions, debates and learning from all sides from all people.

But it hit me the other day. Where did this interest come from? How come I got bitten by the political bug, and others did not?

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Priorities.  What's really important?

Sorry if this diary is a little "stream of consciousness," rambling, and long, but that's exactly what it is.  I've been mulling over these thoughts for awhile now and thought getting them down "on paper" and getting some feedback and comments might help me bring some coherence to it all.

UPDATE: Was gonna do two diaries, but apparently you can only publish one a day, but since I will be outta town and incommunicado for the next couple days, I've gone back to one diary.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know about the subject of Today in History and those who do not.

In teaching the history of calculus, including this man is integral, especially if you don't want to believe the old lie, published and pushed by Isaac Newton, that he and he alone is the father of the study.

If you want to study the history of evolutionary thought, you start not with Darwin but with 17th century thinkers like this man.

If you want to get to the core of the Earth's composition, read what this man proposed about it.

If you fancy the idea of a universal language based not on artificial, invented symbols but how people naturally conceive of things, such that language barriers are no longer formidable, check out his characteristica universalis.

I could go on much longer, but there is not time to fully catalog the plenitude of scholarly contributions made by Gottfried Leibniz, who was born on July 1, 1646.

Tom Hagen: Your father wouldn't want to hear this, Sonny. This is business not personal.
Sonny: They shoot my father and it's business, my ass!

Quotes fromThe Godfather (1972)

It's pretty hard not to take it personally when someone shoots your father (or HRs you for a comment they didn't get).  Nevertheless, that's what this diarist advocates.  Wonder why?  Read on.